There's a remaster coming for The Last Of Us Part Two, which is a very Naughty Dog thing to do in general. I'd read a thing about how the remaster was "feeding a misguided narrative" about how these are taking resources away from making new games, but I don't care about that shit. It's the Internet - you will find every conceivable position enunciated with full-throated vigor. No; the problem with it is that it's boring - and potentially dangerous.

Almost certainly, the purpose of this Remaster is to pad a quarter, to draft on the apparently profound success of the teevee show, and to project further into the mainstream. If you already own The Last Of Us Part Two, it's essentially a ten dollar DLC with a bunch of other shit.  It's fine.

For my own part, I bought a Steam Deck instead of a PlayStation 5. And now, I'm spending a good portion of each day trying not to buy the OLED version. I could give the old one to my eldest - that would be, like, a gift for them? What I'm saying is that I'm a good person, but also, I don't even have the target platform. I'm not really in the market for it as a product anyway.

Also, despite what Authority Figures were constantly on about when I was young, and then when I was older, and then when I was even older than that, how videogames were going to desensitize me to violence and stuff, I haven't seen evidence of it. That said: fiction is undefeated in its power to immolate bullshit, which is why it must be brutally policed at every turn. I understand why the powers of the time might have been concerned; we were entering a realm where parental control or even knowledge over the culture their children were exposed to was disintegrating.

But even from the very first preview of The Last Of Us Part Two, they were engaged in the kind of lurid, borderline pornographic depiction of violence that makes me think preacher men and clucking marms might have been right about something, just too early. I didn't want the original version for that reason - and I certainly don't want the new one.

(CW)TB out.