Honestly, I’m more angry about the meme creator thinking that Super Mario Bros. was 1972.
The showrunner of TLOS was also the head writer for the game.
It was the other showrunner, Craig Mazin, who said this. He doesn’t work in vidya gaems Though I can’t find the original source where he said it. So could be a shitpost.
That’s right because playing Dark Souls, I had to insert my sanity in the coin slot every time I died and it said Thanks Obama.
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.
Yes, like GoldenEye. No one played it, and it was definitely not a popular FPS where you jumped on enemies. It’s an obscure game based on the obscure movie where James Bond jumped on every single woman he saw. /s
You’re being too generous. In the 90s we were playing PlayStation and TV shows were still using the death sound from Atari Pac-Man
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 try to “vote with my wallet” on these things whenever I can.
You can’t just call people on the spectrum bots :P
It’s like hearing someone say “there were no strong female leads in movies before the Hunger Games”
Sucker Punch came out a year before
Ellen Ripley enters the chat
“Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?”
Nuke the site from orbit
i love how it says 1972 while showing the original super mario bros
Have I been playing Skyrim wrong all this time?
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
You owe Todd a lot of quarters missy.
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.
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.
I’ve been balls fucking deep in Spider-Man 2 lately. I got it a couple weeks ago and haven’t stopped since. I’m already almost 100% done with my NG+ run. I got a bunch of costume mods and some gameplay tweak mods, and I’m having a blast swinging around the expanded NYC (including Queens and Brooklyn) in all these different costumes that all honestly look fantastic.
It’s just more of the same/similar Spider-Man games we’ve all been playing for the better part of 20 years, but it’s just so goddamn fun.
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.
You can bypass 90% of the game challenges by just running past it, it works alarmingly well.
Okay. Doesn’t make it a walking sim still
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?
STORY SPOILERS AHEAD
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The second game starts off with killing the MC from the first game and you follow the other MC around on their revenge tour. From the bits I’ve seen it’s going for an ultra gritty, introspective, Walking Dead style narrative that I just honestly don’t care for anymore. It’s just not my thing.
I also don’t want to invest in the series when I know the main guy from the first one gets done dirty.
I wouldn’t call it “Walking Dead” style. If anything, it wears its Cormac McCarthy influences on its sleeve. If the first game was The Road, the second game is Blood Meridian. The story is intentionally dreary, miserable, uncomfortable, and emotionally draining. Kotaku’s review of the game was pretty on the money for a lot of people, it’s entirely possible to be so put off by the tone and story of the game because it’s so miserable.
The thing is that you play as Ellie and then as Abby to get both perspectives on the story. The entire message of the game is that revenge and unending conflict a downward spiral of self-destruction. Joel gets done dirty… but so does everyone. That’s the whole point of the game.
Maybe it’s the gay or the woman with muscles
It’s not that. It’s story beats. I explained it in another comment.
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.
I agree. Rogue lites and choose 3
Seemed like my sort of game, but I don’t like third-person, so I didn’t even try playing it.
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.
Super Mario Bros came out in 1985, not 1972. Pong was 1972.

Grateful for you both bc I did not catch that part of the joke lol
No, the joke was that since 1985 there’s been no games, but the image says 1972.
Lol can you imagine the jump if that’s how it was 🤣
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?
Yeah I know there’s some really deranged people on the internet.
It’s a bizarre thing when people think that proving the existence of a narrative is the same thing as something being true.
Apparently there’s a synagogue in it so some people are upset by that. You’ll of course claim that Zionism is not the same as antisemitism, while also spending a lot of time reading a lot of articles that tell you to hate a video game because it shows a synagogue in it.
That was a lot of words for, “yes, I forgot.” Guy’s own fucking words, you chud. He meant it to be a parallel, grow the fuck up. Not everything is about comforting you, FFS.
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.
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.
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.
Firewatch and What remains of Edith Finch both take around four hours to finish. You can easily finish them in a day or two.
It’s like you’ve never heard of Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters













