I agree with this.

And yes, I completed the game (me and my friends were taking turns whenever someone died/got tired). We finished it in 2 weekends, I barely played during the second one because it was the same thing over and over. Except for a boss fight now and then.

Yes, it is a good game, the story and characters are outstanding in the game industry but the gameplay isn't. It was pretty easy to abuse the so "good" AI.

I don't care about The Walking Dead. I played the game because it was critically very well-received.

That's pretty much how I roll. I tend not to hone in on specific genres. I prefer to try a variety of things to see what I like. I'm very selective about what games I play and what movies and tv shows I watch.

I also don't care about Resident Evil. I played a bit of Resident Evil 4 at a friend's house, but not enough to form my own opinion of it.

I don't really enjoy "dudebro shooters," although your definition of this phrase may differ from mine. I played through the entirety of a Halo game -- pretty sure it was Halo 2. It practically bored me to tears. I amused myself by trying to fit vehicles into areas they didn't belong, with varying degrees of success. I've also played enough of Halo 4's multiplayer to know I don't care for that, either.

An example of a first-person shooter I do like is Half-Life 2. I picked up The Orange Box a few years ago, mostly for Portal, and wound up greatly enjoying everything in the package -- including Team Fortress 2, an online multiplayer shooter I can get into. But I love all three of those games, so I don't have some kind of agenda against shooters.

I don't have a bias against zombie stories, either, though I may have one against zombie stories that play all of the tropes straight. But is that a bias, or am I just bored with being told the same story a million different ways? I imagine I feel the same way about it that others feel about the "story" in a Mario game, but that doesn't bother me because the story isn't the main selling point in those games, or even a marginal focus. I'm not expected to be completely blown away when Bowser kidnaps Peach -- again -- or when Mario saves the princess -- again -- because it's been done to death and you know it's going to happen. So when I'm playing a zombie game and people are the real threat and the darker side of human nature blah blah blah, I'm yawning while everyone is raving about how amazing the storytelling is. It just doesn't interest me -- and I don't even watch a lot of zombie movies, or horror movies in general! It's just not captivating to me. As soon as I know zombies are involved, I can call half the "twists" from 28 miles away. To my surprise, I actually liked Zombieland, probably because it didn't take zombie tropes very seriously, and wound up subverting most of them in the process.

So the story in The Last of Us doesn't seem very original. I grimmace every time I see that quote comparing it to Citizen Kane. Supposedly this is an entirely new level of storytelling from games in the past, but I don't see it. I think we should look to games like Dark Souls for that. Games that build a world with a history, and invite you explore that history as deeply as you want, without forcing you to experience it from a specific perspective and feel a specific way about it.

I'd rather take recommendations from my friends than from a bunch of games journalists -- those same people who universally declared that The Walking Dead was the greatest game because it gave them feels, who said Bioshock Infinite was easily a GOTY contender because it told an alright sci-fi story with pretty graphics and generic FPS gameplay. So when my friends tell me that The Last of Us gameplay is "a 5 out of 10," and I watch a few gameplay videos showing the main character stealthing real hard, jumping over walls and running around two feet behind people actively searching for him without so much as a "what was that sound?" I can draw some conclusions.

I'm not saying the game is bad. But I am saying that nothing I've seen or heard about it has made me want to play it. It looks boring.

So you have no emotions? You don't like games that make you care about these characters? You prefer games that just put out generic hints of a story in the world for you to try and piece it together? Now THAT sounds boring. I like Dark Souls. I really do. It's not because of the story, it doesn't have one, its because of the gameplay.

The Last of Us did everything right. Story/Gameplay/Emotion. If something like weird AI bothers you then you probalby shouldn't be playing video games.

You see people outside the gams industry saying that video games can't create emotion like Movies/TV Shows do. The Last of Us proves them wrong.

Now, stop judging a game before you play it. It doesn't appeal to you. Boo Hoo. That's your loss.

lmao. From "the plot is too predictable" to "you have no emotions" -- that's a reasonable jump to make.

Claiming that Dark Souls doesn't have a story pretty much caps off any interest I might have had in discussing stories in games with you.

The Last of Us certainly "creates" emotion. It manufactures emotion the way a kid puts together a LEGO set, following all of the instructions brick-by-brick until he has the exact same model as everyone else who bought the set.

Of course I should know better than to feel anything less than absolute reverence for the most-hyped game of the year. God forbid the story and gameplay might be uninteresting to me, I should stop playing video games because I'm clearly a robot with no emotions.

There's a difference between weird AI and bad AI. The Last of Us is an example of the latter. And yes, bad AI does bother me, and I think I have a right to be bothered by it.

Unfortunately I have neither unlimited time nor unlimited funds, so I cannot personally experience every game that comes out. I pick and choose which ones I want to play. In order to get through this selection process, I have to form an opinion of a game before I play it. I know I must be blowing your mind with this concept. I have reasons for not being interested in playing The Last of Us, and I have laid them out here. Come the end of the year when the game is sweeping all of the GOTY awards because of my feels bro, I will again have to point to these reasons when people tell me I have to play this game, and I expect much the same reactions.