Watch it: The Last of Us documentary

How do shadows fall in a scene? Are the characters looking at each other when they speak?

These are the questions that Naughty Dog's developers asked themselves during the development of last year's The Last of Us.

The heart of The Last of Us is the attention to detail in every scene. It's the little things that make a character sit into the world or that translates good acting into a believable performance on screen.

Area 5, the team behind the successful Outerlands Kickstarter project, made this 90 minute documentary. Originally released as part of The Last of Us's season pass you can now watch the whole thing on YouTube.

The programme also talks about how much work went into making the player understand the feelings and motivations of the characters.

Bruce Straley, the gameplay director says "What are the things that we can do on the joystick to make you feel the same way that these [sic] characters' going to feel when we get to this next pinch point in th story?"


But wait there's more. Left Behind, the single-player story DLC for The Last of Us released on . The production values here aren't quite as high, but if you're looking for more Last of Us here you go:

Tomb Raider - an unlikely example of gender equality

Lara and Natla - characters in their own right

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Helen Lewis, in the New Statesman, recently introduced me to the concept of the Bechdel test.

It's a way to assess the gender-equality of a piece of film and involves a fairly straightforward set of rules:
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• Does the film have two named female characters?
• Do they talk to each other?
• About something other than a man?

As the Washington Post points out, that’s a very low bar but many modern films fail the test. Helen Lewis asked the question whether video games need a test of their own. It got me thinking.

Wrote about whether games need their own version of a Bechdel test. The comments are *all* fascinating. I know. http://t.co/zSdGZJ9P7y
— Helen Lewis (@helenlewis) January 7, 2014

It’s safe to say the majority of games would fail, and that even having a fully-clothed female character is a rarity. But games are varied, even within the same development studio. The Last of Us, for example, passes with flying colours while Uncharted 2, from the same studio just four years before, fails miserably.

A game that surprisingly gets a pass is the original Tomb Raider, now heading for 20 years old. Despite Core Design’s unlikely representation of the female form, the game has women in both the lead and antagonist roles.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Progress. I’ve gotten my hands on a new console, and this weekend I’ll try rescuing the old one. I’ve also had a look at my shelves to see where I should begin working through the backlog.

Here’s a list of the titles I’ll be digging into over the next few months. I've at least started the vast majority but a few have never been touched. Some, I invested quite some time into before getting bored or distracted. I abandoned others because they were too difficult. It’s been 17 years and I still haven’t finished The Revenge of Shinobi. A few simply outstayed their welcome - good ideas strained through repetition.

Some of the games on this list are a source of embarrassment. I haven’t finished Super Mario Brothers, for example. I’ve never played Super Metriod or Deus Ex or Psychonauts. I consider myself a well rounded gamer and these are blatant gaps in my knowledge that I look forward to filling.

But they’re not all gems. There are games on this list that I don’t want to go back to. Final Fantasy XII and Prince of Persia (2008) were both unique takes on their respective series’ but were largely largely uninspired. I sunk hours into both in good faith but they just never clicked.

Any suggestions? There are over 40 games listed below. Even if they aren’t all classics, I certainly won’t run out of things to do:

Super Mario Brothers (1985) NES

Legend of Zelda (1986) NES

Decision Time

I’ve reached a crossroads. My PlayStation 3 died unceremoniously over the weekend. I can afford to replace it (just about) but at the cost of giving up new games for the rest of the year. This presents an opportunity – to play through the ridiculous volume of unfinished and even untouched games in my collection. I intend for this blog to chart my progress through over 20 years of videogame design. 

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Gaming is an expensive pursuit. It costs both time and money. I have little of either to spend, but I do have a passion for videogames - for their mechanics and for the brief and beautiful glimpses of interactive storytelling that they provide. I love the art, the design and the music of games past and present. I read a lot, and listen to hours of coverage each week, on the wider industry as well as the creative individuals that make it up.

Now my PS3 has died. The soulless blinking of a single red light tells me I can no longer access the five years of data saved on the hard drive, or eject the disc inside. My last back-up is two years old – that's my own fault. I can always buy a new system, but a new system costs money and I don’t have money to spare. Something has to give.

The console will cost me at least €250. That equates to about five new games – the bulk of my budget for the rest of the year. So to keep myself entertained I'm turning to my embarrassing collection of unfinished games. Everything from NES platformers, to late nineties PC classics, to sprawling 2011 RPGs litter my home and my hard drives. And this is the perfect opportunity to clear the decks.

So why replace the PS3? I have to play Bioshock Infinite later this year and I won't be doing that on this six year old laptop. I also have unfinished business with my dead console. Mass Effect 3 and Dark Souls - games into which I've sunk unacceptable amounts of time and personal strife - are my main reasons for wanting to rescue my lost saves. In fact, Mass Effect is a problem for a whole other reason too but I'll come back to that.

There is hope. I can get creative with hair dryers and credit cards covered in reversible packing tape. I can try to save the old PlayStation, at least for long enough to back up my data to the cloud. I'll chart my progress with the hardware, as well as with games of yore here at Hackett Out over the coming months. 

Now I just need to decide where to start. And to think about some sort of design for this crisp white page.