Zero Punctuation

"Just for fun, let's examine the premise as if we don't know who any of these characters are. A bunch of poorly dressed motherfuckers have a great big apocalyptic punch-up until only one survives, whereupon aliens invade, so said survivor travels back in time (no they don't say how, put your arm down!) and brings a warning to two rodeo clowns and a prostitute. Then he does a weird thing that bestows superpowers upon a whole bunch of random civies, his assumption perhaps being that if the entire world consists of poorly dressed motherfuckers having a punch-up then perhaps the aliens will just get freaked out and quietly leave."

"Do you want to hear something totally unbelievable? Some people say they have difficulty telling whether I recommend a game or not. I know, what morons! Yes, I exaggerate every slightest negative feature regardless of overall quality but how else would developers learn? It's like Chinese parenting but less nightmarish. I'll usually give a bit of a general summary towards the end but I guess people might have trouble concentrating that long when they're mesmerized by the sexy jiggle of the fat rolls on a passing close relative. So, in the name of keeping things nice and clear for you touchy sods, let me be as unambiguous as possible in this critique; Mindjack is fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, bad, bad, bad, bad! Don't, don't, don't, don't, play it! And, if you kindly tell your cousin to go throw on a fucking bathrobe, I will tell you why."

"Cover-based shooting is a little dry and overdone, even if it's perfectly executed, and the only way to perfectly execute Mindjack would be with a lethal injection. Once you've persuaded little Jimmy Meathead to take cover rather than perform roly-polys in front of the chosen wall, he has a terrible habit of firing into it, and at one point I couldn't see where I was shooting because the ammo counter on the side of the gun was in the way. Can't see the killing for my gun; how philosophical."

"As is fairly typical of western RPGs, once you actually start playing, the establishing plot gets swiftly dog-piled under a labyrinth of side quests and intermediary objectives. And within a matter of hours I paused to reflect while escorting an old man into the sewer to make a trade with some underground organization on behalf of a crime lord so he'll eventually tell me about some tower that the orcs seemed really keen for me to visit, and realized that I'd completely forgotten how any of it related to the overarching possessed-princess/dark-lord motivation that I still don't get what was going on there! This is always the part of western RPGs I have difficulty with because I always lose the sense of flow. After a few quests and a particularly financially ruinous trip to the armor shop, I find myself floating around a peasant village dressed like a dandy cutlery drawer with no smegma-chugging idea of what to do next!"

"Thank Christ for companies like Epic, for games like Gears of War, that popularized fat space marines trundling between chest-high walls like they're in wheelchairs. But in 2004, a company called People Can Fly shirked modern trends to create Painkiller, a fast, frantic and shamingly fun evocation of the bygone age and one of my favorite shooters of all time. "Wow!" said Epic. "You really showed us how it's done, People Can Fly. Why don't you step over here for a second? Come on, don't be shy, we're not going to hurt you... NOW! DROP THE NET! HIT THEM WITH STICKS! Phew, nipped that one in the bud!" So now that People Can Fly have been roundly whipped into line, they and Epic Games can bring you Bulletstorm, a game about fat space marines."

"Pardon me for being detestably predicable, but I'm now going to complain about how all the bad guys in Killzone are British. Because someone should get pissed off about this, and it might as well be me. I stood up for the Russians when I reviewed all those cold war fantasist wank games, and I don't even know any Russians! I'm fine with that thing where the big villain is a posh British guy, because let's face it, cooing at rainbows sounds evil when you do it in a posh British accent. It's only when you make all the evil soldiers cockneys that you enter the prejudice parade. Cockney doesn't sound evil! It sounds honest and cheeky-chips loveable! You couldn't picture Dick Van Dyke hiding in the bushes in a park, popping children's balloons with a blowpipe! You might say I'm making too much of a fuss, but someone on the dev team at some point said to themselves, "We have a race whose every individual member is so morally bankrupt that players will feel perfectly justified in splattering them painfully against the scenery. Now how do we bring that across in a sort of vocal short hand"? And the most bitter pill to swallow is that they look like Nazis. We helped defeat the Nazis! Maybe we won't next time, America. Maybe after China buys you and puts you all to work in the sweat shops and you crawl to Europe for help, we'll go; "Hmm, well, we would but apparently we're evil, so, hands tied.""

"Anyway, let it never be said that I'm some ignorant Loom-smashing Luddite, because I started playing Killzone 3 not only with the PlayStation Move controls but also with the 3D option on my new massive 3D TV that I bought with all my ad revenue money (much obliged, Internet!) The motion controls didn't last ten minutes. After calibrating (Calibrating, fuck! Starting a game these days is like starting up a fucking cruise liner), the aim was wavery and difficult, I didn't know where they'd moved all the buttons to, and my big red glowing controller was reflecting in the screen and giving people hilarious clown noses! So, after getting sniped silly for a while, that went out the window and I took up a nice sensible SIXAXIS which didn't stop the game from throwing in motion-controlled turny switches whenever it could get away with it. The 3D held out a bit longer - yeah, things in the foreground were getting all prominent and shit but everything from the middle distance on looked like a big flat matte backdrop like the game was taking place in a puppet theater. After a while I turned it off and suddenly I was astounded by the detail in a nearby wood texture now that I wasn't wearing those stupid glasses. Things ten feet away stopped popping in all the time and my dog came back to life! So fuck modern technology right in its cutting edge! Ow!"

"Obviously the game starts about as challenging as a polystyrene prison, but over time it remembers its heritage and gains a few teeth. A Meta Knight boss fight in particular - and I haven't played a lot of Kirby games, but the whole Meta Knight thing seems rather glaringly out of place, in a game where the principal antagonists are a fat penguin in some knitwear. It's like an episode of the Care Bears where they all climb into giant mecha suits and sword fight over the last Jelly Baby."

"Before a subtitle can be thought up we need to determine exactly what Dragon Age II is about. Much like the first one, it's all about the representative messages, and can't go five minutes without someone being really heavy-handedly racist against mages, elves, dwarves, goldfish et cetera, which is why I find it somewhat ironic that you're only allowed to play as a human this time around. When the first game let you pick from an entire Burger King Kids' Club of races and backstories, here you're always a human with the surname "Hawke," so to compensate for the lack of choice other characters can actually address you by name. Whoop di fuckin' do. And I'd just like to point out that this is quite a long game, so being a male character with the first name Ethan is going to stop being funny very fast."

"In an alternative world in which the school system is regarded with universal contempt, children are encouraged to roam the wildnerness siccing wild animals on every motherfucker who crosses their field of vision. You know in the intro to Syndicate Wars where the lad who lives in the dystopian nightmare city has this chip in his head that makes him think he's living in picturesque small town America? I like to think the protagonists of Pokemon all have the same chips and in reality are exploring various murky basements with a sack full of rats and mangy attack dogs."

"The amount of modern Japanese culture that gets worked in makes me wonder if it's not actually aimed at foreign tourists. The equivalent would be a British game in which you play a Bobby in ol' London town, healing up by eating fish 'n' chips and using a fighting style that mainly employs rugby tackles."

"An aspect of the plot I actually liked is that Alcatraz is basically a collection of broken bones and ruptured organs held together with spit, and the suit is acting as some combination iron lung and wheelchair and is the only reason he's still upright, and nowhere is this more apparent than when you've run out of suit power in the middle of a pitched battle, and are trying to waddle behind a bit of wall like you've just caced your pants. It's refreshing to see an unstoppable action protagonist who also comes across as vulnerable and tragic. Nathan Drake could perch his rectum on the top of a flagpole and wisecrack all the way down to the floor, and he still wouldn't be an ounce as sympathetic as a silent protagonist who has essentially been reduced to a load of beef stew in an thermos flask."

"So with motion controls on the way out - my theory is that if I keep saying that it will become more and more true - Nintendo needed to get started on next week's wage packet. The interesting thing about Nintendo is that they're kind of like Nicolas Cage in that they don't do middle ground, they're either doing really well or shitting a hole straight through the bed. When they get bored of making solid Mario platformers and attracting a strong user base, they create consoles that make your eyes explode and license Team Ninja to make Metroid games. 3D may be an utterly pointless gimmick that adds about as much to games as putting glittery rainbow stickers on the cover, but will the 3DS be what changes all that? Well, sort of, in that now the glittery rainbow sticker is in a small wooden box and you have to look at it through a hole."

"Portal is the only game I've been unable to find a fault in. It's like Ahab and Moby Dick, if Ahab regarded Moby Dick with asexual lust and Moby Dick's owners once invited Ahab to come visit their ivory tower and flick cashew nuts at poor people. In the time since then and the release of Portal 2, you'll be pleased to hear that I eventually did come up with a criticism for Portal 1: it's got the worst fucking fans in the world. Nothing ruins a good thing quite like knowing you share your opinion with mindless little tits who bray like mules if you so much as mention the word "cake," and the good thing in question can never be the same again. This is technically known as the "Knights Who Say Ni" Effect."

"Fortunately, I eventually found where all the actual puzzles were hiding; they're in the co-op campaign which I played through with one of my fat friends. With the addition of two extra portals to play around with, the puzzles are bigger and better and satisfying to solve through teamwork. If you need to swiftly make friends with someone, like a future father-in law or armed burglar, then you couldn't find a better ice breaker. I just don't think it has any replay value whatsoever. If you played it again with another fat friend, you'd just get sick of lugging the ball and chain around and they'd resent you for not letting them figure shit out on their own. So, make doubly sure that your armed burglar isn't an avid PC gamer."

"Visually, Symphony of the Night is dense as all shit, but then it was on the PS1. With the advent of CDs for console gaming, games suddenly had lots of disc space to spread their elbows out, and a lot of developers used that to have FMVs up the butt or make games in that hideous first-generation 3D that looked like origami modeling with used toilet paper. But Symphony of the Night stuck to 2D and completely tarted itself up, and it's still niceer to look at than the many incarnations of Captain Greybrown Loadsofbloom."

"I am frankly flabbergasted that a game like Mortal Kombat can seriously be considered relevant in this day and age, at a time when fighting games are thought to have humiliated themselves if they don't show up with their roster filling at least two school buses, Mortal Kombat should by rights have been kneecapped for showing up with only seven playable fighters, two of which being the same guy wearing different coloured jumpers. And while fully-rendered graphics might be a little overkill for a 2D fighter, using photo cutouts of people in costumes has got to be the most ghetto-fucking solution short of cutting out pencil doodles on the sides of milk cartons. And what I understand least of all is why everyone is saying this game is a new release when Wikipedia quite clearly states that it came out in August 1992...oh, do you know what I've done? I've got Mortal Kombat, the 2011 release, confused with Mortal Kombat, the game from 20 years ago with the same exact name! Do you see how confusing this gets?!"

"Incidentally I'd like to invite fans of Brink to take a shot every time I mention Team Fortress 2 - hopefully by the end of this video you won't feel so poorly disposed towards me. You know how Team Fortress 2 (take a shot) introduced optional hats and unlockables that did nothing but mess with perfectly good visual design like a bunch of jelly beans sprinkled on a wedding cake? Well, Bethesda saw this and cried, "Valve will never outdo us when it comes to making bad decisions! Fully customizable outfits for everyone! You won't even be able to fucking see the wedding cake behind the jelly beans!" You want to know the ironic thing, though? Even with this feature, every character looks exactly the bloody same. That's failing to a new level. That's like standing on a rake and the end of the rake has a grenade taped to it."

"Mind you, it's not exactly a brain-melter to deduce whether someone's lying or not. This is the inherent problem when you tell your mo-cap actor, "Look like you're lying, and I know you're acting and therefore lying all the time, so this time exaggerate it," so of course they're going to spin their eyes like fruit machines and shift around like someone's trying to work an ant farm up their bum. The much-touted realistic facial animation is indeed very impressive and you can often clearly recognize the real-world actor who did the mo-cap, such as TV's Greg Grunberg! But while the faces are very realistic and well-animated, somewhat less attention has been afforded to the bodies, with the usual game problem of weird-looking joints and cardboard clothes. So a rather eerie effect is created, and some characters look like Gerry Anderson finally snapped and started taping the decapitated heads of jobbing TV actors to his Captain Scarlet puppets."

"Amongst the 700 subcategories of inventory items you can gather like a bum with a shopping trolley are mutagens and weapon upgrades. But if you ask how you're supposed to equip them then you're committing a social faux pas again. Why do I even have an inventory screen if double-clicking on every single item makes the game slap you across the wrist and say "No, we do that from a different screen! No we won't tell you which one! And put on a fucking tie! Where were you raised, Azeroth?!""

"The first boss fight is the most disheartening moment. Through a lengthy network of caves and dungeons (some sections of which were so fucking murky I literally ended up resorting to casting fireball everywhere just so I could see where the fuck I was going), I was buoyed by the ongoing promise of a boss fight with a giant spider that kept appearing over the horizon like the bedroom eyes of a courtesan peering coquettishly over her fan. Although it very clearly only had four legs, so I don't know why everyone kept calling it a spider. For tedious multitudes of chambers the game went "Ooh, it could be in the very next room! I guess you'll only find out if you keep going, won't you?" And then finally the giant spider found a window in its meeting schedule and chased me through a big cave for a bit before I lobbed two bombs at it and dropped a rock on its head. "Exciting!" said I, "Can I fight it now? What do you mean it's dead? What, we're just gonna move on?" I felt like I'd queued for hours to get on a roller coaster that went down one dip and then dropped you off at the gift shop."

"The interesting thing about Forever is that you can practically cut it in half and see the entire fourteen years of shooter evolution it's tried to keep up with, like the rings in a tree stump. It starts off campy and colorful in a SiN/Blood II: The Chosen kind of way, then it moves into the dark, sweaty unpleasant Doom 3/Prey/Quake IV period when you go into the alien hive (and incidentally, this section contains about as jarring a shift of tone as you can get without splicing five minutes of The Human Centipede into the middle of Mallrats). And by the last mission Duke has finally embraced the FPSs of today, meaning you run around a grey/brown industrial area for a while and then get a shit ending."

"I guess I want it to be good because that's how the story's supposed to end. After fourteen years of sneering bullies making the Did Not Finish joke, the plucky, never-say-die Duke Nukem should finally turn around and silence those guffawing shits. Well, Duke Nukem has certainly put and end to all those jokes, if only because they're now more tragic than funny. Even as I played, that part of me that takes an almost sexual joy in ruining other people's fun turned upon myself and said, "Yahtzee, you and I both know that you have pushed games off subway train platforms where they had less problems than this." Oh, God, you're right! There's just no excuse for loading times this long unless you're a fucking removals van!"

"Ya' know, it's easy to let obnoxious socialites like Duke Nukem: Forever prance about grabbing headlines, but do we stop to appreciate all the non-squeaky wheels who just work efficiently, without needing development cycles longer than the average natural lifespan of a Saint Bernard? Everyone longs to catch the eye of that ditzy straight line block in Tetris, but no one stops to thank the workaday T-shaped block for it's diligent and efficient service."

"I know inFAMOUS is kind of stuck with the whole moral choice thing since the game's pretty much named after it, but no fairy godmothers have showed up since the first game to wave her wand and have it start making sense. Look, if you have two equally viable, equally difficult solutions to a problem - say, humanely suffocating your costly vegetative wife with a pillow or digging through to her femoral arteries with a cheese grater - than the evil option (which if you're having trouble keeping up is the second one) is just irrational! And you can't relate to a character whose actions don't make any fucking sense! Surely the evil option is supposed to be the more convenient but riskier one that would appeal to someone weak-willed. You could spend a lot of time and effort sprucing yourself up and trolling the bars to find someone to romance and settle down with, or you can just fuck a cow and risk angry farmers with paparazzi connections. That's a moral choice."

"When video games have forged the new utopian society Bill and Ted-style, eventually there's going to be a war over whether to sanctify or demonize the bloke who figured out you could make cinematics by zooming in really close on the concept art... Oh! Hello! Didn't see you there! Who remembers American McGee? He was a bloke who worked on Doom and got a free ride, just like everyone else who worked on Doom. I think the bloke who made the tea for the Doom team got to make his own game. His name was John Romero-- No!"

"Even the trademark creepy imagery seems a bit phoned in and a bit over-reliant on creepy dolls. Yes, a porcelain doll's head with no hair or eyeballs is a creepy thing, but after the five hundred millionth one they kind of get devalued in the global creep economy, falling below sweaty Uncle Dan and the feeling of another person's bum warmth on your toilet seat."

"...For a game that seems to have set out with the plan to bring three big names together and wait for the explosion, none of the three amigos brought their A-game. Akira Yamaoka randomly smashing at his banjo strings suited the disquieting surreality of Silent Hill, but not so much a quirky action/horror game that seems to be mouthing along to a squealing heavy metal soundtrack that it doesn't have. On the gameplay side, where was the Shinji Mikami who once made a game where dozing off for one second led to you getting your head chainsawed off by a mad Spaniard? And while enough of the disposable income of the alternative crowd glimmered invitingly in the eyes of publishers for the game to be marketed with the tagline, "A Suda51 Trip," for all Shadows of the Damned's demon skull nobstitutions, this is probably the most grounded Suda51's ever been. Killer7 was a trip; this is more like a bank holiday day out to go watch someone throw horse giblets at a lingerie shop."

"You know, publishers, when you replace a letter with a number for your clever douchebag sequel name, it only means that other douchebags like me will just insist on pronouncing it that way when they read it out loud, as in Sesevenen and indeed Fthreear. Still, I prefer both of those to whatever the hell Thief 4s logo is playing at. When the fuck has it ever been acceptable to replace an "E" with a "4?" If you let that kind of bullshit scoot by too many times then our daughters will all be shagging Communists by this time next year."

"I remember Twilight Princess being too easy because it was compensating for the Wiimote being as friendly as an attack dog that's been trained to administer Chinese burns. Then again, I've been trained by all the more recent Zelda games that have really just been building on Ocarina of Time, so playing Ocarina of Time now is like a surgeon re-training as a fishmonger. I know that you should look to the side missions to replace that rat scrotum you call a coin purse, but 1998 audiences didn't. Is it fair to say that later Zelda games had better gameplay and characters with actual arcs and more personality than a lungfish in a moist bath towel, when Ocarina of Time was the template from which all those games arose? Probably not. But if you ask me, Nintendo has shot themselves in the foot. What with N64 technology being emulatable only on dried leaves and bits of old twig, Nintendo were this close to having an entire generation who might never even have known Ocarina of Time existed, and Skyward Sword might have blown their minds."

"But the AI don't go after collectibles; they usually just stand there staring at you with gormless uncomprehending eyes. They were also never programmed to drive, so in the occasional vehicle section, if you perhaps would rather take riding shotgun to its literal heart, then fuck you and your haughty airs. The AI will pile into the back seat without a word and just look at you like a dog with its leash in its mouth. And as I said, they can't aim for shit. But after you've single-handedly cleared out an entire room, they'll unfailingly say the one of their four or five endlessly repeated lines that goes, "You don't have to do this all by yourself, you know." THERE IS NO MIDDLE FINGER BIG ENOUGH!"

"So enough with these iron-sight examination simulators, I'm going where the worlds are bleak and the heads are large for my third XBLA double bill! And with characteristic convenience, the XBLA has recently chundered up two games that both approach the theme of world-building from vastly different directions. Perhaps this speaks to some larger trend within society today, or a prevailing desire on the part of indie designers to recreate the entire world into one where you can charge more than fifteen bucks for your game design degree course work."

"Video games seem to be a little bit frightened of relationships, in a curious reflection of their predominantly male and sweaty customer base. Oh, there are plenty of games that depict the commencement of a relationship, generally as a consequence of Party A rescuing Party B from a giant fire-breathing lizard thing or an evil general or their own virginity depending on the genre. Very few games are about a relationship that's already going on except when one half of it exists solely to get murdered at one point so that the other half can seek revenge without someone constantly asking them how they think jumping over turtles, shooting mercenaries, or fucking each other all day in the butt is going to bring in enough money to raise a family. Well, now the balance is being restored by Catherine, a Japanese game centrally about the difficulties of relationships such as unexpected pregnancy, the impetus of commitment, and being chased up an infinite staircase by a giant monstrous girlfriend trying to eat you with her butt. Did I mention it's Japanese?"

"...It'd be fair to call Catherine a story-driven game. And I guess the biggest problem I have with the story is that Vincent is such a fucking tool! Catherine (that's psycho Catherine, not frumpy Katherine) basically bullies him into getting seduced by her; yeah, maybe her running around in a net curtain might have helped, but still. And if the dude could take five seconds to just explain things rather than stammer out more lies while sweating like James Murdoch at a government hearing, then he could probably sort everything out! But no, he just accepts guilt and whines about it incessantly to his mates, every single one of whom would be well within their rights to powerbomb his face into the nearest bollard. I think this is an anime thing, where they like their protagonists angsty and ineffectual and given to wanking off over unconscious women. I watched an anime once; dude pulled a gun at the start of the episode, fired it at the end, and everything in between was angst! I wouldn't mind, but he missed!"

"The title was the first telltale heart murmur. "Armageddon" is one of those words from the subtitle bucket, like "Chronicles" or "Resurrection," a word you stick on the end of your sequel name to communicate the fact that you have less creativity than a pencil sharpener. Red Faction Armageddon is the final game of a trilogy that started with Red Faction Guerrilla (don't worry, you didn't just turn over two pages at once). You play Darius Mason, the grandson of Alec Mason from Guerrilla, who is engaged in conflict with an evil cult leader who was apparently defeated once before by Darius' dad. And everything indicates to me that Darius' dad's actions were the events of a second intervening game that wasn't actually made. In which case, what frightens me is that someone at THQ looked at Darius and Darius' dad and decided that Darius was the more interesting one! Mason Sr. must have been a geography teacher who defeated the cultists by diligently doing his taxes at them!"

"The year is 2000 the shooter was riding PC gaming like a trusted pony (a pony that you occasionally had to slap or replace with a completely different better pony, but trusted nonetheless). With Half Life ,Thief and System Shock 2 first person games have been steadily raising the bar, then a company called Ion Storm made Daikatana and made the bar tunnel right into the ground beyond the wit of spelunker. But then at the same time Ion Storm brought out Deus Ex which is widely considered the greatest PC game of all time. That may sound like incongruous behavior for a developer but the thing is, during Ion Storm's creation myth a bolt of magical lightning struck John Romero's hair and the fledging Ion Storm was split into it's good half and it's evil half. The evil half was Ion Storm Dallas that made Daikatana and devoured children who refused to eat their vegetables. And the good half was Ion Storm Austin which made Deus Ex and leaves chocolate buttons in the shoes of all the good little boys and girls."

"Having deliberately avoided any exposure to Human Revolution up to the time of writing, I sincerely hope to be dining on these words with tartar sauce by the time this video goes out, but I don't see how these days you can have a game with anything near as much depth and complexity as Deus Ex 1! And before all you people who liked The Witcher 2 start pounding your keyboards so hard that it starts snowing Cheeto dust, I meant the kind of complexity that I like! A plot where people can reference philosophy and G.K. Chesterton in really, really bad accents! And that has intuitive inventory sorting, and a health system where you can get all your arms and legs blown off and have to slither over to a health station using only your lips!"

"Deus Ex: Human Revolution centralizes the debate surrounding transhuman augmentation. "Would you," it asks, "supplement your body with machinery?" What do you mean, would I? I already wear spectacles and a wristwatch, and I always carry a phone, which I'm currently in the process of duct-taping to the side of my head. Anyone who talks about technological development being "unnatural" deserves to be abandoned in the wilderness wearing nothing but a fig leaf. But even if I weren't biased, if there's a conflict growing between a group of people with ocean liner pistons for forearms and a group of people who insist that everyone should be forced to be as shit as they are, I know which side I'd rather be on. Hey, I've got a better name for the pro-humanity movement: The Sore Losers' Club!"

"I don't know how many more times I have to say this, but I guess at least once: a boss fight is not just a random enemy who's eaten three times as many protein bars as everybody else! A boss fight is supposed to be a final exam for everything we've learned up to that point! Ideally, Human Revolution would have given the option of gunning the boss down, also maybe hacking some turrets to fight for you, or sneaking away up into the rafters to drop pianos on their head - but no, all you can do is shoot them. And considering I was going for the non-lethal pussy run, my tranq rifle and stun gun were a fat lot of good against a bloke who appeared to be occupying the same space as a combine harvester armed with a gun that shoots exploding furniture that kills you in two hits, so I basically had to quicksave every time I successfully made it to the other side of the room before my internal organs did!"

"Switching instantly to any car anywhere is the main gameplay gimmick that's woven nicely into the storyline. John Tanner, cut as he is from the generic white bread wise-cracky douche hero template, starts getting pretty likable when he has the Groundhog Day revelation that he can now live life without consequence, immediately possessing a driving student and speeding through the oncoming lane just to make the dick instructor mess his corduroys. Serve and Protect, ladies and gentlemen!"

"One day I'm going to make a zombie game of my very own. It'll be an apocalyptic survival game in which you and a small group of desperate survivors with complementary skills must navigate a deserted city without being crushed under an avalanche of zombie games, movies, and reinterpretations of classic literature. I'll call it, "ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING ZOMBIES ALREADY!" Honestly, at this point, you people just won't be able to cope if civilization ends any other way, will you? If the fucking Daleks invade or the entire world gets covered in carnivorous jam, you'll have to make papier-mache zombie facsimiles just to get through the day! Except, let's face it, however you might imagine zombie apocalypses giving you a new lease on life, we all know most of you would start talking suicide pacts if the Internet went down for more than a week."

"So here we go, another bloody brown shooter for the current age with two weapon slots, cover mechanics and regenerating health. Wait, what are these glowing green things lying around everywhere? Medkits, you call them? What an intriguing novelty! Yes, Resistance 3 does not have regenerating health! Holy bum-nuggets, I'm having to desperately seek aid under fire while hopping around on my last remaining limb and things are actually tense and exciting! Oh, but it's small comfort if I can't carry ten weapons at once... I can carry ten weapons at once. Huh. And there's a freeze ray and a lightning rod and a thing I like to call "The Jimi Hendrix Experience" because it makes people puke themselves to death. They're quite fun to use, and there are no cover mechanics because the game assumes you can strategically use a wall without having to rub yourself on it and give it kisses. Erm... Sony, are you all right? I'm not complaining or anything but I'm kind of feeling how the Greeks might have felt if the Trojans had just surrendered before the wooden horse was finished."

"Now, before any of you Gears of War fans rush off to humiliate yourselves in the comments section by posting something along the lines of, "What did you expect, Gears of War is about chainsaw bayonet vasectomies, plot and character is for girls and people with sensibly proportioned necks," I'd like to preemptively tell you to fuck off, and here's why. If I had said that Gears of War 3s plot was a spellbinding emotional roller coaster from start to finish, none of you motherfucking fanboys would be saying the plot doesn't matter. You'd trumpet that from the fucking rooftops until someone asked you to leave."

"It's true the game does the Painkiller thing, making multitudes of monsters to mob you mercilessly, but as with the environments they forgot the whole variety thing, and you only ever seem to fight two kinds of aggressive Roomba and a few palette-swapped wheelie bins. There's really no way of saying this without giving ammunition to conservative anti-game campaigners, but there isn't as much fun to be had in shooting robots as there is in shooting organic lifeforms. When I fire a rocket into a cluster of charging monsters, I like to know that the cleanup will have to be done with a mop rather than a broom! It's hard to explain, but surely we can all agree that the lawnmower scene from Braindead just wouldn't have been as memorable if it had been taking place in the audio/visual department of Harvey Norman's."

"Call me a cynic (please, it's my only sense of identity), but when some resistance movement shows up demanding I dress up in a sheep costume and jump through some hoops making suggestive baa-ing noises before they'll let me fight the evil government who I have yet to actually fucking see, there's only one organization I feel I'm being oppressed by here! Especially when they all seem content to sit around in the base eating pancakes while I'm sent off alone to slaughter saucepan-wearing bandits du jour."

"First of all, I tried out Child of Eden, the polygon murder spree from the creators of polygon-murder-spree Rez, essentially a rail shooter about the internet being under attack by an amassed army of forgotten screen savers. Certainly a spectacular display, but even a cosmic dance with a hundred large-breasted space fish loses something when you have to replay it for the third time because you weren't clear on what you were supposed to be doing. Yeah, I know, game, "Use my left hand to shoot down the purple projectiles before they hit me." Now in what specific way did you envision me using my left hand, 'cause that could mean anything from waving it to sticking a bowling pin up a gorilla's ass. Eventually I figured out that "use" meant, "Do the same thing you do with the right hand to use your normal weapon, but keep your right hand pinned to your side because I might think you're trying to strangle me and go in to a panic." And even then, the usual delay motion sensors have before registering your action led to several frustrating game-overs. And every now and again, the game would pause itself right as it was getting excited, because it assumes that any ambiguity of motion on your part means that you have suddenly been abducted by space monsters. But doing panicky improvised t'ai chi to amuse graph paper is not gaming. It's more like therapy for geometry-phobics."

"Arkham City isn't getting out of here without a recommendation, but it's worth remembering that when you go straight sandbox you lose control of a certain amount of structure. A word of warning: if you're like me - handsome, talented and secretly longing for death - you'll want to finish the main story first and do the side missions in post-ending fuckabouts, because you need all the gadgets to find all the secrets. And then like me, you'll end up flapping back and forth like a confused magpie at the aluminum foil tennis championships trying to trigger the side missions that your quest log says you haven't found yet. And like me, you'll eventually look it up and discover that some but not all of the side missions get locked off if you don't finish them by the story end. And then like me, you'll probably make a noise that's somewhere between a sigh and a gnash, and then like me you'll say "How does that make any donkey-boffing sense?!" And like me you'll maybe jump up and down a few times, and like me you should probably stop padding this video out."

"Battlefield 3 was built on the Frostbite 2 engine - I know this for a fact because it can't go five minutes without banging on about it. This is a game that isn't trying to sell an engaging experience or even the military lifestyle, it's trying to sell destruction physics and the lighting engine. This becomes clear around the second time a building collapses with the camera angled in such a way as if to say "You may now appreciate this. A minimum level of appreciation is required to continue.""

"The game opens in London, with Drake walking off cobbled streets into an English pub with a motherfucking red phone box out the front where every single member of the clientèle looks like Grant Mitchell from EastEnders. Now, I've always assumed that the foreign locales in previous games were at least researched to some degree, but now I'm forced to call that into question, because the equivalent of this would be walking into Central Park and seeing a load of Prohibition-era gangsters feeding the ducks by shooting bread out of tommy guns."

"In one of the behind-the-scenes featurettes, the developers flat-out admit that they think up the spectacular set pieces first and then come up with the plot around them. And by Christ does it show, because these games are getting as formulaic as a Scooby-Doo episode. Who wants to bet the lost treasure at the end will turn out to have been deliberately lost because there's some negative effect surrounding it that the bad guys want to weaponize? And that Drake will pull off the main villain's face and it'll turn out to be old man Withers!"