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"It also does the thing where it goes, "Oh, look, a sewer level. How original." (*roll eyes*) And then proceeds to unironically have a sewer level, that goes on way too fucking long. If you know it's bad, why are you doing it? Surely the comedic subversive thing to do would be to pretend we're having a sewer level, and then go, "Oh, bollocks to this hackneyed shit! Let's have a level where you ride an ostrich through a bouncy castle!""

"Back before Mass Effect finished itself off with all the grace and elegance of the last season of Game of Thrones wanking into a bin, whenever I played one of those games, it always struck me how you only ever saw that universe from the top of the social heap; from the perspective of a universally famous and respected galactic saviour who could swan about on the best ship ever, decking journalists with impunity and being extremely flighty about what his favourite store on the Citadel is. I always wondered what the Mass Effect universe was like to the average fuck, just about qualified to reverse their space van out of their own space driveway and deliver crates of flavourless nutrient paste to the worker cubes; how did they feel about Commander Shepard? Were they happy with the flavour of ice cream they got at the end of Mass Effect 3? Well, I guess we'll never know now, since after Mass Effect: Andromeda, more Mass Effect is about as hotly demanded as the Jeffrey Epstein Bumper Fun Activity Book for Kids."

"...Let's not forget, you can buy what's termed "timesavers"; so first we buy your game, Ubisoft, and then you charge us more money to not have to play it? If I paid double price up front, would you just not give it to me at all? Take a step back, people, because this has all gotten way too fucking normalized. When you charge money for something you can produce infinitely at zero cost, like in-game currency, that's not a service; that is the fucking death of economics as a concept. How the fuck did we get here from basic principles of trade?! It's like walking up to a dude in the stocks in the village square and saying, "If you give me three turnips, I'll spit in your face.""

"But let's get on to some of the bigger stuff, like, for example, the giant dribbling cock that Square Enix tripped and broke its nose on, the one with "Avengers" written along the side. With Avengers: Endgame and the very distinct appearances of the main actors still fresh in public memory, wheeling out a game starring their stunt doubles left everyone a bit nonplussed, at best. "Oh, come on, Yahtz! The cost of the likeness rights for these people could've paid for four more years of mysteriously-silent Final Fantasy VII development!" Oh, fair enough, Square Enix; just show us how the Avengers game plays, then. "Mmmmmm... No.""

"So Rage 1 was a pudding-y fart in an overcrowded swimming pool, and Bethesda must've said to id, "All right, fine, just make Doom." So they made Doom, and it kicked arse, and then they were like, "Great! We've figured it out! Now let's make another Rage!" Why?! Why are we still bothering with Rage?! And why do you have a black eye? "I walked into a door. I mean, because it's a post-apocalypse story that desperately needs to be told, that's why! Now, let's make Rage 2, and they're definitely not making me say this!" Well, let's give Rage 2 a chance; I mean, there might be a few things that a shoot-y drive-y post-apocalypse sandbox can do with the color magenta that Far Cry New Dawn didn't already do this year."

"I hope Bloodstained realizes what it has done; all we needed was a few more disappointing fuck-ups, a few more Mighty No. 9s, Yooka-Laylees, Broken Ages, and maybe we could've all been completely soured to the Kickstarted retro callback. "Oh, maybe it isn't healthy to never want to leave our youthful comfort zones," we could've all said. "Maybe we should be open to new thoughts and ideas, for just as the gene pool requires variance, so too does art need a diversity of new concepts to avoid stagnation and producing nothing but the cultural equivalent of harelips and webbed toes." And you fucked that up, Bloodstained, by proving the system can actually work, and now it's going to be Kickstarted remakes of Custer's Revenge as far as the eye can see. If you want a picture of the future, imagine General Custer's lovingly-rendered shiny bell-end slapping a human face - forever."

"I must confess, listeners, that I'm a little bit biased against Yoshi's Island and its present-day derivatives; of all the chapters of what we might as well call the "Original Mario Canon", I like Yoshi's Island the least, not just because listening to Baby Mario cry made me want to vaccinate him against continuing to be alive, not just because of the questionable way in which Yoshi would swallow enemies and then poo them out of his implied cloaca, not even because the aiming controls were shit (and still are shit, despite them no longer having the excuse that the controller isn't full of unused buttons and analogue sticks all hankering to muck in like a bunch of guilt-stricken white people at an African house-building project). No, the main reason Yoshi's Island sits poorly with me is that it introduced to a hitherto-perfectly straightforward series of platformers the idea that there can be degrees of success. See, in Mario World, you can crawl across the finish line as tiny Mario with shards of tortoise shell lodged in your face, or you can break the tape with the tip of your giant powered-up stiffy, and either counts equally as a win; you can find your own level of success. But Yoshi's Island doesn't tick the level off as "properly" done until you find all the invisible secret places and end it with full health, and thus began video gaming's dark history of exploiting the "obsessive instinct", something that set the path that led us all the way to our current apocalyptic age of live service loot box labouring; all it took was for one cunt to realize that that sense of fulfilment one gets from the "Level 100% Completed" jingle is something people might conceivably pay extra for, a cunt who will one day be remembered alongside the dude who fucked the monkey that gave us AIDS."

"You shoot bullets at the enemies to make their health number go down, so you can chip at your arbitrary number of objectives, and find gear to improve your numbers in rooms with very large numbers of chest-high walls... Some day they're going to refine this all down and make a game where all you do is press plus-one on a calculator until you reach the arbitrary point that makes a nearby person's chest cavity explode, and your calculator gets slightly bigger. It'll make billions."

"Mummy, can I watch this funny Internet video about my favorite Yoshi game?" "Of course, darling! There's hardly likely to be a reference to the dude that fucked the monkey that gave us AIDS!"

"In the aftermath of the climax of the previous game, when someone drove all the mechanically augmented humans kill-crazy by doing the equivalent of posting an honest review of the new Ghostbusters on the Internet, humanity is reeling from the attack and the augmented humans are regarded with fear and suspicion on the off-chance that something might flip the crazy murderer switch again at any moment. So welcome to Episode 2 of the Clumsiest Racism Analogy in All of Speculative Fiction. You can't split humanity into augmented and not-augmented because having oven-hobs instead of nipples is not a trait unique to specific families (unless babies are having their legs snapped off as they emerge from the womb and replaced with shelf brackets) to say nothing of the fact that you can't make the "few bad apples" argument if literally every augmented person went off their hydraulic cyber-trolleys and a certain amount of fear might be justified if no one knows that the insane murderer switch isn't still lying around somewhere for some family dog to accidentally trip while rubbing his ass on the carpet. Hey, remember how in the original Deus Ex augmented humans were a pretty small minority and no one made much of a fuss about them because hey, turns out a bloke with JCBs lodged in his armpits is a useful thing to have in peace-keeping force or when some furniture needs assembling and that most of the conflict in the setting of that game was rooted in the divide between rich and poor and insidious population control orchestrated by corporate interests and the media? "Oh, no! Such themes would be completely irrelevant in the current climate, especially since triple-A game publishers haven't finished paying all the installments on their nuclear-equipped supervillain bunker on the moon. Let's just make it all about the people putting sandwich toasters in their kneecaps.""

"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."

"But as we settle in to the primary gameplay loop of The Devotion 2, we see precisely how it intends to carry on the series legacy of staring existential horror. As you connect with a safe house and a list of numbered objectives appear in the corner of the screen, knowing that all of them will entail the exact same thing -- walking into yet another exhaustively decorated large room full of chest-high walls, taking up position and waiting for another parade of identical generic bad guys to inexplicably leap out of cover in turn so you can pop them in the face -- and then you will grasp the true horror of your existence, that you willingly paid money to play what is essentially a right-wing gun enthusiast's version of Fifty-Two Pickup for potentially the rest of your life. And in that, The Devotion 2 is a true sequel to the previous... [Yahtzee impatiently turns to the imp who has just appeared] What!? What do you want? [*whisper whisper whisper*] Well, what is it a sequel to, then? [*whisper whisper whisper*] What, the boring one? [*whisper*] Actually, that does make more sense. Sorry, everyone, little misunderstanding; I'll have to start again. (*ahem*) Boring Tom Clancy Ubisoft Sandbox 2 is another The Division. Oh, bugger! I've confused myself."

"Once the graduation's over, Zach starts work as a peace officer working with the evil ruling authority. So while I was at that point about as engaged as a dad chaperoning his daughter to a One Direction concert, I figured I was obliged to at least play as far as the bit where we get framed and the sinister authority turns against us, which anyone with the majority of their brain still inside their skull could see coming. Any game in which you start as a member of a sinister authority who interacts with poor people and suspiciously attractive revolutionaries will almost certainly contrive you to be no longer a member of the sinister authority before the second act, with the exception of modern warfare shooters, where you usually stay in the sinister authority and French-kiss assault rifles for six hours."

"Frankly, I think Close to the Sun presents a cautionary tale. If you're going to knock something off, maybe pick something that isn't really good and made by more competent people than you. Why not try to make, say, Ride To Hell, but actually functional, and consequently infinitely less interesting? And then re-name it something like Days Gone."

"...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."

"Funny, isn't it, how whenever a game talks about being "over-the-top" or "tongue-in-cheek", it always seems to mean the same thing these days: that it's going to look like an irresponsibly violent version of Jet Set Radio? Probably cel-shaded, every character's introduced with a freeze-frame profile and dresses like a Tank Girl cosplayer with colour blindness, and a lot of things will be magenta. Oh, yeah, and there'll be a panda, for some reason."

"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."

"As one of the first fully 3D FPSes, it's fun to look at Quake as part of gaming's collective learning process. "Mouselook? Why on earth would you want that on all the time? How often will people want to look away from the horizon, I mean honestly?" But Quake 1 was a pioneer in more than just the technical field. It's probably one of the first retro shooters to be entirely consistent in tone. A slightly laughable tone, I mean, this is a game that gives all its levels names like, "THE TOWER OF DESPAIR" and the map list reads like the first album from a high school goth metal band, but compare that to Duke Nukem 3D where pop culture references and monsters going to the toilet are right alongside the captured, violated women begging for death. Quake represents PC games maturing out of the in-jokey fucking about and into awkward, angsty pubescence, for better or worse. Later it would go off to college in Half-Life, join the military for Call of Duty, and get all its arms and legs blown off in time for Gears of War."

"Sea of Solitude is one of those games that's either going to really speak to you, or completely leave you cold. It'll all depend on whether you personally relate to Kay or not, and the more I played, the more I disliked her. Not because she was an inattentive sister or any of the other reasons the game gives for why she's tormenting herself like this. It's because she's such a fucking self-absorbed drama queen, she'll craft a grand operatic scenario out of her interpersonal relationship issues. "Oh no! I didn't give my depressed boyfriend enough space! Verily must I be clothed in the rainments of the traitor and banish myself to the wine-dark seas of nothingness to dwell forevermore." JUST STOP TEXTING HIM SO MUCH, YA DIPPY MOO!"

"It started in 2002 when, in the run-up to the release of horror-themed action-adventure Shadow Man 2, Acclaim announced that they would pay the funeral costs of anyone willing to put a Shadow Man 2 advert on the headstone of a deceased relative, prompting public outcry and the Church of England basically telling them to piss off. Yes, Church of "Tea and Crumpets with the Vicar" England! Takes a lot to upset those lads; they don't even hate gays that much. Now, in my research, the name "Steve Perry" came up a lot; apparently, he was the executive coming up with these ideas, but I find it hard to believe that one person could be entirely to blame. Sure, I can see one executive descending from a cocaine-induced trance to announce, "Hey, I know what demographic we should target: the recently bereaved!"; what I have trouble picturing is the roomful of colleagues that then replied, "Yes, we agree! What a good idea; let's action it!" without subsequently making hasty, sarcastic eye-rolls at whoever was keeping the minutes. Later the same year, Acclaim promoted the resoundingly mediocre Turok: Evolution by offering a sack of cash to anyone who was willing to christen their newborn baby "Turok", apparently shifting their demographic focus to the other end of the scale."

"Quake was the last collaboration between Id Software's two Johns, Romero and Carmack, before Romero went off to make Daikatana out of mousetraps and semen and Carmack proceeded to craft Quake 2 out of stale Weetabix and paste. Quake 1 finds the happy medium and illustrates why they kinda needed each other. That lightning gun that murders you if you use it in water definitely smells of Romero, but at least there's some imagination on display. The colour scheme and repetitive levels were probably scraped up from the Carmack tarmac, but the gameplay is characteristically solid. I like that every monster is clearly distinct - from each other, I mean, if not from the background since everything looks like it just dropped out of a sewage worker's nose - and all have a different role in life. The knight harasses you in tight spaces and the fiend harasses you in the open, there's the floating scrag, whose job is the molest you in those troublesome hard-to-reach places, and then there's the ogre, whose job is to GET FUCKED! You think you're so great sitting up there spamming grenades with impossible to predict bounce trajectories, let's see who has the last laugh after I've quick saved another seven or eight hundred times!"

"Remnant (huurk) From the Ashes is a third-person action-adventure with a grim tone set in a dying world- it's a Dark Souls clone, isn't it? "Yes, Yahtzee, that's why we thought you would like it, since you feel about Dark Souls the way a starving tiger feels about something tigers particularly enjoy eating!" Yeah, but it feels like half the original IPs these days are Dark Souls clones. You're like grandparents, you are; I show up to your house in orange trousers one fucking time and now you get me a new pair of orange trousers every fucking Christmas. So come on then, what's this one's gimmick? "Well, it's Dark Souls, but with guns!" So, Bloodborne, then? "NO, SHUT UP! It's Dark Souls with a full-on third-person shooter: over-the-shoulder, iron sights, the whole steaming cow pat." So, it's Dark Souls but combined with the other 50% of every game that comes out these days?"

"Setsuna's so fucking sweet and forgiving she gives me ice cream headache, but there's a point where we go beyond naively trusting into the realms of mental handicap; when she insists on you joining her party the only thing she knows about you is that you're a hired killer, specifically hired to kill her. "Oh player-san, I feel so comfortable around your upraised dagger and coppery stench of blood money." I made myself laugh again by imagining Setsuna meeting a rabid grizzly bear. "Oh, I just know there's goodness in your heart, Mr. Tufty." RAWR! MAUL! MAUL!"

"Want to know how to do a Gears of War witticism? Step One: Say something relevant but completely obvious, to stir the players from the latest trance the combat put them into. Step Two: Continue talking uselessly until I hate you: "We need to go over there, and by 'over there,' I mean towards that big scary building full of enemies." "Oh, great. So what's the good news?" "Well, the good news is that I'm very handsome and glib and..." SHUT THE FUCK UUuuUUuuUP!! "...Okay, but by "shut the fuck up," do you mean...?" OH, MY GOD!! Why can't you just accept that Joss Whedon will never hire you?"

"[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."

"It must be said, though, that Anal Man-tasy XV or older is indeed distinct from its predecessors, in that I mostly understood what the fuck was going on. It's a nice straight-forward plot for once: We are Noctis, a prince who wears wellington boots and took his name from the instructional sign on the front door of the school for the mentally slow, off to get married to secure peace between kingdoms before a giant fruitcake-sized dump is dropped onto events when the The Empire invade our homeland. I wonder if these evil constantly expanding superpower nations have ever considered the PR boost they'd get from NOT calling themselves The Empire. I mean, the Federation from Star Trek does basically the same thing but everyone likes them because they're called the Federation and brush their teeth once in a while."

"The game opens with a flashback to two brothers. The older: Brash, confident, and already enrolled in the military — the younger: more shy and troubled, and looking to the older with hero worship. Now, if you think you've guessed which of these brothers will be our underdog protagonist, then you've been misled by your basic storytelling instincts, you big stupid cunt. No, the protagonist is the older brother! And after jumping gleefully over about fifteen years of character development, we suddenly cut to the brothers on a mission to ghost warrior the bollocks off some fools, which ends with the younger brother being captured by some global supervillain group or other. We then jump forward again two years — what is this; the fucking summer Olympics? — when our hero, Mister North... I've honestly forgotten his first name; it was either "Jon" or "Rob", so lets just call him... "Oliver" — is deployed to Georgia searching for his brother, and finds himself up against a mysterious masked sniper conducting a reign of terror. Oh, goshington ballbags, I wonder who that'll turn out to be! Who will be behind that mask when we confront this person who snipes almost as well as we do, and seems to be interested in us personally? Will it be Whoopi Goldberg? Or Cardinal Richelieu? Charlie the Chipshop Man? Ooh, maybe it'll be the competent story writer who disappeared right before the game began!"

"[Code Vein] is another Souls-like with combat that's generally FINE and boring level design, but it has one thing that makes it notable: it's the most game I've ever played. This is a game where the character customizer has 90 billion hairdos and two noses; a game where one of the facilities in your home base is a , and if you get in it, female characters will show up in skimpy towels. This is a thing that happens. It built a hot springs episode into its fucking mechanics! And after the second main boss in a row was a giant demonic stripper with their , I made the decision to stop playing before my recommendations became too embarrassing."

"And so ends the year Two Thousand Nineteen / What a cascade of failure and pain it has been / Out came the games to not that much cheer / But lots of hostility, and yawning, and sneers / That made all the publishers recoil in fear / And push back the games that looked good to next year / But no amount of pushback would have been enough / To lift our poor industry out of the trough / Of artless, 'sploitational, grind-a-thon guff / Of loot-box live service, and all of that stuff / But anyway, to close out Two Thousand Nineteen / The best, and the worst, and the blandest I've seen."

"I was hesitant to reward Bloodstained just for being Castlevania: Symphony of The Night, but it isn't that, really. What it is is exactly what I wanted: For Castlevania to stop pissing about and pack all the good ideas it's had into one game that we can finally call good without qualification. "Okay, but I can I make the protagonist wear a silly hat?" Yes, Koji Igarashi, have all the silly hats you want. "I will!""

"The history of gaming in the 2010s could theoretically be told entirely in open world games. If I were to pick that represents them all, I'd probably go for Far Cry 3, which was pretty good, but it was where an unpleasant trend was being to crystallise - the sandbox game becoming less "open-ended cathartic adventure" than "gigantic, three-dimensional checklist of busywork", its maps splattered with identical, copy-pasted challenges and collectibles designed mainly to torment the obsessive-compulsive, with a primary gameplay loop best summarized as "tidying up". Where the stories gradually devolved into withered strands of linear tutorial missions that don't even have proper endings, 'cos we have to go straight back to the sandbox afterwards to hunt for the remaining five hundred sliver pinecones."

"Wattam's blurb states that it's a game about friendship, but I don't agree that it is. What this game is really saying is that the only way to be accepted by society and your peers is to blindly follow instructions, and that if someone chews you up and shits you out you should just be grateful for the attention. So apparently it’s a metaphor for your first job after leaving college."

"The end result of the Capcom Five was that, what should have been a boost for the GameCube, turned into one broadcast after another that Capcom had zero faith in the console, and Nintendo wouldn't forget. In fact, rumour has it that the whole debacle is why there weren't any Capcom characters in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. And if it's true, then that's the most pathetic attempt at revenge I've ever heard of! It's like telling the bloke who murdered your family and stole all your money that you've expelled him from your best friends' tree-house club."

"World War I was a conflict without clear heroes or villains; just millions upon millions of young men being sent to tragic, pointless deaths in the name of nothing but an international game of political bum-bouncing, so there'll need to be a thoughtful, more morally complex approach to the storytelling. "What was that?" cries Battlefield 1 again. "Sorry, we were busy making a story campaign about rugged, English-speaking fancy-boys squinting heroically into the middle distance as they mow down dastardly, jabbering Krauts by the hundreds!" I wouldn't harp, but there's this whole bit in the introduction where an American and a German soldier lock gaze over a field strewn with bodies, and both lower their weapons in recognition of their inner humanity that can never be erased by a system that sees them as naught but expendable cogs; and then, five minutes later, it's back to "Phwor! Massacring expendable cogs sure is fun, 'eh lads?!" Even if you're playing as the German side of the multiplayer, the bloke on the briefing menu talks with zat very smug and efil German foice, ve vill punish zese stoopid Amerikan Kowboys for ze Glory of ze Kaiser! Mmmmmm..."

"Black Mesas Xen is three or four times longer than the original, which I'm not sure is the solution I'd have gone for. "Oh, you don't want your broccoli? Well here’s three times as much, bitch, and if you don't learn to like it I'm going to start pushing it up your nose." I suppose having worked on it for years they wanted to prove they weren't Duke Nukem Forever-ing that whole time, and that is most certainly proved. The cosmic vistas are spectacular, every inch of effort is on display, and while it is overlong and the quality has its dips, some bits are pretty forgettable and some chug along like the early morning hangover shits, there’s enough of a sense of wonder about it that I wasn’t unengaged. Trouble is, I don't think it addresses the actual issue with Xen – we just spent umpteen hours tactically combatting our way through an ever-evolving narrative about a research facility disaster and military cover-up and this Metroid meets American McGee's Alice bad acid trip at a children's ball pit full of tricky platforming and bullet spongey bosses doesn’t feel like a payoff for what was set up."

"The usual indie arty platformer theme of small innocent child in big scary world is like the missionary position. There's nothing inherently wrong with it, some interesting things have been done with it, but when it's all you fucking do you'll swiftly be desperately hankering to break the monotony with just one suck job or nipple clamp. The thing about small child scary world though is that it rarely does sequels, because the underlying theme of small child scary world is coming of age and/or loss of innocence, and you can’t lose your innocence twice. Well, I suppose you could lose it in stages. Say, lose half when you find out that Santa isn’t real, lose the other half the first time you take it up the arse."

"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!"

"THE DOOM SLAYER is an unfettered, chaotic id who only wants to kill demons and find collectible Happy Meal toys; in other words, he's the player of a mindless shooter game. But the central gag of the character is that all the other characters in the plot are looking for meaning and cosmic/religious significance in his actions where none truly exists; he just doesn't give a shit. That's the joke; very funny, ha ha ha. But in Doom Eternal, when there are entire levels devoted to traipsing through empty hallways learning the history of THE DOOM SLAYER and the origin story for how he came to not give a shit, and we're beset by cutscenes and dialogue and codex entries filling us in on the Maykrs of Urdak and their history with the Sentinels of Argent D'Nur and their long tradition of shit and the not-giving thereof, then suddenly, the game itself is the one projecting unnecessary meaning onto the dude who doesn't actually give a shit, and the joke is at the expense of the story-writers!"

"...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!"

"I wasn't going to bring up the coronavirus thing again; I mean, the site's called "The Escapist", not "The Constant Reminders of Our Inevitable Hubristic Doom". Besides, it'll pretty seriously date the video in a month or two when the virus goes away forever and everything returns to normal and all the dead people come back to life and there's a rainbow. But now I have to talk about Resident Evil 3, a game about society descending into chaos because of a viral pandemic. It could only have been less fortunately timed if the zombies ate toilet rolls instead of brains."

"I suppose the fact that the very first game I reviewed went straight into the bottom five should have been read as a bad omen for the year, more so than that fucking gorilla, anyway. Devil's Third was monumentally stupid and apparently designed by a schizophrenic with vibrators for thumbs, but it shall only skate at the edges of the bottom five for at least being weird enough to briefly distract one from, say, a recent bereavement or loss of limb."

"The first thing you need to know is that Dead Rising 4 doesn't have a fixed time limit or mission deadlines. You remember, that thing that every Dead Rising has and what makes them interesting, and is as much a part of Dead Rising as the sense of betrayal is part of getting kicked in the balls by your beloved horse! What it does have is a linear sequence of missions that will still be waiting for you, even if you sit down in the mud outside and make daisy-chains for eleven hours. You remember, the way every bloody sandbox game works. Dead Rising has taken the part of innovation that entails doing the shit that everyone else does; which is innovative in the same sense that the grey goo scenario is innovative. "Oh, wow! My legs have been harvested by a ravenous, unstoppable nano-swarm! This will add an intriguing new twist to the upcoming line-dancing tournament!" I shouldn't have to explain that the time limits were there to add a unique challenge! Yes, it could occasionally get in the way of trying on hilarious barbecue aprons and tricycling down the escalator, but isn't that cathartic fun all the more satisfying when we know we've parceled our time to allow for a quick barbecue apron session in between making progress and not just cocking about?"

"I guess 'spectacle' is all that matters in JRPGs these days, that's why half the time in combat the deep shadows and particle effects mean I can barely tell what the fuck's going on. You know what was really spectacular, viewers? An epic three-disc adventure on the PS1 that was long because it had lots of stuff in it. And Final Fantasy VII Remake only managing to be as long as it was because a lot of it's copy-pasted like a suspiciously well-written undergraduate thesis feels like a slap in the face to those of us who remember a time when we could have nice things. And isn't that the story of my fucking life right now. Hey, remember when games had actual depth? SLAP! "No you don't!" Hey, remember when you could go out to that frozen yoghurt place you like? SLAP! "No more of that!" Hey, remember when you could get off on light BDSM? "No slap!" Oh, you tease!"

"Through a linear series of encounters with unique characters, Cloudpunk builds a well-realized world of human-A.I. tension, inequality, corporate oppression, and all the usual bollocks cyberpunk goes on about, and at various times, Rania has to make moral choices which have the usual long-term effect on the story, i.e., little, if any. But the story really falls flat for me around one major central point like a six-inch nail in a soufflé: I just don't like Rania as a character. She's come to this city she knows little about and openly hates from some kind of small nation of hipsters that you probably haven't heard of, but trust me, it's much better; half the characters she meets are obnoxious in some cartoonishly overdone way just so she can get all judge-y at them, and they keep foisting important missions and major life decisions onto her because they watched her drunkenly banging into lampposts and doing very unpleasant things to the handbrake for two minutes and decided she had the wisdom of the ages. I might've preferred Cloudpunk if it were Euro Cyber Truck Simulator and just had me randomly deliver stuff while I listened to podcasts, and it told its story more covertly through background details rather than make me sit and listen to what Rania thinks about something that's none of her sodding business."

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

"You remember "Cockup Cascade", right? The term I came up with for an unfortunate feature of many stealth action games where the slightest misstep means getting caught in a pile-on of escalating fuck-ups, so you might as well just reload the instant you get spotted? Well, Desperados III is the patron saint of Cockup Cascade; the cocks barely have a chance to come down again. The enemies all have visibility cones spread wider than your mum's legs when she hears a bottle opener, and you can only see one guard's cone at a time; on top of that, a lot of guards who look like they're staring straight ahead are, in fact, glancing back and forth like a nervous gazelle at a tennis match, covering an area the size of a conservatively-proportioned aircraft hangar. So half the time, you'll settle into the nice, long "slitting a throat" animation, and only then be informed that someone offscreen is looking at you from their table at a delightful Parisian-style street café on the surface of Mars. And thus, the cascade begins. Everyone on the map is alerted and rushes your position, more guards spawn in on top of the existing ones; it's like the fucking fight scene at the end of the original Casino Royale. And while you do have a gun, you fire it once and then can't fire it again until you've remembered all the lyrics to "The British Grenadiers", and your special power to pause the game and queue up your next few actions, at this point, provides nothing besides the chance to take a moment and really drink in just how completely fucked you are. So don't kid yourself about making a stand; you're just going to fucking quick-load. It's not so bad in the early game, but before long, levels are absolutely packed with enemies and overlapping patrol routes, and it turns into a sort of ultra-violent puzzle game, where the objective is to figure out the precise sequence of actions to pick off every enemy in ascending order of gregariousness, quick-saving with every inch of progress. An experience like untangling a huge ball of Christmas lights, turning it over and over, picking on loose bits, occasionally pulling on the wrong thing, getting electrocuted and making all the children scream."

"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."

"Can I do a spot of disabusing here? The kind I always have to do whenever they put out a DAVID CAGE game, or anything else presenting a façade of dramatic depth? The following things do not make a character deep or compelling: 1.) Getting hurt a lot (Looking at you, Tomb Raider reboot.); 2.) Being sad; 3.) Doing morally questionable things; and we might as well tack on 4.) Being a member of a minority, just 'cos I've already given up hope for this video's comment section. What does matter is the characters at least be interesting to watch, and these aren't; the banter between Ellie and her girlfriend as they adventure together sizzles like a flask of slightly tepid water because they're too similar in personality, background, and motivation to have good chemistry. But the most important thing is growth. Walker in Spec Ops: The Line slowly becomes a monster as he's twisted by the constant backfiring of his good intentions, and that's why it's compelling; Ellie has no character development. Villain Lady does, a little bit, for stupid reasons, along the lines of suddenly realizing that the enemy faction she's been genociding unquestioned for months are also human beings with families and would rather not be genocided, thanks, but Ellie just sets out to do something shitty and remains a shitty person; in fact, the game keeps droning on for about two hours after you think it's finally ending just to continue establishing Ellie's shittiness!"

""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."

"Of all the video game protagonists I've been unreasonably obliged to identify with, I struggle to think of one I dislike more than Deacon St. John. Even Jeffrey Cuddletrousers from Hatred at least had some fucking ambition in life. At least he knew how to express himself, and didn't just mumble into his shoes all the time. He didn't sulk and whine every time someone asked him to do something, like a teenager when the bins need putting out. And he didn't passive-aggressively criticize them under his breath the moment their backs were turned; he'd mainly just stab them in the face and shit. But the developers apparently thought Deacon St. John's "dynamic" personality needed to be a constant presence, so he has to comment on fucking everything. "Oh, I picked up a bottle. Another Molotov is it? Yawn!" And another thing; stop second guessing my intentions, Deacon St. John! I walk two feet out of a zombie clear-out zone, and you go "Ooh, I guess I'll finish clearing it out later, then..." You'd like that, wouldn't you, you lazy bastard!? What was your job at that biker gang you used to be in? 'Cause I think it must have been taste tasting the crystal meth."