Archives

On paper, I fit the fanboy bill. I’ve decreed my love of The Last of Us to not only my gaming friends, but to my parents, wife, and kids, all of whom I’m sure are dying to hear my thoughts on the sequel. I’ve played through the game twice on each of the last two generations of PlayStations. I even dabbled in the vastly underrated multiplayer despite my failed campaign to recruit my friends. 

This proves that 1) I need new friends, and 2) I’m a devoted disciple of Naughty Dog’s tale of Joel, Ellie, and Friends. 

So then, here’s the short version: The Last of Us Part II is the most disappointing masterpiece I’ve ever played. 

…a distillation of everything Naughty Dog has come to do so very right.

The American holiday of Thanksgiving marks the start of shopping and gluttony, and also the Hollywood Oscar Season, when movies considered “Oscar-worthy” are released in theatres. The thinking is it keeps important films fresh in the minds of the nominating committee, whereas something that came out last spring is easily forgotten. The same happens with gaming, for different reasons, yet this year’s holiday was a very quiet time. Practically nothing of interest happened.

No, not even that.

I’m glad we had the chance to do this, and frankly I wish it’d been reasonable (or realistic) to record a much longer, more organized conversation with such smart people about such a smart game as The Last of Us. As this longest console generation winds down, it seems reasonable to say that this game will be remembered as its crowning achievement, a Shadow of the Colossus for the PS3 era – and that’s two generations in a row wrapped up not with some great bro-shooter epic but with something melancholy, thoughtful, often heartbreaking, and deeply meaningful to those who played it. The Last of Us, from serial hitmaker Naughty Dog, is a game based on a lie. There are zomboids and bandits, there’s beating people to death with bricks, there’re set piece battles aplenty. But it started with the lie, it’s about the lie, and maybe in the end the lie is all that really matters.

It’s powerful, it’s brutal, it’s stark and funny and tragic.  It’s long enough to satisfy even though you don’t want it to end by the time it does.  No one else is doing quite what Naughty Dog has done here.

I’ll always buy Naughty Dog games, they having convinced me of their undying committment to our love via the Uncharted series, but I don’t tend to slaver with excitement before they actually come out. Thus I wasn’t suffering from the can’t-waits in the days leading up the The Last of Us, their fungus-fueled post-apocalyptic proxical-parent TPD (third person depressor). I just waited until Friday and bought the game. Didn’t even unwrap it until the next afternoon.

You’ve probably seen boatloads of perfect scores from full reviews already, along with the odd 7.5 outliers that’ve caused such internet furor. Here’s what I have to say, after several hours, several more hideous deaths, and more clicking feral mushroom-zombies than you can throw a bottle to distract.

Ahh, 2011. The year in which we were supposed to have the Rapture (twice), the year of the Arab Spring, of Occupy, of the Whipping Judge and Pepper Spray Cop. The year of Steerpike’s Neglecting To Get His Carpets Shampooed, Even Though They Need It. The year of the release of Titus Awakes, which I haven’t finished but which probably doesn’t include my namesake since he died in Titus Groan. The year Brandon, Amanda, Bearwhale, and Ravious joined us as contributors. The year I gained weight, and the year I played games.

As it happens, all the games I rank below came out in 2011, though that’s not a rule. Our objective is to tell you about the games that we’ll remember most from 2011, whether they shipped that year or a decade before. And we’re each taking it in our stride – ranking, rambling, sorting. There are no rules. These are the ones that stick out in my mind. Some made me irresponsibly happy. Others made me inconceivably sad. I leave the rest to you, because I love you all, and I wish you a glorious 2012. If the world doesn’t end in December, be sure we’ll return with that year’s batch.

Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series are some of my favorite games of this generation, or ever.  They are well-made, exciting, and have the sort of gripping storytelling and character development that so often eludes game developers entirely.  Their cinematic nature makes the series seem like a shoe-in for film adaptation, but the director attached to the film, David O. Russell, seemed dead set on not drawing from the games.  Like, at all. But with his recent …

Okay, okay, I’m behind on this one too. Look, I’ve got a lot of games to play. Some slip past. It happens. I’m only human, right? Thankfully there’s a jolly old elf who comes by my house every December in an attempt to rectify the fact that I miss a lot of games most people grabbed on Day Zero. Heck, I never even played the original Uncharted. That, however, is a failure I intend to …