The Quite Nerdy Blog

Warning : this post is going to contain spoilers for both games in the Last of Us franchise, as well as discussions of some terrible acts of violence. I'm not going to use screenshots of any of these events, but if you don't want the games spoiled or don't want to read descriptions of graphic violence, I recommend you don't read on. This month marks the one year anniversary of The Last of Us Part 2 . The launch was, to put it mildly, messy. The game was beset by delays, was being hyped up to absurd degrees by rabid fans and then suffered some really brutal leaks. These leaks revealed many crucial and controversial details of the narrative of the game and made it pretty much impossible to have even a slightly nuanced conversation about what the story was doing. Out of context, these narrative beats infuriated fans, but a year on I want to look at them in context. Both of the full length The Last of Us games (I am ignoring the DLC game Left Behind as it isn't entirely...

I have been playing The Last of Us recently, enjoying my newfound freedom from academia by finally indulging in some longer story-based video games. There are problems I'm having with it which I think I'll end up getting into in a longer post in the future, but there's also a lot I'm loving about it. Chief among those points of adoration is the world that the game builds. For those who don't know, The Last of Us takes place twenty years after a huge pandemic event rocks the world and turns many people into what are effectively zombies, leaving only a few survivors to band together and roam the now empty world. Having finished the game just a few days ago, there was one sequence that really stood out to me in a game that has a fair few great sequences. Without delving into too many plot specifics, our lead characters Joel and Ellie arrive at the University of Eastern Colorado on horseback, expecting to find survivors but finding a completely abandoned landscape. It s...

On the 20th of March 2020, a day I have been anticipating for years finally arrived; the new Animal Crossing game was released. As the poor guys I had to live with in the months leading up to it can tell you, I didn't shut up about it for most of that time. Fair to say, it's been a hell of a year since then, one that we were starting to get into when Animal Crossing: New Horizons  made its unassuming release. Unlike most of the people who spent those first panicked months of the pandemic we now call home playing Animal Crossing with a sense of mania before eventually dropping it, I have been playing it for the last year. Not every day, but I've never missed more than two in a row. This makes me a loser, and means I have some explaining to do. This is me explaining myself. Mum, Dad, I'm sorry that your eldest son ended up like this, but we work with what we have. The slow opening up of the island allowed me to slowly build my routine and even today, I still keep most of ...

Sometimes, I play a game and I just think "oh, well this is unfair". Not in terms of it being unbalanced necessarily. That happens occasionally for me because I suck at playing games, but it's not what I'm referring to here. No, what I'm referring to is that sometimes it feels unfair how much a game is just tailor made for me. Hades  is such a game, the newest from beloved indie studio Supergiant Games. It is a hack and slash rogue-like (don't worry if none of those words mean anything to you, I'll explain in a minute) in which you play as Zagreus, the son of Hades. You are attempting to escape the Underworld for reasons that you will discover as you go, although the path to getting to the mortal realm will, ironically, involve being killed quite a lot. As someone who loves a little bit of Greek mythology, as well as a well crafted indie game, Hades was always going to go down well with me, but I wasn't expecting it to go down quite this well. Talking ...

The new generation of consoles is here and currently, there are not many games for them. However, if you have the Xbox Series X or S, you have the benefit of Xbox Game Pass. Over the past few years, this has become the big selling point of having an Xbox and while I have complex feelings on the disappearance of game ownership, it's still a pretty incredible value prospect. Much like Netflix, you pay a monthly subscription fee and get unlimited access to a huge suite of games, for as long as you continue to pay your membership fees. Strangely, it also comes with a "Surprise Me" button which allows you to get randomly recommended a game. Seeing as there appears to be absolutely nothing else happening at the moment, I'm playing six random video games for your enjoyment! Let me quickly set out the rules. I picked six games using the "Surprise Me" button and played them all for at least 15 minutes. I don't have an Xbox Series X, I have a humble little Xbox On...

We are slowly approaching the end of these best of the decade lists, but we have to make a stop in the world of video games first. As an artistic medium, it's often argued that video games are the only medium that is constantly improving as technology advances. New advances in technology mean new things are possible in video games and so with each new generation, it becomes possible that even more advanced video games can be made. This decade, video games have been a great escape for me, offering both stories I could lose myself in and gameplay experiences that I have loved sharing with friends. Because they're so time consuming, please don't be offended if any games don't make it onto this list. I really wanted to play The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt , but it was a very daunting prospect. On a similar note, games like Spider-Man  or God of War  have not made the list because I don't have a PS4 and therefore couldn't play them. Otherwise, all a game has to do to qualif...