OT - The Last of Us
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_Us


Been hearing good things about this game.

A buddy of mine who plays video game a lot more often than I do told me that it's perhaps the best game he's ever played. He says the opening sequence is amazingly good.

I have it and I've played it for maybe two hours. Very good game honestly with great graphics and the AI is damn smart!

I haven't finished it yet, don't really have the time between working and...working...but the opening sequence knocked the wind out of me. I sat down and realized this would not be a normal run-n-gun adventure game. I'm a few hours in, and I've been loving the whole thing!

The developer, Naughty Dog, has been pretty consistent in making great games. I loved the Uncharted series.

I'd love to see a PC version...got no real interest in buying a console FPS

Sadly, Naughty Dog is pretty staunch with their 'PS3 exclusive' titles.

Yah they go back to the PS1 as a playstation-only dev (Crash Bandicoot.)

I agree, I don't do FPS on consoles, the controls are usually terrible and clunky compared to a mouse and keyboard. Regardless, this looks really good, and someday when I can pick it up for $15 used, I'll probably spring for it (yes, I tend to be a cheap gamer :) )

I hear you. That's why I still have my PS1 around...here...somewhere...I got three generations of Playstations, though I probably won't be springing for the PS4. I'm not made of money, and I tend to splurge on RPG things before video games ;)

Same. My wife is a console gamer though and she's planning to buy The Last of Us so no doubt I'll see it being played soon.

So I'm the only one who thinks the game is crap.
A typical linear storyline that you can't deviate from because you just run into the badguys who will insta-kill you and besides, it's not worth exploring because those areas you can explore have nothing in them anyway. When you fail that section you have to do it again and again and again and again ad infinitum ad nauseum until you get it right, attrition learning removes any potency that your character's death would have had because hey, it happens so often you stop caring about it. And Joel. And Ellie. And pretty much the entire game. I stopped caring to the point where I dropped the game into a box of stuff destined for the junkroom.
Like Mass Effect, it's one of those games that I will never bother to finish and I will never play it again.

You want to use stealth as often as possible but then the game saddles you with horde-mode where you have to kill everyone in your way but while gun combat kills you real quick, the badguys seem to be almost immune to bullets. Shoot a badguy in the head with a pistol and he shakes it off and goes on to kill you and the supposedly realistic shaky gun aiming, the less said the better. Yeah yeah upgrades supposedly improve this but it's still as annoying as hell. And while the badguys have all the ammo they could ever want, you can't scavenge any of it from their corpses because Naughty Dog decided that making you do gun combat with only 10 rounds would somehow increase the tension when in reality it just frustrates you and then leaves you really pissed off.
And then there's the problem with your NPCs wandering out in the open when you're trying to sneak around, or they get in the way of what you're trying to do.

The storyline is good but the gameplay is cliched and tedious and the games' only saving grace is the multi-player part. I could go on but you get the picture.
They should have just made the story a movie (with all the cut scenes it seems that that's what they really wanted to do), and been done with it, then I would have wasted only half the amount of money I paid.
Still, it looks pretty but all in all I'd rather replay the Metro or STALKER series again.

That's funny, I just completed my second play-through of the Mass Effect series about an hour ago. It was quite emotionally potent, I found.

Played the same story in the 1990s (Star Control II and III) so that was nothing new and certainly no drawcard for me. However, it was the mind-numbingly tedious fetch-and-carry missions in the citadel that killed the game for me. Never finished the citadel, never touched Mass Effect in any version ever again (although I did like the ground combat at the beginning of the game).

If you think about it, nearly every video game is basically a linear story. A lot of them try to disguise this with numerous side quests, and maybe two or three alternative endings, depending on how the rest of the game was played, but they're still largely linear. Most digital RPGs are essentially interactive stories and, like paper and ink stories, there's almost always a definite beginning and a definite end. Some day, with more system memory and faster processing speeds, programmers may be able to craft a more open-ended game but we're probably not going to see one anytime soon.

Also, since you can usually save and reload often, there's very little danger involved in video/computer games. It's not like the old days where you had a few 'lives' and, once they ran out, you had to start over from scratch. I think that this would be a cool feature to bring back. Allow saves, but once a character dies a few times, the saves are all erased and you have to start over again.

Pen and paper/tabletop games, especially sandboxy ones, can avoid some of the former, while the real risk of losing a PC to death certainly overcomes the latter.

This is why all my XCOM games are on Ironman mode. Mission outcomes are permanent. Haven't completely lost a game yet but a few have involved a lot of rebuilding after the primary squad got shredded by massed plasma fire or a sectopod with a case of the ass.

- C.

Half-Life 2 and Episodes 1 & 2 are very replayable.

Once you get out of City 17 (and in parts of it - esp. in the last chapter of HL2) you get a serious postapocalypse vibe. Aside from the bio/tech and uniforms of the Combine forces it could be post-war Poland along the Baltic coast...

Always makes you wonder how they fumbled the ball and never carried forward with the Half Life series. Still rated as one of the top games ever by most gaming magazines.

It is to the best of my knowledge still under production, it's just in "Valve Time" which means it'll be done when it's done.

It's getting stupid at this point but at least they're not dragging out depressingly long development times and exacerbating the problem with shit like the ads for Daikatana and the constant "here's a video demo - wait, we threw that engine out here's another one with the new engine" ad infinitum that 3DRealms went through on the 12+ year development cycle for Duke Nuke'em 3d 2.

The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series have excellent capacity for expansion and ongoing storylines because the developers are happy to support very active modding communities.

Bethedsa Softworks is fantastic; Skyrim is a game I can just play and play and play. I've got a 60+ level character and stumbled on a quest the other day to hand out religious tracts in a town (and a few other places) and play matchmaker for Mara (goddess of love/compassion). No real benefit to it (I'm filthy rich with over 7m gold, and it gives no additional skill abilities), but it was just intriguing to do.

I like Skyrim and Fallout3 and New Vegas. open world sandbox games with lots of options good and bad. I can never finish Bethesda games though, just too much stuff going on in them. The closest I got was finishing the main quest in Fallout 3, I got the DLC but didn't even scratch that. I quit Fallout New Vegas maybe 75% into the main quest. I might get the DLC for that since I am a fan.

Skyrim I had to quit over a year ago after a couple months and maybe 1/3 into the main quest. I picked it up again a few weeks ago, Bethesda issued the DLC on disk so I am thinking of getting it.

But 7 million gold!?!?! holy crap how did you get that much?!?!

oh yeah and I was thinking of getting The Last of Us, but it doesn't look like I will have that much time. I will wait a bit and see how much the cost goes down.

Ah but that's the whole thing - you can't finish a Bethsoft game. There's always stuff to do! Whether it's quests or inventing things to do yourself...!

Grind grind grind grind grind!

(Just checked, it's my Oblivion character who has 7m, my Skyrim character has 1.7m).

My Morrowind character had like seventeen million.

Seriously if you know how to exploit the economic systems it isn't hard.

Steam is having a sale .... :sawink2:

Fallout is my favorite game of all time really...LOVE THEM!!!!

This game, Last of Us and the Uncharted series are two reasons I MIGHT buy a PlayStation. I am an XBOX fan myself but these make it hard...

I don't have time right now for another game, plus call me old fashioned but I like disks. I'm sure there's going to be additional downloadable content so I'd rather just get that all at once.

well I mean the main quest. And theoretically, you could do all the quests (main, side, faction quests etct). After that, there's not much else to do but wander the countryside finding stuff to kill I guess.


oh, only 1.7m. :) I'm at a lowly 20k. I was gonna try and buy the house in Windhelm, but it looks like you have to take a side in the civil war and I don't want to do that yet.

did you finish the main quest yet?

Elder Scrolls Online is in beta I think and the rumor is that a new Fallout is in the works.

Yeah, but that's hundreds of hours of gameplay. I mean, all of it put together.


Yeah: did the main quest. I've bought all the houses, etc. Good times! :)

Not so interested in those, although I really should give Fallout a spin one day.

GET OUT OF HERE STALKER!!!!!

I had to stop comparing games to Stalker, it's just not fair... though I think all developers should use it as the goal state for "open world." Stalker + Chrono Trigger = Best Game Design EVAR!

OK, getting on to this game, so far I can see how it's a playable movie... but we're in an economic depression/recession state (whether official or not). Companies don't take risks very often during these times, and when they do they're calculated risks. Sadly the calculated risks I'm seeing taken are 1.) Do yet another zombie game, and 2.) Have a female lead who's not sexualized and/or helpless.

But they're doing linearity so WELL here!

The STALKER series are the only games that made me afraid to wander around the gameworld at night time - as soon as it got dark, I'd look for a place to hide out.
Yeah yeah it's just a game but the atmospherics are magnificent... the sound of a bloodsucker stalking you at night time can still scare the hell outta me!

In Call of Pripyat, the game bugged after the mission with the Bloodsucker nest. One of them survived, and hunted me across the map. The way my mind made it seem, I was terrified. I killed its family, and it wanted revenge. Served ice cold. It slaughtered three different STALKER camps as if followed me, and it was 'all my fault'. Never has a game done that to me!