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Plus side of steam, I get a game that continues to be a let down just complain to customer service and get your money back or get steam credit for the next game you buy.

This is one of the reasons I no longer acquire games legit first. I only buy if they seem worth it.

It's pretty obvious why they didn't release a demo or let reviewers get advanced copies in this case. They were trying to prevent anyone from learning it was shit until too late.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8SzBhjqaQ

Yep.

Been watching a play through of "The Last of Us," and I have never, in my life, been more pissed off about a title being exclusive. The game is atmospheric, well paced, and gorgeous. If they could pull this off with seven year old tech what could they have done with a real PC?

The story is nothing radically original and neither is the game play but the story is well done and the game play looks to be handled nicely. The game I'm watching is only about two hours in and most of the combat has been stealth based rather than shoot'em up. It's rather more of a survival game than an action one. At the very least it's making for a good zombie fix when the Walking Dead is on hiatus.

Tyyr wrote:Been watching a play through of "The Last of Us," and I have never, in my life, been more pissed off about a title being exclusive. The game is atmospheric, well paced, and gorgeous. If they could pull this off with seven year old tech what could they have done with a real PC?

The story is nothing radically original and neither is the game play but the story is well done and the game play looks to be handled nicely. The game I'm watching is only about two hours in and most of the combat has been stealth based rather than shoot'em up. It's rather more of a survival game than an action one. At the very least it's making for a good zombie fix when the Walking Dead is on hiatus.

So agreed, it makes me frustrated with exclusives that limit themselves.

The killer is that being written for the PS3 it's pretty much doomed to never be released anywhere else. Cell processor architecture makes it incompatible with x86 architecture requiring a ground up rewrite of the core engine to make it work. About the only hope we've got is a streaming service maybe one day.

Now about 6 hours into the game and it just keeps getting better. Best part is that the guy I'm watching "Frankiein1080p" doesn't comment much and lets the game just play and he breaks it down into 35 to 45 minute blocks which corresponds nicely to the amount of content in your average hour long TV episode. Right now I'd rather be watching The Last of Us than anything on TV.

Also, anyone who wants to claim that video games can't be art had better be ready to defend themselves from The Last of Us and I don't think they can.

I'm going to wax poetic here so just deal with it. I won't spoil anything in this post.

Assigning a simplistic number to something like The Last of Us is ridiculous. Thinking back to every other game I've ever played and the couple I've watched, many of them, even Mass Effect, were easy to grade with a number and it was appropriate. They were great, but they were games. The Last of Us goes far, far beyond being a simple game. I'd almost call the "game" portion of it incidental to the story and trying to answer where it rates besides things like Need for Speed or Call of Doggy, is stupid. It's apples to cheetahs. It implies an equivalence that is just not there. The Last of Us is what games can be. An incredibly well done, adult, story told out over the course of 8 hours. It represents the current pinnacle of cinematic game design.

Part of the magnificence of the game is that it understands how to pace itself. You get that sinusoidal up and down of rising tension, climax, and denouement over and over, smoothly, logically, organically. The game understands when it needs to stop and dwell on what just happened. When it needs to let its characters reflect on what they're going through. I accidentally used "growing" instead of "going" in that last sentence and actually I think my mistake was more accurate. No one is static in the game, all characters of any significance grow and change, none more so than the protagonist Joel or his ward Ellie. However the game manages to grow characters you only spend a level or two with. Heck it creates engaging characters and scenarios with people we never even meet but only learn about through letters and notes left behind. It's great writing, some of the best I've seen. It surpasses the writing in ME2 largely because you don't have to deal with a huge ensemble cast. You're really looking at only 6 characters over the course of an eight hour game so there's time to focus. In many of the "puzzle" portions of the game you'll have long stretches of just wandering around, figuring out how to get from place to place and naturally characters start chatting each other up giving you lots of character building dialogue to listen to and focus on while working puzzles, it's time well spent.

The game's production values are also impressive. It's hard to really make the connection that you're watching something being played on a console that is eight years old. This highlights two things, first that a properly optimized game you can get amazing visuals even from older hardware and two that one of the big console advantages is that with fixed hardware its much easier to do that optimization to ensure your game looks awesome. It's just a pity it can take so long to manage that optimization and the brute force of PCs just wins out. Does make me wonder what this game would have looked like on PC. That work is put on display as the game gives you many, many amazing vistas that it invites you to just stop and stare at. In fact one of the latter vistas benefits from you just staring as you get more and more conversation from the characters. The voice acting is likewise impressive as they really flesh the characters out. The other half of the acting, the visuals, are well done with them getting better performances out of Ellie and Joel's character models than most pre-rendered cutscenes. Sound does it's job. Each gun is distinctive, environments sound right, it's just good stuff.

The ending... good lord the ending. This is the first time in a long time I haven't been pissed off or let down by a game or show's ending. It's mature, morally ambiguous, and again, excellently paced completing Joel and Ellie's character arcs in a satisfying if incredibly brutal at times fashion. When the game ended there was no rage, no screaming, "BULLSHIT!" at the screen it was just perfect for the game.

If you have a PS3 buy the game. If you don't have a PS3... seriously think about buying one to play this game.

If you want to watch a good playthrough then look up FrankieonPCin1080P on youtube. Plays the game well, and in such a manner that it's easy and fun to watch and knows that people want to watch the game, not listen to him gibber on. Keeps his comments concise and to the point without ruining the tone of the production.