realph

@thesoutherndandy: Yeah, I'm interested to see what games will be available on Live. With this week's self-publishing announcement, don't be surprised if half of Ouya's entire library is available from day one. Fingers crossed for Towerfall!

@strainedeyes: Just added DCUO to the list!

Yeah, I'd be up for organising another one in London. Eurogamer might not be a bad idea @chavtheworld.

For me, it's FIFA 14, Battlefield/COD, Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed IV.

Launch lineup is looking a little like this for both consoles. If you're planning to pick up a next-gen system in November, which games are you going buy with your new box at launch?

Rockstar are posting the first official gameplay video for GTA V tomorrow.

Kind of surprised they're doing this, as we typically don't see gameplay from GTA games up until launch. I've always loved that tradition with the series. Shame.

@garfield518: Yeah Vinny's definitely beat it as of last week's podcast. He praised the game.

Think the Bomb Crew would have finished it, or at least one of them?

I know Ryan had his wedding over the weekend so can't imagine he's been able to find the time. Brad didn't seem to keen to play it. I hope at least Jeff has finished it so he and Vinny can talk about it.

I attended a preview event for The Last of Us a couple months back. Simply put it wasn't the greatest of demos and gave me bad feelings about what was soon to be released in June. It's not that the gameplay wasn't good necessarily, it just felt SO familiar and generic.

Being a guy that loves systems in video games, I was really disappointed Naughty Dog weren't innovating in this department. Take I Am Alive, while it wasn't a great game by any means, the mechanics of survival felt original enough for me to respect what they were trying to do, even if it wasn't the sweetest of executions.

Regardless of how I felt walking out of that preview event, I realised the difficulty of demoing these sorts of games, so I hadn't written it off just yet and still planned to pick the game up at launch.

After being blown away by the opening 15 minutes, the game that resumed is game I didn't much care for. Sitting down with the game in front of my TV confirmed as much. Encounters felt repetitive, boring and most of the time ended up frustrating me. While the story still had me hooked, after almost 10 hours in, I was ready to write this game off.

Then it stepped up a notch (slightly) we met Henry and Sam, escaped the city at night and got away. They eventually died and not long after Joel got hurt real bad. This was the turning point for me.

Continuing alone as Ellie, hunting for food in Winter, not knowing if Joel had made it felt harrowing. It was a beautiful spell, the kind of slow-paced moment I felt the game had lacked up to that point. Maybe it was that sudden cut they made from Joel falling off that horse to Ellie fending for herself, I dunno.

Then there was the bumping into David, the fighting off what felt like a thousand infected, the high fives all round after I'd completed that sequence, and then watching that reveal play out. Ahh, did that make the 12 hours up to that point (10 of which I didn't enjoy) worth it or what!

As the game progressed I started to fall in love with it more and more. Taking control of Joel post-fever and playing out his and Ellie's sequences separately, retracing Ellie's footsteps through the same town in the foggy snow trying to find one another felt so well directed and Naughty Dog pulled this off effortlessly.

I can go on forever discussing the second half of this game, hell, even that bit with the giraffes. But it was that last scene in the hospital where you picked Ellie up off the table and ran for it; harkening back to the start of the game so brilliantly without being preachy or obvious. Watching Joel shoot Marlene when confronted at gunpoint (just like the opening) with the threat of Ellie being taken from him, Ellie, who at this point fully embodies his daughter. And straight up lying to her in the car, to suit his own selfish needs.

As I explained at the start of this post, after 10 hours in I wasn't a fan. And after all the praise heaped on this game, I hated it slightly more (I know, that's kind of dickish). But somehow, The Last of Us had me do a complete one-eighty on my feelings and opinions of it when I was nailed on to hate this game. Neil Druckmann, my friend, take a bow!

So, this is how I feel. I'm about 2/3 through the game on my first playthrough.

Naughty Dog have done a great job in the past of building great games around really generic core mechanics. The Crash games, Jak games and the Uncharted games all follow this same formula.

Take Uncharted for example, it's a real basic third-person cover shooter at the root, but it's what ND wrapped it in that made it so special. The awesome technical set-pieces, the incredible console graphics, likeable/believable characters etc. Uncharted had fireworks going off around it at every turn.

The Last of Us doesn't have any of the same pyrotechnics, and the repetitive gameplay stands out a lot more because of this. I love the story, and Joel and Ellie are pretty cool, but the gameplay on show is super bland.