The Last of Us (HBO Spoilers)

[Whiskeyjack]

Don't think its accurate to say the show is a shot-for-shot rehash of the game.  They're definitely hitting all of the major scenes and themes, but they're also streamlining and modifying certain things along the way. 

And I think its working well.  Both episodes have been great.  And the changes all make sense. 

Overall, I'm super happy so far.  They're hitting the tone perfectly.  Joel and Ellie's characters have been on point.  There's a good mix of quiet moments and tense action.  The Clicker scene was awesome.

Supposedly, next week's episode is one of the best (according to reviews), so looking forward to that.

[Ran]

For those who are curious, someone's put up a "movie" made up of the cut scenes (and some in-game dialog sequences) from the first game. The first 40 minutes are more or less what the first two episodes cover:

 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, IFR said:

Watching that video convinces me that I couldn't properly enjoy watching someone stream their play of this game. The cinematic sequence is well done, but immediately afterward, seeing Joel's spastic Brownian motion as the player takes control just made the whole thing hilarious to me. Here Tess is sacrificing herself, and Joel randomly starts running backwards and crouching behind a tree while the threat is to his back, and just taking his time collecting items.

But I'm sure having control yourself makes this more immersive so those moments don't detract as much from the experience.

I'm now really hoping that after a super dramatic moment they then have Joel randomly searching the ground for crap to make molotovs with and hiding behind the wrong sides of walls from things. 

[psynetik123]

6 hours ago, IFR said:

Joel randomly starts running backwards and crouching behind a tree while the threat is to his back, and just taking his time collecting items.

Yeah... well... it's a game. What exactly were you expecting?

Were you expecting the player to mimic getting down on their knees and start wailing and crying over the loss of Tess?

[psynetik123]

Oh and also, based on what others have already done, I'm guessing it's A-okay to post game spoilers if the HBO series has passed those points?

Cool, well here's a much better video of that scene but in the recent PS5 remake:

They totally wrecked Tess's face though. They made her look much older for some reason.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

You can't look too pretty during the apocalypse. And if you look at pics from 100 years ago, people in their early thirties look like they're in their late fifties today.

Anyways, second episode was awesome. So far it seems like they've nailed everything for this show. 

[dbunting]

Before I start following this thread, is this just for the HBO show and spoilers for it or are people posting game spoilers here also? I know nothing about the game and don't want to ruin the show for myself.

[Kalbear]

45 minutes ago, dbunting said:

Before I start following this thread, is this just for the HBO show and spoilers for it or are people posting game spoilers here also? I know nothing about the game and don't want to ruin the show for myself.

This thread is only for the show. While we can talk about similarities in the game we can only do so after the episode which has them aired. so we can talk about Tessa dying because it happened in the show but not really anything after.

[IFR]

4 hours ago, psynetik123 said:

Yeah... well... it's a game. What exactly were you expecting?

Were you expecting the player to mimic getting down on their knees and start wailing and crying over the loss of Tess?

Well, I was speaking to the ludonarrative problems presented by the fact that it is a game, and by how this is further compounded at watching someone play it for you, which removes the immersion factor.

I'm not one to argue that video games can't be art, since what resonates for someone is a very individual thing, but the nature of the gameplay being at a dissonance with the story completely alters for me how the story itself is experienced (eg instead of something compelling and moving it becomes unintentionally comical).

[briantw]

1 hour ago, dbunting said:

Before I start following this thread, is this just for the HBO show and spoilers for it or are people posting game spoilers here also? I know nothing about the game and don't want to ruin the show for myself.

There's a separate thread for people who have played the game.  You're safe here.  No spoilers outside of the most recently aired episode. 

[dbunting]

Really liked the first two episodes, saved and watched them at the same time.  I know nothing of the game other than the guy and girl are the main characters.

You do get the normal post apocalypse standard stuff such as FEDRA and Fireflies but who cares. Loved his reply to the guy, "if you ask me about...I'll break your jaw"

The tension was built up well during both episodes, I actually felt tense a few times and didn't grab my phone while I was watching.  That's my rating system, how many times and for how long did I look at my phone while watching. The less I do that, the better the show is.

They did a pretty solid job of telling us what to expect, Ellie asking about monsters with their heads split open living in the dark, ended up being the clickers.  Told us about swarms, underground networks, then we saw it. Also about Raiders and Slavers, so we know what's coming in the next few weeks. The one thing I wonder is how did his brother get so far away in Wyoming and why? What was his mission and that is a long ass trip when fuel is 20 years old. I love how they showed car batteries being worth a lot, gives a real feel to what it would really be like.

[Heartofice]

I like the show well enough so far. Much like the game, I think it’s going to come down on the relationship between the main two characters as to how much I really enjoy it.

I do get a lot of flashbacks to the game which is both fun but also a bit dull as I feel I’ve seen it all before. On top of that it’s still just a very well executed set of well worn zombie movie tropes at this point, just like the game. Because of that I doubt I will ever love the show as the whole genre is so played out by this point, but that doesn’t take away from the quality of the show overall 

[Relic]

18 hours ago, Whiskeyjack said:

Don't think its accurate to say the show is a shot-for-shot rehash of the game.  They're definitely hitting all of the major scenes and themes

I kind of wish they deviated from the game a bit more, tbh. The "railroading" has been pretty obvious in both episodes, so far. 

[karaddin]

Just saw it pointed out that this episode gives a solid hint at the answer to a question I think someone asked at the start of the thread - how does a pathogen with such a short incubation period manage to spread globally so quickly?

The hinted answer is contamination of flour. The flash back to the start of the outbreak in Jakarta had the first infections taking place in a flour and grain factory. In the first episode it was clearly shown that neither Joel nor Sarah ate anything with flour in it, their lack of flour for pancakes led to having eggs, they both dodged the biscuits from the neighbors, Sarah didn't eat the cookies because raisins and Joel forgot to get the birthday cake. And the neighbors definitely did have flour.

Seems pretty solid to me.

[Kalbear]

Yep. As the mycologist mentioned at the start the flour was considered to be a 'perfect' substrate. From a fungal perspective the spores can live in the flour and then become activated once ingested, and then quickly activate. This is actually very close to the way Ophiocordycepts works in ant colonies, where the spores can remain dormant for a long while until the ants either ingest them or they get put into moist areas between the chitin plates. If they are external the attack can take a while as the fungus produces enzymes to digest the chitin and get inside, but if it's in the digestive system it can go very fast. 

Apparently the standard ant strategy is to have the infected ant get as close to the queen as possible and then explode with spores. The counter strategy is that ants can tell when an ant is infected and will carry out that ant as far away from the hive as they can, even sacrificing their lives to do so. 

[Corvinus85]

2 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Apparently the standard ant strategy is to have the infected ant get as close to the queen as possible and then explode with spores. The counter strategy is that ants can tell when an ant is infected and will carry out that ant as far away from the hive as they can, even sacrificing their lives to do so. 

All that I've read is that the most typical behavior of an infected ant is to climb a tree and latch unto the underside of a leaf which is a good environment for the fungus to begin growing and releasing spores. In many cases the ant climbs to a place near the colony, so from on high the spores end up falling in the feeding area of the colony, thus infecting more ants.

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

Just saw it pointed out that this episode gives a solid hint at the answer to a question I think someone asked at the start of the thread - how does a pathogen with such a short incubation period manage to spread globally so quickly?

The hinted answer is contamination of flour. The flash back to the start of the outbreak in Jakarta had the first infections taking place in a flour and grain factory. In the first episode it was clearly shown that neither Joel nor Sarah ate anything with flour in it, their lack of flour for pancakes led to having eggs, they both dodged the biscuits from the neighbors, Sarah didn't eat the cookies because raisins and Joel forgot to get the birthday cake. And the neighbors definitely did have flour.

Seems pretty solid to me.

I asked that question above and this is a decent explanation. So basically cordyceps infected flower from Indonesia ended up in Texas and in most other places. I suppose with spores the fungus could jump to other reservoirs of flour, but still I would think that at least one country out there maybe managed to self-isolate. Is the show trying to tell us globalism bad, grow your own food!!! 

[karaddin]

The disruption to many pharmaceutical supplies into Aus over the last few years is sadly making a good case for a similar point irl feeling sorry for myself with a migraine while the most effective migraine meds have been unavailable for a month for the second time in the last 4 months here.

I think the idea, obviously taking some suspension of disbelief, is that it needs to be kept off the entire land mass not just a country and it's a very large flour supplier. And it's going to take them quite a while to figure out the flour is the problem.

I'd expect some smaller islands to be ok, but they'd probably go isolationist in response so random survivors in the US wouldn't even know. Unfortunately for alternate universe karaddin, Australia is very unlikely to have been one of those countries given our close proximity and trading relationship with Indonesia. But some of the Pacific islands might get the last laugh.

[mcbigski]

Other than zombie exhaustion, there's no reason why I shouldn't want to watch this and love this.  But the still shots I saw of the plague people looked fucking stupid.

Accepting that, I hear it's good.

[Ran]

2 hours ago, mcbigski said:

But the still shots I saw of the plague people looked fucking stupid.

They're pretty decent representations of fungal growths on insects and animals can look like.

It's pretty solid. If you enjoyed the first season of The Walking Dead, this'll work.

[Mexal]