The Last of Us - The Non-Interactive Version

Thought the first episode was very good. Wasn't much of Ellie in it, but I think the casting of everyone seems great. Looking forward to the rest.

Has the re-release of part 1 improved the gameplay at all?

I only played it for the first time about 18 months ago, it's clunky and slow and shows it's age, the difference between that and the second game is leagues apart. The new release (though I've not yet played it) presumably has all the improved gameplay of the second game.

It does not

Well that's disappointing, lucky I've not got a PS5 to test it out then.

Well I'll be damned that first episode was excellent.

Also the casting is fantastic. Only one I'm not entirely sold on is Ellie but that might be because I can't get her GoT role out of my head yet.

Switch it to NTSC mode and it should run at a steady 30fps.

quadfather Isn't this par for the course though? While playing the game, your attention span is divided by everything you are interacting with (locations, enemies, goals etc.), but during the show there's nothing else to do but watch and pay attention (unless you practice your music or play on your phone that is!)...

The thing thats aged is, really, the thing they labouriously harp on in the second one; the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of people. A game that is so interested in telling a 'story' these days would be better served as a survival horror but they wanted dragged out the run time by having battle after battle after battle. 

I think TV probably is the best place to tell this particular story as I found all the combat jarring even in the first one. The second one was even more ridiculous as its even longer and you kill even more people while harping on about it every five fucking seconds.

I mean it certainly had the standard cognitive dissonance required to accept that the hero 'has' to mass murder a whole bunch of people. However, movies and tv aren't immune from this problem either. The classic Austin Powers joke, that no one ever thinks about the families of henchmen applies. Equally Naughty Dog do riff on this idea of consequence-free violence in the sequel.

I certainly enjoyed the stealth and combat of TLOU at the time. It was truly intense in places and the scavenging and crafting offered quite a lot of strategic options for encounters, which again wasn't a well established action game trope 10 years ago. I thought one of its strengths was the pacing which was nicely varied. Plus for it's time, the animations were exceptional. The combat flow looked convincingly tired, and suitably desperate. Prior to Naughty dog, if you pressed punch in a game, you generally just always saw the same generic punch animation. They really raised the bar to use motion capture and blended animations to make fights seem more visceral and realistic.

You might be right that TV may be a better way to tell the story, we will see, but without spoilers, I can only say that the story beats hit hard in the original game and I felt more invested in the character fates than any game I'd played to that point.
Not even sure I can genuinely think of a game where I actually properly cared about the characters before TLOU. When playing the role of Joel I certainly felt increasingly protective of Ellie, so I guess we will see whether TV can generate the same emotion from just watching.

None of this is to say people should go and play the original (if anything it appears the TV show has you covered), but in 2013 (and on old PS3 hardware) the whole package was a phenomenal achievement.

Probably should have finished part 2 before coming into this thread but hey ho

I fucking loved TLOU 2 fwiw. I know that's it got a mixed reception here.

I like it more than the first! Haven’t replayed it yet though.

I’ll get around to watching the first episode of the show when I get home today. The weekend was kind of busy so I didn’t have time. Not like HBO has to worry about low viewership.