SPCDA: The Last of Us

I'll try my best to operate without spoilers, but, eh, there's only so much I can do.

I've been making a lot of little, poor choices lately. Shining example: my clean laundry (read: underwear) is downstairs, and my bedroom and bathroom are upstairs. For some reason I refuse to rectify this, and every morning I have to furtively dart downstairs in a towel, pajama pants, or yesterday's underwear in order to collect enough items to finish dressing.

I laugh at this a little bit, but also chide myself. I'm 28 next month. This is, perhaps, not the sort of thing one does, and certainly not something I'd be proud of should somebody observe this in action. When I think on it, and things like this, my concluding thoughts are, inevitably, who would you try to impress otherwise? It's just you.

It's sort of a defeating thought, but eventually things get done. I'll eventually get the laundry upstairs (about the time for the next cycle to begin). I'll eventually get the house vacuumed. But for now, especially summer, I just have other things that are more interesting, or at least, better hold my focus.

Somewhat recently I bought a blender. A nice one. And I've been, well, blending, a whole lot. So much so that I really, really should have been worried about the hepatitis contamination that occurred in the frozen strawberries and blueberries from Costco. So much so that I've probably gone through two dozen bags of individually quick-frozen strawberries since April. I've dropped ~12lbs down from then. Victory comes in slurry form.

About the same time, I also had the misfortune of buying alcohol from Costco. No, no, no hepatitis there. The issue being: I bought what I thought to be a sufficient amount of beer, vodka, and liqueurs for a group of people, and they weren't drank (nobody's fault). My attempts at outright leaving it at other's houses never ended in success.

And so... so I've been working through them, making room in my fridge. Slowly. And usually combined with strawberries, blueberries, bananas, yogurt, and spinach. It's actually not that bad. It doesn't necessarily help with the diet, but it helps if I'm lacking inspiration for programming or writing. Maybe the alcohol sterilizes the berries, I don't know.

Anyhow. All this to say, the first night I played The Last of Us, it was too hot upstairs to do anything. I decided to make a cool booze smoothie, and play for a few hours. I sat on my coffee table, across the room from a pile of clean underwear. I sipped, and waited for my PS3 to update.

I don't want to spoil the beginning. Or the rest of the game. But damn... I'm not a parent. But I know parents. And I know their kids. Were I a parent, I might have had to turn the system off that night. Maybe the vodka dulled my emotional distance emulation layer, but the game starts off intense, and doesn't really ever stop. To quote Jerry Holkins:

Children carve something out of you, a place for themselves; people can twist the knife in that spot, and it just bleeds and bleeds.

The Last of Us is an interesting game. One that I'll probably be talking about for a while, or at least, hanging it over people's heads until they play it and I can finally discuss it freely. I've described it as a combination of the game Dead Space intersected with The Road. It is hyper-violent (particularly when you die, and you die often, though it isn't a grind). It is challenging at parts, especially those that absolutely require stealth, or where you've managed to paint yourself into a corner by expending too much ammo.

The shining part of this game, however, is its character development. Joel and Ellie feel like real people, and their fears and perils become your own. Which makes navigating a terrifying post-apocalypse all the more harrowing.

The Last of Us is also interesting for what it represents in gaming overall. It is a game that, though crafted with the polish of a big-budget game, is very apparently targeting what is now the average age for a video game player (37, says Wikipedia). This isn't a criticism, but a nod that the gaming industry and the gamers are maturing. The Last of Us isn't even the first game to ask these kinds of questions, and hopefully will not be the last.

Having finished the game, it has left me reflective (and sleepless), much like any good book, movie, show, or game. I wonder about what's important, about what I have to do, and what matters. About what I would do if nothing mattered. Or if only one thing mattered.

(scratches neck) I have some laundry to fold.