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The Journal
07-06-2025
- The Journal
Man who left victim with 'life changing' injuries after being invited to house for food jailed
A CO DONEGAL man who attacked another man after he had been invited back to his home for drinks and food leaving him with 'life-changing injuries' has been sentenced to six years in prison. Tristian McAteer attacked his victim with a knife, slashing his face after he was invited back to Stephen Doherty's house in Ballybofey on 16 October, 2024. The 26-year-old accused appeared at Letterkenny Circuit Court where he pleaded guilty to two charges including robbery and the production of an article, namely a knife. Details of the incident were outlined to the court by Detective Garda John O'Sullivan and state barrister, Ms Fiona Crawford, BL. The accused and Mr Doherty, along with a woman, had been out drinking at the Shamrock Bar in Ballybofey, earlier in the day. When back at Mr Doherty's house at Navenny Street, the victim asked McAteer and the woman if they would like something to eat. When he came back into the room with food, McAteer told Mr Doherty that he was taking his television and then attacked him with the knife, slashed him in the face and head. Mr Doherty tried to defend himself and managed to get on top of McAteer and put his knees on top of his arms as he tried to hold him down. However, the woman then attacked Mr Doherty by stabbing him with a screwdriver in the head and then striking him in the back with slats of wood from a child's bed which she had found in the house. Mr Doherty managed to flee from his house to a nearby bar to raise the alarm while bleeding heavily. He asked to look at their live CCTV and as he did so he witnessed McAteer and the woman leaving his home and getting into a taxi with two of his televisions, a Playstation 4 console and controller and a portable speaker Mr Doherty was then taken to hospital where he was treated for his multiple injuries. They included lacerations to his cheek and forehead and damage to his nose. The scene was secured by gardaí and later that evening, McAteer was located and arrested at Glenfin Street at approximately 9.50pm. His clothing was covered in blood, he had been fighting with other people and he was pepper-sprayed by Gardai before being arrested. He has been in custody at Castlerea Prison since October 21st, 2024 and has entered a plea to both charges. The woman who attacked Mr Doherty during the incident is also due to come before the Circuit Court and Judge John Aylmer remarked that this was very much a 'joint enterprise.' A victim impact statement was read out in court on behalf of the victim Mr Doherty. Advertisement The statement on behalf of Mr Doherty, who was not in court, told how the incident had resulted in his home being turned upside down and his life destroyed. He said he thought his life was at risk at one stage when McAteer had the blade to his throat and that he was seriously injured as a result of the attack. The court heard how McAteer has 30 previous convictions for a range of offences including robbery, possession of knives, assault, road traffic, criminal damage and breach of a safety order. Barrister for the accused, Mr Peter Nolan, BL, said his client was actually a very quiet man when sober but is often under the influence of some kind of intoxicant. He had a troubled background, never knew his father and his relationship with his mother is strained although she has always supported him. His brother died tragically earlier this year and this had had a particularly bad impact on McAteer and he realises now that he is at a crossroads in his life and that his life is bleak, said Mr Nolan. McAteer has now broken all contact with the co-accused and other people he was involved with. Mr Nolan added that this was a 'classic situation' of a man with no qualifications, no work history and not ability to be gainfully employed so he slips into the easy way of drinking but now realises that's not the way. He said McAteer had put his hands up and gone forward on a signed plea and was anxious to deal with the case. He added that it was a story that Judge Aylmer has heard numerous times but he was anxious that something be done for McAteer stressing that he agreed with the Judge that this was very much a 'joint enterprise' and that both of them were responsible for it. Passing sentence, Judge Aylmer said the aggravating features of the case was that McAteer had previous convictions for robbery and assault and the fact that he produced a weapon and used it on the homeowner. He added that all this occurred all occurred in the sanctity of Mr Doherty's home where McAteer had been invited as a guest before walking away with his television. His victim had been left in a state of anxiety and depression and had to get counselling to help him for guidance moving forward. Before considering mitigation, Judge Aylmer said he placed the robbery at the upper end of the scale meriting a sentence of 11 years in prison and the production of a knife at the utmost end of the scale meriting a full maximum sentence of five years in prison. He added the accused had come before the court on a signed plea which was 'very wise' where he said almost nothing else could be said for him. He accepted McAteer was remorseful, that gardaí said he was quiet when sober and that his entire criminal record was related to his chronic drug and alcohol addictions, adding he will have plenty of time to address these issues in prison. Due to the signed plea, he was reducing the sentence of robbery to one of seven years and the production of a knife to one of three years with both sentences to run concurrently. He added that he wanted to encourage McAteer to engage in his rehabilitation and said he was suspending the last 12 months of the sentence meaning the accused will serve six years in prison. When the sentence was handed down McAteer spoke up to Judge Aylmer and called the sentence 'disgusting' before being led away by prison officers. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Daily Mirror
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
You can save almost £100 on a Playstation 5 thanks to limited time deal
You can currently save almost £100 on a Playstation 5 slim thanks to this limited time offer which sees it slashed to £385, with shoppers calling it a 'worthwhile investment' Whether you're a gaming novice or a die hard gamer, upgrading to a new console is something everyone looks forward to. However, it's no secret that consoles can be pricey, especially when they're one of the newest models around. That's why Playstation fans are rushing to snap up this great deal on Amazon, which sees the Playstation 5 slim slashed 20% for a limited time. Usually costing £479.99, it's currently on sale for just £384.95, saving you £95. A brilliant upgrade from the older Playstation 4 model, the Playstation 5 slim has the capabilities for both disc and digital games, so you can download new games or go old school with the physical copy of them. The slim model is also sleek and space saving, measuring 10 x 5 x 1.3 cm and weighing just 5.08 kg. It's much quicker and quieter than the older PS4 model, and has an ultra-high speed SSD for faster loading. It also has adaptive triggers, 3D Audio2 and a whole host of new games to choose from exclusive to PS5, as well as still allowing you to play a backlog of PS4 games. The Playstation 5 Disc model is currently also on sale at Very for £389, saving you £90. Meanwhile at Freemans the PlayStation 5 (PS5) Console with GTA V is down from £519.99 to £409.99, saving you a huge £110 and getting you the added benefit of the most recent Grand Theft Auto game. Comparatively, the latest Xbox model, the Xbox Series X, is £499 on Amazon, whilst the Nintendo Switch (OLED Model) is on sale down from £250.90 to £232. However if you've been keen to get your hands on a Playstation 5, the current Amazon deal is one of the cheapest prices on the market. You can also save on the digital version, as well as the both the standard and digital versions with the addition of the Astrobot game. Amazon shoppers have also praised the Playstation 5 slim, with more than 1500 five star ratings at the moment. One said: 'The PlayStation 5 Slim is a fantastic upgrade from the original PS4. It's sleeker, lighter, and more compact, making it easier to fit into any entertainment setup. The performance remains top-notch with fast load times and stunning graphics. The modular design, including a removable disc drive, adds great flexibility. While it's still a bit pricey, it's a worthwhile investment for any gamer looking to enhance their gaming experience.' Another agreed: 'You immediatley notice the difference between this and the PS4, particularly in loading times. The visual difference comes more when paired with a 4K TV/Monitor. Also fan is quiet, only sometimes the disc drive can be loud when copying a game disc (which can be fixed, as far as I'm aware). Even so, if you are a gamer I'd get this. A clear improvement on its predecessor.' One did caution: 'Great console - but you won't get the free 24-month premium voucher (worth £200+) from buying here so probably better to order from Sony or another retailer directly in the long run.' Whilst another added: 'Everything works fine. The only problems are that the station doesn't come with stands pr a charger for the controller. And for some reason the PS5 slim doesn't have 1TB. It instead has 825 GB like a standard PS5.' However another was thrilled, writing: 'As a pc player this console is great fun and has plenty of great exclusives that look amazing in 4k and perform fantastic they are definitely worth getting into.' Shop the Playstation 5 slim on sale at Amazon now.
Atlantic
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Last of Us and the Power of Video Games
This article contains spoilers through Season 1 of The Last of Us. In the final episode of Season 1 of The Last of Us, the most emotionally wrenching zombie-apocalypse TV show ever made, a loner named Joel stalks through a hospital, his face as emotionless as the Terminator's, killing everyone in his way. He is trying to save a young woman named Ellie, who holds the secret to curing the zombie plague, but to make that antidote, she has to die, and Joel would rather let his species go extinct than lose her. I recently asked the actor who plays Joel, Pedro Pascal, how he found a way to justify his character's rampage. He responded: 'I understand why he did it, but I can't justify it.' He should have asked me. As I told myself every time I saved Ellie, if you truly love someone, killing for them is easy. The Last of Us is based on a video game of the same name, and the second season of the series premieres this week. Before The Last of Us, I had never been a serious gamer, for the same reason I don't do cocaine: I'm an ADHD-addled depressive with escape fantasies, and if I tried it, I might never come back. So, outside of Mario Kart races with my kids, I abstained. But on one of the uncountable empty days of the early coronavirus pandemic, I put down $300 to buy a Playstation 4, which came prepackaged with The Last of Us. The game booted up and showed me an open window, its curtain blowing in a light breeze. I was told to 'Press Any Button.' I did. A young girl named Sarah sits in an empty room. Her father, Joel, enters. She gives him a watch as a birthday present. He likes it. She falls asleep, and he gently tucks her into bed. What was this—an interactive simulation of a Hallmark movie? Sarah wakes up later that night, alone. She gets out of bed and then … stands there, not moving. I realized this was on me. I pressed the joystick in my hand. She moved. She, or I, or we, went downstairs to look for her, or our, father. Then the first sirens blared outside. News reports flashed on the TV. Joel ran in, panicked. A neighbor crashed through the sliding door, crazed, howling like an animal. Joel killed him. This was more like it. Next we were in a truck, trying to get someplace safe, and the truck crashed, and now I was Joel, fleeing with Sarah in my arms as a horde of bloodthirsty people tried to bite us and a soldier shot Sarah and she died in Joel's arms or my arms and the screen went black and I realized that this was not Mario Kart. Over the next days and weeks I would labor until my obligations to work and family were done and I could turn on the console and turn off the lights and be Joel again. By now he was a smuggler, traveling with a girl called Ellie across a bleak landscape filled with monsters that were once people and monsters who were still people, doing everything he could to keep her alive. After I had finally saved Ellie, and doomed humanity while doing it, I found myself back in my own world, watching the credits roll and feeling exhilaration and regret, each as vivid to me as I had ever experienced in my real life. I couldn't remember when I had been so affected by a work of art. Or when I had ever thought that a video game could be a work of art. Neil Druckmann was born in Israel in 1978, and, like most '80s kids, he became fascinated with comic books and video games, which helped him learn his idiomatic but still accented English. When his family relocated to Miami, he attended college for a criminal-science degree but found himself drawn to the gaming industry, eventually getting a master's degree in entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon. In 2004, he joined the Naughty Dog game studio as an intern, and quickly rose in the company, designing and programming games, including its Uncharted series of Indiana Jones–like adventures. And during all that time, he was piecing together a story—or in the clinical language of modern media, an 'IP,' or intellectual property—of his own. His inspirations were an obscure but beloved Japanese game called Ico, from the early 2000s, in which the hero leads an imprisoned princess by the hand out of a huge castle; Frank Miller's comic book Sin City, featuring a violence-scarred cop who protects a little girl; and the universe of zombie stories, most importantly George Romero's Living Dead movies. The game would be graphically sophisticated and expertly designed by Naughty Dog's team of artists and engineers. But the real innovation was its core subject matter, something that may have been entirely new to the industry: 'The game,' he says, 'is about the unconditional love a parent has for a child.' Druckmann is, along with Craig Mazin, the co-creator, executive producer, and writer of the HBO adaptation. (I hosted a podcast with Mazin in 2019 about his HBO miniseries Chernobyl.) I spoke with them both during post production for Season 2 of The Last of Us. The show is Druckmann's first foray into traditional filmmaking, and I asked him about the difference between creating a story as a game to play and as a TV show to simply watch. He told me that from the very earliest conceptions of the game, he had been sketching out the 'mechanics' of Joel and Ellie's relationship. Was that another term for what a screenwriter might call story beats or plot points? 'No,' he said, speaking patiently, as he would to someone who hadn't learned English from video games. 'I mean interactive mechanics: How do we put certain interactive elements on the stick?' (Meaning, literally, in the hands of the player, holding his joystick controller.) 'How do we use that dimension? People that actually have kids know immediately: You would do anything for this other person. How do we make the player feel that?' He pointed to a moment midway through the game when Joel and Ellie are exploring an abandoned hotel, and Joel falls down an elevator shaft, and then has to fight his way from the basement back to Ellie. It's the first time in the game that the two are separated. 'You feel Ellie not being around you,' Druckmann said. 'And you miss her.' I remember that moment vividly, the vertiginous feeling of not just falling but falling away from Ellie, whom by then I had saved from death many times, and I felt panic and anxiety because she was alone in a world filled with predators … and I had to get back to her. I have never been angrier, or more impressed, at being so profoundly and successfully manipulated. Many video-game adaptations in TV and film have been profitable; few have been critically acclaimed; a couple, like 1993's Super Mario Bros., with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the titular plumbers, have been epoch-defining disasters. The pitfalls are many, the most obvious being that a game's appeal is that it's something you play. Can anything a writer or director comes up with be more fun than slaying the dragon (or zombies, or aliens) yourself? But at the center of the problem is the protagonist, a human-shaped frame intentionally left empty so that you, the player, can fill it. 'For example, when they adapted Halo, they had a complication,' Mazin told me, talking about the popular first-person-shooter game. 'They had a hero whose face you never saw and whose voice you never heard. Then you've got to invent somebody, and you've got to think, What is his face and what does he sound like and what does he want and what does he say? ' Halo ran for two seasons on Paramount Plus before being canceled. The Last of Us posed the reverse challenge: one of abundance. Joel and Ellie aren't faceless and voiceless human suits for the player to wear, but fully fleshed out, living people played via motion capture by the actors Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson. As players first inhabit Joel, then Ellie, then Joel again, they follow a linear trajectory, designed to create meaning not only on the screen, but also in them. The interaction goes both ways, as the players steer the game and the game steers result is an experience of fear, anxiety, relief, rage, and finally, Druckmann's carefully engineered final state: unconditional if murderous love. But the viewers of a TV show can't fall down a shaft and be separated from a character just so they will miss her, let alone hold the character's choices in their own hands. All a TV show can do is show other people making those choices, and hope the audience follows along. It's the difference between describing what gravity feels like and throwing somebody off a cliff. For the show, Mazin and Druckmann faithfully re-created many famous scenes and much of the dialogue from the game—sometimes down to costumes, set design, and camera angles. They didn't do this, they assured me, to please fans of the game who might be upset at the omission, for example, of the moment when Joel and Ellie find a herd of wild giraffes descended from zoo animals in Salt Lake City. They re-created that scene because, as the saying goes, if something ain't broke, rent an actual giraffe. 'We don't sit there and go, 'Ah, shit, this is something that is a waste of time, but the fans would love it,'' Mazin said. 'If there's fan service, the fan is me.' They also expanded the story laterally. Because they are no longer avatars for the viewer, the principal characters can be less admirable. As played by Bella Ramsey, Ellie seems older than the waifish game character, with a reckless temper and a willingness to deceive. Pascal's Joel is more emotionally reserved and wary than Troy Baker's, and at the same time, more callous and seething with anger. In the show, someone says that Joel is the only thing in the desolate waste that scares another smuggler … and you believe it. In the game, Druckmann told me, he insisted that the player would see only what the protagonist sees, so they'd have the same reaction to whatever lurked around the next corner. The TV show, though, delves into other storylines, most famously in the episode 'Long, Long Time.' Early on in the game, Joel and Ellie pick up supplies and a vehicle from Bill, a loner in a fortified small town. Bill mentions that his 'partner,' Frank, has left. From that scrap of backstory, the show spins out a love story between the deeply closeted survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman, who won an Emmy for the role), and Frank (Murray Bartlett).To pause the zombie fighting and dwell on a long-term romance was a remarkable gamble. If the elevator-shaft sequence in the game is impossible to replicate on TV, this episode's slow conjuring of grace in the midst of ruin would be impossible in a game. Another difference is a significant reduction of the body count. I asked Druckmann and Mazin about all the violence in the game, and they almost laughed, as if I was asking a soccer coach why his players don't just throw the ball. That's how games are played. 'The violence is problem-solving,' Mazin said. 'That's the play. That's the fun part.' But in real life, anyone who killed as many people as Joel and eventually Ellie do in the game would be reduced to a traumatized, gibbering husk. 'In the show, we actually talked about how to make every single act of violence matter,' Mazin went on. 'Every single one changes not only the person doing it, but the relationship between Joel and Ellie.' Mazin and Druckmann aren't always successful. One episode's climactic set piece re-creates a sequence in the game in which Joel, perched with a sniper rifle above a mass melee, picks off assailants as they threaten Ellie. It's one of the very few moments when the show's video-game roots show: No sane person would fire that many rounds so close to somebody he cared for unless he knew that if he hit her, time would reset and he could try again. But there are many instances in which, as Mazin says, the violence ratchets the relationships into a new state. For example: a brutal fight in which someone is about to kill Joel before Ellie shoots him with a gun she's secreted away. The man howls in agony, sobbing and begging for his life until Joel stabs him to death. From that moment, Ellie is no longer 'cargo,' as Joel has called her; she has saved his life, and helped him take someone else's, and the trauma yokes them together. HBO is being tight-lipped about Season 2, but it is based on The Last of Us Part II, the sequel game, which was released in 2020. If it follows that story as closely as the first season followed the original game, we know some of what to expect. The first game was about unconditional love; the second was about something Druckmann says he learned about while growing up in the West Bank: tribal rage, the desire for vengeance, and how violence begets more violence. The central, violent conflict is between Ellie and another young woman named Abby, something once unheard of in the male-dominated space of video gaming, and still rare in prestige TV. From the July/August 2023 issue: 'Hell welcomes all' Druckmann brought on Halley Gross, a writer for HBO's Westworld, to help write the second game, and hired her again for the show. He told me that in addition to needing help organizing a script with far more characters and branching storylines, 'I also knew that I wanted to tell the story of Ellie and Abby and put these two women through the ringer – physically and emotionally. I believed that I would approach the material with a higher level of confidence if I could do it with a female co-writer.' As Season 2 jumps forward five years, we realize that Ellie is not just a character who's had some exciting adventures and is about to have some more. After her bloody salvation, she is 'locked in trauma,' Gross told me. 'She cannot outrun this. She cannot outthink this.' The Last of Us Part 2 was as revolutionary as the first game, but in new ways. If the first game was designed to make you feel love, the second asks the player to experience anger, hatred, and eventually even guilt, as their transgressions make Joel's rampage at the end of Season 1 seem like an easy call. I'll be watching what happens next with excitement and dread. (Gamers know why). But—like others who spent many hours on the stick—I know I'll feel some nostalgia for the time when I lived it all myself.
