{"id":24522,"date":"2014-09-25T16:24:28","date_gmt":"2014-09-25T21:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24522"},"modified":"2014-09-25T16:25:02","modified_gmt":"2014-09-25T21:25:02","slug":"last-of-us-ep5-the-brick-thief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=24522","title":{"rendered":"Last of Us EP5: The Brick Thief"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TidnQkOr_vo\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TidnQkOr_vo'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>So Joel rolls up his sleeves, and Tess walks around with bare arms. This is silly. But it doesn&#8217;t bother me as much as this:<\/p>\n<p>Watching the episode after recording, I see that Joel&#8217;s metal object (a pipe, I think) snaps in the middle of combat. Look, I understand the need for the player to gather and manage resources, but that is simply <em>not good enough<\/em> as a reason for having heavy-duty objects snap in half after a few hits. Neither is the &#8220;well, maybe it rusted!&#8221; excuse. Get a wooden bat, and see how long it takes you to snap it in half by pounding away on a mattress, punching bag, or other things that give and bend the way the human body does. I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s impossible, but I am saying it&#8217;s not going to happen after five swings. It&#8217;s certainly not going to be <em>common<\/em>. And I don&#8217;t care how ripped you are, <strong>you are not going to snap a metal rod on a human torso<\/strong>. Guffaw.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve got bullets, guns, potted plants, food, pills, bricks, shivs, and documents.  The player has lots of crap to gather up. Please don&#8217;t add this ridiculous nonsense to a game that&#8217;s trying so hard to be taken seriously. I could hand-wave it (like so many other mechanics) if it made for good gameplay,  but melee weapon degradation was an annoying contrivance twenty years ago, and it hasn&#8217;t become fun since then. Now it just looks silly. <\/p>\n<p>Having complained about all that, I do like the approach to combat that this game takes. Most zombie games have you fighting waves of them, but TLOU keeps it small, focused, and tense. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) So Joel rolls up his sleeves, and Tess walks around with bare arms. This is silly. But it doesn&#8217;t bother me as much as this: Watching the episode after recording, I see that Joel&#8217;s metal object (a pipe, I think) snaps in the middle of combat. Look, I understand the need for the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[439],"class_list":["post-24522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-the-last-of-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}