The Last of Us - it's the time of the season

It's good. Adds some lovely depth to Ellie's character and has some fun combat, although I found the very last section a bit of a pain in the arse. Basically, if you liked the main game you'll enjoy the DLC too.

Did you do it on hard, or normal? (or "survivor"??)

Just regular-issue normal, I think.

i splurged, got the DLC and played through it tonight. no regrets, great stuff. easy recommend to anyone who beats it and wants more, it fits in well - happy with the framing device and timeline they went with too.
you weren't kidding about that difficulty spike in the last section, whew

not to get too corny here, but i love that we're in a time where this super high-budget project can come out with this extra story, which is for the most part an affecting, low-key coming of age teen drama

yeah... this game is best-in-generation, no doubt

Good interview on the making of the DLC:
http://www.wired.com/2014/02/last-of-us-dlc-interview-long/
I'll have to pick up that prequel comic, didn't realize it was so tied in.

not to get too corny here, but i love that we're in a time where this super high-budget project can come out with this extra story, which is for the most part an affecting, low-key coming of age teen drama

i just don't know if this is really a state of affairs to celebrate!!

the spectrum of voices and tones is so generally narrow in video games, it's a tragic waste of the medium; not seeing a downside here, especially with such a high-quality product in this instance

i wish there were less superhero movies but i wouldn't be cheering if one of them had an episode of the gilmore girls as a post-credits scene

i mean, actually i'd love that, and i don't really care about the number of superhero movies, so that statement is basically nonsensical. but i think the point still stands

lest you worry, there's still plenty of psycho stealth murder-'em-up action. i'm telling you though, the dichotomy works very well in Left Behind

this game really revolutionized transporting wooden pallets in water for NPCs that are scared of doggypaddling

i look forward to the game which presents that sort of scenario as a puzzle to which the solution is to shoot your partner and/or yourself in the head

i love this game but loooooool

xp that's why I keep meaning to get around to playing Persona 3

i started that the other day, i was kinda disappointed by how much less self-assured the opening seemed than pers 4

I've been playing this with no problem for a month and then the last couple of times I tried to play it got stuck on the "LOADING" percentage where it will go up to like 91%, then stay there a long time, then jump back down to 0% and stay at less than 1%. Then if I try to quit the game and turn off the PS3 it won't let me completely turn it off. Anyone seen this or have any idea what to do about it?

man finished this and never once used a smoke bomb v disappointing

the combat was fun i agree with tracer about the feeling of giddiness when it was abt to happen

also lol the random notes lying around everywhere for no decent reason, best part is the end where marlene leaves multiple tape recorders lying around like who carries around multiple tape recorders for different entries in a single audio diary and then leaves them around?

the story and """"emotions"""" are geeked over by gamers bc gamers are trained by the terrible storytelling of the gaming industry to respond dramatically to even the most slightly not-shitty story and characterizations. the very ending w/joel was alright as a turn but i don't get projecting what happened over the rest of the game like it was earned, or like the majority of the story wasn't just there to reach that point. it's hard to do, making a 15-20 hr story seem tight when you have to intersperse it with hours and hours of largely silly and unbelievable combat situations, but i'm still not gonna go easy on it u kno. like i can see where the story beats are in each season (and "winter" was really fantastic) but it's still so shoddy front to back.

when i was maybe 10 or 11 i remember bearing witness to a conversation my brother and his friends were having -- they were all 3 yrs older and big big big JRPG nerds, and one of them mentioned crying when aeris died, and i immediately responded like "what? you cried? at that??" and he was like "oh you little one, one day you will be cool and in tune with your emotions like me" like he was so proud and almost bragging about having an emotional response to a game and even then i could tell it was sort of forced. i loved ff7! but come on. for like the next 3 times i watched my brother play through ff7 (he played a loooooooot) i think i tried to cry at that moment. i think of that every time a game comes around that makes nerds get all loudly emotional when it offers less emotional pull than a paul ws anderson video game movie

same feeling as when i told my friend i was playing HL2 and he was like "oh man aren't you just like totally in love with alyx vance" and i just sort of stared

well, talking of hl2 (and this) (and bioshock infinite):

bc gamers are trained by the terrible storytelling of the gaming industry to respond dramatically to even the most slightly not-shitty story and characterizations cute girls in peril from which only you can rescue them

(nb i have not played this so i'm not saying there is not More going on but this certainly seems to be a key, uh, storytelling strategy, in the industry these days.)

can't remember if alyx ever got herself into much peril but iirc her conversation was always trembling just at the brink of fellatio

but then to be fair so was the conversation of literally every npc in the game. gordon freeman!!!

she was meaningless pixels, a total non-person who was barely even in the game

she was the state-of-the-art scripted NPC FPS companion of the day. remember that up until that point we had... Daikatana and the hapless Black Mesa staff

was kinda affected by the single endlessly replicated security guard model hl1 had, who joined you to enthusiastically fight by your side every time you encountered him and invariably died ninety seconds later. an eerie purgatorial thing. of course in hl2 he/they was/were retconned into the metaphysically uninteresting "barney".

even deus ex sucked at this, and yet i rescued the suicidally aggressive "miguel" from his prison cell every single fucking time, even though the game gave you no incentive whatsoever to do so besides feeling bad for this nonexistent idiot for no reason

lol had a long rant with Joel the other day about stories and acting being "good for a game" and how that is code for "too shitty for even the worst straight to DVD movie to get away with"

also lol the random notes lying around everywhere for no decent reason, best part is the end where marlene leaves multiple tape recorders lying around like who carries around multiple tape recorders for different entries in a single audio diary and then leaves them around?

this is bioshock's fault, which means it's system shock 2's fault, which kinda makes me sad to admit

in bioshock infinite iirc they were entire phonographs? fuck games.

cute girls in peril from which only you can rescue them

(nb i have not played this so i'm not saying there is not More going on but this certainly seems to be a key, uh, storytelling strategy, in the industry these days.)

no idea why i said "these days" btw sry my brain was in another castle

lol that games are still doing that. it was cool in system shock tho , that you wd be wandering around hiding from mutants and shit while listening to them, novel for the 90s

I remember feeling vaguely moved at a cut scene in ffix where the black mages are all falling from the airship and a music box is playing or something. perhaps a v self aware moment. whereas aeris dying is just like rpg iconography 101

moment I found moving in ffvii as an adolescent: cloud and toga hanging out by the whatsit crater, everything emotionally unresolved, unsure if their friends will join them to go to their probable deaths, a 30-40 looping wind sound effect in the background and no other soundtrack. I think that was it tho

*tifa

for like the next 3 times i watched my brother play through ff7 (he played a loooooooot) i think i tried to cry at that moment

this is an incredible memory.

it's hard to do, making a 15-20 hr story seem tight when you have to intersperse it with hours and hours of largely silly and unbelievable combat situations

For certain games like this, the visual lushness of the world grants so much to the experience and the story, if not explicit. I vividly remember one point where you're escaping Philadelphia after meeting that father-son duo, and you have to escape through a toy store. Now if you're just gunning it, it takes less than ten seconds to run through there. But I stopped and looked around and how much detail was in this set that you could just glance at and never notice, how much effort and craft it took to make this store, it amazed me, all the shelves, objects, signs, overgrown foliage, broken glass, individual toys and colors and everything; the distress to show the age and burden of what the store had been in this universe. They probably put almost as much effort into this one-time use setting as they did those endless apartment buildings where you had to choke out a few dozen psychos.

this novel was full of what hemingway called ... true sentences

I finally played the DLC and FUCK ME THIS IS THE BEST DLC EVER. Chock a block with surprising moments, both of fear and delight. There is an incredible scene where, well I'm not going to spoil it because it's too good but it's just the most touching love letter to the power of video games, the power of friendship and the power of imagination all explicitly rolled into one.

Also you get to play as Ellie, and you get to kick ass.

Which is so totally satisfying and awesome that I forgot for awhile that in the main game you play 95% of it as tough-nuts beardo dude.

*thumbs up*

Anyone played through the main game again? Seriously tempted, especially as I did it on "normal" the first time.

I enjoyed it so much on PS3 I ended up getting the remastered version for the PS4. It's the only time I've ever double-dipped for a game, and one of the very rare occasions I've wanted to do a second run after finishing the first time. I'm only a couple of hours in but really looking forward to going through the whole thing again - I've already noticed some stuff I missed on the first playthrough.

I played through on PS3--there's a big advantage as you get to keep your weapons and level-ups, so it turns into more of a straight-up action game. You don't get to keep your unlocks from the previous gen in the PS4 version, which bummed me out.

I also played a bit of the multiplayer for the first time. I generally despise playing with strangers but it's way more fun than I expected - it does a really good job of keeping the tension of the main game.

xpost @ tracer, seriously, play on hard for sure. I did my first playthrough on hard and it's way more fun and survival-horror-ish imo. You have to really sneak around and strategize every encounter, at least until you get the flamethrower late in the game.

^oh, good to know. this came with my borrowed PS3, planning on playing it whenever i finish Demon's Souls.

If you like demon's souls you should definitely play on hard. Or the harder-than-hard one, where you don't get to use your sonar thing, which was way too hard for me but if much more of a YOU DIED type of gameplay experience (with lots of checkpoints and pretty fast respawns)

The restarts are seriously amazing in this game. Like 3-4 seconds max.

OK, I think I'm in for hard.

I don't even remember the flamethrower??!? Maybe i never got it ;_;

i'd worry playing through snowville on hard, that part was torture for me

like the story in retrospect more than after i just finished playing but it's one of those things where it gets compressed into smth much smaller in my memory and idk

I like the story as long as I'm thinking about it separately from the gameplay. If you consider what you as the player do to be part of the story, then it's a story in which Joel is a mega-ubermensch who brutally kills his way through hundreds of dudes, rather than negotiating, compromising, and using his wits. That's obviously a standard a lot of games fail, but I feel like it becomes more of a tension as narratives aspire to certain kinds of seriousness.