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Super Mario Bros was published in 1985 not 1972 but yeah.
Back in the 90’s, video games were new enough that you could forgive the film industry for not being familiar with them. It’s been 30 years. They still don’t get it.
They don’t play video games, they do coke or children. They live different lives than us poors.
I mean, lets be fair here. Its both coke and children.
I kinda stand with Yahtzee Croshaw on this: The video game industry is a lot bigger than the film industry and makes a hell of a lot more money, so filmmakers should probably do a little learning their place.
I’ve got a suspicion that this is one of those “say something intentionally stupid so that everyone jumps on the train to correct you and create engagement”.
That’s how everything in the internet works nowadays. I just can’t do it. Everyone (mostly bots I suspect) seem to want to get pissed off or feel themselves like correct or interesting.
I was listening to a podcast recently, New York Videogames Critics Circle, and they talked about The Last of Us 1 and 2 and Neil Druckman as if it was the first game to ever make the player feel emotions. Like not just that it did so successfully, but that it did it at all.
It’s like hearing someone say “there were no strong female leads in movies before the Hunger Games”
Ellen Ripley enters the chat
Foxy Brown looks on from the back of the bus.
I can’t think of any aspect of The Last of Us that didn’t appear in an earlier game. It was well enough done, but I don’t feel like it was innovative in any way.
The Last of Us is just something I cannot get in to. Been trying for 10 years. I just do not care and it bores me to death even when I was trying to force myself to stay with it. Turns out as I get older, I still don’t want walking simulators. I still just want more of the games I played as a kid, and luckily I still have them all.
It is fine to have a different experience and taste in games. But The Last Of Us is absolutely not a Walking Sim. For one thing, Walking Sims, by definition, have no combat. You just walk around and explore a place and uncover a story along the way. TLOU is filled with stealth combat and 3rd person shooting, survival horror style resource management, as well as exploration and an unfolding story.
I think what you mean is that you dislike Narrative-driven adventure games. Walking Sims are a sub-genre of narrative driven games, but not all narrative driven games are Walking Sims. The Last Of Us is an narrative- driven action-adventure survival-horror game.
I agree. Rogue lites and choose 3
+2 +2
Seemed like my sort of game, but I don’t like third-person, so I didn’t even try playing it.
I like walking sims but I hate stealth action games. Will never be able to play TLOU.
Also hearing about what they did in the 2nd one kinda kills my interest.
Did what in the second one? Made the stealth action more involved?
I absolutely loved playing The Last of Us. But I find no enjoyment in ever playing it again (I tried and got bored). It will be like rewatching a movie I’ve seen, but meanwhile having to relearn how to watch it as well. I think these storydriven games have their place, but there are surely more engaging games.
It’s frustrating how people in charge are so far away from reality.
Remember when Kathleen Kennedy said that writing for Star Wars is hard because there aren’t any books and comics?
She can’t have said that.
Hate to break it to you, but…
So on one hand, that reads to me like she meant “we are not pulling from the existing comics or books”, as opposed to “we are unaware of them”.
On the other hand, the Darth Caedus (aka Jacen Solo) might have something to say about Kylo Ren being an “original concept” that “was not pulled from the books or comics”.
This explains so much.
What the ACTUAL fuck?
Can’t use material you don’t own, if your primary interest is money.
No books or comics*
*That we own the rights to
Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow was slated to write and direct Episode IX before you brought J.J. Abrams back in. Is this final entry in the trilogy a particularly hard nut to crack?
Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be.As bad as that last movie was, I’m still glad Colin Trevorrow want allowed anywhere near it. There are few directors who are that out of their depth when given a big budget…
What the Michael A. Stackpole is she on about?
Lol what? That’s like saying drawing is hard if there’s no connect the dots
I have a biased take here, but:
It’s so much worse than that. It’s like saying “We can’t trace any completed connect the dots drawings” when there were 200 already completed connect the dots drawings specifically based on Star Wars.
I would kill to have a Darth Bane movie trilogy or two movies based on Revan. There’s even a Star Wars zombie book they could have turned into a movie at the height of the zombie media craze for crying out loud.
Horribly, horribly mismanaged.
It is like she is saying filming Lord of the Rings was hard because there were no books to start from.
I guess Zionism is a bold innovation in video game storytelling now.
Edit: putting this here because I know you goddamn morons arent gonna read two comments down:
https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/neil-druckmann
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii/
https://time.com/7275781/the-last-of-us-controversy-israel-gaza/
This isn’t even a controversial association, you people have to fucking grow up.
“Druckmann has openly stated that the themes of revenge and cyclical violence in The Last of Us Part II stem from his reaction to the 2000 Ramallah lynching of two Israeli soldiers, where footage of the event filled him with “intense hatred” and a desire to “kill all these people that committed this horrible act” and “make them feel the same pain.” He later reflected on feeling “gross and guilty” for these impulses, but used them as the foundation for the game’s narrative. Druckmann also draws parallels to Israeli politics, citing the 2011 exchange of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, noting how his father viewed the deal as harmful to Israel overall but would release every prisoner to save his own son. These inspirations manifest in The Last of Us Part II’s portrayal of warring factions: the secular, militarized Washington Liberation Front (WLF), equipped with advanced weaponry and resources, mirrors the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as a “brutal but well-intended” military, while the Seraphites, a religious cult engaging in ritual disembowelment and fanaticism, dehumanizes Palestinians as an extremist threat akin to Hamas.”
Not everything has something to do with Zionism FFS.
lol, lmao even. Literally the most famous video game instance of it:
https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/neil-druckmann
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-not-so-hidden-israeli-politics-of-the-last-of-us-part-ii/
https://time.com/7275781/the-last-of-us-controversy-israel-gaza/
Maybe read a bit eh. Did you like, forget this was a famous story not three years ago?
Is that a real quote?
if you don’t think so, spend the two seconds it takes to search it out yourself
Nope doesn’t look like it, looks like it was someone being gamergate about videogames
The absence of evidence is no evidence of absence
If we want to be charitable there’s a nugget of truth to what he’s saying though. I’m 48 now and I’ve played computer games since I was seven, and I’ve worked with game development myself. TLOU was the first game that felt like it had a story for someone who’s 40+. It felt like some kind of milestone. The art of games has matured significantly in the past 15 years.
Clearly you’ve never played the cinematic masterpiece that is Sonic Adventure 2.
I think there are a lot of candidates before TLOU, and you are being very charitable I would say.
The first game that I remember having a worthwhile story is probably Max Payne (themes of bereavement, drug addiction, betrayal) or the Thief games (environmental storytelling!)
Come on, Space Quest V was not written for kids
Neither was Leisure Suit Larry. But I’d argue that the the game still appealed more to kids than to adults. With TLOU I saw something else happen: many kids hated the ending, while dads like me totally got it.
Yeah, it’s worded stupidly, but there’s a point there. TLOU was emotive in a way I haven’t felt often in video game writing. Ref how well it adapted into TV.
I think what he’s getting at is that gaming has focused more on gameplay loop than storytelling, which is generally fair.
If anyone has recommendations for games they think have writing of comparable quality, lay them on me. For me so far the pantheon is bioshock, RDR2, TLOU, and I have high hopes for Bg3.
Planescape Torment, The Longest Journey, Max Payne, Mafia the city of Lost Heaven, BioWare games (KotOR, Mass Effect, etc), Persona 3/4, Dead Space, Alan Wake, Deus Ex… I mean storytelling over gameplay is Quantic Dream’s whole schtick, success/failure aside. Previous Naughty Dog games.
There’s a bit of a a conflation between cinematic presentation and storytelling. I literally grew up on story driven games well before TLoU. Homeworld was absolutely haunting with its understated dialogue, sweeping score, and timeless themes.
Even the year before TLoU, Spec Ops the Line came out, a deft and timely reimagining of The Heart of Darkness for the late Iraq war era–adding into it through the mechanics of the shooter genre. Talk about literary.
Oh shit dead space, yeah that definitely needs to go higher up my list.
Cinema/storytelling interesting point. For sure there’s a lot of personal taste at play. Maybe the other dimension is agency in the story. A branching narrative is obviously harder to write/produce but is what separates games from other media (which is a reasonable critique for e.g. TLOU, which works so well as just… a HBO series).
- Firewatch
- What remains of Edith Finch
- Outer wilds
The first two are “walking simulators”, i.e. very linear. But the story telling of all three is amazing. Firewatch also feels like a “game for grown-ups”. It deals with a person who leaves his wife because she gets early onset dementia. He runs off to work as a firewatch in a national park. Lots of complicated feelings involved and an extremely engaging mystery unfolding.
I need to find more time for walking sim stuff. Played “everybody’s gone to the rapture” and ejoyed it.
It’s like you’ve never heard of Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters
i love how it says 1972 while showing the original super mario bros
Anyone else with fond 1970s memories of finding the parents’ lock to the coinbox of the home NES?
The Last of Us whas the first game you could play without quarters? I had no idea. That’s pretty incredible.
Have I been playing Skyrim wrong all this time?
You owe Todd a lot of quarters missy.
Someone call a psychiatrist, we have another case of Other Games Syndrome.
You’ll be ok. Let’s just sit down and play either of your games. Do you want to play Super Mario, or Last of Us
No, it’s the same thing. You’re an arrow who jumps on the heads of enemies.
Wait, you didn’t think you were the person with the bow did you? The stealth archer is inconsequential to the story. It’s the arrow that matters.
Nobody else inserted quarters into their computer whenever you died in Doom?
I did once. The quarter fell onto some solder points and short circuited a bunch of stuff. Fried the whole machine. This was back in the early 90s, of course, when a typical computer cost as much as a nice used car and maybe four people in the county had one, much less knew how to fix one. Some original joke about getting beaten with jumper cables. Sometimes the hard lessons are the ones that stick with you most because as I got older, I learned how to solder and perform board level repairs. It’s an insanely useful skill.
You can’t die in Doom. Per the quote - you die after jumping on enemies. The lack of jump button and infinitely tall monsters were specifically implemented to prevent player death in Doom.
That’s why it’s considered a milestone game. Truely astonishingly design.
Also, once you think about it, the last of us isn’t even categorically a game.
The cut scenes are good, but the stealth bits are really exciting gameplay too. Genuinely scared my partner with the faces I pulled playing the left behind expansion.
https://youtu.be/e5jDspIC4hY?t=214 is the timestamp for that final definition of what I generally try to push as the definition of a game. Not sure I agree with it, but it’s an interesting take and what I was mostly speaking to.
Ah interesting. I’m a big fan of the “what is a sport” pub chat, so this is fun too. “single player game” = oxymoron doesn’t hit common understanding of what constitutes a game, but I don’t think we have a word for the subset of games being singled out here.
Is there a level of capability for AI where you would consider them “agents” according to this schema? Obviously TLOU enemies don’t qualify, and multiplayer is generally more fun. Aah so many questions. I’m going to have to find someone who will put up with 2hrs of debate on this if I stand them pints.
