Edit: Alright guys, I fucking get it. Please for the love of God stop saying the same damn thing to me over and over.

Numpty is a new word to me by the way. Hehe! :D

To be fair, I read his original review and though I haven't played the game, understood his rationale for giving it such a score though the updated 8.0 score just for the Remastered edition does come off as a bit strange despite the reasons given in the updated text.

i'm excited to get it.

good reason to get back into multiplayer, plus i never bought any of the dlc so im trying to rationalize the expense that way. =p

... What?

That is not what a 10/10 means. Before the music website CokeMachineGlow abandoned review scores altogether I thought they did an excellent job of summarizing what their scores meant, and as someone who's been a critic myself the past seven years I felt it neatly summarized how most reviewers approach their scores. You can roughly translate this to a four point scale.

DON'T EVEN BOTHER:

0 - 19%: Painful

20 - 29%: Terrible

30 - 39%: Poor

40 - 49%: Nearing average

BE WARNED:

50 - 54%: Average

55 - 59%: Slightly above average

60 - 64%: Good; serious flaws

TRY IT:

65 - 69%: Good; detracting problems

70 - 74%: Impressive; well above average

75 - 79%: Solid; few major reservations

BUY IT:

80 - 84%: Great; repeated listens suggested

85 - 89%: Exceptional; repeated listens demanded

90 - 95%: Best of decade

96 - 100%: Best of genre

@random45: No, it really doesn't. If you're attributing that to it then you're going to be sorely let down by a lot of games. 10/10 means it is a super high quality game. NOTHING is perfect. Everything could always be better or improve.

Is there always going to be this inevitable debate over game reviews and scoring systems? We should just let critics be critics and get rid of this whole notion of 'objective product reviews', considering there are so many Let's Plays nowadays that will show you the mechanics.

Obviously 10/10 implies something of highly comprehensive quality ('flawless' is just nonsense talk, let's not be silly) but we might as well be pragmatic and not refuse to use 10% of the already narrow scale, considering most publications have ditched anything below 4 already.

No, you are actually completely off base. You most likely get that mentality from schools/grading systems, which doesn't apply to critiques. Here on giantbomb they used to have a page the spelled out, "While we don't believe any game is perfect, we recommend this game without reservation", which is what pretty much all reviewers are saying when they give something a 10/10. As you said, nothing is perfect, but reviews are here to tell you if something is worth buying or not, and a 10/10 is saying "hey, this is really great and you should check it out".

Works for me. Never got to play the entire game on ps3 just the last bits, so I'm their customer.

Probably has something to do with the DLC which is really excellent. That or he spent the last year listening to and reading effusive praise of the game and some of it rubbed off on him.

For anyone interested, Sony is steaming a show in 8 minutes. "The Last of Us: One Night Live" in which the actors from the game will be performing the cut scenes live.

Re-reviewing this seems dumb and harkens back to the days when reviews had separate scores for "Graphics" and "Story" and "Sound". A game is defined by its melding of those parts, and I highly doubt a few more points of texture resolution would actually make Last of Us any better to someone who didn't like it.

No outlet does, has ever, or should ever follow this philosophy. You're in the wrong here. Sorry.

Yeah, these reviews are far from revelatory. Reading them, it's more a case of, "Well, duh." Naughty Dog would have had to have done horribly wrong to make the game substantially worse than the original release.

@adam1808: Hmmm...I just remember that his main gripe with the game being the mechanics though I might be misremembering what other points negatively contributed to the scoring.

It is a bit strange since the Remastered version doesn't change any of the game mechanics and it is essentially the same. I mean keeping it consistently at 7.5 would probably have not been surprising. I dunno, it might have had something to do with the fact that the review was tacked on the original PS3 version which in a sense is fine but I think I would have been a bit less nit-picky if it was actually:
A. Had its own review, which I admit is probably unnecessary since IT IS the same exact game so there wouldn't be much to write about in the first place or...
B. Not have done an updated review for it at all. Hehe!

Yup, I have to agree. A 100% or 10/10 or 5/5, etc. doesn't mean that the game is perfect or flawless. Even the GB staff would even tell us that this is not ever the case when a game is given a 100% score.

@gaspower: Polygon's review policies rarely make any sense. I often find that either their wording doesn't match up with the number at the bottom of the page or I don't completely understand why a particular reviewer disliked a game. I love a lot of the people working there but some of their decisions regarding how/why certain reviews are written are just plain odd.

Now that the alternate ending has been outed and performed live and the game redone, what are the chances ND took the time to animate it and hide it in the remastered game somehow?

Okay I didn't think this deserved it's own forum thread but what is going on with the digital download for this. It downloads 11gb, then I played through the prologue only to get another screen where it was downloading more of the game... is this common with full games off psn? Maybe I'm crazy but I'd rather just let the thing do the whole download while I'm asleep rather than piece meal downloading each chapter.

It's not uncommon, no. Some games allow you to start playing before the full download is complete. However, it's problematic, as you can get to a point where it's impossible to play any further because the console hasn't downloaded enough of the game yet. When that happens, the only option is to wait for more if not all of the game to download.

This really blows my fucking mind. I always thought scores were based on the quality of the game, and that's why everyone always blew a gasket when a game they wanted to do well only received an 8 out of 10. If this is really the case, then what in the world is even the point of a 10 point system? What differentiates a 9 from a 10, or 1 from a 2? A four star system like Giant bomb uses makes a lot more sense to me now though.

The entire concept of a ten-point review score system is an antiquated holdover from the early days of game reviews. It's been skewed too heavily over the years by poor review practices at various sites and reader (read: uninformed fan) interpretation that a ten-point scale doesn't even mean what it should at this point. There's no purpose in a scale from 1-10 if, in the reader's mind, the only scores that matter are 8-10, where 10 is equivalent to one of the best games ever and anything below 8 is untouchable garbage. And ten-point scales that use decimals are even worse, both for their innate absurdity (what's the difference between an 8.6 and an 8.7?), and again, the fan expectations. (See the volatile reaction to Jeff's Twilight Princess review when he gave it "only" an 8.8 instead of a 9.0.)

A five-star review system like Giant Bomb's is much more functional because, with its smaller scale, there's less room for score bloat or absurd personal interpretations. Metacritic tries to equate the five star system into its 100 point system, which is silly and demonstrates the issues with Metacritic in general. But too many sites still rely on the ten-point scale, with or without decimals, and so the absurdity of people blowing up over a game receiving a respectable 7.5-8.0 (when in reality, a truly poor score should be considered anything below a 5.0) continues to happen.

@hailinel: thanks for the reply. I've been searching around, but do you happen to know if there's anyway to have it just download the full game?

Go to your home screen, find the game, press the OPTIONS button, scroll to information and in the "download status" you can see the actual total size and progress.

@quipido: wow. I feel dumb. Thx duder, very helpful.

@hailinel: Thanks for the explanation, it's going to take me a bit to adapt to seeing review scores as recommendation-based rather than quality-based, but at least I know now for future reference.

now we just need Bioshock Infinite Remastered so they can go toe to toe for backlashed-against games of 2013!!!!

@ripelivejam: Both games are overrated both games sucks

That sentence could've been two if you just put the effort in. Both games were great, although Infinite feels almost separate from what Bioshock was. Although Bioshock was essentially System Shock.

Having never played the game on the PS3 (I never owned a PS3) I'm excited to see what the hype is all about.

^ give multiplayer a chance too

its quite a bit of fun

I not long from preordering after watching the quick look and the live show/. magnificent game so it is.

Something about this getting scores this high just doesn't sit that well with me for whatever reason. Maybe it's just because I've become so spoiled by PC games these past few years, but when you upgrade your PC all of your games are automatically "remastered" and you don't have to spend full price on a new game. Just load up steam and say "damn, look how fucking great all these games look". Something about this seems dirty to me.

Its odd reviewing this package for anybody, really. As a journalist you're obligated to do so as its a new product for a different format. But you can't reign back your scores because you've got the PS3 scores to contend with. And nobody's going to say a remastered version is less. That only leaves one direction for the scores to go, if they weren't there already.

However, if you're coming into the Last of Us - at this point in time - needing a score, you've probably never played it.

Was never a huge fan of how the game played the first time around to be honest. But the story was superb and the game just looks fantastic. One of the most detailed games I've ever played. I'll probably pick it up again when it goes on sale just to try the multiplayer, it looked kinda fun in the QL.

I really can't tell if you're being serious right now. This is what the internet lobotomy as done to me.

Infinite wins this contest handily. I'm actually surprised how little backlash LoU has gotten since that seems to happen to most high rated games these days.

@giantlizardking: Well, it's not a PC game, first of all. They included all the DLC along with brand-new commentary. They also spent the time getting the game to run on a completely new console, a massive task in and of itself. It's more than just a settings bump.

Don't make me puke!

@bwheeeler: yeah I get that it is slightly more than a settings bump, but between this and tomb raider it seems like a disturbing trend. It's fine that the DLC is included but if you already paid for the game and DLC once it would be nice if they would have only charged you an upgrade fee.

It's just strange how Polygoons intentionally underrates Playstation exclusives or flat-out misleads their readers, while scoring significantly worse performing multiplatform titles on the XB1, higher. That $750.000 sponsor money (read: bribe money) from Microsoft is still a sweet honey pot I guess. Do not call these goons journalist or reviewers, microsoft shills is more apt.

So does everyone else but Joel have infinite ammo on every difficulty setting? And human enemies who shoot you don't usually drop ammo or weapons? Otherwise I'm really enjoying the game, but those things feel kinda out of place and brake my immersion.

That was my initial thought until I clicked on the link. But if you think about it, Gies would never give a universally acclaimed Sony exclusive that high a score.

\

8.0 wasn't too far off from how I felt about the game originally. But the more I thought about it, the fonder I grew of it, which doesn't happen very often with games.

@trafalgarlaw: Calm down. I will agree that Arthur Gies shouldn't be allowed to write professionally for anything and should limit his "thoughts" to personal blogs if anything. But looking for vapor trails in the sky isn't a valuable use of anyone's time.

What vapor trail? It's out in the open and even acknowledged by polygoons. You're okay with professional reviewers accepting money from videogame & console manufacturers, to fund a videogame website?

What do you think that giant Last of Us Remastered ad on the front page of this site is exactly?

Advertising, not sponsoring/funding.

Yes, it's a video game manufacturer/developer giving these fine, professional reviewers money to advertise their game on their site. If they didn't "fund" the site by advertising on it, GB would probably cease to exist.