The Last Of Us: Third-Person Confirmed And Story Details

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Yeah, we know. You want to have every last detail concerning Naughty Dog's new project, The Last Of Us.
Well, you'll probably have to wait a bit for full disclosure, but at least we have some baseline information from the developers, which is a start.
According to USA Today, the two characters you see in the trailer - Joel and Ellie - meet at the start of the adventure and team up. Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann says Joel sees Ellie as "his one chance at redemption." This comes from an idea for a graphic novel Druckmann had back in 2008; it involved a father and daughter in a zombie tale. The idea had potential, after all.
But just to be clear, Naughty Dog has confirmed to other sources that The Last Of Us is definitely not a "zombie game." As for how the studio approached the new project, Naughty dog co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra said they had guys who "wanted to be challenged." After Uncharted 2: Among Thieves shipped, a few members moved over to work on The Last Of Us while others stuck around to work on Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception.
Lastly, we learn that their new project will be played in the third-person perspective, like the Uncharted series. And in regards to the progressive nature of the project... Said Balestra:
"We're trying to move the medium of video games into an area elevated in the same manner of respect of film. We want to redefine what our medium is even called. 'Video game' is not an accurate name anymore. It is not necessarily a game with rules and a winner and a loser. It's an experience."
Man, we can't wait to hear and see more.

PSA: Battlefield 3's 'Back to Karkand' now on PC, Xbox 360

Battlefield 3's "Back to Karkand" has been deployed on PC and Xbox 360. The maps for the expansion were buried in a recent PC update, so the mouse and keyboard crew should be good to go. Xbox 360 users have a 2.07 gigglebyte update ahead of them, so that's something to get going on ASAP. The PS3 version was updated last week.

"Back to Karkand" is free for those who picked up the "Limited Edition" version of BF3 at launch -- otherwise it's $15 (the standard for FPS map packs).

The mega Xbox 360 download doesn't just add Karkand maps, however, as there's also a ginormous list of changes made to single player, multiplayer andBattlefield 3's general balance. Check it out after the break.

Get in touch with Vita launch titles with ten new trailers

Sony sent out a bunch of trailers for first-party launch Vita games, focusing on the Vita-specific features each game uses. The good news: we see clever combinations of controls here, like Escape Plan's "pinch" of both the front and back touch panels. And Gravity Rush looks really neat regardless of how it's controlled.

The bad news: we're not nearly mature enough to see ten references to "front touch" and "rear touch" without giggling. If that's how Sony is going to refer to those features permanently, we're going to have a problem at press events.

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