Earlier this week, Sony held a press conference during the Paris Games Week trade show. If you follow games, you’re intimately familiar with what ensued: a lot of blue lights, a handful of enthusiastically delivered sales notes from a charisma-less executive in an ill-fitting suit, and a series of short trailers and…
Bruce Straley, co-director of The Last Of Us and multiple Uncharted games, is stepping away from Naughty Dog. The 18-year Naughty Dog vet broke the news via a heartfelt post on the developer’s website today, saying that “after heading up three extremely demanding projects, and taking some extended time away from the…
2013’s post-apocalyptic road trip The Last Of Us often gets held up as a milestone in video game storytelling, with millions of fans investing themselves in the story of hard-scrabble survivor Joel and his fierce young charge Ellie. Now, after years of rumors, developer Naughty Dog has confirmed that it’ll be…
Keyboard Geniuses is our weekly glance at a few intriguing, witty, or otherwise notable posts from the Gameological discussion threads. Comments have been excerpted and edited here for grammar, length, and/or clarity. You can follow the links to see the full threads.
A pompous, awkward, acne-spotted 16-year-old, Harold Lauder is one of the few immune to the superflu that wipes out 98 percent of humanity in Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic masterwork. But while others mourn the dead, Harold revels in the demise of his bullies and naysayers. The end of the world means the end of his…
As Matt Gerardi noted in his review this week, the nuke-ravaged world of Fallout 4 places a greater emphasis than ever on community—a point that Matt extends in the first entry below. Fallout 4 is part of a long tradition in games where indefatigable survivors carve out a tiny slice of heaven in a world sent to hell.…
Welcome back to AVQ&A (Gameological edition), where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with games, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got…
The 2015 Writers Guild of America Awards are being handed out on February 14, and the nominees for the Video Game Writing category have been announced. According to Variety, not one, but two Assassins Creed entries—Freedom Cry and Unity—are up for the honor, competing against Alien: Isolation and The Last Of Us: Left…
In her 1992 book Men, Women, And Chain Saws: Gender In The Modern Horror Film, film academic Carol Clover noted that at the peak of slasher films’ popularity in the late ’70s and early ’80s, they presented an intriguing shift in gender representation on screen. More strong female characters were being pushed to the…
Welcome back to AVQ&A (Gameological edition), where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here…
The Last Of Us, Naughty Dog’s post fungal-apocalypse drama, has been showered with just about every possible accolade and award a video game can hope to receive (including the most cherished of all, being named The A.V. Club readers’ favorite game of 2013). And now, to celebrate its towering artistic achievement in…
This week, I’m joined by Gameological contributor Drew Toal, who recently went and joined the hordes of people who own new consoles with nothing to play on them. For his first PlayStation 4 game, Drew grabbed Wolfenstein: The New Order. When he told me he wasn’t digging the game after playing for a bit, I suggested…
Welcome back to AVQ&A (Gameological edition), where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here…
The Last Of Us, which was The A.V. Club readership’s astute pick for the best game of 2013, is set to become a live-action motion picture. As reported in a report from The Hollywood Reporter reporter Rebecca Ford, the game’s creative director, Neil Druckmann, will write the screenplay for a film adaptation of the…
Yesterday, Sony published a feature-length documentary on YouTube that chronicles the making of The Last Of Us, the post-apocalyptic drama from Naughty Dog (and The A.V. Club readers’ choice for the best game of 2013). The behind-the-scenes look, titled Grounded: The Making Of The Last Of Us, was previously…