Category: Video Gaming

The Last of Us looks a lot like the video game that inspired it, but don’t mistake that for damning it with faint praise. The HBO series’ weathered apocalyptic look is often lifted straight from a game known for looking cinematic and full even at its most ruthless and brutal. Everything is captured with excruciating detail, including Joel, played now by Pedro Pascal. But in The Last of Us TV show, Joel isn’t quite the man he was — and that’s by design.

Some of that is just practical: As part of translating the game to TV, co-creators Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had to update the ways in which Joel was interacting with his environment.

“There are certain things that we embrace about our medium that are different than the game medium. In the game, you need a healing mechanic; you get shot a lot, you have to heal. You get shot once in reality,” Mazin laughs.

Dispelling that means showing all the damage a guy like Joel had taken on, physically and emotionally, after Sarah died. His knuckles stay bloody, and his body seems to hurt. Pascal’s Joel isn’t sneaking around the same way Joel does in the game. “Joel’s walking in a crouch so much that he would have, like, these massive quads, right?” Mazin says. “55-year-olds can’t crouch for more than like three minutes! Tops! And then their back gives out.

“So embracing frailty […] I think helps pull people into this kind of immersion, which is different than the video game immersion.”

Image: Naughty Dog/Sony Interactive Entertainment

Image: HBO

That also means tweaking — ever so slightly — Joel’s character. With a long, arduous journey ahead of him, the Joel on TV has a different path to walk than his character. And viewers who have played the game might spot key differences in his TV counterpart: He’s no longer dealing weapons like he does in the game, but trying to hunt down a battery for his car so he can go find Tommy.

“In the game, due to gameplay, Joel has to be extremely capable to justify all the actions you’re doing, and there’s certain things we’re doing in the game to get you to connect to him by being him,” Druckmann tells Polygon. “And that was part of the casting of Pedro Pascal as Joel. […] We were less looking for someone who could play a tough guy — because in some ways, that’s the easier part — and more someone that could show there’s a tortured soul inside of it.”

The Last of Us’ first episode sets up that struggle for Joel, between the lighter sides of his heart and the massive grief, pain, and violence that defines his life now. In a way he is softer, a choice that will certainly play into the ending of the first game, which has earned its rep for being fairly divisive. It’s hard to imagine the game’s Joel — so often defined by his brutal, thawing apathy — help a fellow worker out when they’re too overwhelmed to move a child’s body to the pyre this early in the story.

It’s there that Pascal proved to be key to Mazin and Druckmann’s vision of who Joel needed to be in HBO’s The Last of Us conception of a hardened but a little more human than his game counterpart.

“Pedro is so charismatic, and there’s like a pull — he’s funny, he’s a genuinely funny guy — that to suppress all that when you watch him on screen, it feels like there’s something missing from this guy, and you want it to come out,” Druckmann says. “We obviously see a lot of it in the beginning and his interaction with Sarah. […] And then when all that goes away, and then over time, you get to see hints of it coming back out, it becomes really fascinating to follow this guy, this really damaged guy.”

Pascal remembers the one note he’d get was “to remember to bring [himself] to it as much as possible.”

“That was the way to understand Joel best was, you know, with my own heart,” Pascal says. “I found him to be a very hardened person, and not somebody who reflects on his own feelings, even before losing his daughter or the world ending before his very eyes. And that loss kind of calcifying and shaping who he is, and how he survives thereafter.”

The Last of Us premiered on HBO and HBO Max on Jan. 15. New episodes of the nine-episode season air on Sundays.

According to a recent report, the recently released The Callisto Protocol hasn’t met sales expectations.

Early last month, the first title from Striking Distance Studios, The Callisto protocol, launched to middling reviews. A relatively new studio led by Dead Space creator Glen Schofield, this first title of the company was clearly set up to be quite big, with Geoff Keighley giving it a big push at both Summer Games Fest last year, and at The Game Awards in 2020 where the game debuted. Except things haven’t exactly gone to plan, as according to MK-Odyssey, the game hasn’t sold quite as well as expected.

The report states that the game cost around 200 billion won, or £132 million, to develop, an obviously huge budget, which sales haven’t currently hit yet. The Callisto Protocol had been referred to as a quadruple A game, something we’ve heard the upcoming Perfect Dark reboot being called as well, obviously pointing towards the larger scale games are approaching.

A number of investors in Krafton, the game’s publisher, have lowered their target stock prices as a result, with Samsung Securities sharing that it predicted “cumulative sales of five million copies,” but now thinks that two million won’t be easy until this year.

It is a bit surprising that so much was invested into a brand new IP, particularly one which sits in a genre that typically hasn’t had the highest amount of sales compared to other genres.

VG247’s The Callisto Protocol review gave the game a 3/5, noting that the game doesn’t really do anything special, nor is it an evolution of what Dead Space did. The game suffered from some serious stuttering issues on PC, which Striking Distance has addressed, but in general everything that has come from the game just proves how pointless crunch can truly be.

Atlus has confirmed you’ll be able to stream Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden, but oddly you do have to include a spoiler warning.

The thing about streaming games on Twitch and posting let’s plays on YouTube is that it sits in a bit of a grey area. It is technically showing off copyrighted material, but most developers know that it ultimately makes them more money though, as it’s essentially free promotion. Atlus doesn’t seem to acknowledge that too often though, as back when Persona 5 released you couldn’t show certain parts of the game, something that’s still in effect with the recent release of Royal on modern platforms. With the upcoming availability of Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden on modern platforms, Atlus has once again released its requirements, which are pretty lax with one caveat.

As shared by Persona Central, you are allowed to stream all of P3P and P4G, which is a marked improvement compared to P5R. However, you do have to do one thing: any video or livestream has to make sure the viewer knows it contains spoilers. “When delivering content corresponding to the story like event scenes, please clearly indicate that the content includes story, so as to not deprive other customers of their enjoyment,” reads the rule in its entirety.

Atlus also made the note that it “may delete videos and suspend live streams” that it considers to be “inappropriate,” so if you are intending on doing anything with the games, keep that in mind, as vague as it is. It’s relatively understandable that people are asked to be considerate of spoilers, but when it comes to P3P and P4G, both of which are more than a decade old, it is a little bit of an odd stipulation.

Either way, if you are interested in checking out the games, streaming or not, you can check them both out on Xbox when they come to Game Pass next week.

Lost Ark developer Smilegate recently banned a wave of bots to prevent cheating, but a number of real players have found they were banned too.

Bot bans obviously aren’t uncommon in any online game, particularly MMOs which can have huge playerbases. Smilegate recently put a ban wave into effect on Steam, getting rid of a large number of bots, but it also seems real players were caught up in the crossfire.

The ban appears to have mostly affected players that haven’t logged in in a number of months, or those that have a small playtime. While a ban might not really matter to the player that isn’t too invested in the game, bans do matter for your overall Steam account. Recent reviews on the game’s Steam page are mostly negative at the time of writing as a result of the recent ban.

Those that haven’t played the game in a while might not have noticed, but because some evidently did so for whatever reason, a number have discovered they’ve received a ban. This led to the moderators of the game’s subreddit put out a post acknowledging the large number of posts being made about the issue.

Since the Reddit post was made yesterday, Smilegate has put out a statement on the game’s forums, and is working towards undoing them. “We have determined the error that triggered these false bans, and are actively working on reversing them for all affected legitimate players regardless of whether a support ticket who has been filed,” reads the post. Those that have been banned can still submit a ban appeal ticket to customer support to try and get free of the ban sooner.

In more positive news for the game, a crossover with CD Projket’s The Witcher is on the way, set to go live on January 18. There’s a whole quest to do with the main man himself Geralt, and there are a number of Witcher-themed items and cosmetics to earn too, like a wallpaper skin, weapon skins, and full character skins too.

Sundays are for angling your umbrella so the wind doesn’t turn it inside out. Before you duck, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things).

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Make every Wordle a winner with my convenient selection of tips, hints, guides, and more. Need a clue to bring today’s Wordle into focus before you run out of guesses? There’s one just below. Prefer the security of the answer to the January 15 (575) puzzle in big, bold capital letters? That’s here too. 

I don’t think I’ve ever revealed three alternating greens on my first go before, but I did today. Surely with this setup, the next guess would be the win? Ah, no. It turns out that even under these lucky circumstances, there are more possibilities to work through. But I did get it on my third go—and I hope you do too (if not earlier).

Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Sunday, January 15

Marvel Snap will be getting its long-awaited PVP Battle Mode on January 31, assuming there are no “last minute issues.”

The news was revealed on Marvel Snap’s official website, and developer Second Dinner’s associate design director Kent-Erik Hagman also took to Unity Blog to further detail what players can expect.

Marvel Snap’s Battle Mode arrives as part of the Version 1.0 update, and it will see two opponents facing off against each other through multiple rounds. Both players will start with 10 health and the goal is to cut the other player’s health to 0 before they do the same to you.

Additionally, decks are locked throughout the entire battle, so it will benefit players to pay attention to what cards are played so they can know what they’ll be up against in future rounds. Another strategy is to hold a card back until a future round to surprise surprise your opponent.