An article ran by Capital New York may have gone largely unnoticed by the wider gaming world had it not been for a link by film critic Roger Ebert, posted to Twitter with the added comment "such a good writer." The article, entitled "The Last of Us, and Other Video Games That Leave Nothing to the Imagination" asserts that The Last of Us is another in a long line of games that awards the player for doing horrific things whilst to offer anything mentally challenging along the way.
"At the E3 video game expo in Los Angeles earlier this month, a crowd of gamers cheered on a camo-clad tough guy as he went room to room beating people to death and setting them on fire.
"It was a typical third-person-shooter video game action, except that the realism was stunning. A nearsighted person without glasses could have mistaken it for a movie scene.
"I wasn’t at the event in person. I just watched the game demo play on YouTube, with the “live” audience response mixed in. But they seemed to be thinking the same thing.
"Just when it seemed a brawnier guy with a two-by-four would overpower our hero, a petite female sidekick stabbed the assailant in the back. The hero kicked his attacker to the ground and leveled a shotgun at his face. “No, no, NO!” the brawny guy shrieked, a split second before the hero unloaded. After the man’s jaw shattered in a spray of blood and bone—smash cut—the title THE LAST OF US, white-on-black, filled the screen. The crowd roared."
Steven Boone, the writer, actually has a lot of good to say about video games and goes on to say that it's not a "problem" suffered only within the video game industry, but in film and TV as well. Still, he probably should have taken a closer look at the overall game before dismissing it as a mindless showcase of violence, although in all fairness that IS what Naughty Dog showcased in the one trailer he saw.
