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Dominic Thiem “Wins” U.S. Open

Of the two men entering Sunday’s U.S. Open championship, only Dominic Thiem had ever been to a major final, losing twice to Nadal in the French Open and once to Djokovic in the Australian earlier in the year. You would think someone with that kind of track record would know approximately where to hit the tennis ball, but you would be wrong. Thiem couldn’t find it and would lose the first set 6-1. He would have lost the 2nd set 6-1, but Zverev sent an easy volley sailing out of bounds. Zverev would go on to win the set 6-4 but the winds were shifting.

Between the 2nd and 3rd set, Thiem’s witch (physio) brought him a small bottle of potion which Thiem consumed. Pat McEnroe, himself a practitioner of the dark arts, spoke openly about it being a magic elixer. It did the trick. Thiem found his mojo, sort of, and Zverev lost the ability to rely on his booming 1st serve. What remained was a battle for survival. The ultimate set featured a few good rallies, and at times during the match, one could marvel at Zverev’s serve and occasionally brilliant net play, but that was about it for highlights. Both men had exactly as many double faults as aces and more unforced errors than winners. Each had a chance to serve for the match, but neither could manage it so we ended up in a tiebreak. Still, no one seemed to want to win. Zverev went up 2-0 in the breaker before double faulting Thiem back into it and finally missing a return to give Thiem the match.

I think I speak for all of us, players included, when I say thank god it’s over. Congrats to Thiem on winning his first major and being the first man to come back from a 2 set deficit in a U.S. Open final. I’m sure he would agree there’s still some work to be done. There’s certainly no heir-apparent to the current roster of immortal tennis death robots. The French Open starts on September 21 and I think my friend Jennifer put it best when she said, “Nadal is going to blow these bitches off the court in under an hour.” I saw nothing on Sunday to make me believe she’s wrong.

Admit It, Tennis is the Best

First of all, with the exception of fist fighting, it’s the only reasonably popular sport that’s 1 on 1, one player vs another, tennis against tennis, may the best tennis win. Second, the shoes. And last and most important, it is the sport least molested by its referees. Yes, there are the famous line call disputes, but with the introduction of the Hawk-Eye System in 2006, those have all but disappeared and you could go whole years without seeing a match decided by a bad call. Challenges and replays take 10 seconds and there’s no need for a former umpire or line judge on the broadcast team to debate their veracity. All that said, when the authorities do need to step in, they step in. Hard.

On Sunday, top seeded men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic, frustrated after losing a service game, swatted a ball towards the back wall. The ball struck a line judge in the neck, and after a brief, one-sided debate with the umpire, Djokovic was disqualified from the tournament because THOSE ARE THE RULES.

As an American sports fan, I am so inured to the idea of one rule for the famous and a one for everyone else, I still can’t believe they actually removed the 1 seed even though it was the right thing to do. Can you even imagine Patrick Mahomes throwing a ball at a ref and the NFL kicking the Chiefs completely out of the playoffs? Even if that was the rule, the league would find some way to weasel out of it. “Uhhh the rule says ‘with malice’ and we believe, based on the way the ball was thrown, that it was actually ‘enmity.'” This is why tennis is a sport and the NFL is an “entertainment product,” there are rules.

Keep in mind 33 year old Djokovic is competing to be the GOAT. He’s four major titles away from most all time, and was the top seed in a major tournament Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal both skipped! They didn’t need to even play this one. They could have just brought some cameras and reporters to Arthur Ashe stadium and handed Novak the trophy and 3 million in prize money. Others have been booted from matches for throwing tantrums, most notably John McEnroe at the 1990 Australian Open who was penalized for smashing his racket and then disqualified for the manner in which he tried to explain himself to the chair umpire, but McEnroe was the 4 seed in a far more competitive era, and in no danger of being considered the greatest player who ever lived.

The silver lining to all this is that by removing Djokovic from the tournament, the US Open guaranteed itself a first time major winner. And that’s great! Great for tennis, great for fans, and certainly great for whoever wins. Not great for Novak, but he’s gonna get another shot in two weeks when the French Open starts. And, yes, in the last 15 years only three people have beaten Rafael Nadal at Roland-Garros, but one of those people? Novak Djokovic. Tennis is the best.

I Love This Funny Allstate Commercial About Other, Less Funny Allstate Commercials

I love the end of this Allstate commercial, but I have a real problem with terrible customer service on display at the beginning. Not only does the host interrupt Allstate Man as he’s speaking, he doesn’t even look up from his phone as he does it. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and believe whatever he’s doing on his phone is work related, but he should still make eye contact. I realize him looking up and recognizing Allstate Man is what kicks off the joke, but I could have done without the rudeness.

Everyone is good, including the host. He’s sincere and I like his two handed gesture. Haysbert is steady and the line cooks are solid, but the real stars here are the people geeking out at the table. The girl is so excited she has to get up out of her chair a bit, and the guy, at first bold enough to say hello, turns back to his girl to give us his fantastic take on, “That’s totally him. That’s totally the guy,” before finally turning away in a belated attempt to play it cool.

I only wish I could be there when that actor, Pete Carboni, gets recognized as the guy from the commercial about recognizing the guy from the commercial, and hear someone says, “That’s totally him. That’s totally the, ‘that’s totally the guy’ guy.”

By the way, have you seen the rest of this through-the-looking-glass oeuvre from Allstate where Dennis Haysbert plays the person who appears in Allstate commercials, but who is not necessarily Dennis Haysbert? This is where we are now, insurance companies writing fan-fiction about their own advertising and passing it off as more advertising.

There’s this one, where the Allstate Man’s friends (us) are watching a fake basketball game and become visibly annoyed with Allstate Man (Allstate) and how many insurance commercials he’s in.

Allstate Man shrugs and gives them a, “Don’t look at me, man, I didn’t make the rules. If you want people to remember something, you have to beat them over the head with it.”

Then there’s this one, where Allstate Man is trying to break through into television, but is having trouble because he’s already so famous.

This is the one where the Allstate universe and the Dennis Haysbert universe are most closely aligned because Dennis Haysbert is a working actor and has been since the late 70’s. Part of me thinks these commercials were Haysbert’s idea, his way of dealing with being more well known as a pitch man than as a “serious” actor. It’s probably not easy. There’s probably some real conflict there, or was, he’s had this job since 2003. Maybe the reason we’re seeing these now is he’s finally come to terms with it. Or maybe not. As he stands there on the shoulder of a gritty desert road, more prop than performer, you can almost hear him saying, “Don’t forget, I was in Heat and Major League.”

Netflix’s Project Power is Not About a Scam Charity

It’s about a pill that grants the swallower five minutes of super powers, only no one knows what power they’re going to get until they try it – it’s like Airheads White Mystery – some people just explode. It’s Limitless with some serious limits. The pills themselves are cool, they look like they have little nebulas in them, but I find the five minute time restriction extremely odd. It makes the whole thing seem rather silly. Five minutes is no time at all. You know those other movies about super heroes? Well, this one’s different because it’s about temporary superheroes. The tagline is “What would you risk for five minutes of pure power?” It’s an interesting question, and the answer is, not much man it’s five fucking minutes.

Project Power, directed by Ariel Shulman and Henry Joost, was released on Netflix on 14 August 2020 and stars Jamie Foxx, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Dominique Fishback. Foxx plays an ex-army major called The Major who survived an early testing phase of the Power Pill, but passed some of its lingering effects down to his daughter. The defense contractor responsible for creating the pill, learns of the girl’s abilities and kidnaps her. The bulk of the film is The Major working his way up the supply chain to find her. He enlists the help of low level dealer, Robin (Fishback), and Frank (Levitt), a cop who wants to use the drug to fight the drug. Jamie Foxx SHOULD be investigating why the excellent Courtney B. Vance appears as JGL’s precinct captain in an early scene and then is never heard from again. That’s what I want to know.

The powers themselves are underwhelming. One guy gets bulletproof skin. A useful ability, provided you can schedule your shooting for that brief five minute window. There’s a guy who’s sort of invisible. Another who I think is supposed to be like Wolverine when he had the bone claws but who hews more closely to Beetlejuice on his way to the whorehouse. There’s the dude who sets himself on fire, but doesn’t fly or anything like Human Torch, he’s just on fire.

About two thirds of the way in, we’re told the powers come from animals, but I can’t think of any animals who set themselves on fire. There’s a scene where Jamie Foxx tells us that the pistol shrimp is the most powerful animal on the planet because its attack produces cavitation bubbles that reach over 7,000 degrees celsius as they collapse, and while I think it’s fabulous I got to watch a real scene in a real movie where tough guy Jamie Foxx teaches us about the pistol shrimp, I’d like to give a shout out to the mantis shrimp because it does the cavitation bubble thing in addition to having the most complex visual system in the animal kingdom AND looking like the world’s craziest Pride float.

The cast is solid. Fishback was the most interesting, I’d never seen her in anything before. Foxx and JGL do their thing. The movie is fine. There are some fun fights, just be prepared to suspend your disbelief from a tall building.

The Parks Board Game Helps Remind Us Not to Take the Outdoors for Granted if We’re Ever Allowed to See it Again

I was skeptical. Playing a game about national parks didn’t really get me going. Not my genre. Are these parks on other planets? How many hit points does my hiker have? What drew me in was the artwork. A lot of it is from the Fifty-Nine Parks Series which I had never heard of, but am now obsessed with.

The box, and all the cardboard inside it, is very thick and feels nice to hold. It makes you think, “oooh, fancy” even though it’s cardboard. Opening and setting up the game was a pleasure. All the wood pieces come preloaded into holding trays and are exquisitely cut. The games says not for children younger than 10 but I’d maybe even push that up to 32 or 33 and this is why.

These animals are fragile. I think it’s a lesson about how our natural resources need to be handled carefully. By some miracle, none were broken. The cards are new cards and I need to get over my reluctance to damage new cards. They’re cards, they’re gonna get damaged. The parks cards are a majestic 70 x 120 mm. They’re a joy to shuffle. Then there are 4 decks of hateful 50 x 75 mm cards that thankfully only have to be shuffled once per game so it’s not another Robo Rally/Ticket to Ride nightmare, endlessly shuffling decks the size of matchbooks. The board serves only as an organizational tool, whereas the randomized trail tiles form the surface on which you actually play.

Players take turns moving their two hikers down the trail, taking pictures and collecting resource tokens in the form of Magic the Gathering style suns, raindrops, mountains, and trees. At the end of the trail players can buy gear, take more pictures, and visit parks using the accumulated tokens. It’s hard not to think of it as “buying” the particular park but you must remember that the national parks are for all of us and you don’t own it just because the card is now sitting in front of you. The game definitely stirs up a desire to visit these places in real life. Many were unknown to me. How many of the national parks can you name? That’s a fun mini-game, you could play. A donation is made to the National Park Service for each copy sold.

The mechanics are pretty simple once you get all the pieces out and set up and learn what they all do. Each individual action is easy, but keeping your eye on the big picture is the challenge of Parks. The gear, season, and canteen cards all have advantages that play off each other and the actions on the trail tiles allowing you to craft a play style suited to your particular goals. My year goal was a “Year of Gear.” 3 bonus points awarded if I purchased 10 Sun worth of gear, which was fine with me because I love gear. Additional points are awarded for number of parks visited and pictures taken. Don’t sleep on that camera. I won by 1 point largely because I took 8 snaps. The picture tokens are little tiles with nature scenes. You can select them at random or pick your favorites, it makes no difference to the game. I went mostly random but did choose an impressive moose I saw walking around in there.

Parks was designed by Henry Audubon and released in 2019 by Keymaster Games. 1-5 players. I didn’t try the solo mode, but it works well with 2, and can be completed in under an hour. It’s beautiful and inspiring and there’s not a ton going on. Just how a walk in the park should be.

Palm Springs: What the Groundhog Day Format Teaches Us About Ourselves

The Groundhog Day Format, if you’re not familiar, is any plot where the main character or characters are trapped in a time loop which lasts exactly one day, and a day is defined as the point at which the characters wake up, to the point where they either fall asleep, or die. Most often this is a regular 16 hour day although in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg’s character refers to doing a bunch of crystal meth and flying to Equatorial Guinea which google maps says would take almost 48 hours so it can be extended. The length of loop is important here. Wikipedia, Cinema Blend, and IMDb all have lists of time-loop movies, but they include some more generally about time travel and others, like Source Code, that use different, often shorter, time loops which exclude them from the Groundhog Day Format. Source Code, itself an excellent movie, uses an 8 minute time loop which gives it an urgency you won’t find in the Groundhog Day Format. A day-long time loop is a lazy sort of time loop. It’s long enough to fuck around, but short enough to fit nicely into a movie script. A day is also the basic unit of a human life.

Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, and Edge of Tomorrow are all enjoyable films that use the Format – Groundhog Day is an outright classic – and I think the reason we love this device and the reason we keep returning to it is because it’s about one of our favorite subjects: death, or more specifically, the postponement of death. We love to put ourselves in the shoes of a character who has all the time in the world. My favorite part of Groundhog Day is how seemingly overnight, he mastered the piano and learned to speak French. So often we feel like a task is too daunting because of how long it would take so we don’t even start. How nice then to be able to put the world on hold and devote day after day to one of our passions.

In Palm Springs, we meet Andy Samberg’s character, Nyles, already trapped in his loop. He’s been there for a while – we don’t know how long, it could be thousands of years – and he’s settled into a comfortable rut. The day he’s reliving is his girlfriend’s friend’s wedding day, and after a botched hookup attempt, he ends up accidentally drawing his girlfriend’s friend’s sister Sarah, played by Cristin Milioti, into his private curse. She then goes through the five stages of time loop, Anger, denial, acceptance, mayhem, and finally, trying to get back to a more traditional schedule.

Inevitably in these movies, after a period of funnin’ around inside the loop, the protagonist gets fed up and tries to get out. What sets Palm Springs apart is Nyles doesn’t want to leave. He’s happy, or at least comfortable, in his little slice of the continuum. “Why would I want to go back there anyway?” he asks Sarah. “It’s a world of death and poverty, debilitating emotional distress.” It’s an excellent point and one I’m happy Palm Springs makes. Anyone trapped in a time loop, especially a day-long loop, is effectively immortal, and immortal on the best possible terms. You get unlimited life units, you get to be out during the day and don’t have to feast on human blood, and, with most of these stories, you can kind of leave whenever you’re ready. Because immortality would definitely be fun for hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of years, but at some point it’s gonna be time to leave the party.

And you get to explore death in ways no mortal ever has. These movies almost always feature the characters killing themselves in a variety of gruesome and sometimes hilarious ways. “Don’t drive angry!” They get to know things about the process of dying that none of the rest of us will ever know. Maybe not what happens after, but everything about the moments leading up to it and those are true mysteries of the universe.

In the end Nyles agrees to try to leave his loop. Maybe he’s ready – like I said, it’s possible he’d been attending that wedding for millennia – and he’s got a good reason to go, but I wonder what it’s going to be like for him on the other side. We never get more than a scene or two after they leave the loop, but there has to be an adjustment period. You gotta remind yourself that you can’t just kill yourself or punch someone in the face. Readjust to the fact that your actions have consequences you can’t sleep off. Equally jarring to finding out you’re stuck in a time loop in the first place must be realizing you now have to plan ahead.

I really liked Palm Springs. It is a sweet little romantic comedy that adds a few wrinkles to a Format I would happily watch day, after day, after day.

Does Everyone Else Hear the Name Devin When They Watch This Geico Commercial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssBt8DrbAi8

Or has my targeted advertising gotten that sophisticated? I was legitimately freaked out when I saw this for the first time. I’ve been trapped inside for too long to be able to confidently dismiss DJ Khaled speaking to me from my television. I sat motionless for several minutes wondering if my mind had finally gone. I felt sane, maybe reality itself had broken.

Careful study of DJ Khaled’s lips seems to show him saying “Devin” so they’re not dubbing in my name when he’s off-screen. I suppose it’s possible they recorded 5,163 versions of this commercial with DJ Khaled saying a different name each time, but that seems unlikely. Frankly, It wouldn’t seem as suspicious as it does if they didn’t say the name four times. I can go six months without hearing my name spoken aloud that many times. I guess it helps that this YouTube version also has the name Devin. YouTube is the same for everyone, isn’t it?

IS IT??

Ad Astra: A Movie About Confronting Your Absentee Father… on Neptune.

It’s a story as old as fatherhood itself. One day your dad puts on his coat, says he’s going out to discover extraterrestrial life and never comes back. You’re left hurt and confused. You spend the next 30 years trying to figure out what you did to make him leave. What you could have done better to make him stay. Then one day you hear he’s shacked up with some research project out at the edge of the solar system. Bastard is still alive. Well, you’re a man now you hope, nothing for it but to hitch-hike out there and get some answers before the old codger kills every last organism this side of the oort cloud.

Ad Astra isn’t a space movie. I mean yes, a lot of exciting and fairly improbable space-stuff happens. Brad Pitt’s character does get into a gun fight on the moon. He does sneak onto a rocket right before take off. He absolutely fights off two zero-gravity baboons, so you would think it would be a space movie. But what I mostly remember is the beautiful cinematography and the internal conflict. Besides, all of those obstacles could just as easily have been: getting into a bar brawl, breaking down in the Mojave and hopping on a boxcar, and fighting off two regular baboons. The story would be the same.

The visuals and the messaging get a little muddy at the end. Floating around outside Neptune and its rings doesn’t look as clean as the rest of the movie, and the scenes with the father are a paella of themes including: people need to rely on each other, dedication to a calling is the highest ideal, forgiveness, the wizard is just a guy behind a curtain, pity takes the steam out of anger, and human will can overcome the impossible, or maybe we should kill ourselves.

I like this movie! Other than all the action – which was well choreographed – it’s slow and plodding and takes place mostly inside of Brad Pitt’s head. It’s like Solaris but more fun. Pitt is at his understated best. His heart rate never gets above 80 and he’s a good sport about his automated psych evaluations. His character, Roy McBride, addresses his problems. He’s not always sure if it’s the right thing to do, but he knows it’s what he has to do. Maybe what seems funny at first – talking to a machine about your emotional state – really is helpful. Maybe just getting people into the habit of talking about what’s bothering them allows them to process more effectively. Someday, guys. Someday.

There really isn’t anyone else in it. Donald Sutherland has a small role, and Tommy Lee Jones plays the father, but only for a hot second. They’re both pros, but like I said, this is mostly about watching Brad Pitt’s still beautiful face as he internalizes and kicks ass.

Directed by James Grey who did 2016’s The Lost City of Z, Ad Astra was released in September of 2019 and made for $90M. Worldwide gross was $127M so it made a couple of bucks. I looked this up because I would like to see more of this kind of movie so it’s in my best interest that it be profitable. Hard to know what matters more, a disappointing $50M domestic gross, or a $127M international, but a bottom line is a bottom line, right?

Help me out and go watch it on HBO Now or Go or Max or whatever it’s called. I’m going to get started writing my version: Sede In Terra.

Recently Deleted

As the owner of a grievously inadequate 861GB Playstation 4, I’m regularly forced to delete old games to make room for new ones. These are their stories. Someday I may go back to them, but, probably not.

Risk of Rain 2

I played this game after finishing both Outer Wilds and Subnautica and when I booted it up I saw an image of a spaceman sitting on top of an escape pod playing a guitar. Was this a beautiful mashup a those two great games?? Could this be my new favorite game evarrrr??? It wasn’t either of those things. Risk of Rain 2 is a very cool looking and sounding roguelike I absolutely hated playing.

You start with only one character class, the commando, who has a couple different kinds of attacks. The primary is the double tap, which sounds cool but it’s just firing your gun. It sounds like this, bangbang, bangbang, bangbang. There are a lot of enemies so you end up holding the fire button down the whole time, bangbang, bangbang, bangbang all day long. The enemies also respawn so you’re never quite rid of them and I got sick of shooting as I searched for the teleporter so I just ran past them. This seemed to work pretty well, no enemies, no bangbang, just running. After a while, I could still hear them making noise behind me so I took a look. They were all there, the bugs, and lizards, and shit I’d ignored and sprinted past, following me in a giant mob, like the townsfolk coming to burn Frankenstein’s monster.

I found the teleporter a few times. It releases a boss. The boss killed me right away. The game suggested I change the difficulty setting. I did. The boss killed me right away. I quit after the third try on easy. Maybe I suck. Whatever. No more bangbang.

Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2

I have a headache just thinking about this game. The screen is very bright and very busy. You’ve got multiple characters to control, everything is breakable and drops coins, so when you’re fighting your smashing into furniture and various bits of scenery and the coins are bouncing everywhere and She-Hulk just fell off a cliff and I don’t care enough to put up with this.

Also, because of the kind of gamer that I am, I wanted to collect all the coins so I just got drawn down into this merciless smash and collect cycle. I’m sure veteran Lego gamers would tell me to ignore the coins. Maybe I’ll try Lego Indiana Jones or something. Oh and you can’t manipulate the camera. It’s maddening.

The heroes and their powers are well designed, and there are a lot of them. Pretty much any Marvel person you can think of is in there. Some levels have pieces to them that can only be unlocked by specific characters you don’t have when you’re first starting out. All I could think was, “I have to come back here?” Throwing Captain America’s shield is fun at first, but shooting is awkward and during encounters I usually defaulted to just mashing the attack button. I’m sure there are intricacies to the combat I didn’t stay long enough to learn. Which reminds me of…

Bloodbourne

I keep periodically running into fans of this game so I had to give it a shot. It’s hard as hell, they say, and they’re right, it is hard. It is also depressing. The world, what I saw of it anyway, is dark and smokey and filled with trash. You move through the streets with the certain knowledge you’re about to be killed and forced to do the whole thing all over again. Every time I got to a checkpoint it was like a gift from a nonexistent god.

Because there is no god in Bloodbourne, that much is clear. This is a place that has never known kindness, or succor. There’s no tutorial to help you fight. All you get is simple button functions scrawled on filthy gravestones, and two awkward weapons. Good luck!

Bloodbourne had been sitting on my hard drive for over a year, and I was convinced I would never play this game again, but then TODAY, the day after I deleted it, I read this article on Kotaku essentially crediting it for making the writer a better person. Oh for fucks sake, alright! I’ll give it another shot. 10 hours to get good. I can do that. I’m googling tips though.

Little Nightmares

This is the one success story of the bunch. I downloaded this game to play with my girlfriend, but she ended up getting hooked on it and played the whole thing without me! She loved it. I can tell you from sitting there watching and NOT PLAYING that it is gorgeous. The world is very creepy and the bad guys are gross and funny and mostly gross.

A side-scroller with a shallow third dimension, the puzzles are mostly solved through exploration and stealth. The action mechanics look great and work well. The whole thing takes place on a dank, creaky ship, a great setting for anything, in my opinion. There are some unexpected, gut wrenching moments in this simple game, and the ending is befitting any good horror story. A treat.

The Last of Us 2: A Great Game About Terrible People

Short Version

Long, but if you like action/stealth combat and good storytelling, you won’t mind.

Long Version

80% of the world’s population is made up of assholes. The litterers, the line jumpers. The people who gleefully reveal their particular flavor of prejudice within the first five minutes of meeting them. After that you’ve got 15-18% who are alright. Most of your coworkers fall into this group. You get along fine, but they’re best in small doses or in a large group. You don’t mind seeing them around, but if you get left alone at a lunch table you’re like, heyyyy, we’ve never interacted one on one before. Finally there’s the 2-5% who you might – might – consider a true friend.

So it is with the post-apocalyptic world. Except now, instead of 2 million people in your immediate vicinity, there’s 50, more or less ensuring everyone you know sucks. The end of the world isn’t going to improve anyone’s personality, but what are you going to do? Leave? Risk the wastes, hordes of zombies, and almost certain death on the off chance you run into someone who makes you laugh? Face it, for better or worse, you’re stuck with these d-bags.

So it is with The Last of Us 2, a game centered around two of these d-bags. Developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, TLoU2 – not an attractive acronym – puts you in control of Ellie and Abby, two characters with legitimate reasons to seek revenge, but who, like so many before them, become consumed by it.

Minor Spoilers!

The story of The Last of Us 2 is its greatest triumph – the script is fantastic – it’s beautiful and epic and sad. Sad because it’s a tragedy and also because when it was over, I wanted to go back. To stay for a little while longer. The characters aren’t always perfect, but you’re bonded to them through shared experience and I miss them. It’s like reading a great book, I didn’t want to return to the real world which is weird because the world of TLoU2 is pretty rough. There are scenes I thought I would hate, like the flashbacks and the music store in Seattle, that I was utterly charmed by. Sitting through the scene in the music store, I kept thinking, “Man, this is long!” but simultaneously, “Man, what a beautiful moment in an otherwise brutish existence!”

There was an instance in this game where I was given a simple command, press the square button, where at first, I physically could not do it. I set the controller down. I intentionally died multiple times because what I was being asked to do crossed so far beyond my own ethical boundaries. Never before have I had that experience in a video game. That, in and of itself, is an achievement, and it’s an achievement in storytelling. I mean you have to care about the characters in order to care about their wellbeing, and I cared deeply.

Another great thing about The Last of Us 2 is how everything feels. Burning a shambler with a molotov feels fantastic. Getting killed by an infected feels awful. There’s a split second at the end of the clicker kill animation where Ellie looks straight into camera which punched me in the gut every time. Even manipulating the weapons at the workbenches feels satisfying. A lot of this has to do with the sound design. The clicks, clunks, and screams are all deep and rich. They feel important and decisive.

I love the rhythm of this game – scavenge, fight, scavenge, fight. Every time a new NPC would join me I’d have to explain to them, out loud, in my living room, “Listen, since this is our first time adventuring together, I have to warn you, I move pretty slow. I have to check everywhere for treasures so don’t rush me.” Then they’d rush me! “Are you coming?” they’d ask. “Yes! God damn it. As soon as I make sure I can’t crawl under… AH HA! A screw!” I love the simplistic approach to crafting, and I love the way it forces you to think creatively about how to solve problems, i.e. kill everyone.

Left to my own devices, I’m the kind of player that will stealth kill whenever possible, but TLoU2 forced me out of my comfort zone with limited inventory space and tricky AI. Limited inventory space forced me to use every weapon at my disposal because I find it abhorrent to hunt down crafting materials and not be able to pick them up. To that end, I’d use whatever weapon would free up space in that material category. Full on rags? Throw molotovs. No room for baldes? Shiv time. And heaven forbid I have to leave shotgun ammo lying about. The enemies also travel in unpredictable routes. Some of them go in loops, but sometimes they just break off and go somewhere else. They also do this great spin-look just in case there’s anyone sneaking up behind them and guess what, there is. More often than not, I would get discovered midway through an encounter and be thrown into combat, desperately fending off enemies with a limited supply of bullets. They do not let you just sit and line up a headshot either, these creeps are quick on the draw.

Major Spoilers!

Ultimately, even though Ellie is, well, Ellie, the main character and the closest thing this game has to a hero, Abby’s half of the game is the more compelling. Her story is layered and her sequences, getting abandoned in the dark by Lev and Yara, descending the crumbling building, and escaping the Seraphite island, are fucking fabulous. The evolution of my feelings towards Abby was another of this games successes. By the time the game pits them against each other, I was begging for things to work out. It doesn’t though.

The ending is untidy, but I’m not sure what I wanted. Actually I do, I wanted them to team up, recognize in one another the same indomitable will and unflinching loyalty that allowed them to survive this hell on earth and build a new society together. I wanted Abby to have her own ending. I wanted Ellie to go to Catalina to see if someone else was working on a vaccine; maybe technology had progressed to the point where they could make it without killing her. I wanted to know if Lev was ok. I wanted to know where Dina went, and if Ellie was going to find her. No one gets what they want at the end of The Last of Us 2, but that’s how some stories go. I do hope I get to see them again. They may be d-bags, but they’re my d-bags.

Advice to the Player

Go loud if you want to – you can shoot and then hide to reestablish stealth.

Tall grass is your friend – you can get away with a lot if no one has mowed in a while.

Bricks and bottles – best weapons in the game. Combine with momentum and a spike bat.