Zero Punctuation

"Whenever a new Tom Clancy game comes out, I always have to double-check his Wikipedia page to make sure he's still dead. He's prolific for a corpse!"

"We are a member of a secret government agency called "The Division", that consists of agents secretly inserted throughout the general population for... no particular reason, now being activated to go into ruined Manhattan and jolly well sort it out! 'Cause it turns out, Wayne LaPierre was right all along: the only thing that can stop a bad roving pack of murderous thugs is a good roving pack of murderous thugs. So let me see if I've got this straight, the corpse of Tom Clancy: We're a member of the secret police under no official scrutiny or accountability, and our job is to go into an area of civil unrest and murder dissenting citizens without trial, and it's not set in Stalinist Russia? "Now we can take these back to the people!" said my earpiece friend after a supply recovering mission. Sorry, which people were those again? Presumably not the people in whose corpses I now stand knee-deep? Oh right, you meant the "real" people; the ones that bowed and scraped when the government assassination squad showed up. See, the premise would have worked perfectly well if we'd just been some random citizen doing our bit to take back the city, Charles Bronson style, baby! The only thing the secret police thing adds is to make us less relatable and give hard-ons to the paranoid authoritarian lot, who want to believe that the government will finally sort out those intimidating young people who stand around outside their house talking loudly."

"Uncharted 4 is very decisively the final game in the series about exploring marvelous lost cities in many exotic international locations, while controlling an insufferable, murdering pillock whose dialogue is ten percent smug quips and ninety percent exertion noises. And Uncharted 4 has concluded that the insufferable pillock is the part we're invested in. I feel this is making the same mistake as the new Tomb Raiders, trying to focus on the protagonist of the adventure story rather than the adventuring part. Claim to be invested in Laura Croft's character all you like, but you know you'd rather watch her outrunning an avalanche than talking earnestly about her commitment issues. I mean, strip the adventure out of Uncharted 4 and it's just "People With No Idea How to Communicate With Each Other: The Game"! I know that's kinda the point when Nathan Drake creates a rift with his wife, by not telling her he is going on an adventure, but towards the end when they are together again and are having a big reconnecting scene, these people who've been married for years still can't fucking communicate! All they do is quip and talk into their shoes; it makes me fucking cringe! I want to step in, shove them aside, and do the dialogue myself with sock puppets. If you dropped a Shakespearian character into the Uncharted universe, they would stand out like a neon-pink Johnny in a cucumber patch: Come join me now/ ye gentles all/ and crouch behind/ yon chest-high wall!"

"You're out of luck if you're not interested in Nathan Drake as a person and would rather get on with the action and adventure part of the action adventure, cause before things kick off you've got two flashback chapters to get through and then a chapter in which Nathan Drake bums around the house being mildly frustrated. You know what though, I talk shit, but I was actually starting to like the bastard during that whole segment. I wanna see more of the boring, suburban life of the ex-douchebag adventurer; it's like Han Solo getting dropped into the middle of an Alan Bennett production."

"...For a moment this week, the spirit of Summer of Arcade returned when the Xbone coughed up a spiritual successor to Limbo, the depressed self-harming beach babe of the 2010 frolics. So let's take a look inside... Er, sorry, I meant to say: Let's take a look at Inside. And that's going straight on to my list of game titles that are needlessly awkward to Google, alongside Fuse and Wet and Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, which is very awkward to Google if your girlfriend ever looks at your search history. Inside opens with a small child lost in a dark forest, and you are given the implied instruction to keep moving right until something tells you to stop. Nothing wrong with having a comfort zone, of course, but one could be forgiven for thinking at first glance that Playdead Studios have merely slapped a sporty red top on to the protagonist of Limbo and left it at that. It's an atmospheric puzzle/platformer of the child-lost-in-scary-world genre that remains even after all these years the fast track to indie acclaim. You have a "jump" button, and a "pull things" button, and you will die like a Game of Thrones supporting actor demanding a salary increase. But while the similarity to Limbo remains stark, things feel a little different when you start getting chased by dogs and scary men with flashlights, and we discover there's slightly more of a plot going on inside... I mean in Ins... Oh, fuck it! I'm just going to call it "Thatcher's Britain" from now on, all right?"

"...So it's a perfectly sound idea to try the recipe again with maybe one less cup of diarrhea and one more cup of God of War. And so, in Shadow of The Beast, we are the titular beast who resembles a purple dude wearing a Pokémon on his head. We were created as a living weapon by an evil sorcerer, we break free of their control, and proceed to murder our way through the sorcerer's minions to take up our list of grievances with the big baddie. So far, so good. Or rather, so far so God. Of War. Where the game tries to evoke the game that inspired it is in the combat, which is very much in the spirit of, "Keep pressing the 'punch' button." Enemies approach in single file from in front and back, and most of them can be instant-killed with one hit. What's the word for this strange feeling inside me, this cozy feeling of warmth and familiarity, that makes me feel like I'm in precisely the place where I'm most comfortable? Oh! I remember: Hatred. I hate this combat system."

"I'd like to take a moment to draw your attention to one of the user-defined tags that was attached to this game on Steam: "Story Rich." I take slight issue with it, because you don't get "Story Rich" just from mugging Final Fantasy X in an alley-way and nicking their wallet; Final Fantasy X itself is only story rich in Zimbabwean Dollars. Thankfully, I Am Setsuna only nicks the pilgrimage plot-device and not the rest of Final Fantasy Xs plot, and the player character, as far as I know, isn't a ghost-footballer from the future."

"Which brings me to the second user tag I want to bring up: "Female Protagonist", an outright stinking lie because the player character is a mercenary who becomes Setsuna's guardian. Setsuna's the important one, yes, and you can rearrange the party to put Setsuna in the vanguard if you feel you need a human shield, but it's still the mercenary whose dialogue we choose, when we make the recurring vital decision between agreeing with Setsuna or slightly sarcastically agreeing with Setsuna. Perhaps there's an argument to be made that the playable character needn't necessarily be the protagonist of the story, but if I'm honest I don't want Setsuna to be the protagonist because she's wetter than a fishing trip to Seattle."

"I have formulated a theory. From the things we hear in the missing briefings about how Samus Aran has been running around offscreen being the best at everything, Federation Force feels like The Darkness II-style co-op campaign running in parallel to the plot of the main single player campaign that isn't actually there. So maybe there was an actual Metroid Prime 3DS game being developed at some point that had the shitty multiplayer mode that must exist as part of the game industry's pact with Satan, but resources ran thin and something had to be cut out, so they cut the single player campaign because the crazy-pills salesman came around that morning giving out free samples. And then someone said, "Wait, people will be annoyed about this decision." And their boss popped another crazy pill and said, "You're right! We'd better put in a soccer mini-game to mollify them. After all, the kind of fanboys who wasted their tender years learning to speedrun Metroid on the slim promise of pixel tittie are also notoriously keen on team sports.""

"[Resident Evil 4] alone may well have saved the GameCube, if it had been an exclusive! But as we all know that turned into a pretty big "if". So, here's a smaller "if": Maybe everything would have still been lovely for Nintendo if Capcom had kept their mouth shut and hadn't announced the PS2 port two months before the GameCube release. Consequently, Resident Evil 4 sold 1.6 million on the GameCube and 2 million on the PS2; what should have been the laying down of a winning hand became the laying of a cruel fist upon the goolies."

"...The game opens with a very Assassin's Creed-esque disclaimer to the effect of: "A lot of people are going to be saying very horrible racist things in this game, but please understand we had to put all that in to accurately bring the era to life. And when you think about it, not putting it in would've been even more racist. Right, now that we've gotten that out of the way: Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, coon, coon, spic!" I get that the 60's Deep South literally was more cartoonishly bigoted than a 2016 presidential candidate, but having granted themselves the all-clear to say the "N-Word", I suspect that the writer started slightly getting off on doing so. I'm not one to judge; I'm going to say the word "retard" right now for literally no reason. But don't get all hand-wringingly sanctimonious about it when your game also contains Italian gangsters with tommy-guns who talk like they're never more than three wise-cracks away from bursting into a song from Bugsy Malone!"

"By the end of the game, I was struggling to remember why we were supposed to hate the main bad guy. He killed about 0.01% of the people we've killed and had been running a bunch of naughty crime rackets (which we've proceeded to take over and not change in any way), but he also had an overarching, sinister, diabolical scheme! ...To set up a legitimate business, leave the criminal life behind, and create a future for his children. Oh, hang on, he does say "nigger" once or twice. Well, okay then, say no more: Let's drive his harmless, old ass to suicide to show how much more enlightened we are these days!"

"Oh man, this is the end of an era. It's only Half-Life 3 left in the Infinitely Prolonged Sense of Vague Disappointment bucket. And after that, the industry's going to have to mishandle a whole batch of new long-term projects to tease us with, and that's just not gonna happen until hype for triple-A games becomes worth giving much of a shit about again. The Last Guardian was announced nine tongue-spunking years ago. An entire tonsil-jizzing generation of consoles has passed between it and its predecessor Shadow of The Colossus."

"[on final end credits card:] Remember to spay and neuter your giant cryptofauna."

""No Man's Sky"? More like "No Game"! "...That wasn't your strongest attempt at wordplay, Yahtz." No worries, I'll just patch something better in later."

"Let It Die kicks off with a skateboarding grim reaper wearing funky sunglasses, which is an image that leaps straight off the front cover of The Complete Dullard's Guide to Creativity. See, it's a traditionally grim thing acting in a lively and light-hearted way. That's almost as clever as putting a hat on a dog. "Shit on a midshipman's biscuit! A dog in a hat?! DOGS DON'T WEAR HATS! I hope the government are keeping a watchful eye on this dangerous subversive.""

"Now, doing nothing but comparing Dead Rising 4 to its predecessors would be a stubborn, churlish, and counterproductive thing to do; so let's keep doing it! Hey, remember how the boss-fights with psychos used to be elaborate and interesting with colourful characters and unique attacks? Well, instead of that, now you fight generic dudes in silly outfits with slightly longer health bars. Another wonderful "innovation" to the format! "Oh, look, the grey goo scenario has eaten my arms now as well! What a perfect opportunity to learn how to balance things on my nose!" Alright, fine! Dead Rising 4 introduces a couple of new mechanics. You can equip powered armour in order to continue doing the same zombie-splattering you've been doing all along, except with slightly more defense. And there are stealth mechanics now, and — holy shit — I just thought of another word that doesn't belong anywhere near Dead Rising! Stealth is for characters who aren't carrying around three dynamite crossbows and a giant, acid-spewing hammer, thank you very much! To me, stealth mode was just a "walk obnoxiously slowly" button that I only ever pressed because I forgot that it wasn't the sprint."

"Our protagonist, Ethan Winters, drives to a scary place in the middle of nowhere because his wife, who's been gone for three years, sends him a message, asking him to— Hey, wait a minute! That's just Silent Hill 2! Fortunately, RE7 swiftly differentiates itself because, while James Sunderland gets drawn into a masterfully crafted atmosphere of dreadful symbolism, Ethan Winters gets a hand chainsawed off. Well, that's much more expedient! He finds himself at the mercy of a family of psychotic, super-powered Republicans who wants to make Ethan's bodily integrity great again, by sawing more bits off of it. Whoops! Bit political, that; better insult the other side to retain balance! In contrast to previous Resident Evil protagonists, Ethan is a normal dude with all the fighting skill of a Democratic Party election campaign. Although, having said that, he bounces back from traumatic injuries remarkably quick. Stuff gets shoved through his hand so often, he should start using the hole to store his biros and business cards."

"And it's the spirit of Deadliest Warrior that brings us Ubisoft's latest multiplayer-focused Skinner box, Foreigner, so called because it's about how people of different races and creeds will never ever get along under any circumstances. Specifically, it concerns a permanent three-way conflict between medieval knights, medieval Vikings, and, uh... Japanese samurai, which, from a geographical perspective, is kind of like King Leonidas and the 300 Spartans showing up to join in the Falklands Conflict; whatever, it's a fantasy. Three communities of knights, Vikings, and samurai all live within five minutes' drive of each other, and they smack the shit out of their neighbours all day because it's easier than learning the Norwegian for "Stop kicking your ball over my fence!""

"Horizy Zozy Dozy is the game you're probably more familiar with as, "That thing with robot dinosaurs and the archer girl from that one Disney film." In a post-post-post-apocalyptic future, really weirdly ethnically diverse tribes of future humanity live a subsistence lifestyle in the overgrown ruins of their forebears, and all knowledge of their history has become shrouded in myth. There are also robot dinosaurs for some reason. Although all of this does get eventually explained by the main plot, including the weirdly ethnically diverse thing. There was definitely a lot of thought put into the story of this one, which is gratifying. I do slightly get the sense that the explanation for robot dinosaurs was rather blatantly working backwards from, "Let's have robot dinosaurs, because they kick arse!" but I'm not complaining!"

"...The main character of this game about existentialism is 2B — 2B as in, "Or not to be," you see; it's not just a kind of pencil. 2B is one of several mostly identical female android warriors (or "gynoid" warriors; thank you, pedantry corner) who fight the machines with katanas and robot suits and dress up in french maid outfits. Thank Christ for that! I might have forgotten this was a Japanese game for two seconds and stopped loading my mouth with Pocky."

"I knew [Ghost Recon Wildlands] was yet another Ubisoft Sandbox Game, and therefore another round of blandly visiting icons on maps like an overworked Uber driver, but I didn't expect it to be the Ubisoft Sandbox Game; the ultimate archetype at long last."

"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."

"I want to emphasize, though, that the core combat is really good. I smash through a window on a skateboard, kick the same skateboard into somebody's eye socket, backflip over his friend shooting two guys at once, kick a frying pan into the air and shoot at it so the bullets ricochet into three other guys who were in cover and apparently left under some mad idea that it was in their power to stop me, and then, for the first time since initially entering the room, I touch the floor."