T w e n t y S i d e d

So Joel rolls up his sleeves, and Tess walks around with bare arms. This is silly. But it doesn’t bother me as much as this:

Watching the episode after recording, I see that Joel’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 not good enough as a reason for having heavy-duty objects snap in half after a few hits. Neither is the “well, maybe it rusted!” 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’m not saying it’s impossible, but I am saying it’s not going to happen after five swings. It’s certainly not going to be common. And I don’t care how ripped you are, you are not going to snap a metal rod on a human torso. Guffaw.

We’ve got bullets, guns, potted plants, food, pills, bricks, shivs, and documents. The player has lots of crap to gather up. Please don’t add this ridiculous nonsense to a game that’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’t become fun since then. Now it just looks silly.

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.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

When The Last of Us came out, actress Ellen Page accused the developer of ripping off her likeness. The similarity is pretty strong to me, but it was even more striking before the changes to the character’s face part way through development. Not only does that look like Ellen Page, but the voice is kind of similar as well: Both the actress and the character have that same middle-register, slightly rough voice that’s unusual for women. And of course the Ellen / Ellie thing didn’t really help Naughty Dog in their claims that the similarity was purely a coincidence.

The sad thing is that Ellen Page actually was starring in a videogame at the time this was going on. She appeared in Beyond: Two Souls, a game which didn’t do nearly as well. It was another adventure of the David Cage variety, and we all know how those games go. I’ve been saying that, “If your game is trying to be a movie, then Last of Us is how you need to do it.” Beyond (disclosure: I haven’t played it) is criticized for being the antithesis of this: It’s a game that’s low on gameplay and interactivity, and telling a story that’s muddled, meandering, cliche, nonsensical, and in no way good enough to stand up as a movie. Again, I haven’t played it, but having played through some of David Cage’s other work I’ll say that description sounds extremely plausible.

The whole situation is kind of screwed up. Imagine if someone had used CGI to rip off Bruce Willis in appearance and voice, and used their fake Willis to make the critically acclaimed Die Hard. And meanwhile the REAL Bruce Willis was starring in Hudson Hawk, which opened opposite of it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Rutskarn is right. This only looks silly because the world looks so real. Older stealth games had mechanics that were just as ridiculous, but we understood them to be representative. They were a metaphor, as part of the language of a simplified cartoon world. But now we’ve got this thing that looks “real”, and we’re throwing a bottle directly through a guy’s field of vision without them noticing. And strangling a grown man to death in a quiet space while his friend stands just two meters away, oblivious? Looks like everyone decided to put on their silly pants today.

Also strange is the way the game is still so video-gamey about the guards. Those nameless, clueless, powerless rubes you gun down on your way to Robert. In real life, I’d be extremely worried about that trail of bodies. At least one of those guys had a mother who loved him very much, and who probably had other sons. At least one of those guys was married and took care of a family. At least one of those guys had a brother about the same age. If I was Joel I’d be paranoid that tomorrow the buzz would be all over town: Who shot all those guys? It’s not like they didn’t conspicuously pass multiple people on their way to Robert. Word would get around. Somewhere out there would be someone (probably a group of someones, maybe even a posse of someones) who would work just as hard to solve these murders ad Joel and Tess did to recover their guns.

Of course, that not how the game works. Those guys didn’t have names of histories or families. They were mooks to be killed because this is a shooter. It’s just that as games get more and more visual fidelity, stuff like this looks increasingly strange to me. And to be honest, I don’t know what the solution is. You could lower the body count, but only at the expense of having less shooting. So we can either have a game with little shooting (Walking Dead) cartoony graphics (not gonna happen in the gritty AAA game space) or we end up playing a casual mass-murderer. I suppose you can also set the game in a world with lots of foes that can be killed guilt-free (aliens and Nazis) but that does tyend to narrow your options with regards to what kinds of stories you can tell.

Despite my bellyaching, I really wish I’d played this game. I’m dumping on the shooting from a narrative / tonal sense, but it looks fun.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This is a problem I have with any sort of post-apocalyptic world. If we’ve regressed back to pre-technology days, then nine out of every ten people need to be farming. Food is everythingWe’re assuming clean water is easily obtainable. Which it isn’t. Especially in cities.. What are these soldiers guarding? Why are we living in these cities where there are (apparently) lots of zombies and no food? Why are we wasting our precious fossil fuelsSpoiler: Gasoline apparently has a shelf-life of only a couple of years, even when stored in ideal conditions. Twenty years after the end of the world, all the gas is GONE. Sorry. driving solders around in humvees and huge troop trucks when we could be putting that magic labor juice into farming equipment? Are people STILL dying on a regular basis from random zombie bites? Why would anyone need to “smuggle” guns in a world like this? Is the government really trying to maintain an unarmed population? Isn’t everyone that doesn’t own a gun already dead?

Before we go any further: YES, I know there are in-game answers to some of these questions. But those answers themselves just replace one question with another:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Last of Us EP2: Suddenly, Chest-High Walls”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.