Zero Punctuation

"But there are only two endings, a good one and a bad one, and the extreme contrast between them is rather jarring. In the good ending, you're a virtuous flower child with love and a smile for all the shiny-coated beasts of God's kingdom, and in the bad ending you're some kind of hybrid of Hitler and Skeletor whose very piss is pure liquid malevolence. I'm sick of games that claim to have choice but that only really come down to either Mother Teresa or baby-eating. All I'm saying is that a little middle ground is nice now and then."

"Bioshock is billed as a spiritual successor to System Shock 2 and I'm sure System Shock 2 will be very proud of its normal-mapped, Phong-shaded bastard child because it takes after its daddy almost to the degree of George Bush. And I know what you're going to say: "Yahtzee, you charismatic stallion: What kind of complaint is that? System Shock 2 was brilliant, and any game that's in any way like it should be equally good." But that's the thing: It isn't like System Shock 2, it is System Shock 2. Oh sure, it looks different and it differs in the fine detailing and the character names are changed and shit. But once you strip all that out, the bad guy might as well just be SHODAN with a waistcoat and a copy of Atlas Shrugged."

"With the current generation of consoles, we've reached or nearly reached the point where graphics aren't going to get much better, so we can all stop rushing to top the last generation's technology and concentrate on making some games with actual depth. Except of course that the console wars are all ultimately futile because the best game ever, Fantasy World Dizzy for the Commodore 64, has already been made. Or maybe all of gaming is pointless, just toying with the gravel on the side of the big road of life. But hey, at least there's violence and tits!"

"[listing the good points of the game] Firstly, it's something original in an industry that seems to be built on ripping off everyone else. Secondly, it's genuinely funny, while most video games attempting humor are like unanesthetized bowel surgery. Thirdly, every single character is well-defined with their own quirks and personalities, even the tiny, unimportant bit part players that get less screen time than Christopher Lee in the last Lord of the Rings film. And lastly, it's fun. Remember that? Fun? What we used to have before gaming felt like a second job?"

"One of the themes running though Schafer's humor is the juxtaposition of a mundane situation in a bizarre or fantastical setting (see: Grim Fandango), and Psychonauts continues this tradition by being set in a summer camp for psychics. The story follows the adventures of Raz, a child acrobat who, in deference to tradition, runs away from home to escape the circus rather than join it, and whose natural psychic talent allows him to insinuate himself into the camp without paying tuition fees. Shortly however, karma bites him in the ass when he finds himself embroiled in a sinister plot and having to explore strange ethereal worlds based on the subconscious minds of those around him. It's all kind of like if Tim Burton knocked up David Lynch in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and he did meth right up until the birth."

"Part of me feels that, from an artistic standpoint, there may be some merit in RE5 because the point of a horror game is to be unnerving; and forcing the player to do something that they find distasteful as well as frightening is a rather groundbreaking method of doing that. But then again, this is Resident Evil, the series that brought us "squeaky-voiced midget Napoleon"; and if there’s anything sophisticated in an idea of theirs, it’s probably a total accident."

"Nariko then turns to some...thing sitting vacantly nearby, wearing cat ears and makeup apparently applied by a Kiss fan with Parkinson's disease, and relays to it her intention to slit up evil dudes. She then adds, with a totally straight face, "We may need you to play twing-twang." My first thought when I heard that was, "I am so going to quote that out of context," but on reflection it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in context either. If the developers were hoping I'd consider buying the full game just to see what "twing-twang" is, then mission fucking accomplished, I suppose, but I'm going to be very disappointed if it isn't a cutesy euphemism for lesbian cunnilingus (yeah, I went there)."

"Eventually, I got to the final boss who didn't hold still long enough for my stupidly overpowered dark spell to be effective, so all I could do was whack it repeatedly over the head with my sword while it chewed constantly on my lower body. But I had so many health potions by that point that I could basically drip-feed myself with the stuff and, after the boss popped its scaly clogs, I still had enough left over to throw a health potion keg party."

"The big selling point, of course, is that you can choose to be a good character or an evil character, so I of course set out to be the evilest bastard who ever lived, and the best way to do this according to the game was to dress in black, grow a big moustache, draw all over my face, and backhand the occasional passer-by. I also set myself up as a magic user because I wanted to end up looking like Ming the Merciless, but the starting spells were all so ridiculously piss-weak that I ended up having to use a sword half the time anyway, and the game ended up dubbing me a "Spellwarrior," which made me feel like it was calling me an indescisive prick."

"Fable is by Lionhead Studios, home of longtime auteur game designer Peter Molyneux, who has a tendency to promise the Earth and be ultimately crippled by his own ambition (see the big fat broken monkey-fest Black and White). During the development of Fable, for example, it was promised to have features like rival NPC characters, plants growing in real time, and a system wherein your every slightest choice of action changes your appearance and the world around you. What we ended up with was a buggy action-RPG with a great big stiffy for itself."

"Personally, at this point I'd only consider buying the full version of The Darkness if it came down to budget price, and they threw in another, better game. And some cake. And Belgium."

"...What I was supposed to do was go back to an easily-missed white spot on the ground, use it to summon an evil imp, and instruct it to move a thoughtlessly parked car out of the way of one of the cemetery entrances. Let me just reiterate that: The game literally has me summon a multi-fanged beclawed monstrosity from the depths of hell, not so I can make it enslave the innocent or lay waste to all worldly nations, but so that I can enlist it as my own personal breakdown service!"