Zero Punctuation

"And so in the spirit of exploration, our hero travels to strange new worlds, seeks out new civilizations, and offers to do their laundry. Let me ask you something: if an alien came down from space and walked among us as ambassador to beyond the furthest stars, would it ever occur to you to call him over and ask if he wouldn't mind bobbing down the shops to run you a couple of errands? Maybe that's partly why BioWare games always speed down the uncanny valley like a herd of autistic wildebeest. It's not just that all the characters look and act like department store dummies with snap-on plastic hairdos; the game feels like it was written by one, as well. Ryder finds himself thrust into the role of head pioneer and the promotion requires him to have part of his brain cut out and an AI put in that talks to him inside his head, does all the difficult adding up, and occasionally fucks around with his bodily functions. He takes this in his stride and reacts with bemusement when other people think that that's slightly fucked up. It does all rather come across as a plot written by someone who learned about human emotion from children's pop-up books."

"The core gameplay of an RPG can also be character building: Making your character fit a role, a role that you are playing, as it were. But just about the only prior Mass Effect mechanic that has been slung in the bin is all that Paragon/Renegade business, and now, whether we respond to each dialogue with wit, with intelligence, with aggression, or like we've pounded ourselves between the eyes with a mixture of Botox and horse tranquillizer (trick question; that's every response) doesn't seem to matter one chafed mosquito nipple."

"You are ace cameraman Blake Something-or-other, who comes with his wife to hillbilly murderer country to cover a story, and makes the rookie error of showing up in a helicopter, which, in video game intro sequences, hold together like a Jammie Dodger in the back pocket of a pair of jogging bottoms. So the inevitable happens, and he's got to rescue his wife from both a Christian death cult and a Pagan death cult that appear to be at odds, but seem to find plenty of common ground when it comes to doing horrible, horrible things to Blake's gormless ass. Again, maybe Resident Evil 7 ruined this with all that chainsaw-based overzealous manicure business, because I swear, Outlast 2 is trying to break the "horrible, inescapable torture in first-person" record. Fucking hell, it's like The Passion of the Christ: VR Edition!"

"The game opens with a flashback to two brothers. The older: Brash, confident, and already enrolled in the military — the younger: more shy and troubled, and looking to the older with hero worship. Now, if you think you've guessed which of these brothers will be our underdog protagonist, then you've been misled by your basic storytelling instincts, you big stupid cunt. No, the protagonist is the older brother! And after jumping gleefully over about fifteen years of character development, we suddenly cut to the brothers on a mission to ghost warrior the bollocks off some fools, which ends with the younger brother being captured by some global supervillain group or other. We then jump forward again two years — what is this; the fucking summer Olympics? — when our hero, Mister North... I've honestly forgotten his first name; it was either "Jon" or "Rob", so lets just call him... "Oliver" — is deployed to Georgia searching for his brother, and finds himself up against a mysterious masked sniper conducting a reign of terror. Oh, goshington ballbags, I wonder who that'll turn out to be! Who will be behind that mask when we confront this person who snipes almost as well as we do, and seems to be interested in us personally? Will it be Whoopi Goldberg? Or Cardinal Richelieu? Charlie the Chipshop Man? Ooh, maybe it'll be the competent story writer who disappeared right before the game began!"

"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 think it is fair to say that the DC Comics Universe and its various adaptations could stand to take itself a touch less seriously. "Oh, it is easy to be an armchair cinematographer, isn't it?" snarks Johnny DC in reply. "You try getting in a cheery mood when your films need to break 400 million on opening weekend or your executives will have to take a pay cut and cause the collapse of the local pool-cleaning industry!" I'm just saying, Johnny DC, that Superman and Batman crying in the rain, smashing each other's faces in, and talking like pro-wrestlers with mouths full of cat-litter, might be drifting somewhat from the essence of those characters. That is to say; power fantasies for little boys who don't want to tidy their rooms."

"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."

"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."

"The N64 had the power, the IP, and the good reputation; there was just one tiny little massive cargo container full of bat smegma sitting on the N64 railroad tracks, and it had the word "cartridges" along the side. Cartridges did have merits. They load fast and are sturdy enough to still work after you smack your brother with it for asking for their turn, but the same is true of an articulated truck, and you wouldn't pick up your dinner date in one. The age of the CD-ROM had come, which may well have been slower to load and stopped working if you used them as improvised weaponry. But in comparison, developing for cartridge was like chiseling the ones and zeros onto stone tablets, and third-party developers were turned off. Ultimately the third-party developers would be the king makers of this generation. Capcom gave their old pals Nintendo the cold shoulder and showed up to the Playstation's birthday party with Resident Evil. Squaresoft batted away Nintendo's attempt to hold hands so it could go behind the bikesheds with Sony and show them their knickers, aka Final Fantasy VII."

"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"."

"I wonder what the fucking target audience for this game could be. The overlap between people who like fantasy visual novels and people who like NBA Jam can't be the biggest niche in the world, but I stuck with it and after playing it all the way to the end, I think I'm prepared to say I like Pyre. Obviously I dropped the basketball difficulty to low 'cos obviously who gives a shit, but I should have remembered that Supergiant Games are pretty good at this whole interactive storytelling lark, and scratch my scrawny scrotum if I didn't genuinely didn't want to see what happened to these characters! We call it the "Bioware Bro Buffet", but between this and Persona 5, Bioware seem to be the worst at it. Again, I liked the Pyre Platter more than the Mass Effect Andromeda Burger King Kids Club, in spite of them only being still images that didn't make any effort to emote — or possibly because of."

"I died a bunch of other times, and actually came worryingly close to the limit. But that was from a very annoying section where you have to run from light to light, because hanging around in the dark too long makes you die of... erm... being extra-insane, somehow. Which is just as irritating a mechanic as it was when Metroid Prime 2 did it. I had no idea mental stability was solar-powered."

"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?"

"Destiny 2 has quite a long Pissabout Deferment Index, or "PDI", which is the term for the amount of time a free-to-play or Skinner box game gives you to get settled in before it starts pissing you about. It only started when, out of nowhere, the next plot mission required me to grind up two more levels, which wasn't much; I only had to do a couple of side quests, or rather, "adventures", as they are called here, which I suppose is one way to make them sound interesting. "Ho, traveller! Are you a stalwart enough hero to 'adventure' to a place and shoot the lads?" But then, after the next plot mission, I needed to gain another four levels to proceed, and, yeah, I guess I see what we're doing here now, Destiny 2."

"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."

"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."

"But the stealth is like a blatantly rigged carny game where the cans are glued together and the goldfish have all died, anyway. It's the shitty kind of stealth where every motherfucker on the map instantly knows your position (and least favorite place to be shot in) because you moved one quarter-inch out of cover to look around and were spotted by someone's hamster. Thus begins The Cock-Up Cascade, and I hate Cock-Up Cascade, because it feels like being unduly and continuously punished for making one tiny mistake. The commanders also instantly know where you are, and will continually re-spawn backup until you storm their office and chop all their arms and legs off -- like the exact opposite of the smooth, un-rattled secret agent you ostensibly are."

"Triple A games are now merely platforms for blatant attempts to fleece money from colossal dimwits that somehow have financial independence despite not being able to open a tin of beans without losing an eye. And then the publishers will say, "Hey, just because we erected a giant sign saying 'Please jump off this cliff and dash yourselves to death on the jagged rocks below!' doesn't mean you have to do that!" Granted, but I object to the way most of the game takes place in the shadow of the giant sign, and the rest of it is spent perched astride the giant sign. What I mean is, Assassin's Creed Origins is one of those Triple A terminal cases where everything seems to have been built around the giant cliff-jumping sign as an afterthought. Firstly, it's got all the usual variables: Character levels and XP, in-game currency, weapon upgrades, crafting items; 'cause of course, the more things you can quantify, the more imaginary prizes you can put in a loot box, the more you can base the gameplay around making numbers bigger and hypnotize the players into wanting a weapon identical to their current weapon except with a whole two numbers bigger more than they want their next fucking meal! I can't think of what other purpose giving every character a level could possibly have. It's certainly catastrophic for immersion, when anything more than two levels higher than you will just mash you into a fine paste even if you do get a stealth attack on them; one would think a hidden blade to the windpipe would be a pretty decisive argument-ender no matter how many press-ups they did that morning."

"I don't want to dwell on the prevailing loot box controversy because it's been covered to death elsewhere and I'm not a multiplayer guy; I was more pissed off about EA selling Battlefront I at full price with no single-player campaign and then sticking one in their second, equally full-priced game and expecting forgiveness. But then, this is an increasingly-popular strategy, isn't it? If you've done something shitty, follow it up with an even shittier thing and the first shitty thing will be swiftly forgotten and normalized. Take EA's advice: if you get caught cheating with your wife's sister, double down and fuck her guinea pig, as well."

"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 mean PUBG, which stands for PlayerUnknown's Bonanza Goldmine, the breakout hit multiplayer shooter based somewhat on the concept of Battle Royale, except Battle Royale didn't involve quite so many people running around in their undepants (not yet, anyway; don't put the idea in their head, you know what Japanese culture's like). One hundred players are dropped unarmed and helpless into a deserted sandbox map, everyone who owned property in the area apparently thought that a small pile of guns and supplies makes a lovely living room conversation piece, the playing area gradually shrinks over time, and the winner is the last person to get shot, fall to their death, or quit in disgust after listening to the voice chat. Because another thing PUBG could stand for is Players Unabashedly Backing Genocide. Seriously, the first thing I did was mute that shit 'cause I started my first game and immediately heard someone going, "Niggers, niggers, niggers, niggers," and I know that sounds like something I'd make up, but I swear they were. Hell, who needs to interact with the other players, anyway? I do usually avoid multiplayer games. After all, I Personally Understate the Benefits of Gregariousness. But I'm fine as long as I don't have to socialize and we can just mutely exterminate each other, like when I go to trivia night at the pub."

"And in the year when loot boxes became a symbolic evil right alongside toothbrush mustaches and Ugg boots, PlayerUnknown's Burbling Grandma's cosmetic loot boxes are taking a pretty sizable amount of piss -- probably up to waist-deep at least. After my first boots adventure, I knuckled down and church-camped my way to my second loot box, dreaming of the next fancy cosmetic that would surely make me the belle of the morgue. And ya know what I got? A pair a beige trousers. Great. This'll be perfect camouflage if the next match takes place in an Ikea showroom. So I knuckled down again until I got my third loot box which contained a pair of white trousers. My fourth, which is about where I resolved to give up playing the loot box market, was -- brace yourselves -- a pair of black trousers. Well, at least I assembled a complete spectrum of trousers. Or to put that another way, I Painstakingly United a Britches Gradient."

"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."

"After the death of the beloved Charles IV, his heir, Wenceslaus, of "Good King..." fame, proceeds to, in a very literal sense, fuck things up royally, until his half-brother Sigismund imprisons him and starts smashing up the countryside for giggles. At the outset, none of this means a whole lot to our main character, Henry, a peasant blacksmith's son who's more concerned about the day-to-day doings of a medieval peasant, which is to say, covering himself in shit. There's even a mechanic where certain speech and charisma checks are affected if you show up covered in shit, which is pretty fucking unfair, because it's medieval times, and the only thing that isn't covered in shit is the clouds, and only because no one's built a big enough siege tower."

"I reached a point where I was supposed to join a big raid on a bandit camp with twenty other lads, which took six or seven tries because victory was hinging on all my NPC helpers pulling their weight, and that was like expecting a team of sled dogs to help with your maths homework. But finally, we managed to breach the inner camp and Henry decides he's going to fight the bandit leader by himself, in a fucking Thunderdome. And then, I had to give up on the whole game, because I could barely get one hit in before he wiped the fucking floor with me! Fuck "realism"! The "realistic" approach would have been to let me lure him out of the fucking Thunderdome and get my sixteen heavily-armed mates to pass him around for sweaty cock-slaps. But nope! Fuck player choice! Fuck your build! It's standard boss fights or into the bin with you!"

"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."

"I found a nice, quiet spot to set up base camp that was convenient for the river, the local spider cave, and the Rock, Tree, and Bush Emporium and started progressing my way up the tech tree. "Make a stone pickaxe: one bit of wood, five rocks." Gotcha. "Make a bedroll: one bit of wood, five leaves." That's done. "Now make a wooden storage box: 100 bits of wood—" Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! That was a fucking jump! I only wanted a foot locker, not a fucking Regency wardrobe with a complimentary portal to Narnia! "Now let's build a tannery; that'll be 240 rocks—" WHAT?! It's, like, three bits of wood with skin stretched over it! What are the rocks for?! You going to put it on a gravel driveway?! "Well, we're just making sure you get the full intended experience; that is to say, wasting hours of your life banging a rock with another, smaller, pointier bit of rock.""

"What's sad is that there’s always a great deal of potential in David Cage video games: I look forward to the day when he actually creates one! Har Har Har. He doesn't make branching-narrative video games, this lad; he makes branching-narratives and then tries to tortuously squeeze a video game into it. I feel like he'd rather be making films. He doesn't appreciate the essential differences between the way an audience engages with a game versus a film. At the very start, we play weird-faced lanky detective android in a hostage situation and we're permitted, and indeed obliged, to bum around the room next to the hostage situation gathering intel on the perp before we confront them. This also gives us the chance to learn a bit about the world we're in, which would've been fine, but as I leafed through a jolly interesting magazine the hostage taker suddenly shot one of the SWAT guys and the game went: "WHOOPS! You bummed around too long! That's going on your permanent record!" I don't get it, David Cage. Did you want me to explore and immerse myself in this world you've created or did you want to maintain psychotic death-grip control of the story's pacing? 'Cos if the latter, then just make a fucking film! Or, perhaps more realistically, a choose-your-own-adventure book. Well, I say he should make a film, but he'd never hack it in films ironically because he's a hack. All his dialogue is clichéd and most of his ideas are nicked. I enjoyed Westworld too, David Cage, but you didn't have to enjoy it so bloody publicly!"

"I'd like to close this review by discussing one of the plot twists. [...] Remember that nanny bot who adopts the human child? Towards the end it turns out the child was also an android all along! Ooh, what a twist! An inadequately explored twist that adds nothing to the characters or story and may even be detrimental to it. I mean, "Can a robot mother truly love a human child?" was a question with some power to it in this context, but, "Can a robot love another robot?" Yes, they can! We know they can! We've seen like twelve of the buggers doing it already! It's just a twist for the sake of having a twist. In other words, it's a David Cage twist. Sounds like a dance, doesn't it? Hey, everybody! Do the David Cage Twist! Walk stiffly around the room for 10 minutes, then reach for the sky — and fall flat on your face."

"I suppose I could mention Ubisoft, but that feels like mentioning the colour of the wallpaper; they're always hanging about in the background, putting out their samey sandboxes with the clockwork regularity of an explosively copious period. New Assassin's Creed, right on cue; set in ancient Greece, which makes sense, because the ancient Greeks were really into buggery. But what made me choke on my sherbet was when the bloke narrating the gameplay video said, "For the first time, you will be able to choose between a male and female hero." YOU WHAT?! Am I on crazy pills?! Assassin's Creed Syndicate did that! What is the fucking point of doing progressive and innovative things if you're just going to pretend they didn't happen two games later and try to score innovation points a second time?! It's not "progressive" if you're progressing to the place where we already fucking are, genius! I'm genuinely mad about this; I've got no more room to snark about Beyond Good and Evil 2 now, and it's Assassin's Creed: Odysseys fault!"

"I went for the pacifist run because there was a distinct whiff of moral choice-driven story branching about all this, and my instinct is always to shoot for "best" ending, because it's usually the one that feels like an ending and not like I fucked something up. Vampyr may be an exception, however; it really wants to be a story about a broody vampire tortured by the clash between his urge to kill and his duty to heal, but after I didn't kill anyone, it becomes a story about a perfectly nice, if slightly intense, bloke who doesn't get enough Vitamin D. So the, quote, "good ending" was a bit of a damp squib; one of Reid's vampire pals try to get their melodrama on, going, "Ooh, we are nothing more than killers and our blood is cursed!", and Reid's all like, "Bollocks we are! I haven't killed shit!" "Oh, so you haven't. Never mind, then; let's get McDonald's." Now, when Reid says he hasn't killed shit, he is truncating a little; he should have said, "I haven't killed shit, except for the 500,000 vampire hunters I murdered in standard combat." Yes, this is the rather glaring incongruity of Vampyr; there's something a little bit hollow about Jonathan Reid's quiet nobility and pacifism when he's just had to murder twelve identical Cockney thugs on the way back from the chemist. Well, I suppose it's self-defense killing, but it still raises a lot of questions. How come killing these lads by the hundreds somehow doesn't affect the rest of London's population like killing named characters does? Did they all get bused in from Wolverhampton?"

"[This Is the Police 2] has pretensions to cinematic storytelling, but, well... Here's my impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene. I mean, I mean, this is me doing an impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene, right now. I'm doing it now. Can't you see I'm doing an impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene, viewers? Viewers? Viewers? Are you listening, viewers? You need to be listening to understand my impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene! I think they're going for an ultra-naturalistic dialogue style, but if realism was the intent, it fell flat, because, realistically, if I were stuck in a conversation like this, I'd stick my head in the nearest bread-slicing machine."

"Marvel's Spider-Man is of course a new sandbox game about Spider-Man, a genre that has seen one exemplar -- Spider-Man 2 on the GameCube -- and a whole load of Spider-Manure since then. So let's get straight to the big question: Is Disney's Marvel's Spider-Man a better Spider-Man game than Spider-Man 2? The answer is: Yye-ees... And that incidentally was my entry for the 2018 Most Subtext in A Single Syllable competition."

"The plot [...] is, you are in Generic JRPG Swords and Sorcery Fantasy World, east of Java; you are the last surviving heir of a deposed royal house who was found as a baby and adopted by peasant farmers. There's a weird birthmark on your hand that magic occasionally comes out of, and you grow into a strong, handsome lad with a girl's haircut, so when you come of age, your adoptive parent takes you aside and says, "Look, let's not beat around the bush; you couldn't be more obviously a destined fantasy hero if your high school graduation picture was painted by Boris Vallejo. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any global crisis going on at the moment that would require a destined hero, so why don't you just wander around the countryside for a bit, and destiny will presumably strike at some point?" I'm not being dismissive here; that's literally how we start! You go to the royal castle on the off-chance that a kidnapped princess needs rescuing, but get thrown in the dungeon 'cos the king's played too many Elder Scrolls games and thinks that's just what you do with destined heroes. You break out within minutes, and the plot becomes "go from city to city looking for the person who isn't one of the five or six endlessly-repeated NPC models, recruit them to your party, then do whatever they want to do until the next one comes along". By this method, we enlist to our cause a toddler, two hotties, an old man, a comedy stereotype of a homosexual, and an actual homosexual, and after the last party member joins, they say, "What do you mean, 'destiny hasn't struck yet'?! All right, let's just gather the six Destiny Balls; that'll wake the fucker up." I only had three or four days to play the game in, so I was under no illusion that I'd finish the fucking thing, and I dropped out after the third or fourth ball. About twenty hours in, and still no sign of a big villain; couple of "Darth Vaders", but no "Palpatines", you know?"

"That was when CoD: BlOps 4 laid its knob across my porridge for the first time: "No single-player campaign." Well, Activision, as Milorad Petrović said in response to the Invasion of Yugoslavia, "...The fuck?!" "We thought you'd be pleased, Yahtz. Every story campaign of every CoD game you've played in years, you've called racist and overblown and taken straight from what insecure NRA members see when they close their eyes and touch themselves; at least we didn't hire Kit Harington this time!" Granted, but having removed the single-player, are you going to charge less for the game? "Ohohoho, Yahtzee! I can see why people say you're a funny guy!" A hundred-and-thirty bucks, the deluxe version costs!?! As the water treatment engineer said of his favourite outflow pipe: "That's taking a lot of piss!""

"A degree of general knowledge is required to identify people's nationalities, or what a topman does as opposed to a seaman. If it helps, topmen are generally concerned with the rigging and what goes on above decks, whereas semen is a white liquid that comes out of your penis when you think about Jenny Agutter too much."

"It's weird that the music's so annoying when the rest of the sound design is fuckin' top-notch -- voice acting, ambient sound, and especially the little radio plays that accompany the death flashbacks. I couldn't say for sure if it accurately reproduces the sound of a bloke getting torn in half by a giant calamari platter, but it certainly made me cross my legs uncomfortably."

"Rise of The Tomb Raider was my third most mediocre game of 2015, and now Shadow of The Tomb Raider has made it proud by hitting the number two spot. Now that the reboot trilogy has finished sandblasting the personality off Laura Croft, any chance we could go back to the old one? She might have been constantly pouting like she was trying to conceal an entire Portuguese man o' war in her mouth, but at least that was a facial expression of some kind."

"The worst game of 2018 was, like the devil and weird sex practices, known by many names: The Seven-Hour Snore, Hunt Down the Refund, Shit Down the Piss-Shit... Call it whatever you like! Just never forget what Hunt Down The Freeman was and what it represented: A cringe-fest that unstitched its thoughtless patchwork of stolen assets to whip out its deseased knob and dispense blood-flecked urine all over a once-top-rate franchise with the tacit approval of its creator! Fuck, man, what else is there to say? I suppose I could say "fuck" again... No, that's the wrong attitude. It's a new year, after all. Let's move on from the past and focus on what the future will bring. [a copy of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate appears] ...FUCK!"

"At its core, it's about the combat, and yeah, it's Smash Brothers. You mash buttons, and hope all those particle effects are coming out of them and not you. Every now and again, your tiny opponent gestures vaguely with a limb that's like two pixels big on screen, and you promptly get blasted into the cosmos and you're left wondering what the fuck that was and how you were supposed to predict it. So for a while, I was struggling along, not having much fun, but everything abruptly changed after I unlocked Donkey Kong, who I proceeded to exclusively play as. Why? Because A) He's big and cartoon-y enough that you can actually read his fucking movements; and B) he has this one attack that I like to call, "Fuck Off I Win (Ook Ook)," where he slaps the ground and everyone in a ten yard radius explodes. I ended up challenging myself not to use it, because I jerk off sailors for nickels and even I thought it was cheap."

"And that's why it's time for the first indie double-bill of the year. Gratifyingly for my love of connecting themes, both games are named after a word that means, "grey." Not only that, but they're both words that mean "grey" that you might use if you're a pretentious twat. Or French... For all the difference that makes."

"Hi, I'm Yahtzee Croshaw, super-casual game reviewer! What's that, games industry? No new games of interest? That's cool; we're all super-caj here. Have a fun-size Twix. Yeah, so I finally finished Celeste this week. I've been playing it super-caj style for about an hour every three months, and yeah, it certainly is a game. It was okay, I dunno... The way people were banging on about it all year, I was expecting it to fire streamers and ticker tape out of its nipples. It's just like the Senua's Sacrifice thing where the main character has a mental illness and therefore it's a masterpiece, and if you think otherwise, you're Hitler. Oh, you are Hitler! Well, that's cool; I'm super-caj. Have a Twix. Heyyyyyyyy..."

"Katamari Damacys greatness lies in the simplicity of its concept and the unrivalled catharsis in its execution. You start out with pathetic laughable sticky balls that can just about pick up drawing pins and which get gleefully batted about by the cats that patrol the living room. But then a few minutes later, after you're done hoovering up the garden furniture, you come back, and there's something very rewarding about seeing an exclamation mark appear above the head of a cat that once bullied you. "I see you remember me, Mr. Whiskers!" After all, what good are sticky balls if you can't crush pussy."

"I didn't expect to finish Kingdom Hearts III in the time I had, so I had just set out to play until I knew my opinion wasn't going to change, and that moment came at the Winnie the Pooh section. In-between two of the actual levels, it suddenly becomes important that Sora investigate why he's not on the cover of a Winnie the Pooh book; wasn't sure why he felt he should be, except his general sense of being the centre of the fucking universe, but then we go to the Hundred Acre Wood, and it turns out everything's fine and they just wanted to hang out, although they won't let you leave until you've played some insipid colour-matching games. Sorry, why was this important? Is the plot seriously being held hostage by Winnie the Fucking Pooh?!"

"What we have here is a mission-based tactical combat game from the XCOM developers but instead of your squad being five randomly generated Scottish dudes whose names all start with "Mc", they’re officially licensed Marvel superheroes. And when you get back to base, instead of sending them to training or upgrading their equipment, you take them on romantic dinner dates. And on top of that there’s this heavy theming around black magic and the occult, so the end result is a rather awkward The Punisher meets Harry Potter fan fiction mishmash in which we find ourselves thinking "Man, I should've taken Spider-Man mushroom picking in the haunted forest before we came out to neutralize this group of armed terrorists.""