Hacker CinemaThe Last of Us Development Series
The Last of Us Development Series
2013 · TV series · documentary · 4 min episodes · 1 season
Through short documentary episodes, key features of The Last of Us are shown.
2 positive2 negative1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
5 comments on Hacker News
Last of Us and God of War tend to get a lot of recognition, but it depends on what you’re looking for. Like film, you have to be open to the experience.
The title is "Sx truths", meaning there's no room for argument, interpretation or nuance. It's not his opinion, they're not observations, they are truths. That sets the tone for a strongly opinionated point of view, that ultimately failed to provide suficient proof for most of its examples, making it a rant.
And rants are fine, but trying to present it as the profound observations of a veteran with 20 something years of wisdom that shits on everyone's favourites without many arguments ("The Last of Us [...] having a story as good as a medium-quality zombie movie" is not an argument) comes of as toxic.
>The Last of Us has decent gameplay but became a phenomenon by having a story as good as a medium-quality zombie movie
Seems like the writer is just hating AAA games
But I'm also curious what zombie movies does this guy watch that have a so so much better story than TLoU
I have not played any computer game in over more than a decade, but I played a lot earlier.
Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie.
The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn. One of many such game movies for this game: https://youtu.be/W6jbYfmQAG4
That story seemed to be good but kind of stupid and the same as always, completely predictable, you already know what happened when you see the start and it's a bit stupid and too far-fetched - that kind. Until it wasn't. Turned out it wasn't just well-made, when you find out what was really going on it was THE BEST.
Not only does it have two very different stories layered (three, if you count the present time story): One about what happened to earth and its people and one layered inside of two people, the MC and a woman in the past, with seemingly no connection, until we find out the opposite is the case.
Both story-parts actually had me crying. When I found out after about four hours what had actually happened on earth, it was a great emotional shock. Same with the ending, that used the connection between the MC and that person from the past.
Even the machines and their (animal) forms make sense, there is a good and IMO satisfying explanation.
The stories in this game and in a handful of others are much better than most movies.
If you are in the mood for something really dark, watch a game movie of "SOMA". Underwater survival. Earth is gone - a giant meteor made the surface into a fiery hell, the only survivors are some researchers in a deep ocean facility. Best small detail: They get the "uploading your brain into a computer simulation" right, see the very ending of that game which shows it one last time (TL;DW: As someone who knows neuroscience, the idea makes no sense anyway, but let's forget that and assume it makes sense. What will happen is you still stand there in front of the computer, wandering what happened, after the "upload". Because you still exist, and the copy is not you. It's a copy. You still die, there is no magical connection between you and your copy.)
I am/was in the same boat as OP. I moved back to Germany after almost a decade in the US (mostly Silicon Valley). Closing your eyes does not make the problems go away. Even if you don't care and avoid the tens of millions of left-behind people, for myself, looking at things like health care was enough to give me second thoughts. It is nice as long as it is nice. I had a colleague, enterprise sales, very good income, who ended up living in the streets in the Bay Area due to a few turns of bad luck that could happen to anyone. Health care cost issues were part of it, but it only got really bad because of a the self-reinforcing feedback loop since there was no help available early (and the very late help was privately organized from people who knew him once they became aware of his dire situation). I venture to claim that he would have been okay if similar bad luck had befallen him in his native Germany.
I'm not sure how seriously other people take this, but I find it curious that a huge part of entertainment in movies, shows and games made/consumed in the US is about violence horror, and/or the end of society or even the world (oh and "heroes" of course - always coupled with violence). That is not a global phenomenon, or it only is in as far as Hollywood has always been exporting culture. It also is not normal, I can say from my own (almost half a century) life experience (first part of it on the Eastern side of the German border).
Myself, I can empathize with scenarios of the post-apocalypse as shown e.g. in "The Last Of Us", especially the violence and distrust between surviving groups - imagining myself in the area of the US in such a world. I can't imagine the same scenario in Europe, at least not on the same dystopian level. I would feel significantly safer in Europe after the collapse of civilization (said this commenter before getting murdered an hour later by another desperate European end-of-society survivor, haha - yeah, sure, can happen, it's just my gut feeling).
I have to balance my post by saying I still feel strong and positive about many things in the US. I'm not a "dark side only" guy when it comes to the view of that country. Still, even if I were rich I would not go back to live there, I don't feel good about the overall direction, even if a lot of things were to improve. All this darn celebration of violence and "heroes", for example, and as was pointed out here, science (so many immigrants holding it up), economic policies, politics (result of a feedback loop with economics and business policies, e.g. incentives for the media - what kind of news sells? Plus incredible concentration in a few hands).