Zero Punctuation

"Okay, I looked this up, and I think I've got the details square: The popular and influential Japanese cutesy farming sim franchise Farm Story was published by Natsume in the West under the name "Harvest Moon"; in 2014, the developer switched publishers, and its games have since been released in the West under the name "Story of Seasons" because Natsume reserved the rights to the name "Harvest Moon" so that they could make their own rival cutesy farming games and call them "Harvest Moon", because they assume those fat, ignorant Westerners have reservoirs of cream gravy instead of brains and won't know the difference. Well, just dip a biscuit in my skull, because I tried out the new Harvest Moon on Switch. I enjoyed Harvest Moon back on the SNES and have clocked in enough hours in Stardew Valley to raise an actual child or moderately-sized dog, so I was curious to see in precisely what manner Natsume was buggering the franchise's reputation over a feeding trough; quite heartily, it turns out."

"Harvest Moon: One World is the game, and while it seems to have had some noble intention to sprinkle a little more adventure into the concept so you're not just waking up and urinating on potatoes day in, day out, in doing so, it loses sight of the core appeal of these games, and there's a general air of wrongness about the whole thing, which first started sinking in when it told me to go to the cave and mine some bronze ore. There's no such thing as "bronze ore", you shitwits! It's an alloy; it doesn't occur naturally! It's like telling me to go harvest a cupcake bush."

"[That's] it, really; I'd heard that Natsume was driving the Harvest Moon ice cream van smack into the animal shelter, and I suppose I was just curious to see the wreckage for myself and pick through it for salvageable orange Frooties. In the meantime, if, like me, you enjoy fantasizing about what it would be like to have actual manual skills, there's a new Story of Seasons coming this month that's probably the one worth holding out for. Or try the remake of the GBA one that's out on Steam; keyboard controls are a bit wonky, and it's hard to get a good sexual tension going when all the love interests are proportioned like Dora the Explorer, but that's just the companionable whiff of cow manure that drifts into the farmhouse kitchen, compared to One Worlds hundred-yard swim down the factory farm runoff pipe."

"There's a lot about base-designing that feels inefficient. You're supposed to designate areas as specific rooms, but I'm unclear on why my minions need a barracks, and a dining hall, and a break room, and an entirely separate kind of break room for replenishing mental health or something. That's what happens when you let the fuckers unionize, I suppose. Furniture for one kind of room can't go in any other kind of room, which makes no sense; would it really break the interior designer's heart to shove a fucking vending machine in the break room so my dudes don't have to trudge all the way to the dining hall for a Twix? And while we're on the subject, why can I only put fire extinguishers, guard posts, and staircases in rooms officially designated as "corridors"? I just wanted a fucking split-level food court! Also, why did I have to research the concept of a staircase?! Where was my evil genius educated, St. Bungalow's School for the Wheelchair-Bound?"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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?"

"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!"

"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."

""Hey, we should probably do something to seem like we're not just entirely copying RE4's homework!" "Hmmm... what's the exact opposite of a tiny castle-owning man?" "A giant castle-owning woman!" "Genius! Fish fingers all 'round." Yeah, sorry if you got into that whole meme that arose around Lady Dimitrescu, because whoops! She's only the boss of the first area; she dies, like, two hours in, and then it's back to fantasizing about your high school French teacher in a milkmaid outfit."