Zero Punctuation

""Hang on, Yahtzee! If the protagonist turned out to be a different brother than who you expected, that's a subversion of expectations! Isn't that a good thing?" It might have been, if the brother we got left with hadn't been an insufferable tosspot. I think his in-game character profile says it best: "North is a firm believer in America's role as World Police." Wait, what?! So our protagonist watched that Team America film, and didn't realize it was a satire?"

"I wonder how far they're willing to push this. I'm already having to call the sequel police every time they reboot an old game and not change the title, and now look: The first game to be named "Prey" isn't particularly old and, more to the point, is somewhere on the low end of "bugger all" to do with this new game called "Prey". Watch it, Bethesda! This is the kind of bullshit that brings down the sequel feds! Alright, both games are about alien invasions, but by that logic it might as well have been called "Space Invaders: Episode 973". This really goes to show how utterly allergic these bean-counting, creatively bankrupt loaves of chunky shite are to new ideas; they had a perfectly acceptable original IP, and still felt the need to slap whatever pre-existing name they could find clinging to the side of the rubbish chute."

"I've said this before, third-person games: Leave the right analog stick alone to its happy little world of controlling the camera. You force it out of its comfort zone, and it's just gonna piss on the bus seat and ruin the whole field trip. None of this was enough to bring out that hate I mentioned earlier. Frustration, yes, but frustration doesn't stop me from playing. It just means I'll need two Diazepam and a wank once I'm done. The hate only came when I was taking on the third boss. It's a big industrial machine with about nine things on it trying to kill you; fair enough. But for some turbo-cocking reason, every time you attack one, the game auto-targets it, leaving you staring blissfully into its eyes as its eight friends are winding up attacks where you can't see. Get past that, and I can start attacking the core. But if you target it... Fucking switches to a fixed camera, so I can barely see what I'm doing! What's got in to you, camera!? Is this about the pissing-on-the-bus-seat comment? Finally, after much frustration and about nine hundred attempts, I've gotten the core on the ropes and I'm moments from landing the final blow, whereupon I glitched through the floor and fall to my death. No! That's too much. That's gone right over the Tropic of Fuckabout on a JetSki full of dicks. I'm done! Fuck The Surge, fuck Deck13, fuck anyone who likes it. Blimey, that's filled my schedule out for the week."

"In hardware news, Microsoft have updated Project Scorpio with a somehow even worse name: the Xbox One X. There's already two X's in "Xbox", you dozy gits; this name is starting to look like a defaced game of tic-tac-toe. And I feel bringing it out alongside the Xbox One S is practically inviting the "confused elderly relative on Christmas morning" nightmare scenario."

"It's a deliberate edification of retro-style game-play with a subtext of nudge-wink, self-aware irony, and it's published by Devolver Digital because of course it is! Even if it had tried to get published by something else DD would have burst in the window dressed as a highwayman and kidnapped it, because this is very much DD's shit. Devolver Digital breakfast every morning on a bowl of pixels and a tall glass of the piss it took out of something."

"Get Even is an odd mish-mash of elements, the kind of game that can only be described with a sentence beginning with the words, "Sort of," and ending with the word, "thing." As in: Sort of stealth action-adventure thing. Or, sort of sci-fi psychological thriller thing. Or, I sort of pulled my trousers down to show you my thing. The protagonist is named — and you might want to hold a fishing net in front of you or something because, when you hear this, your eyes might just roll out of your head — Cole Black. He's a grizzled mercenary type bloke who sounds a bit like Sean Bean making out with a fat angry dog. He spectacularly fails to stop a teenage girl getting blown to bits and then wakes up in an abandoned asylum. (The world of videogames probably has special "Sorry to hear you woke up in an abandoned asylum" greetings cards; it happens so bloody often!) With the help of a mysterious voice, Cole must use a third-party VR helmet to explore his own buried memories and piece together the events leading up to him not saving a teenage girl from being blown to bits."

"Dead Cells, if anything, seems to be trying to discourage meticulous exploration. There are doors to extra bonus areas that lock if you don't get to them fast enough. "Fuck you, door! Of course I couldn't get here in under three minutes. I passed by six tunnels on the way here and had to be extra certain that they all contained flashing red-clawed death!""

"Perhaps the relevant question is not how accurately the N. Sane Trilogy recreates the Crash Bandicoots of yore, but how well the Crash Bandicoots of yore hold up in this modern, spoiled age of quick-saves, auto-aiming, and online wikis providing access to an entire global network of big brothers to get past the hard bits for ya."

"...There were many factors leading to the Saturn's failure. Some blame the cancellation of its one and only Sonic game, Sonic X-treme, which would have been the 3D Sonic to counter Mario 64. And yes, I think it's a shame we didn't discover early on that Sonic and 3D meet the way the German invading infantry met the Siberian winter. Perhaps a lot of later unpleasantness could have been avoided. But if you asked me, banking on a console mascot is playing the game by old rules that the fifth generation was in the process of rewriting. Mascots were part of the world left behind, the one that would be compressed down into a little, comfortable nostalgic ball that Nintendo would wear on its head for the rest of fucking eternity, like a space helmet full of gummy bears."

"Buckle up while I attempt to explain this: In an oppressive fantasy kingdom, literacy is banned, perhaps the most sensible response to the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey books, you (by which I mean the player character, not the greasy, unpleasant, serial masturbator watching this) are a scholar exiled to the wilderness below the civilized world who hooks up with a group of fellow exiles that need you to read a book they found that tells them about the secret rituals that have the power to free them from exile. For some reason, it turns out the rituals all involve going up against a similar group and competing to throw a ball into the other team's hole. If it seems like a rather contrived explanation for the three-on-three basketball thing, that's because it bloody well is! Oh, yes, and during your odyssey-cum-basketball tournament, you attract several more party members, each representing one of the sentient fantasy races in a case of what we academics call the traditional "Bioware Bro Buffet"."

"Nintendo, what the steaming cross-eyed fuck is this? I'm still trying to get my head around it. A crossover between Mario and Raving Rabbids using turn-based X-COM style combat? What is this, a fucking Mad Lib? Or did someone lose a bet? If only you'd won the beer pong tournament at the last game dev party, Sony would have had to develop a city management sim starring Crash Bandicoot and Pyramid Head. Look, I'm not ragging on you for doing something unexpected; I applaud that! If you only ever gave people what they asked for, every game would be an identical fucking multiplayer hero shooter with a range of unlockable nipple-tassels. But when you set out to partner up with Ubisoft, was Raving Rabbids honestly the best option to crossover with Mario? I mean the Assassin's Creed series is also frequently based around jumping on people and already has a bunch of comedy Italians in it. Tell me you couldn't picture it; Mario in a little Assassin-robe, jamming a wrist-spike in an unsuspecting Koopa-Troopa to make coins fly out?"

"There are eight playable squad members; Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi and Rabbid equivalents of each, and only three to a squad, so what if the player only uses Mario, Luigi and Peach the whole game? It wouldn't be Mario and Rabbids at all then, it would just be Mario murdering Rabbids, and we've been skating on thin ice with the racism thing ever since we gave Mario an outrageous comedy Italian accent. So the game flat out forces you to put at least one Rabbid character in your party. No explanation is offered, the game just greys out all the home-team Mushroom Kingdom lads if you've already got two, so if you want to team Luigi's long-range focus with Peach's short-range superiority, then you can eat feces fettuccine, my friend! This might be the first example of a gameplay mechanic introduced solely for the sake of the contractual obligations of its characters."

"It was while I was following a series of objective markers in order to get to a place wherein might be found some lads to shoot; I paused about halfway down a corridor to take a break from the sheer roller coaster of excitement the mission was turning into and found myself staring at the wall texture. We were in one of the several hundred ancient alien temples covered in somehow-still-functioning LEDs that Bungie have made across their career and the decor had gone for an intricate pattern of narrow lines and right angles, but then I looked closer and saw there were multiple layers of lines, some in sharper relief than others. I got curious and looked around the entire surrounding area for where the pattern repeated, and I couldn't find it! Every part of the wall seemed to be a unique combination of lines and little glowy lights. Who were you, mysterious wall-texture-designer-person with whom I feel a strange kinship as I gaze upon your work? What ambition spurred you through the years of practice and higher education that brought you to this place? When you dreamed of your artwork being hung upon walls to be viewed by millions, is this precisely what you had in mind? I picture them heading back to their cubicle to touch up another series of functionally-identical-but-slightly-varied wall textures and passing a meeting room where they overhear some designers discussing how best to word the latest iteration of "going to a place and shooting some lads", whereupon they heave a weary sigh and add another few names to the workplace massacre checklist they know damn well they no longer have the balls to execute."

"The exception, as always, is Nintendo, who do not need to be told that nostalgia pays off, because they already carved that into the forehead of every fucking employee. It's part of the induction day schedule now, right after biscuits and pointing out the toilets. Seems they accidentally put their name on something half-way original this month, and the balance needed to be redressed. So they spun the wheel of Nintendo policy, and it landed on, "Remake Old Game." Which shouldn't come as a surprise, as that option covers half the bloody wheel, with the other half split between, "Make low-effort unwanted spin-off," and, "Announce another fucking new console.""

"(sotto voce) Okay, Yahtz, you can do this; one more week before the big releases start, and then you can stop pretending anyone gives a shit about indie ga... Oh! Hello there, viewers!"

"Hob does do a good job of executing what it sets out to do: The air of wandering adventure, of secret purpose, of boredom, of exploring the ruins of strongholds and cities once mighty if boring, atmospheric, boring, boring, boringly boring... Don't misunderstand me, Hob... "It sounds like you think I'm boring, Yahtz." All right, I guess you haven't misunderstood me, yes!"

"Last time, my problem with the story was that the world had no physical coherence; you just randomly warped from horrible place to horrible place with no idea of how or if you were getting closer to victory. This complaint appears to have been addressed: it's established that the evil mega-corp has somehow built an entire coherent town in our kid's noggin, but parts of it are being corrupted by psychos. So now we do have a sense that our physical location actually matters, but the plot's still a mess: we establish our main villain, have a boss fight with him, then he goes, "By the way, I'm working for someone else who hasn't been mentioned or established in the slightest, but he's the main villain now. Oh no, I'm dead! Bleh!" Also, the relationship between real and virtual worlds confuses me. Everyone in the virtual world has a body in the real world, right? So why is Sebastian the only one we see in the plug-in room? Why doesn't our contact on the outside just go to the bodies of the troublemakers and stick an ice pick up their nose? We help one bloke escape the virtual world, but how did that work? They escaped, woke up in the real world facility, then politely asked the mega-corporation not to immediately shoot them in the face?"

"Shortly, Mario is left in the dirt and meets the inevitable magical spirit character that basically acts as glorified mouse-pointer: the star child in Mario Galaxy, the butterfly thing in Super Paper Mario, the Roomba from the Rabbids thing. This time, it's a magic hat, and as has been well-documented of, Mario throws the magic hat at a living thing that isn't already wearing a hat, then Mario parasites their body and overwrites their free will like a Cordyceps fungus with a slightly racist accent."

"Every now and again, you get to play as Bayek's missus doing ship combat missions, which I find mystifying. Does Ubisoft think we now expect Assassin's Creed to have ship combat, just because Black Flag had it and it was a little beacon of joy and light glimmering all too briefly from inside Ubisoft's churning mass? Because I don't want your ship combat if you're just cynically crowbarring it in like a nice ball of glittery tin foil to look at while we're getting sodomized over the recycle bin."

"Look, I'm not mad at you, Assassin's Creed Origins; I'm just disappointed. And bored. Mostly bored. I might have had a better time if the game had let me speed through the story campaign instead of forcing me to grind up dull, repetitive side-quests to reach the minimum level for the next main mission. I don't like the feeling that the game is fighting with me to stop me getting what I want out of it. Actually, maybe I am mad at you, Assassin's Creed Origins! I'm so sick of all this; I'm sick of playing Triple A games that feel like they exist not because a creator had a vision and an idea that excited them, but because quarterly income projections needed to be met. It's like Blackbeard going into stock market fraud; yeah, it's more lucrative, but there's no freedom or adventure, and they won't let you carve tits on the figurehead!"

"We kick off playing as Iden Versio, a commando and true believer for the evil Empire with a name that sounds like a low-market electronics company from Eastern Europe. She flies around the galaxy doing commando shit with her two squad members: Del Meeko, a slightly nerdy bloke with the word "meek" in his name, and Hask, a sneering Imperial blue-eyed boy with the word "ass" in his name. So here are the things we immediately know for absolute certainty will happen: the Empire's going to get its shit pushed in, Versio's going to switch sides, kill Hask in a boss fight at some point, and some ghoulish recreation of Carrie Fisher's corpse will probably call her a "cool dude" and give her a fist bump."

"I'd love to comment on Battlefront IIs ending, but it doesn't seem to have one. You think it's going to have one, and then it just doesn't, but don't worry; a text caption assures us that the story continues in multiplayer. Well, fuck me for trying! There I was, giving the benefit of the doubt, only for the doubt to be farted on and thrown back in my face! I felt sorry for you, story campaign! I thought it was a shame you were forced to hang out with your ugly roommate who charges micropayments before they'll do the washing-up; I thought I could take you out by yourself and maybe we could all have a little fun and take our minds off your ugly roommate! Little did I realize he was setting up a fucking threesome!"

"The real turning point comes when the depressed girl commits suicide; that's the definite point of bollock descent into icy water. Although, her depression had been portrayed with a slightly uncomfortable authenticity, so it wasn't creepy in an enjoyable psychological horror kind of way; it was just really fucking sad. It happens regardless of what choices you pick, which, in itself, might be an effective premise for a game about depression: constantly reliving the same few days trying to save her and failing every time because her problems are too deep-seated to be fixed just because you accidentally felt her up on day three."

"But I might as well give it away now, I think the game's already peaked by this point; it's already thrown its skirt up and flashed you its knickers with "Subversion of Dating Sim" written on them, and the game has been given away, so all it can do now is try to psych you out by drifting into the faintly lame territory of the video game creepypasta. So of course, graphics start fucking up and characters start bleeding from the eyes and doing that thing where their pupils go really small and they smile a bit too widely, which is, of course, anime shorthand for someone being two gratuitous panty shots short of a Sailor Moon episode. And if anything, this all made me less creeped out. "Phew, I'm glad you started bleeding from the eyes, 'cause things were getting a bit harrowing back there for a while with all that slightly-too-real depression and suicide business." And then there was all that anticipation leading up to it, playing the happy-clappy standard Dating Sim shit, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but now I can relax, because I see we've entered Silly Horror Town. Yeah, you go ahead and stab yourself, missy; couldn't hurt, could it?"

"I'm just going to spoil a lot of The Inpatient, because, trust me, missing out on this one is not going to haunt you to your dying days. The thrust of this and Until Dawns premise is that if you eat human flesh, you turn into a wendigo, right, and the main diversion of the plot is whether you turn into a wendigo or your roommate does. Now, in the former, our roommate is absent — presumably 'cos we scoffed down their entire body with French fries and ranch — but I don't get why the roommate becomes a wendigo in the other scenario, because we're self-evidently not eaten; I don't remember looking down at any point and seeing that one of my legs was chewed off. Just a little plot hole, but there's so little plot, one hole turns it into a fucking engagement ring."

"Lord, save me from all these fucking survival games. (There's an ironic joke in there somewhere.) They always start sensible with combining rock with stick to create stick with rock on the end. But sooner or later you end up mashing together two mushrooms and a piece of discarded tinfoil to create a magazine-fed 5.56mm Colt AR-15, which you then rub on a small pile of turds for a second to add the optional holographic sights. Still I understand why they appeal. Where most games revolve entirely around the player waiting giggling just over the horizon for you to step into the designated minotaur area so it can leap out and start flinging minotaurs, it's refreshing to play a game whose world feels like it couldn’t give a shit about you, that its environment and life forms could muddle along perfectly well by themselves and which will kill you stone dead if you go twenty minutes without sucking any hydration from the tear ducts of a passing sparrow. Anyway, we've done crafting survival games in most of the standard Mario level biomes -- grasslands, desert, jungle, ice world -- so until they bring out a crafting survival game set in food world where we have to make spears out of Twiglets, here's a crafting survival game set in a ocean level, Subnautica. You are Rex Handsome, faceless mute space adventurer with the superhuman ability to not go all wrinkly when they stay underwater too long. Sadly he got this power by trading in his ability to prevent spaceships from exploding, and his spaceship explodes over an ocean planet with only three survivors: Him, one escape pod, and the Mars bar in the glove compartment. Now our hero must find a way off the planet, but in the meantime do the usual survival crafting game stuff: Build a base, find food and water, explore, and remember to breathe every now and again, you dozy git. Subnautica is the kind of game that probably could have gotten away with procedurally generating the map and having no further plot beyond, "See how long you could last and maybe find yourself a nice crafting project, like building a castle with a fire breathing effigy of The Allman Brothers on the top." So I was surprised to see that it didn't do that. The world map is fixed and astonishingly there's a plot with an actual ending, where you get to leave the planet tearfully waving goodbye to The Allman Brothers as you go. HO, YES! That space ship disaster wasn't just a contrived setup; the massive wreckage is your principal navigation point for the whole game, and your first challenge is figuring out how you're going to loot it while it's on fire and pissing radiation like an incontinent dog from the Bikini atoll."

"Riding elephants is one of those things I didn't realize I wanted until I had it. It's just fun to stampede into a ring of soldiers or, indeed, wolves and go "What's up motherfuckers? The elephant in the room is that you're all fucking dead.""

"The plot opens with Sonic et al., running fast and fighting Dr. Eggrobotmannik. Blimey, that's a bold stride in a new direction! No wonder we needed a fucking reboot! In short order, Sonic frees an evil snake monster from the past who claims that it was Sonic himself who imprisoned him a thousand years ago. And so the plot starts making time travel noises as Sonic is transported back to do the thing he already did. You might reasonably think at this point that we're setting up a Zelda-esque mechanic wherein we hop back and forth between two different time periods throughout the game, and you'd be all wrong and a bag of chips! We go back in time, imprison the poor bastard, and come straight back. It's never brought up again and we're not even a quarter of the way through the game!"

"Well, this is about as late an entry as late gets, but you really would be hard pressed to find worse than the last game I reviewed. I say "reviewed," perhaps the better word would be "autopsied." Buggy, rushed, horrible design, and with dialogue as irritating as chicken wire across the plums, Sonic Boom can suck my fat cock! I'd think of a more roundabout way of saying that, but I refuse to put more effort in than the developers did."

"[...] And, similarly, the worst game needn't necessarily be the most objectively badly made or frustrating one, but the game with the worst intentions. Sonic Boom and Spider-Man feel like the developers were all wearing oven mitts, but a game that has every advantage in the world, and then calmly, decisively, and deliberately puts its todger in a saucepan full of hot bleach, is somehow orders of magnitude worse - it's Thief! I will never understand the logic behind triple-A reboots. "Here's this game people used to like, primarily for its uniqueness! Let's reboot it and make it just like everything else! I see no reason why people could be anything less than delighted! Do you think my todger's clean, yet? I think the bell-end's fallen off!""

"[post-credits] Random documents and audio logs / We find them stuck to notice boards, we find them under dogs / We're gonna put them in a file and give it a review / And we're bored of all the gameplay, but we've nothing else to do."

"This ostensibly new IP plays a lot like Dead Island, I thought, before noticing that it comes to us from the same developer as Dead Island, which confused me for a bit 'cause I assumed they were working on Dead Island 2, currently represented by a pre-rendered trailer that, as always, tells us as much about the game as it does about freshwater fly fishing. But apparently that's being developed by Yager, creators of Spec Ops: The Line, a game about an American agent being inserted into a middle eastern city on an innocuous fetch quest and confronting death, horror, and violence while getting a lovely suntan. But I digress. Dying Light is a game about an American agent being inserted into a middle eastern city on an innocuous fetch quest and confronting death, horror, and OH, GOD, EVERYTHING'S SPIRALIING IN ON ITSELF! WHAT ARE THESE THINGS IN FRONT OF ME? JESUS CHRIST, THEY'RE MY OWN BUTTOCKS!"

"In the run-up to release, I'd gotten the idea that The Odor: 1886 was a four-player co-op shooter -- going again by the teaser and the four characters on the box-art, arranged with equal prominence. I wonder if that might once have been the intention because, of the three characters on the box besides Galahad, none of them are still participating in the plot by the final level, as if in the original first draft they were supposed to have been tagging along with you. Although having said that, the main villain is also no longer participating in the plot at the end. To go back to the Advanced Warfare comparison: It's like if Kevin Spacey just flat out hadn't appeared in the final mission and the final boss fight was instead with Kevin Spacey's pet Staffordshire Terrier, with Kevin Spacey mockingly saluting from a hang-gilder with 'Sequel Hook' written on it."

"As for the actual plot, well, why don't you fill in the blanks yourself? You're a cop on the blank, you get blanked for a blank you didn't commit, and now you're out for blank and to clear your blank. The new modern shooter is officially the old detective thriller with gradual shift to heist movie in the second half. What confuses me, though, is that, even after you've been wrongly accused and are on the run, you can still arrest people. In fact, when the evil private cops show up to arrest you, you can arrest them back! What organisation is going to come around and pick those guys up?! The criminal police from Opposite Land who give talks to high-school kids on how drugs are really great and everyone should take them?"

"...I did engage with the characters, and felt sad when my choices led to their deaths -- although it's pretty fucking hard to predict where some axes will fall. One particularly nuanced character died as an eventual consequence of me turning an evil tree into a horse. Well, now it sounds obvious!"

"So what other online content is there? "Other online content?" said Splatoon, bemused. "We've got a whole two maps! You can wear different shirts that no one besides you will ever notice or care about! What more you do want?" Two maps?! "No, of course not just two maps! We wouldn't be much of a multiplayer-focused game with only two maps, would we? We've actually got five maps, thank you very much. But we artifically restrict you to two and change them every few hours." Okay. Why? "What's with all the fucking questions?! You see anyone else complaining?" said Splatoon, pointing to the many player avatars standing around the lobby like Village of the Damned with Miiverse posts floating over their head saying things like: [in a droning monotone] "This is the best game ever," and, "Hooray for Splatoon," and, "My connection died again. Whoops, I mean: I love Nintendo," and, "Thanks to Nintendo and to local gaming retailer for bringing me this great game." That was a real message I actually saw. How many checks do you think that guy is cashing?"

"VR tech may finally be making its move. The claim that motion controls would enhance immersion was always about as believable as the claim that a sledgehammer can enhance a Fabergé egg, but I genuinely believe that VR represents the way forward for immersive gaming [...] But of course, Oculus already did its pre-E3 announcement that it was jumping into bed with Microsoft. Yowser! Could have broken that more gently, Oculus! You don't come out to your parents in a Christmas card. An Xbox One controller will ship with it, like a rich snot buying his way into the popular kids' club; and you can stream Xbox One games onto to it. There was a video of someone playing a third-person game on a screen in a virtual living room, which I'm guessing is their entry for the Piers-Morgan-for-President Total Pointlessness Award. And also, there's going to be a special two-handed controller that incorporates- No! That incorporates motion-se- Oh, GOD no! That incorporates motion-sensor tec- No no no! We were SO CLOSE! We were almost FREE! Why must we forever carry our failures around with us like a scrotum full of horseshoes!? Oh, you can pick up a virtual gun with your actual hand and fire it. 'Cause that's what I want added to the process of shooting an enemy, isn't it?! My noodly wrist groping for something that isn't there, like a castrated wanker! Hey, Captain Scott! How about we make sure we can actually get to the South Pole before we start making plans to erect the Statue of Liberty there?!"

"The problem with super-hero movies is that they only have three plots: Villain endangers hero's loved one; hero faces villain who is dark reflection of themselves, villain threatens to cover a city in gas that will make everyone as petty as they are. Arkham Knight goes through all three, multiple times, with varying degrees of disconnect and all messily layering over each other like an orgy in a poorly-made lasagna."

"Maybe, rather than a linear mystery to be unlocked by the end, I should see it as immersing myself in the larger world of the characters. The problem with that is: I don't like any of the characters and I'd sooner immerse myself in a vat of cold Marmite! I think I'm supposed to sympathise with the American scientist lady, because this is rural England and the locals read the words "American scientist lady" the same way they read the words "Venusian ballerina crab". But she's hardly meeting them half-way; treating them like idiots and reacting hypersensitively to their blissful ignorance, like a cat that shares a litterbox with a hedgehog."

"Between Volume, V for Vendetta and Children of Men, I'm noticing that the world of fiction finds it curiously easy to believe that a near-future Britain would become a fascist dictatorship. It's like all British people are sitting on the edges of their settees watching Countdown just waiting for the economy to dip a few more points so they can gleefully fling their teacups aside and start taking the truncheon to the underclasses. And speaking as a British person, this never rings true for me. Now, I admit I haven't been in Britain for nigh-on ten years now so maybe Carol Vorderman founded a neo-fascist revolutionary movement while I wasn't paying attention, but most of the British people I know, if you invited them to truncheon an underclass for the greater glory of the superior British race, most of them would reply with, "Ooh, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was making a fuss", before apologizing for no reason. At the height of the Empire, maybe, but I just don't think there's anything the modern British care enough about to inspire violent dictatorships (except maybe football)."

"I have a soft spot for the slasher movie. Not that they're ever anything above god-awful. I mean; calling Friday the 13th "art" is like calling a face full of crusted shit "cosmetic surgery". But I like them because there's something very essentially cathartic about watching a bunch of complete twats get completely twatted. When the parade of out-of-work actors in their mid-to-late twenties pretending to be carefree teenagers with unfeasibly easy access to expensive holiday real estate seem to find no end of amusement in jumping out at each other ten million times across the first hour as the soundtrack shrieks like Sharon Stone just recrossed her legs in front of the violinists, Jason Voorhees is acting out the growing desires of the audience as he starts slitting them up like Christmas presents with good dentistry. Until Dawn is an interactive story of the David Cage school pushed through the filter of slasher movie, with the promise being that, if we make all the right decisions, perhaps we can keep all the out-of-work twenty-something actors alive. I don't think you were paying attention, Until Dawn! I will have made the right decisions if every single one of those gurgleburgs ends up upholstering the soft furnishings in Leatherface's man cave!"

"[Until Dawn] also owes something to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, in that it tries to psychologically evaluate you to an extent, albeit with considerably less subtlety. At one point, a character brazenly asks, "Say, which three of these things do you find scariest?" And lo and behold; the three you pick will show up later! That seems like an easy system to game: "No, really! I'm terrified of Magners Cider, Jaffa Cakes, and handjobs!""

"Turns out Cortana's big dramatic death scene in the last game wasn't for realisies, but one could kinda predict that from the mere fact that there is a Halo 5 at all. It doesn't take a giant space-protractor to calculate that Master Chief and Cortana are the only marketable faces of the franchise; which is not even because they're good or interesting characters. It's only because Mr. Chuffy is the protagonist and Cortana flaps her big blue knockers about like a gelatin dessert on a merry-go-round. The funny thing is, even in-universe, everyone seems to realize that Mr. Chuffy and his little blue titty-monster are the only characters of any importance. So when Mr. Chuffy reports having a weird dream about Cortana being alive and calling him to distant planet, not a single person so much as hazards the possibility that it was just a dream and maybe he'll forget all about if they buy him a new wank-doll for Christmas. No, they're all like, "Ooh, this is serious! We better go to that planet, then!""

"The action is split between the four Spartans trying to hunt down Mr. Chuffy and Mr. Chuffy himself, who also has three finger puppets with him for no better reason than because his bits needs to be four player co-op as well. Any potential that might have been here for some kind of tense or dramatic character interplay is lost by the fact that Halo continues to seem like it was written by a castrated slug. The crime for which Mr. Chuffy is being hunted is so completely fucking weak that the two parties can barley summon the effort to be cross at each other when they do meet. Two of them have a token punch-up about midway through that has more the air of two blind people trying to politely get past each other in a crowded restaurant. It might have helped if it had been playable! But Halo 5's attitude seems to be that nothing ruins an action sequence faster than players."

"Bethesda RPGs are always deeply explorative, but never immersive. They make for some great screenshots, but the moment it has to start living and animating, you find it full of blank-eyed computer programs who struggle to navigate a six-lane highway without a carelessly-placed dog turd making their path-finding bugger up, and who have a weird habit of mysteriously vanishing in front of doors, which the doors always find so surprising that they momentarily forget how doors are supposed to work."

"The quickest possible description for [Devil's Third] would be, "Poor Man's Metal Gear Solid," and I mean really poor; like the kind of Metal Gear Solid that was brewed from ketchup packets in a prison toilet. You know how Hideo Kojima's approach to including real world politics and history in his games is to read the first line of the Wikipedia page and then get bored and set a whale on fire? Devil's Third somehow does even less, and seems to have gotten its understanding of the world from what could be barked at it through the door-hatch as it was passed its morning bowl of gruel. How's this for -- let's charitably call it -- misguided: The main character is an inmate in Guantanamo Bay, which in this reality is an underground prison by way of Beyond Thunderdome populated exclusively by white, American Metallica enthusiasts."

"Awww, the mean ol' puzzles hurt Yahtzee-Boo-Boo's fragile little gamey-brainy-wain. Perhaps you'd be more suited to the kind of puzzle where you only draw straight lines connecting a shotgun barrel to a foreign insurgent's left testicle." HEY! Twat-Finder General! I solved the puzzles. I just wasn't having fun doing so. I completed the whole island, turned on all the laser beams, opened up the mountain to what I suspect was the final climactic area, and then the game threw fifteen more line-drawing puzzles at my face, and, frankly, fuck that! "Congratulations on getting through that bowl of dog food, player. Here's your reward: another helping of dog food."

"Hey, Yahtzee," said Steam towards the end of the week. "Do you remember that announcement trailer you saw a while back for a game called Bombshell?"

"Twenty years have passed since the last game, the Earth has come under the control of an oppressive alien regime fronted by a dorky human collaborator, and when the silent protagonist gets released from suspended animation the resistance can finally get started. Because no one was willing to get off their ass and defend themselves without the presence of this one gormless mute. But enough about the plot of Half-Life 2; let's talk about XCOM 2 instead."

"Now, I wasn't sure I was going to do this game, because you know what I'm like with JRPGs that aren't called EarthBound or Persona 5: I'll be rolling my eyes dismissively at the first sign of hairdos that look like they were crafted out of brightly-colored mashed potato by an extremely bored child who can't leave the table. But precisely thirty seconds into the plot, I had a feeling I was going to have to talk about this one, firstly in a review, and then maybe in some kind of inquest into what the fuck Japan has been playing at for the last thirty years or so. So here's how the story starts: the president of the United States is on his way to a summit of the U.N. when the city he's driving through gets hit by a direct nuclear strike. Don't worry, you didn't just turn over two pages at once; this is still Ni no Kuni II. Moments before death, the president is transported to a fantasy world; specifically, to the bedchamber of a little prince boy wearing cat ears. Well, that's one explanation, anyway, but maybe you should save it for the hearing, Mr. President. Also, he gets de-aged about thirty years for no particular reason except it's the law that JRPG protagonists can't look old enough to buy a health potion without getting carded."