The Last Of Us

I am a huge fan of Naughty Dog studios and their work on the Uncharted franchise for the PS3. The visuals are stunning, the plots are top notch, and the play control is intuitive, all ingredients for a first rate game.

I just had the chance to play through the early access demo for Naughty Dog's newest offering, The Last of Us, which drops later this month on June 14.
Having seen the trailer, I knew that they were shifting focus to more of a post zombie apocalypse survival style of play, as opposed to the "Indiana Jones" Fortune Hunter game style that Uncharted did so well.
On first trial, this game looks and feels great. Naughty Dog has nailed the visuals. The collapsing buildings, overgrown vegetation, dynamic weather, all combine to create an environment taken straight out of the pages of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.
While they don't give of the plot away in the demo, the interactions between the characters are interesting, and they hint at enough of the story to hook you in.
The controls took a little getting used to, specifically the melee attack, but ultimately I enjoyed the gritty sense of the combat. I generally tend to rely on a balance of stealth avoidance, and long ranged scoped attacks for most zombie encounters in other games, so I imagine that I will do the same with this if the opportunity presents itself. In my mind, toe to toe combat with a zombie is only a last resort!
And now for what I thought was the most interesting aspect of this demo, the zombies themselves. Naughty Dog has chosen to take a slightly different approach to the concept, and rather than the outbreak being caused by a viral or bacterial infection, if my guess is correct, the zombies are in fact infected hosts of a mutated form of parasitic Cordyceps fungus. Cordyceps fungus is a real world fungus that infects insects, replacing the hosts tissue with its own, and effectively overtakes the hosts central nervous system to further its own reproductive cycle, before releasing spores into the atmosphere that then hunt out and destroy their next host.
So Naughty Dog has basically taken a real world parasite, and by tweaking its ability to affect humans, created a feasible back story for a zombie apocalypse. Add to this fact, that they have devised different stages of infection to create various "types" of zombies, many of which can effectively hunt, and run at terrifying speeds, and this is a perfect recipe for one seriously deranged zombie survival story that will keep me up at night. It is my sincere belief that Zombies can not run. If zombies can run, or climb, or god forbid, hunt using echo-location like some of these creepy bastards devised by Naughty Dog, then every member of the human race may as well just dig a hole, lay down in it and wait to die, because that is game over for us as a species.

Tsuro - The Game of The Path

Got out last night with a new group of folks who introduced me to a number of new board games, many of which I had never before experienced. The game that resonated most with me was a simple yet stylish offering called Tsuro.

In Tsuro, each character is a wind dragon (not to be confused with the luck dragon from The Neverending Story).

Played on a sqaure board, laid out as a grid, each dragon starts at a separate point along the exterior of the game board, and then each player in turn places a tile down infront of their dragon, which dictates the path that the dragon will follow. Each player receives 3 tiles to begin the game, and draws a new tile from the deck after a tile is laid. The point of the game is to lay down tiles so that your dragon avoids flying off of the board, or colliding with other players dragons. Last player standing wins.

The artwork of the game board and box draw heavily on Asian dragon symbolism, and very clean, simple lines. The game play, while seemingly simple, can become relatively complex once a player starts to manipulate the paths of their opponents. Ofcourse, choices are dictated by the tile cards in a players hand, but how a player chooses to utilize these tiles leaves significant room for varied play styles.

Game play moves very quickly, with a four player game lasting under 10 minutes.   Our game ended in a draw with a spectacular head on collisio between two dragons.  Because we had other games to sample, we didn't play a second round, but the game obviously caught my interest as I found myself contemplating strategy later in the evening. After our play test, our host mentioned that he had first discovered Tsuro through Wil Wheaton's online show: Table Top. I immediately decided that I would need to find the episode, just to see Wil Wheaton's approach to the game. As I expected, the episode of Table Top featuring Tsuro, featured 2 other mini games as well, Zombie Die, and Get Bit.

If you aren't familiar with Table Top, the premise is simple.   Wil and his compatriots play test various board games, for the sheer joy of playing. It was entertaining to watch their game unfold and compare the various play styles of Wil's playtesters to the players that I had played with earlier in the evening.  Wil took the master startegist approach, attempting to gain control of the center of the game board early on.  Unfortunatley, it was all for naught, a he failed to secure the victory.

I love that such a seemingly simple, yet remarkably complex game has still got me thinking about it 24 hours later. This will definitely be a box that I will be adding to my games closet very soon.