Zero Punctuation

"Mind you, I said we haven't moved anywhere since Unity, but at least Unity tried to play a bit with the idea of Assassins and Templars not being a totally uncomplicated good-versus-evil situation; whereas in Syndicate, the best and only argument for opposing the main villain is: "Fucking look at the guy! He's like someone drew a Snidely Whiplash moustache onto a picture of Joseph Goebbels!""

"If you ask me, the overt RPG mechanics make the game even more frighteningly tone-deaf. I mean, there are moments when certain characters beam down from Planet Sensible and call out the whole "unaccountable secret police" thing, and the game does present it like he's making a valid point. But then the cutscene ends and we go straight back to "Oh boy, time to fight some Level 20 disenfranchised citizens! Watch out for the elite enemies, they get more health from being extra disenfranchised!" The tone's all over the place. One moment you find an audio log of someone using the mummified corpses of their children to get the campfire started, the next you're talking to one of those wacky section commanders who all have a single hilarious personality quirk, like they keep talking about their TV career or how they used to work at the zoo jerking off polar bears. It's a big fat indicator that the game had nine different writers who spent the whole dev cycle locked in different toilet cubicles."

"Meanwhile, the game watched uncomfortably from the sidelines occasionally shouting, "Hey, there's all these fancy oils you could be using to get this done about point-four percent more efficiently. Maybe you could craft some from the entire Hanging Gardens of Babylon's worth of random herbs and flowers you've got stuffed down your trousers?" "Got any upgrades for the basic healing potion?" I shout back. "Not presently, no," replies the game. "Then I'll stick with mashing quick-attack if it's all the same to you." "Well, if that's your attitude, your sword just broke again, haa-haa-haa." Oh, bloody hell. Rivery Gerald's oaths of fidelity last longer than his fuckin' swords. I think they just stuck a hilt on an unusually long Pringle."

"Remember how Leonardo was a major character in Screedo 2, and the friendship between him and Ezio was actually firmly established? Well, the sideburns muscled that out, too, 'cause every meeting with a historical figure in Syndicate plays like something from a fucking kids' TV series: "Hello, I'm the famous Charles Dickens." "Hello, the famous Charles Dickens; we're stand-ins for the audience." "Hello, stand-ins. I guess that means I can inexplicably enlist you to solve my problems." "What problems, the famous Charles Dickens?" "It's all these random thugs stopping me from finishing the famous books I write. If only there was someone around here who could brutally stab them all to death for me.""

"I did hear the game was alright, but I wasn't gonna buy a fuckin' PS Vita to play it. That'd be like adopting an incontinent chimpanzee 'cause you fancy the lady who comes 'round to change his nappies. Thankfully, a remastered version of Gravity Rush came out last week for the PS 4, which I very much appreciate, because I'm sick of all this "mad people" privilege in modern society; they get all these exclusive games, they hog all the fun medications, and there seems to be a whole bunch of them running for president at the moment."

"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."

"There are also a few obscure object mechanics that the game doesn't explain properly, but bases puzzles around regardless. It's possible, for example, to put the boxes on top of the roving proximity mines. It's not fair if you don't make all the rules clear. If I'm stuck in a puzzle game, I prefer it to be because I'm a big thicky-bobo who can't figure out where all the pieces go, not because one of the pieces was still in the box. Forgive me if it didn't occur to me to go near the bleeping explode-y death-ball and repurpose it as a dessert trolley."

"And now your regularly scheduled reminder that the new consoles are shit: The new consoles are shit. Thank you."

"I suppose my first major problem with the story is that I assumed I was crawling through the village on my overloaded mobility scooter to discover the nature of the mysterious event that happened to it. It's rather swiftly established that everyone got disappeared by space magic; but after completing the game, I still didn't have any explanation better than, "Everyone got disappeared by space magic." Which raised the obvious question of what the hell we have been learning for the last three hours! Well, we know that scientist-guy is a complete douche-balloon because his mom is the Lord High Empress of The Busybody Cattlecunts, and we witnessed a bunch of other interpersonal conflicts that all ended rather anti-climatically when — you guessed it — everyone got disappeared by space magic. But you know what? Everybody Wants to Rule the World was never intended to be traditional story-telling: What with events playing out for us in essentially random order. So now — as well as being glued to the side of a gazelle — the book's being chewed up by the honey badger riding on the gazelle's back."

"I once described the Assassin's Creed series as a line graph and here's how it continues: From the point that Unity was at, draw a perfectly horizontal line. We've jumped 60 years and about 250 miles, but we haven't budged a fucking inch. I wouldn't say Syndicate is the worst Sassy Credo, but it might well be the laziest. Lazily written, certainly. We play as twins, Jacob and Evie Frye, one of them is brash and reckless and direct-combat-oriented, the other is smart and measured and more suited to stealth. I'll leave you to guess which one's the boy and which one's the girl, but here's a hint: Try to think like the laziest writer in the fucking universe."

"Anyway. I should probably tell you what genre of game Devil's Third is. Well, you can't pin it down as simply as that, as it drunkenly meanders between several different rooms of the Gameplay House like it just got in from a bender and can't remember where it left its kebab. It's a hack-n-slash, shooter, military, horror, character drama, bad fashion-sense simulator making the classic mistake that a bit of everything creates some kind of sumptuous buffet, when here in the real world one does not put cola cubes, live bait, and Mini Babybels in the same pick 'n' mix bag. Clearly, not enough of us gave our lives in the trenches of Ride to Hell: Retribution for everyone to learn that a brawler and a shooter don't get along in the same space."

"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?"

"You're in the wrong place if you're looking for an engaging plot, or indeed any plot. You might think the shit I described so far constitutes a plot, but you’d be wrong. The killer sabertooth tiger that sparks off the adventure we kill later on as one of the big hunt missions without even much prominence. I ousted both the rival tribes, who, I'll just reiterate, we aren't given much reason to oppose except that they'd also quite like to survive the winter. But the game still didn't end! This is the game that Ubisoft's sandboxes have been tacitly threatening to turn into for quite some time now: One where all sense of structural progress is kept as vague as possible for want of turning the game into a platform for a series of disconnected events and repetitive challenges, I suspect because it's easier for the inevitable fucking DLC to slot into like a bloodstained erection. But you know what, I'm with you, Ubisoft. Who needs some uppity creative trying to dictate to me how to experience their creation? I mean, where did the creators of Breaking Bad get off telling me I should watch season one before season two?! Oh, because I quote "won't understand what's going on?" You don't know me! And who does this Shakespeare motherfucker think he is, putting the pages in numbered order?! I am the master of my domain, I choose to shuffle them all up and read the text from right to left!"

"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!"

"No, I know what it is. It's an endurance test. You see how much of the dialogue you can listen to before you slice you own ears off with a paper guillotine. Or perhaps just turn the volume down, you spaz. "Getting sniffy about random quips not meeting your comedy standards again, are we Yahtzee?" (Referring to Sunset Overdrive) I would be if they were quips. They seem more like matter-of-fact running commentary. "Bounce pad!" announces Sonic as he touches a bounce pad. "It's bounce pad time!" he adds. "I'm bouncing off something with pad-like characteristics!" he clarifies. And when it's not that, it's the game weakly attempting to praise itself. "This is amsoewe[sic]!" cries a sprinting character as they face-plant into another rock. "This place looks amazing!" they say, taking in the boxy buildings worthy of a pre-analogue sticks PS1 game. But saying something isn't enough to make it true, unless you say something like, "Sega are attracting derision, the massive wankers!" And when the dialoge isn't awful quips or self-aggrandizement, it's just treating the player like an absolute cretin. (As Sonic Boom) "That wall looks breakable. I noticed you haven't broken it in the 2.7 seconds since I last mentioned that. That's cool. I'll check again in 2.8 seconds." What makes you think I'm this stupid, Sonic Boom? "You bought me." Touché."

"You are an unknown consciousness that wakes up in an unknown garden where an unknown intelligence forces you to complete puzzles for an unknown reason. It's like when your parents used to make you sit in the garden and untangle the Christmas lights and whenever you finished one you were allowed to come in and watch one episode of The Prisoner."

"In fact, The Order seems to be making eye-contact with Ryse: Son of Rome, as they both stare forlornly out through the fences of their respective death-camps. They are the stuff of the "spunkgargleweewee"-modern-shooter behind the thin disguise of an alternative setting; a "funkmarbleteehee" if you will. In fact, the moment that crossed my mind, I realized that the plot of The Order is point-for-point identical to the plot of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare: We are "Sir Galahad"; a veteran, loyal member of the Order with the face of Al Swearengen from Deadwood and the vocabulary of a shaved bear, pledged to defend the land from evil terrorists -- I mean, werewolves -- but then finds himself having to fight off a civilian resistance, and in situations like this, you can put money down right fucking now on his high-tech, authoritarian big-boys club proving corrupt and him switching sides to a resistance movement surprisingly accepting of a dude who murdered two-hundred of their mates that morning."

"I'm surprised by how many original characters are introduced in MKX. There's even a gay one, apparently, and it's not the one dressed as a cowboy (which I call a fucking missed opportunity). "Original" might be a poor choice of words, actually; one of the new characters is blatantly Master Blaster from Mad Max 3, and most of the rest are the younger offspring, cousins, and catamite love slaves of the returning old farts. I remember saying about MK9 that it was written like a subpar superhero comic trying to earn a tax rebate on red ink, and that comparison's only getting stronger now that everyone's got a fucking teenage sidekick! The trademark extreme violence feels rather incongruous combined with this whole Muppet Babies concept: You can play the story campaign and watch Johnny Cage complain to his ex-wife, Sonya Blade, that she never makes time for their daughter any more, and then you can go into one of the non-story modes and watch Johnny Cage snap his daughter in half lengthways like a giant Kit Kat."

"We live in an age where mass communication has counterintuitively turned all attempts at verbal debate into a basketball game where the teams are on different courts, and stand around a basket racking up meaningless points and throwing shit over the dividing wall. The only way an individual can safely express their politics these days is to anonymously spend money. Hence why homophobic pizza joints can mysteriously accrue a million dollars in donations. Hatred exists merely as a maypole for those wishing to defy the cultural nannies who want to tell them they can't have it until they learn to wipe their bottoms properly."

"This game's shit! Oh, sorry, I usually do more of a setup than that, don't I? I'll start again: "Goodness, me, this game's shit!""

"...Konami recently decided they're going to take everything they've built over the years as a game developer, arrange it nicely in front of them, and then pick up a big hammer and smash and smash and smash and smash and smash. "Sorry we had to cancel Silent Hills, but we kind of lost our interest in it around the same time we lost our fucking miiiiiinds! Here, have a pachinko machine instead. We like pachinko machines, 'cause it's nice to have something around that has some fucking balls. Also, fuck off, Hideo Kojima; you're too reliably bankable for our liking. We'd much rather stick our feet up our arse and bounce down the stairs making burbling noises with our lips! Brblbblbblbb!" Although Phantom Pain doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, 'cause Hideo Kojima's name is all over it, to a frankly quite psychotic degree. Christ knows why every individual mission has to have its own credit sequence unless Hideo's worried we've all got short-term memory loss. I know you're the director, Hideo; there's a mentally damaged woman over there with her tits hanging out, of course it's by you!"

"SOMA feels like a decent, melancholy sci-fi mystery story living next door to a sci-fi horror B movie whose dog keeps escaping and jumping in our swimming pool (what a little bastard), and you can really feel the game struggling to mesh the two, right up until the end when it blows a little raspberry and gives up trying. On the way to the final area, to conclude the Simon story, a new character literally appears from nowhere, pops his head around the door, and says: "Sorry to interrupt, player, but before you tie up the main plot, could we borrow you for five minutes to tie up the shitty monster plot as well?" So you follow him into a little room, press one button labeled, "Resolve Shitty Monster Plot," and then get on with what you were doing. I'm only slightly exaggerating! So I suppose if Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were here, he'd ask, "Would SOMA be improved if they took out the monster stealthing altogether and got by with exploration, puzzles, and environmental hazards? Also, didn't I die in 1944?" Well, I'd say so, Antoine, but if they took out the scary monsters, what else are the streamers and Let's Players supposed to obnoxiously overreact to? "AAAHHH! IT'S SO EXISTENTIAL!""

"The game opens with the four members of the B-Team having a huge spectacular punch-up in a war zone, at which point I went, "HOLY, WOW! Look at that! The stain on the wall behind my TV is exactly the same shape as New Caladonia! If only this overblown footage of people I don't know fighting other people I don't know for reasons unexplained could be as interesting." After all, I know the backstory for that stain. It was left by an errant jet of spunk after I watched Free Willy for the first time."

"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."

"The Witness is a new game by Jonathan Blow. Ironically, it sucks! Mneh-eh-eh-eh-obnoxious-laugh!"

"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."

"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."

"As for Layers of Fear, like P.T., it's not much more than a showcase of spooky set pieces. But P.T. never claimed to be a complete game! Makes me think of Evil Within: you try to make an entire game out of a delusional nightmare sequence, and it gets boring 'cause it never lets up, and the nightmare becomes the norm. Bid us to sit down and pull the chair away as we do so, but don't keep doing it; do it once, then apologize, let us sit for a while, wait 'til we're calm, then throw spiders at our face and burn the house down!"

"Stardew Valley is a retro-style farming simulator recently released on Steam that's somewhat reminiscent of Harvest Moon. Oh, sorry, I read that wrong. Stardew Valley is Harvest Moon. It murdered Harvest Moon, stole Harvest Moon's skin, and befriended Harvest Moon's parents under the guise of consoling them in their hour of grief."

"The plot is, we play a big nerd sitting in front of a computer playing games (Whoa, slow down, Superhot! Give me a chance to get into character!), who gets sent the hot new game by their online friend, and the barriers between game and reality start to break down as a mysterious force within the game begins to mess with you, in a rather weak-sauce and desperate manner. "Ha-ha-ha! We're in control now! You cannot escape! Press ESCape and see what happens!" Could I just play the next combat mission, please? "Hit escape, you prick!" All right, fine. "Ha-ha-ha! It didn't work! As cat with mouse, I toy with thee! Now I'm going to make you quit the game and restart it again! What now, bitch!?" I dunno; maybe I'll get some work done. "Wait! Come back!!""

"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."

"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!"