"...Plot is, Sonic and pals fly to some island for some reason; there's a big cockup, and Sonic's pals get trapped in cyberspace or something. And when Sonic wakes up alone in the pouring rain in a washed-out landscape surrounded by the imposing ruins of a once-vibrant civilization, as haunting music plays, I felt, not for the first time, a strong urge to grab the Sonic franchise by the lapels, shake it back and forth, and yell, "FIGURE OUT YOUR FUCKING TONE! YOU ARE A FUCKING CARTOON MOUSE IN SNEAKERS! YOU ARE A CONCEPT FOR BABBIES!" You are not Death Stranding, you are not Attack on Titan, you are not... whatever the fuck Sonic 2006 was trying to be; possibly Final Fantasy X, if it was mashed up with some staggeringly uncomfortable slash-fiction. You are also not Shadow of the Colossus, and isn't it astonishing that I even needed to say that to you, Sonic the Hedgehog? I feel like I'm trying to explain to a sofa cushion with a toilet roll tube stuck to it that it will never be a real boy."

"I hate to say "I told you so," constantly, with an air of smugness and perverse relish, but I called this when Saints Row 4 came out. It was, to reiterate, a banger. The series went from generic crime sandbox to being the president of space and it was fun and audacious but it was also going to kill the series stone dead because there was absolutely no topping it. You couldn't make a fourth sequel about becoming president of twice as much space. So apparently Volition didn't even bother to try and have instead nestled their face between the cozy cheeks of reboot, and Saints Row going back to relatively grounded crime sandbox after nine years feels like Jim Morrison coming back to life, crashing on my sofa and leaving skidmarks on the guest towels."

"So the game consists of two phases: the base management part, where You hang out in your cult's campground building stuff and interacting with your followers until you run out of money, bits of wood or piles of faeces to clean up, and the dungeon crawling part, when you venture out to the procedural lands with your big heresy whacking stick and a wheelbarrow. It's the faeces that's one of the sticking points for me, faeces being notoriously sticky. I guess socially well-adjusted people aren't the type to join cults, generally speaking, but I don't remember Jim Jones having to go around the compound every five minutes with a pooper scooper. Something's very wrong here - you can't build a fucking outside loo until you're like three levels deep on the tech tree, but I'd think these people would at least know how to dig a fucking hole in the ground. This is part of the larger issue that the management stuff you have to do is frequently of the micro-variety. You're basically having to constantly make food for these simpering twats, the upgrade that stops them complaining when you make them eat grass is heartily recommended. You have to work on the loyalty of every cult member individually, and that means remembering to give them all a blessing every day. And once your cult goes past a certain head count it's hardly worth bothering to shake the dandruff off your blessing hand. I found it was very easy to get bogged down with the micromanage-y chores in the base because something always pops up if you hang around for too long. It's like being a kindergarten teacher. "Miss! Could you harvest the pumpkins? Miss! Penelope died of old age and the corpse is making us all sick and we still haven't figured out how holes in the ground work. Miss! Lionel blasphemed against our dark saviour, could you sacrifice him for his impudence?" I would, but I can only interact with cultists by standing next to them and pressing the contextual button and Lionel is currently standing in the same spot as three other dudes and one of my base facilities and I don't want to accidentally murder the septic tank."

"It's the ending, again; history runs in fucking cycles. Not that it's as one-sixteenth bottomed as everything else; they're clearly making a deliberate statement with it. It's just that I interpret that statement as follows: "Oh! Have you actually invested mental energy into all these intrigues and relationships we've spent the last few hours building up, and are expecting a payoff to all that? Pah! Talk about missing the point! What a sad lame-o you must be! The end." And then, just to grind the heel in a bit, there's a personal message from the creators. "Ah, when you think about it, Monkey Island 1 was about a wide-eyed naif discovering themselves, Monkey Island 2 was about trying to recreate the success that the wider world didn't care that much about. Haven't these games always been about where we were as creators?" Oh, okay; so you're saying the final message of Return to Monkey Island is, "We've stopped giving a shit, and so should you." Message received! How about next time, you just tweet that and not charge me twenty bucks?"

"Did you know you can get Marvel superhero branded reusable diapers? If you needed holiday gift giving advice. Perfect for the person in your life who worries that the time they spend rinsing infant diarrhoea out of cloth takes them away from thinking about the Incredible Hulk. I'm not saying superheroes are overexposed, or that top level entertainment media is so perversely fixated on them that you can't even make a Scorsese-inspired gritty character piece unless you say it's about the Joker, or that future civilizations will probably regard the Funko Pop! industry the same way we regard the extinct Easter Islanders who cut down all their trees to make more stone heads, or that I bet Benedict Cumberbatch insists on kissing with his eyes open – sorry, lost my train of thought there. Anyway, if you're not quite satisfied with your superhero branded dinnerware and your superhero branded poo bags and your superhero branded gritty character pieces, now you can also enjoy superhero branded Fire Emblem: Three Houses, in the form of Marvel Midnight Suns. It’s not quite as deep or pretty as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but maybe if you promise to buy it for your four year old they'll agree to start shitting in the fucking toilet again. Well, that opening paragraph was all over the fucking place, but hey, I learned it from you, Marvel Midnight Suns."

"Hell Pie gleefully self-identifies as an "obscene platformer" on the Steam page, and you pretty much know what to expect from anything that calls itself "obscene." We're in the realms of Conker's Bad Fur Day that outwardly discourages being played by innocent kiddiwinks because it's full of wee-wees and poo-poos, and as always, this is a slim and slightly pathetic façade because it's only kiddiwinks that are remotely amused by such things and actual adults who watch documentaries about the Cuban missile crisis and shit find it more tiresome than shocking. It's like when the toddler looks over to make sure you're watching before they dump an entire box of garlic powder onto the cat."

"...In the mind of its creator, Bob's Game was so much more than a pixelated distraction any halfway competent RPG Maker user could've farted out in a month – Bob's Game was a vision. One to which only one platform could do proper justice, and that was a Nintendo handheld. So he eschewed the small publishers that expressed interest and applied for an official Nintendo DS development kit. Now, Nintendo is a big company with a lot on their plate between making Mario pencil-cases and removing Princess Peach panty shots from Smash Bros, so they did with Pelloni's application what they presumably do with any correspondence from wide-eyed random no-name twats: shunted it to the end of the priority list between trimming Donkey Kong's eyelashes and designing a controller that doesn't suck. And this is where the story of Bob's Game takes its whoops-we-don't-say-that-anymore turn. You might charitably say that Robert Pelloni was one of those people who had little time for the world outside his own mind. I might less charitably say he had his head so far up his arse he was getting teabagged by his own gallbladder. And he didn't seem to understand that the game's significance within his own life didn't translate into significance to anyone else. As the wait for Nintendo's response stretched into months, Bob decided this was some conspiracy or deliberate snub rather than, say, Nintendo having literally anything better to do, and so he declared that until they acknowledged the game he'd sequestered for five years to make, he would publicly protest by sequestering some more. Now with a webcam on him and with the doors locked for a hundred days. This was successful in that it made him famous amid that sector of the internet that loves to encourage weirdos, especially as he posted a series of increasingly deranged blog posts declaring himself the greatest game designer who ever lived and accusing Nintendo, multibillion dollar company and controller of many of gaming's best known IPs, of being jealous of him, penniless suburban twat. Exactly how much one should read into all this is debatable as after the thirtieth day of his protest when he appeared to be lying motionless in a ransacked bedroom, he claimed to both the internet and the nice helpful police officer that broke down his door that it was all pretend. The protest and insane blog posts had been a viral marketing campaign that we'd all fallen for like the credulous normal-brained people we were."

""All very well, Yahtz, but we've been stewing on the phrase 'like Conker’s Bad Fur Day without the wit' for the last two minutes and we'd like you to clarify, because that's like saying 'like Thomas the Tank Engine but without the sizzling erotic subtext.'" Alright, let me draw a direct parallel. In Conker's Bad Fur Day, you go inside a toilet and have a boss fight with a giant poo. And the poo sings an operatic song as it fights you with profane lyrics that rhyme the word "scat" with the word "twat". This exhibits wit. It's wit to rhyme with shit, but it's wit. The humour lies in a poo, a very unrefined thing, singing opera, a style of music generally considered very refined. In contrast, in Hell Pie, you go into a sewer, and there are poos. And there's no joke there. Some of the poo is alive and hostile and wearing Nazi helmets, but that's not a joke either. There's no comical through line from "Nazi" to "poo". If the poos had all resembled former British home secretary Douglas Hurd, and had been called "Douglas Turds", that would've been a joke with some wit. As it is all the game has done is dropped some poo on the floor and then looked at me as if it expected me to know what to do with it."

"I'll say this for Supermassive Games, they are world class experts at creating entire casts of characters that I instantly and completely despise. They should take a side gig making war propaganda. If they made one of these games starring a bunch of Russian military officers, I'd join the Ukrainian defense force before you can say "Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov". A lot of that comes from the animation. There's still an awkwardness about the motion capture faces, because of course "Haunted Quarry" is a synonym for "Uncanny Valley". There's something very wrong with everyone's mouths and teeth, like they’ve been enlarged in post-production or something. The stock "sexy girl" character in particular looks like she's trying to talk through a bagel that’s been hot glued to her face. But the dialogue makes me hate them all, too. Everyone's got a bad case of verbally explaining their personalities to each other. "Why are you always so upbeat?" "Why are you always cracking jokes?" Those were jokes, were they? Fuckin' news to me. I couldn't decipher them through your private language of arrogant snorts, and constant needlessly abrasive digs at each other. Basically every two way dialog choice comes down to "be a complete prick" or "be a partial prick" and even exclusively taking the second option it still felt like everyone was trying to break the loathsomeness speed record: "Okay, I hated you after six words of dialogue, let’s see who can beat that. Whoa, hold the phone, the buff jock dude’s wearing a backwards baseball cap. He wins. He did it in zero.""

"Trek to Yomis plot suffers from a bad case of "So this is what we're doing now?" Where there's about nine different inciting incidents and it takes way too bloody long to get through all of them. In which case I need to drop a spoiler warning, 'cos in explaining the setup of the plot I'll give away like two thirds of it. At first we're a novice samurai whose master gets killed by the big baddie, which is such a trite scenario I'm pretty sure they sell pre-written sympathy cards for it. But then we forget about that and go off to save a village from bandits, promptly fuck that up, try to save our own village from bandits, fuck that up too, die and wake up in Japanese hell, where we must journey to confront our sins and those we wronged in life. Okay, this is what we're doing, gotcha! Took your fucking time getting to the point."

"Like all Supermassive's prior choose your own adventure books, if the intention is to make me feel like I'm watching a movie, I'd think it was a very poorly edited one. It's always painfully obvious when alternative dialogue has been swapped in, 'cos there'll be an awkward pause and someone's emotional state will mysteriously swivel on a dime. The geography of each scene is very poorly established. Characters have a weird habit of teleporting in and out of the room between cuts. Like, we fight off a monster and then oh no, the monster is attacking Lance Henriksen now and I'm like "When the fuck did Lance Henriksen get here?" Was I supposed to intuit that from the general air of slightly improved acting talent in the atmosphere?"

"The tragedy of Hell Pie is that it had a lot going for it. A strong central mechanic, a nice vibrant appearance, clear dedication and effort from its creators, but it's all let down by being really witlessly, off-puttingly crass. I'm sorry to have to side with your primary school homeroom teacher on this one, Hell Pie, but poo references just aren't big or clever. And I have no idea who this game is even aimed at. Little boys whose idea of intellectual discourse is to compete to see who can yell "fanny flaps" the loudest in a crowded assembly? And of those, the subset that also wants to see small adorable baby animals being bloodily and painfully tortured for no particular reason every time you get a horn upgrade? All I can picture is that one kid I knew in middle school who mysteriously stopped coming to school around the time his sister showed up with burn scars and an eyepatch."

"What we have here is a mission-based tactical combat game from the XCOM developers but instead of your squad being five randomly generated Scottish dudes whose names all start with "Mc", they’re officially licensed Marvel superheroes. And when you get back to base, instead of sending them to training or upgrading their equipment, you take them on romantic dinner dates. And on top of that there’s this heavy theming around black magic and the occult, so the end result is a rather awkward The Punisher meets Harry Potter fan fiction mishmash in which we find ourselves thinking "Man, I should've taken Spider-Man mushroom picking in the haunted forest before we came out to neutralize this group of armed terrorists.""

"By the end it’s just another bloody Sonic game about Sonic being great and slapping Doctor Eggman in the face with his big smug hedgehog willy. A certain light is shed, however, when the end credits roll, and after the actual development team of like, four dudes has gone past, there’s a laundry list of SEGA higherups who all fingered the pie, including more than one person credited as “lore consultants.” I wanna meet the person whose job title is “Sonic the Hedgehog lore consultant” and ask them what their mother thinks they do for a living."

"...Pokémon Legends: Arceus is basically Pokémon as an Isekai. Just the thing for all you Pokémon fans who were concerned that Pokémon GO had made the franchise marginally less embarrassing to talk about in grown-up conversations. The premise is, you are generic contemporary gender to be determined Pokémon trainer who I guess fell off the stage in Smash Brothers Brawl or something and wakes up in the olden days of the Pokémon world when Pokémon training has only just become a thing. The protagonist swiftly astonishes the primitive locals and is hailed as a hero from the sky when they show no fear towards some tiny adorable fluffy helpless baby animals and beans them all in the skull. Silly, yes, but finally a Pokémon game where it kinda makes sense that you seem to be the only trainer who's figured out they can carry more than three or four of the buggers. Soon we get recruited by a quote "surveying" organization who have tasked themselves to quote "survey" all the local Pokémon by capturing them and forcing them into either manual labour or gladiatorial combat. You know, the same way Columbus "surveyed" the Americas. Or how one "surveys" an ant colony with a kettle of boiling water."

"I can only assume that using jump-scares to provoke funny reactions from streamers started getting old, and now they're seeing if similar results can be achieved from just annoying the shit out of them. And if that is the case, look at me falling right into the trap. I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of MY DIIIIIICK!"

"I tried out Babylon's Fall, Platinum's new live service hack-n-slashathon on PS5, or had a crack at it if you will, not that it made it easy. First it wouldn't even start without a PS Plus subscription, even though I only wanted to play single player because y'know, humanity. It's like a highway bypass: I understand why it needs to exist but I'd rather not have one in my house. Got past that and Babylon's Fall still wouldn't unbutton its top until I also signed into a Square Enix account. What the fuck possible benefit do you imagine I'd extract from signing up for another fucking account, Square Enix, other than one more excuse to never check my email?! Christ, this is like trying to get through airport security with an inflatable novelty suitcase nuke. But eventually I got through it all and when I was on the other side of the metal detector putting my shoes back on and admiring the new tag they'd punched through my ear, I cast a look around and thought to myself: "Oooh. This looks like shit!" As in, it literally resembles faecal matter, decked out mostly in glistening browns except for a streak of vibrant blue from an accidentally swallowed whiteboard marker. It looks like a PS3 game, all brown and flatly lit with characters textured and animated like a papier-mâché diorama about kitchen utensils. It even has a classic case of cheaping out on the cutscenes by just panning over still images with increasingly agonizing slowness. I thought the download size was suspiciously small."

"...Security Breach is a full-on first-person stealth shooter Metroid-vania reminiscent of Alien: Isolation, if Alien: Isolation had fucking sucked prehensile slimy dick! I don't even have to review it. I only started playing it in case my Dying Light 2 code didn't come in, and it did. But when it did, I said to myself, "Y'know what? Techland's new over-produced grind-a-thon can wait its fucking turn, because Security Breach is very bad and I want to hurt it!""

"3rd Blandest"

"Eventually I did this enough times that the game went, "Oh! It's coming up on six o'clock! You can go the main entrance and leave!" Feels like there's a lot of the map that hasn't been used yet, but I am so not going to question this; got to the exit, the game goes, "Psych! This is the bad ending! You gotta keep playing to get the rest of the plot." D'oh, the old Symphony of The Night trick. Okay, guess I won't leave. "Great! We are now permanently disabling saving the game." WHAT!? Why the fuck are you doing that? Are you embarrassed about the good ending or something? Are your knickers in shot at one point and now you're going to discourage me from trying? Well, mission fucking accomplished!"

"But, I felt like I'd seen enough of Babylon's Fall, I was so bored and sick of it already and both of my middle fingers had reflexively extended so far they'd started to mess with the ceiling fan. Fuck you, Babylon's Fall. I only reviewed you 'cos the alternative was Shadow Warrior 3 and that was too short to say much about. "How short is it, Yahtz?" Well, put it like this: it was- *outro music*"

"Ooh, you want to be very careful about declaring any release of anything to be the "definitive" version. Partly because I think that's a subjective thing. There will be people out there for whom their "definitive" experience of watching The Crying Game was at three in the morning blitzed out on mescaline with both feet immersed in buckets of wallpaper paste. And as for removing previous versions of the thing from sale, well, let me tell you a cautionary fable about a proud little man named George Lucas who decided that no one had any need for any version of the original Star Wars trilogy that didn't have added Loony Toons sound effects and CG as dated as Sean Connery's relationship advice. And now George Lucas has to sit there and plaster on a smile as the Disney corporation peels the skin off his life's work and stretches it so thin it would disappoint a Marmite enthusiast."

""Well, go on then, Yahtz, tell us World War II shooters are overdone. And while you're at it, be sure to inform us that water is wet and modern political discourse is fucked." Ironically, pointing out World War 2 shooters are overdone is, itself, overdone. We're stuck in the fucking ouroboros of tedium, the snake eating its own tail while complaining that the seasoning is bland. Actually, I wasn't going to rag on Call of Duty for going "Nazi-fartsy" on us again, because I've come to accept that while shooters can't seem to get away from World War II, it definitely hasn't been for want of trying. The Modern Warfare trend was about as valiant an attempt as one could expect, and we all know where that ended so, fuck it, let shooters have their fucking comfort zone. It's the only uncomplicatedly good setting for a quote "realistic" shooter. Get too close to the present and war's mainly decided not by the ground-level machine gun exchanges that FPSes bank on, but by whose tech can make the biggest explosion happen the furthest away. Also it's still the war with the best narrative. Where the writers weren't trying to frame the side with aircraft carriers and predator drones as the plucky underdogs struggling valiantly against an opponent armed mainly with harsh language and angry livestock. Besides, the lesson "don't be like the Nazis, you stupid fucks" is one that certain audiences still haven't properly internalised in this modern age apparently, so fuck it, all is forgiven, World War II shooters."

""Remaster" is becoming rather a foreboding word in my glossary. Not a "re-release": same game with stability tweaks and maybe a nice resolution upgrade to pad out the shelf-life. Nor a "remake": a complete ground-up reinterpretation through the lens of modern sensibilities, polishing up the mechanics and filtering out the gay jokes. Remastering is a cold and unpleasant No Man's Land between the two, wanting the nostalgia cash-in of the latter while only putting in the level of effort required for the former. Except for the QA-department, which in this case was putting in the level of effort required for a permanent vegetative state. All they've really done is put the textures through an HD filter and updated the lighting engine. And when you do that with boxy turn of the millennium era 3D environments you end up with a look that I like to call "Little Timmy got loose on the custom level editor." The retro textures were a match for the janky retro 3D physics and unrefined gameplay design. The characters' faces were indistinct enough your brain was willing to give their intended expression the benefit of the doubt. Now you've got the uncanny valley effect that comes from everyone emoting like Thomas the Tank Engine characters. It's like, I can't appreciate the effort you put into applying lipstick to this pig, Rockstar, because now I'm going to feel weird about eating it. And also the lipstick has somehow given the pig dysentery, because even this easy mode remastering has made it explode with crash bugs and graphical glitches like those masks from Halloween III. I was playing the PS5 version – 'cos you may remember the PC release got yanked back off stores on day one like a disobedient dog off an unguarded picnic – and even that was crashing to home more often than a thirty year old liberal arts major. And after all this they still didn't fix some of the things about the old GTAs that could have used a remaster. Like the way half the voice lines in San Andreas were compressed right the fuck down to fit on a CD and now they all sound like you're listening to them while pouring Captain Crunch down your earholes."

"Oh, you want opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy, do you? Oh boy, do I have opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy. On the one hand it's a snot-squirtingly mediocre game that like so many AAA games of its ilk has the air of something that was stitched together from preexisting templates by about nine different teams who haven’t been talking to each other since a harrowing experience at the company picnic, but it also has a licensed soundtrack that includes "Kickstart My Heart", so on the other hand it's my game of the year, no more questions, please. I can only assume someone at Square must've stolen my high school crush diary, 'cos how else would they know that "Kickstart My Heart" is my one weakness? See, there's absolutely no action a living being can take that doesn't become slightly cooler when it's done to "Kickstart My Heart". Even fingerpainting with Grandma takes on a sort of air of euphoric defiance."

"The "4" in the name comes from there being 4 playable characters, you see. Which is a bit weird, since Back 4 Blood has 8 playable characters. Yeah, you can only have four playing at a time but if you're into number puns there's a lot you can do with 8. "Running L-8", "Zombies 8 My Face"? Oh wait, not zombies, "infected"! No wait, not "infected", "Ridden"! Ridden? That's a word that just reeks of "we had to come up with a legally distinct alternative," isn't it? No one in reality would call them "The Ridden". What, are we up against a resistance group founded by disgruntled domestic horses? I keep misreading it as "the Riddler" and wondering if civilization has finally been brought down by Batman's most confounding foe."

"Our story begins with Star-Choad and his motley crew – Drax "pro-wrestler named after a bathroom disinfectant" The Destroyer, Rocket "My motion capture animation makes me look like a tiny person in a mascot costume" Raccoon, Gam "I don't really have anything to do in this plot" Ora, and Rocket Raccoon's pot plant – flying through space doing their best Cowboy Bebop impression when their latest money-making scheme goes awry and they get embroiled in a threat against the entire galaxy that they must overcome by finally learning to come together and work as a team, which they do about eight or nine times at a conservative estimate. Because AAA only makes two kinds of single player games these days – open worlds, and this thing. A tortuously drawn out sequence of clunkily separated gameplay modes strung together like a collage on the wall of a primary school classroom. It's got a token combat element relegated strictly to samey enclosed combat arenas, action set pieces possibly involving quick time events or their kissing cousin: the chase sequence where you die instantly if you do anything other than press forwards, and all of that is spaced out with prolonged sequences of walking very slowly through spectacular skyboxes, occasionally squeezing through very narrow passages so the rendering engine can have a quick swig of energy drink before the next spectacular skybox. Throughout these slow bits the characters banter. By the anal fistwork of the Siddhartha Buddha, do they banter! You can't stop 'em! It's like that Spider-Man three panel daily newspaper comic, where Spider-Man has to recap that he's up against Doctor Octopus nineteen times in a single lunch meeting. They bang on about what they're doing, what they just did, what they're about to do... "Ooh, the boss we're about to fight is supposed to be like ninety feet tall with wings like stage curtains and teeth like an overbooked Ku Klux Klan meeting" – Which usually turns out to be true even though it sounded like they were setting up a gag where the boss turns out to be a goat in a hat or something. I feel sorry for the no doubt small legion of poor bastards they had writing all this shit because about 75% of the conversations got cut off by me entering a narrow passage or starting the next set piece because of my infuriating desire to progress in the game at slightly above a slow walking pace."

"Since Halo Infinite takes influence from open world shooters, there is a quite inexhaustible supply of bastards because what else are you gonna do in post-ending fuckabouts mode? I say "takes influence from open worlds" rather than flat out "is an open world". Certainly there's an open world in it. One that showed up late to the final exam for open worlds and had to hastily scribble out an assignment that it turned out was from last year's syllabus. It's like some board of directors heard about this open world thing the kids like and told market research to compile a powerpoint, and they came back with "copy pasted towers and base assaults as far as the eye can see". And besides when it forces you to climb four copy pasted towers spread out around the map before it lets you into the next part, the overall plot doesn't really engage with the open world. Completing the optional base assaults or side activities doesn't give you any significant edge in standard gameplay, since the most powerful pew pew laser guns are always conveniently strewn around every combat and boss arena like mini-fridges in hotel rooms and none of the optional crap you can do makes them pew pew any harder. For you see while Halo is flirting with open worlds, it will never stray from its true love: shiny corridors. Its eye might have briefly been drawn by the open world's sensuous curves but its love for shiny corridors is the kind of unyielding emotional bedrock on which contented marriages are built. So the open world sections are separated by plot missions where you complete inescapable sequences of enclosed arenas connected by shiny corridors now you're done fooling about with your open world hussy. And I feel Halo Infinite should've picked a lane. Why not go full Breath of the Wild? Maybe Ms. Open World can't offer stability, but it might've livened up your dull middle age, Halo. Trying to talk the missus into this undignified polyamory is only going to look bad in divorce court. But with an open world comes a need for traversal mechanics, most Halo vehicles flip over if they drive over anything larger than a chocolate raisin and the terrain is usually about as even as a section of your grandmother's upper thigh served with crinkle cut chips, so to counterbalance all that, Master Chief gets a fucking hookshot. And I fucking love it! It's not as fast or as versatile as, say, the Just Cause hookshot, probably because it has to haul around the dump truck Master Chief is constantly wearing and all the Mars bars secreted in the glove compartment, but there are very few games that wouldn't be improved by a grappling hook. Losing at Civilization wouldn't be so bad if I had the option of a dignified exit. So I was hook-shotting up to vantage points to descend upon enemy bases, hook-shotting into vehicles to hijack them, and outside the open world, hook-shotting my merry way down shiny corridors to avoid wearing out Master Chief's plimsolls. But for some reason the game seems to have mistaken this core traversal mechanic for a gimmicky gadget. You have to unequip the grappling hook to use deployable cover, dodge thrusters or see enemies through Walls-o-Vision. So guess what three things I never fucking used."

"Hey, kids! Are you trying to write a comedy game but are worried you don't have the chops? Well, worry no more! You don't. But you can fake it 'til you make it with the patented Borderlands method! A simple three-step process that will turn any dry functional dialogue line into gut-busting hilarity. Step one: Say the thing. Step two: Keep talking like you're a socially inept party-goer who's just had his first line of coke. Step three: Transition into some kind of embarrassed tangent to reflect a level of self-awareness otherwise largely absent from the work. Let's see it in action! "Go through that door" becomes "Go through that door, because there's probably treasure on the other side, and by 'treasure' I mean 'more hideous violence against strangers' which is treasure to me. My doctor says I should get out more." Now was that funny or what? No, it wasn't, not in the least. But it does have a sort of comedy vibe about it and maybe that's all you need. You know, it's comedy in the sense that Owen Wilson is an actor. Obviously I'm being facetious here, there's a lot more to Borderlands specific brand of humour than just characters who talk too much. Sometimes they do it in a silly voice as well. And some of them shout a lot."

"There's nothing particularly wrong with Kena: Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, which is probably why the couple of things I do find irksome stand out all the stronger like choking hazards in my morning porridge. And the biggest, most notable fishhook in the oatmeal for me – and I stress this might just be a me thing – is the character design. They've gone for a Disney/Pixar inspired look so everyone's got that Elsa from Frozen face, with the manipulative doe-eyes so gigantic that if you intend to get lost in them you should probably pack at least twelve days' worth of provisions, and the chubby cheeks and tiny noses and slightly unsettlingly realistic hair and constant lopsided condescending expression like they're expecting the photo for the movie poster to be taken at any moment and the general look like they've just been through Jeff Goldblum's wonky teleporter with a gerbil, who in turn had just gone through Jeff Goldblum's wonky teleporter with a balloon animal. This is an art style that suits goofy family musicals about friendship, not the humourless po-faced psychopomp shit going on here. You look at their feet and slowly track upwards and your brain goes "Normal proportions, normal proportions, normal proportions, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THE GERBIL GOT INTO THE HELIUM CUPBOARD!""

"Colt discovers that the only way to kill the loop is to assassinate the eight superpowered nerds who set it up. None of whom are particularly hard to kill, but the snag is, you have to kill them all in a single loop, and they're deliberately avoiding each other, so your quest is to repeat the day until you've figured out the precise sequence of actions that will result in all of them karking it, since they don't remember things from loop to loop and will always keep the same schedule. And that's glaring plot hole number two, because why would these party nerds want to set up a time loop that resets their own memories every loop?! Surely from their perspective it would just be a normal day? One that ends with a grizzled mercenary type decanting their brain matter across the fucking Twister mat?"

"Well, hijack my helicopters, I can't believe there’s been six Far Cry games already! Surely the concept of liberating an open world sandbox from a charismatic fuckface by clearing out base after base with a silenced sniper rifle and occasionally having to shake a mountain lion off your todger is still as fresh and exciting as a dissipating fart in a locked sauna. So what original new setting is the premise being airdropped into now, Ubisoft? Liberating a chain of remote Scottish islands from charismatic football hooligans? Liberating an antarctic research station from a charismatic penguin? "No! This time you're liberating... a tropical island!" Erm. You mean like in Far Cry 3? And Far Cry 1? "No, of course not. You're in the Caribbean for a start. That's slightly more equatorial than the last two tropical islands. Probably. And anyway, this time you're liberating the tropical island from a charismatic totalitarian dictator." Like the one in Far Cry 4? "Look, if you like freshness so much, why don't you piss off to your local Whole Foods and stick your head under the intermittent broccoli misting device?!""

"You know what, fine; maybe time loop games can be a genre. They're a nice neat way to formalize the standard save/load function within the context of the plot and they let us live the fantasy of not having to advance beyond the present day and watch our civilization's gradual transformation into a gigantic consumer electronics landfill. But they can't officially be a genre without a proper exemplar. What Doom is to Doom clones, Dark Souls to Soulslikes, the bitter polyamory of Metroid and Vania. Yeah, I know there's been half a dozen time loop indie games, but there're so many indie games competing for attention none of them have a high enough profile, it's like trying to see magic eye pictures in television static."

"...While the look and feel of Psychonauts hasn't changed much, one significant difference is that the people creating it have aged about twenty fucking years, and Crikey Seamus O'Testicles does that come across at times. Where the first game focussed on a group of kids Raz's age and their children’s problems like bullying and having to go to the psychotic dentist, Raz's fellow interns are all disaffected teenage Extreme Ghostbusters rejects and the plot isn't even about them - much. They just sort of pop up as a convenient peer group whenever Raz needs someone to get embarrassed in front of; it's almost like they're teenagers in a game being written by people who don't really identify with young people anymore. Which might also explain why the plot eventually focusses squarely on the original founders of the Psychonauts, and Raz having to fix their doddery, old, Farrah Fawcett-liking brains so they can help him defeat their one-time nemesis, so from the halfway point of the plot we suddenly have to stop giving a toss about any established characters and exclusively reserve our tosses for the backstories and inner worlds of these hitherto unexplored vintage scrotes. It's like if most of the second half of The Last Crusade was devoted to a flashback about Indiana Jones' dad. Yes, I'm sure Indiana Jones' dad had a jolly interesting and storied life, but I'm kinda here to watch Indiana Jones biff Nazis and snog hotties, and the closest his dad gets to snogging hotties is adding tabasco to his Sunday brunch Bloody Mary."

"The premise is: you are Colt Vahn, grizzled mercenary type ('cos you can't exactly get a job at the DMV with a name like that) who wakes up with no memories on an island full of good-time Charlies who have deliberately locked themselves in a one day Time Loop so they can party forever and never have to deal with the ever-downsliding outside world, and Colt wants to escape from this situation, which is the first glaring plot hole for me. Fucking hell, airdrop in two crates of hard cider and a Real doll and show me where to sign, guys!"

"On the fictional tropical probably slightly more equatorial island of Yara, a charismatic totalitarian dictator – with the emphasis on dick – is oppressing the people, and you are a generic ex-military type with ties to the resistance and a mysterious tendency to go on violent rampages as favours for people you've just met. You're planning to get on a refugee boat and escape to America, where you will happily live out your days getting blamed for all the nation's problems by chronically obese people in motorized wheelchairs, but moot point because you're going to escape about as surely as the annoying fly in my kitchen when I'm holding the back door wide fucking open, so of course your boat gets shot up and all your friends die and you wash up on the beach. Interestingly though, this doesn't change your motive. You only sign up with the rebels so they'll give you another, less shot up boat to escape to Disneyworld in. Which they do, also interestingly, at the end of the first chapter. Wishing you the best of luck with your Burger King application. So I'm looking at this boat thinking "Hang on, this smacks of that 'joke ending' thing the last couple of Far Crys have done where you can make your character flat out not start the game and piss off home instead." And I was buggered if I was gonna play the whole first chapter again, so I just meekly went back to the rebels and magically became a die hard dedicated revolutionary because the premise demanded it. This annoyed me because in previous games – well, mainly just 3 – I enjoyed the way the main character and his motives developed organically over the course of the plot, but this feels like they're asking me to do all the work. What, do I just invent my own reason for why my dude abandons his escape plan and joins the rebels? Fine. I'm also going to invent that he secretly draws Gummi Bears porn and has a model 19th century sailboat instead of a cock. Whee, this is fun."

"The Monstrums shape the overall plot in that each chapter, Adol gets to know one of them, add them to his adventuring party, and discover their civilian identity, and it never ceases to be hilarious that the game keeps presenting it like we're meant to be surprised, because the Monstrum disguise basically consists of a change of hairdo. Which might make some sense in Anime World, where there are ninety thousand hairdos and three faces for everyone to share, but come the fuck on! Oh, the sassy, matronly party member with big tits is secretly the only other sassy, matronly character with big tits? Next, you'll be telling me that Prince Adam knows more than he's saying about this "He-Man" fella."

"Ys has gradually embraced the various innovations of the action RPG genre at its own leisurely pace, and has recently discovered that open-world sandboxes are a thing, with Monstrum Nox giving you full-on gliding, hookshotting, and wall-running super powers to let you leap gaily about a fantasy city like a flea on an extremely passive St. Bernard. A city of nondescript buildings, all decked out in repeating gray-brown brickwork like the default texture in the Duke Nukem 3D level editor, but bless 'em anyway; they're trying so hard."

"I'm confused, Suda51. I was under the impression there were no more heroes three games ago. Then you had a desperate struggle trying to find a few to carry the sequel the way one roots around in a stubborn nostril for the last scraps of tasty bogey before anyone notices, then the series went quiet for so long and I feel like I'd finally come to terms with there being no more heroes, only for you to find a few more lying around for another sequel. Were there ever no more heroes, Suda51? Final Fantasy never fucking ends, Mega Man is blatantly not old enough to shave - I don't know who to trust anymore."

"The point is, you know it's a slim pickings kind of release week when I seriously give a Mario Golf game a chance, but I figured, "Hey! I just came off slightly enjoying the sniping gameplay in that Sniper: Roast Waterfowl with Carrots 2 game, and what's golf gameplay if not sniping gameplay without the body count?" And so, I set out to escape from worrying about rising income inequality by pretending to be an internationally famous public figure enjoying a sport exclusively played by rich cunts... or not. And that was the first troubling sign: when I started the main single-player campaign, and you don't get to play as Mario. The named characters are only for the multiplayer and challenge modes, I'm afraid; the peasants have to play the campaign as a custom Mii, because of course, when I play something called "Mario Golf", I want to spend the whole time playing as Richard Dean Anderson or Jeffrey Dahmer. Mario, if you can slam your name over the top of this title like an artificially enlarged penis across an unsuspecting forehead, you can damn well stop scoffing mushroom tortellini in the clubhouse and put some bloody work in!"

"So you have to snipe crazy long distances calculating wind drift and bullet drop-off, so it's actually rewarding when you score a headshot and it's like watching slow motion footage of a dog overturning their food bowl. But this is a modern stealth game and so as always the spectre of Cockup Cascade hangs overhead like a socially inept zeppelin. If you miss your target and set off an alert then just fucking reload, because if you couldn't cottage cheese their noggin while they were standing around daydreaming about pies then you definitely won't do it while they're sprinting to the car. And when alerted, all the enemy bodyguards instantly know your position 'cos I guess they're all experts in trigonometry, or maybe my mum made me carve my name and address into all my bullets, and they start firing back. And, mystifyingly, can hit you. From a thousand metres! Makes me wonder why I blew all my money on the sniper rifle equivalent of a Porsche 911 if a bunch of rusty AKs that a rogue nation picked up at the CIA's last rummage sale can achieve the same result!"

"Ys: Molesting Nonce is the latest in the courageously persistent and long-running Ys series of mid-budget Japanese action RPGs that's been about three steps behind the rest of the industry its whole life. But while the games have never exactly lit up gaming horizons like a napalm strike in nipple tassels, I tend to find them fucking adorable, like a little toddler coming downstairs at an adult party going, "I'm a gwown-up!", wearing Daddy's best jacket and waving Mummy's favorite clitoral stimulator."

"Ah, Psychonauts, what a great game that was... I hope your fingers are still smarting from the last time I had to bring that across. Sure, the platforming physics were a bit jank and all the characters looked like their concept art had been scanned in by someone with Parkinson's disease, but it was funny and well written and weird because it was a Tim Schafer game from that wonderful golden age of the PS2 era when games could be weird and culty - I said "CULTY"! - because they weren't expected to make enough money to pay for the CEO's moon expedition. Unfortunately they were still expected to make some amount of money and that's where Psychonauts 1 fell short on initial release, and why I had to start breaking fingers."

"Oh boy, another entry for the hall of "thinly disguised remakes of games made by creators who don't have the rights to the originals anymore." And yes, it was a lot of work fitting all that on the plaque by the door. This time it's Turtle Rock, the original creators of zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, bringing out their new zombie shooter, Back 4 Blood. Boy, that disguise is thin even by the usual standards, isn't it? That's like a uniformed policeman trying to go undercover by putting his hat on backwards."

"In the prologue of Final Fantasy 1, the four Light Warriors travel to a nearby castle to rescue the kidnapped Princess Sara from the corrupted knight Garland. And Stranger on Top of Paradise seems to be doing pretty much the same thing until you defeat Garland at the end of the first dungeon, at which point Garland transforms into a girl wearing nothing but a basketball jersey who explains that she was also on a quest to defeat Chaos but decided Chaos didn't exist, and so prayed to Chaos to become Chaos and get defeated, but now she's been defeated so she's failed somehow. And that specifically was the first moment that made me wonder what the fuck this game was drivelling on about, by no means the last. She joins the party and it turns out her name's "Neon". Aha, I said. Jack, Ash, Jed and Neon, is this a clever riff on how the original game would only allow you to enter names a maximum of four letters long? "Possibly. Anyway, here's your fifth party member, Sophia." Well fuck you, game."

"Now, Resident Evil has had its ups and downs, in my view: mainly downs, and specifically two ups - Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7 - and Vi-li-li-li-lage is best summarized as what you'd get at the exact midpoint between those two games. So, from 7, we have the first-person gameplay that, again, feels like we're piloting a refrigerator box balanced on a Roomba, as well as essentially the same plot beat-for-beat: Ethan gets toyed with by family of psychos, kills them one-by-one, discovers something near the end that ties it to the overarching Resident Evil story, the way one ties the leash of a perfectly satisfactory dog to the front of a combine harvester. The only difference is the acreage. And from Resident Evil 4, we take the gothic B-movie vibe, inventory system, quirky merchant character and associated weapon upgrade mechanics, and basically the whole setting: isolated village in open-quotes "Europe". "Europe", eh? So somewhere between Manchester and Istanbul, then?"

"The premise is, a married couple whose relationship is bottoming out so hard it's getting carpet burns inform their friendless, presumably homeschooled and probably on the spectrum daughter that they're getting divorced. Said daughter proceeds to cry on some dolls she made of her parents for Christ knows what reason and the parents' souls get magically transferred into the dolls. Blimey! Lucky she didn't cry into some bog roll or the sandwich she was eating; that would've been a bit Kafkaesque. The parents must then work together to find a way back to normal by navigating abstract puzzle platforming fantasy worlds based on aspects of their family home, which appears to have been about the size of Windsor fucking Castle. Harangued from start to finish by an omnipotent self-help book with a slightly racist accent whom you and the protagonists will swiftly want to murder. In fact, I'd have given the game's story more points if it had ended with the family finally coming together over a cheerful backyard book burning."

""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."

"Outriders blurb file says a couple of interesting things: firstly, that it can be completely enjoyed in single-player, which is always a wonderful excuse to test that claim. Does this mean you have an offline mode, Outriders? "Oho ho ho ho! It's good that we can still have fun, Yahtzee!" Yes, might as well admit now that this will only be a review of the first four or five hours of Outriders, 'cos most of the limited time I had to play it in, the servers stayed on about as reliably as an oversized sweater on a mischievous dog. I know we're all fucking jaded to games being always online these days, but maybe, as a favor to me, you could all go back to not being jaded just for a little bit? Burn down a few shrines to capitalism? How about one shrine to capitalism? And you don't even have to burn it; we can just piss in the letterbox."

"Blimey, I thought video games were supposed to be violent! I've been doing so little killing lately I'm becoming dangerously well-adjusted. Just look at my last few reviews: idle games, management games, farming sims, last night a stray cat came into my front garden and I didn't stomp it to death. High time for some good old fashioned mindless violence. And who better to provide it than People Can Fly, the developers behind Painkiller, old-school boomer shooter from before old-school boomer shooters were wallpapering the fucking rumpus room, and more recently of Bulletstorm, quirky tongue-in-cheek spectacle shooter that's like Gears of War trying desperately to loosen up at the office Christmas party. I can certainly trust them to provide a murder simulator that’s at least interesting to talk about and not another bloody multiplayer-focussed looter shooter with endless copy pasted bullet sponge baddies and a cover art depicting some smug people walking slowly towards the camera. Isn’t that right, People Can Fly? Yeah, I know Outriders is all of the things I just said! I was doing a little funny, wipe that puppy dog look off your face."