Zero Punctuation

"I think I see how the Nintendo flowchart works. Question 1: Are you an entirely original property? If yes, sod off. Question Two: Has your franchise gone unacknowledged for a long time? Or are you Pokémon? If yes, welcome aboard the uncomfortably sharp edges of the good ship 3DS! Hope your audience likes having sore palms! (Masturbation joke in there somewhere!)"

"The Medal of Honor series has been going on since 1999, meaning that it has officially been going on longer than the actual second World War did. And if you put together all the games, films, and TV shows that have depicted it, the Normandy landings alone probably lasted somewhere within the region of six months. So why does the US have such a fascination about a time that everyone else would rather just forget about and move on? Well, probably because that was the last war in which they did any good, when they had a clear win over an unambiguously evil villain who posed a genuine threat -- rather than any of these wishy-washy recent wars where they just run in, stomp all over a developing nation, and run out again declaring victory around the time the population have to start eating their own dead."

"As evil as the real Nazis were, it seems they weren't evil enough for the developers, and so the accuracy's a little bit skewed against them. And then it's skewed a little bit more. And then it's put in a thumbscrew until it resembles a slinky. I'm no historian, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't an elite branch of stormtroopers who wore gas masks, wielded miniguns, and could take three sniper bullets to the forehead before they died. And I'm also pretty sure the Nazis didn't have a gigantic armored concrete tower that can only be described as a doom fortress."

"A world without Nintendo would be a far bleaker one than this, and yet there's something about them I find incredibly infuriating. They've got roughly enough money to buy Earth and all the heavens, and a fanbase so devoted and rabid that they could release a game about a sewage-encrusted rapist and it would still sell like billy-oh. And while they sit in this position that many game developers worldwide with slews of new and interesting game concepts would happily hack off their wedding tackle to occupy, all they do is constantly remake the same games! Okay, so sometimes you've got an ocarina, and sometimes you're in a boat, and sometimes you're a werewolf having repulsive erotica drawn about you by people on DeviantArt; but pick any one of the ninety billion Zelda games there have been so far and odds are good you'll always be the same bloody guy saving the same bloody girl with the same bloody boomerang."

"For the most part the movement feels natural, and there's something about being able to scribble all over my maps that I found very therapeutic. The reverse effect is offered, however, by the blatant shoe-horning of the DS's other exotic functions into gameplay, such as when you have to yell at the top your voice into the microphone. Doing such a thing while out and about (which, I remind you, is what handhelds are for) would probably cause your own major organs to physically tear themselves from your body to escape humiliation."

"The game is just littered with bad design choices, like Worthy Farm after the Glastonbury festival. Just as an example, in the second level I was faced by a number of wartime pillboxes that diced the entire team to festive confetti the moment they came within fifty yards. Eventually one of those helpful hints that games flash up when they feel sorry for you for being so obviously retarded appeared and told me that one of the girls would run up behind the pillbox and drop a grenade in it if I pressed a certain button while in a certain position. Excuuuuuuse me, Jericho, for not possessing the kind of clairvoyant space brain necessary to instinctively know something that has never until this point been mentioned and indeed will never be used again!"

"Maybe some of this could be forgiven if the seven main characters weren't all completely unlikeable. There's so much black leather on display, it's like someone took the goth clique from a small town high school, pinned them down in front of a 24-hour Rambo marathon, then smacked them brutally around the head with a baseball bat made out of frozen stupid."

"Every now and again, F.E.A.R. remembers that it wants to be a horror game, too, and makes the lights flicker or throws down a random bloodstain like there's someone with the world's most copious nosebleed about fifty yards ahead of you. But I have to admit, when the game does descend into sheer balls-to-the-wall mindfuckery for a few minutes, it's the only time the experience really comes alive for me. I'm running down a corridor when the lights come down and then I'm in another different corridor, only now there's a blurry filter on my vision and I can hear what sounds like a moose being strangled in a tin bath. Awesome! I open a door and it vanishes into nothing and now there's a door on the ceiling. Sweet! There's a corpse at the end of the hall but as I get closer it jumps up and yells at me like everything's my fault. Finally I'm having a good time! Then everything simmers down and you return to boring predictable normality, wishing you were back in the nightmare."

"I guess if you're a huge fan of F.E.A.R., and I mean huge, like, if you play it twice a day and you have Jason Hall's face stenciled onto your toilet seat, and if you've got a love of repetitive tactical combat that borders on the fetishistic, and if you really badly need to know what happens next to the faceless characterless protagonist of the ongoing storyline, then I heartily recommend Perseus Mandate. Maybe you can play it while you hang around the labyrinth with Theseus, because you're obviously a nonexistent creature of myth."

"Another good way to blow your cover is to randomly stab innocent civilians, and trust me when I say that forcing yourself not to do so is a lot harder than it sounds. Those wacky, fun-loving lepers have this hilarious tendency to shove you with all their retard strength and send you flying ye olde mosh-pit style, which I feel makes me well within my rights to lamp them one; but then everyone turns against you because apparently it's not as funny when you do it. And then there are the beggar women who will latch on to you like a lamprey eel and constantly run in front of you whining for coins in a manner scientifically designed to get on my tits. Then I give them a gentle, discouraging knuckle sandwich, and they run off yelling like I'm the asshole. It hits particularly close to home for me, because this is pretty much how all my relationships turn out."

"First you have to walk all the way down from your home base at the top of a fucking mountain at the start of every fucking mission. Then you have to make your way through the target city (pausing occasionally to nut the lepers Glaswegian-style). Then you're forced to do a few errands around the place which are basically the same three side quests over and over again. And when you do finally get to stab someone up, it's all bookended by long wordy unskipable cutscenes. Even after the stabbing, you have to sit through a prolonged conversation with the victim. You'd think having a spike shoved in to the throat would impede one's ability to soliloquize, but you just can't shut these twatmouths up!"

"Don't believe the lie of Guitar Hero Three. It's actually the fourth title in the series, the third being Rock the '80s, which I haven't played, but the day I fork out seventy bucks for an expansion pack is the day I swallow razor wire, pull the end out of my ass, and floss myself to death."

"Then I got to the last venue and the last group of songs on hard mode and came to a screeching halt because they are fucking impossible. NO. STOP. Do not reach for your e-mail client; I do not want to hear about how you five-starred "Blood Rain" on Expert, because if you did, you are a fucking freak, a freak with either three arms or a trained pet spider working the buttons for you!"

"People often say to me, "Yahtzee, you callipygian superman: How can you, a game writer yourself, complain about a game having too much dialogue?" I would reply, "For the same reason that a hairdresser is entitled to complain when someone fills their car with shampoo.""

"Mass Effect is like an incontinent who just drank six bottles of Mountain Dew, so full to bursting with dialogue that it leaks out at every turn. Characters will spout their life stories at the slightest provocation like you've got a documentary crew with you. A mere glance at a computer screen or starship component will dump an entire Reader's Digest into your journal. To the game's credit, you're never actually required to read any of this, but not doing so leaves you the strange feeling that the game somehow resents me for it."

"But don't be fooled; this is your standard fill-in-the-blanks framework. Mario's hateful emotionally retarded ball-and-chain has been kidnapped again, but before you can do the rescue you have to collect a whole bunch of stars - and it is always stars for some utterly arbitrary reason. And in the end, Mario succeeds in rescuing the needy bitch who once again fails to put out, although frankly I've given up expecting any kind of actual human intelligent reaction from that clueless bint."

"Initially, Mario Galaxy gets an easy ride because it has to be inevitably compared to Mario Sunshine, the last "proper" Mario game (disregarding all that spin-off bullshit). And you could transplant the head of Joseph Goebbels on to the body of a praying mantis and it would still compare favorably to Mario Sunshine."

"...You have one second to name any game in which weapon degradation has been a good idea. Time's up. That's what I thought. There's something very wrong about a katana that shatters after five or six hits, one that ostensibly isn't made out of glass or chocolate."

"To me, the Silent Hill series is over. And if Silent Hill 5 convinces me otherwise, then I will remove three of my own vertebrae, curl my spine back, and eat my own arse."

"Of course, with amazing graphics comes the inhumane treatment of processors. Crysis is apparently designed for some kind of hypothetical future computer from space. I played it on a brand new gaming PC resembling the monolith from 2001, constructed from magical obsidian by the proud dwarves of Middle Earth. And it still chugged when things got busy."

"...There is one section towards the end where you're forced to pilot a futuristic helicopter jobbie and... well, imagine that you'd just woken from a 20-year-coma, celebrated the occasion by drinking six bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, then were called upon to pilot a light aircraft bearing a cargo of hippopotami. That's what controlling this section is like. And they expect you to enter dogfights in this thing. That's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube with your elbows."

"What quickly becomes obvious is that Witcher is very much a PC-exclusive game, which are typically designed to be as complex and unintuitive as possible so that those dirty console-playing peasants don't ruin it for the glorious PC-gaming master race. The first warning sign is that the manual is thick enough to beat goats to death with, and then once you get into the game the interface is just a few steps shy of Microsoft Access in terms of friendliness. There's your inventory screen, your character screen, your alchemy screen, your glossary, your quests, your map, you have to switch between combat mode and stand-around-picking-your-nose-while-enemies-carve-you-like-turducken mode. And once you're in combat mode, do you fight in strong, fast, or group style? And if you'll be wanting to mix potions, then I hope you've gone through the necessary eight week correspondence course. If disliking this sort of shit makes me stupid, then call me "Retard McSpackypants". But I'd rather be stupid and having fun than bored out of my huge genius mind."

"As I progressed through the starting village a set of red flags came up that brought me to a sinister realization. One-click combat? Endless drudging from place to place? Quests involving killing X amount of monster Y for lazy stationary cockhead Z? This is a mumorpuger! A single-player mumorpuger with no Alliance dipshits teabagging your corpse, but a mumopurger nonetheless."

"Part of Resident Evils charm is that it still takes itself seriously, despite having the most atrociously written story and dialogue of any product of human endeavor since Hulk Hogan took one too many clotheslines to the head and decided he could act."

"It's gratifying to see Capcom continue their proud tradition of unintentionally hilarious dialogue. "I have a bad feeling about this," announces Jill Valentine after having been repeatedly savaged by the undead, demonstrating her vital intuitive ability to sense danger about an hour after it has commenced. "Where did all these webs come from?" wonders Chris Redfield aloud whilst staring directly at a giant spider. And then there's the recurring series baddie and backstabbing enthusiast Albert Wesker, whose every line of dialog is solid gold because he sounds like Lloyd Grossman with throat cancer."

"[with disdainful sarcasm throughout] Never let it be said that I'm an impressionable twenty-something-gaming-media prick. If I reviewed every bloody game people told me to I wouldn't even have the free time to mainline the heroin necessary to keep me from putting a gun between my teeth; so for the most part I let requests go fuck themselves. The only time I review a game from recommendation is when it is simultaneously recommended by about four thousand bleating lambs (which was the case with Call of Duty 4). This game came recommended more highly than a triple- cunted hooker and brace yourself for a shock because it deserves the praise it gets. ...Mostly. I was surprised because I have this presumption about "serieses" like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor being samey shooters with futile pretensions to realism time-locked Bill-Murray-style somewhere between 1941 and 1945, endlessly repeating America's sole moment of glory in living memory by punching out an endless stream of cackling Nazis with one hand and scoffing apple pie with the other. Call of Duty 4, conversely,is set in the present day which inevitably means that the enemies will either be Arab insurgents, Russians, or both, and the plot will involve the theft of nuclear weapons. And while this turns out to be right on the money it's executed in a very compelling way. The plot deals with a conflict in a Middle East country that tactfully goes unnamed (undoubtedly because the state of that region fluctuates so much that it could be a water slide park by the time time this comes out), and your perspective shifts twitchly between a number of different participants in the conflict, allowing you to experience various different environments and combat styles. The U.S. Marines posted in "Unspecifiedistan" whoop their way into open warfare with their guns balanced on the ends of their massive erections while the stealth-based British SAS scurry around in the bushes like cockney weasels. These changes in perspective in gameplay ensure that boredom is impossible. The controls are tight and intuitive enough to be effective however you have to apply them and to balance the unentertaining seriousness of this sentence: "Boingo boingo whoopsy knickers." What I like about Call of Duty 4 is that there's less of the smarmy, black-and-white "My Country 'Tis of Thee" jingoism that turns me off most war games. While the U.S. Marines act with short-sighted self-righteousness convinced that they're the heroes in their own personal war movie (you know, just like in real life), their attitude eventually leads to them screwing the pooch so hard that the pooch has to lock itself in the bathroom for an hour with a tube of soothing cream."

"All you need to know is this. There are two kinds of games: games that I stop playing because I've been bored or frustrated into a state approaching rigor mortis, and games that I stop playing because I've just noticed I should have had dinner two hours ago. And Call of Duty 4 is in the latter category. It's a truly shining example of the genre that sucked me in like - well, like a triple-cunted hooker. And now since this review has left me with a lot of surplus bile, let me close by requesting that if any more of you would like to tell me how to do my job, then please get hurled out of a plane and land anus-first on the spire of Winchester Cathedral!"

"It's an idea that many people seem to latch on to that, if we were created by some kind of god, then obviously he did it because he loves us so huggy-muggy-much. Never are the holes in this theory more obvious than while playing god games: because it seems that when you place most people in the position of a god and give them responsibility over many tiny lesser beings, then their attitude towards them is usually less about beloved children and more about target practice."

"I set out to make a brutal authoritarian dictatorship because it makes my balls feel big. So all my workplaces were things like Thought Police Headquarters, and all the venues were propaganda theatres, and most of the gormless fuckers were still content or elated. Christ, this must be how Nazi Germany started!"

"All games are about realizing a fantasy, whether it be the fantasy of being a courageous war hero, or the fantasy of being a future space adventurer, or, in the case of some Japanese games, the fantasy of possessing eight prehensile dicks."

"Okay, maybe I'm making too much of a big deal of this, but I'm not kidding when I say that every single minority on Earth is represented in the ranks of Uncharted's bad guys: a stream of assorted blacks; Asians; and Latinos brought together by their mutual desire to kill whitey. This is with the exception of the very British main villain, but he gets arbitrarily killed off about ten minutes before the end in favour of a more ethnic final boss. Sorry to spoil that for you, but I assumed you could predict a plot point like "the bad guy dies.""

"You play Nathan "Indiana Jones as written by Joss Whedon" Drake as he scavenger-hunts for the inevitable lost golden treasure in the standard exotic locales while being aided by the troublesome, initially hostile blonde love interest, and the elderly mentor-type figure who might as well wear a T-shirt saying, "I will die or turn evil.""

"I'm being overly mean. The gameplay is quite adequate. Of course it is; it's been blanketly ripped off. Not a single element of it hasn't been tried and tested in at least three popular previous games. Even the story has been nicked bodily from at least five adventure movies that I can think of -- seven if you let me count all the Indiana Jones films."

"...It would be fair to say there are certain popular trends in anime that tend to set off my cynicism alert. I would list them but, thanks to Capcom, I don't have to - now I can just point to Devil May Cry 4 and say, "Pretty much that." Now don't get me wrong, I'm not some spectacle-adjusting model railroad enthusiast who cannot function without absolute realism at all times. Leaping eight times your own height, swinging swords the size of small cars around, and deflecting bullets with other bullets are all fine with me as long as it's entertaining. I'll even accept that getting a seven-foot katana jammed through your torso is totally survivable, if a bit homoerotic. A game starts widdling on my chips, however, when it populates itself with smug self-satisfied dick-spurts and starts neglecting gameplay because it's too busy letting them swagger invincibly about until I want to flatten their androgynous faces with a kayak paddle!"

"But the lone shiny gold star I stick on for the combat is almost immediately torn off for some truly obnoxious level design. Jumping puzzles? Fine. Timed jumping puzzles? Fair enough. Timed jumping puzzles with fixed cameras? Now we've dropped into the ocean of shittiness. But then they hit us with a timed jumping puzzle with a fixed camera where enemies spawn in every time you fail. And now the ocean of shittiness has closed in over our heads with no rescue boat in sight."

"People often ask me, "Yahtzee, you herculean exemplar: You have so much to say about what makes a bad game, but what is your measure of a good game?" Well, actually, no one's ever asked me that. Mostly they ask retarded questions like when am I going to review 20-year-old Nintendo games like everyone and their dog. But it's the kind of question I'd like to be asked, so I'm going to answer it. One of my measures of a good game is one that teaches me something. Burnout Paradise, for example, teaches me that if Princess Diana honestly couldn't survive a trivial little crash like that, then the girl must have been made out of wafers."

"(discussing the game's open world:) My point is, that the reason why racing games traditionally feature closed circuit tracks is that the fun in a street racing game comes from driving really fast and breaking things. That's a winning formula. Then you throw map reading skills into it and it's the metaphorical shot of Baileys, overpowering all the other flavors."

"I'm actually rather glad that a really, unequivocally bad FPS has been shat out in front of me because there are a lot of problems with first-person shooters these days and Turok plays like an itemized list of them. So rather than do what I usually do (i.e. crucify the game with big blunt rusty nails shaped like penises), let's instead use Turok as an example to go through a few of the mistakes first-person shooters keep persistently making. Perhaps I could persuade developers to stop making them. Then maybe I can persuade the tide to turn back and ride a winged marshmallow to the sherbet kingdom."

"When you consider that the original Turok games were about a time-traveling red Indian, this new installment has had to really work hard to rip off Aliens. They had to lock the established setting and storyline in a wardrobe and throw it off a cliff. They've approached ripping off Aliens with the same determination that most developers would approach making a game that's actually good. And that's sort of admirable, I guess, in a retarded kind of way."

"Most of these problems with modern FPSes can be explained with four words: "Let's be like Halo." But I remember a time when FPSes didn't all march in step behind that inexplicably popular festival of mediocrity, when FPSes weren't all about soldiers or space marines, when they could be about undead cowboys, or backwoods pig-rapists, or wise-cracking misogynistic wankers. I remember a time when FPSes had a sense of humor about themselves and could have colours other than gunmetal gray and dogshit brown. I remember titles like Exhumed and Chasm and Witchhaven II — though on reflection, I'd rather forget about them."

"Long ago in the mists of time, when main characters didn't need to have biceps bigger then their faces and when bump mapping was just something cartographers did to their wives, there lived adventure games. This shy, thoughtful tribe was known for its great story telling tradition and ruled the great PC gaming plains for many years before mysteriously dying out around the onset of the Quake era. Some blame the aggressive expansion of neighboring first-person shooter tribes; but personally I think it's more to do with the fact that most of them were shit."

"We're quickly and frequently reminded that the military is shit and so is everyone in it, while mercenaries are unstoppable immortal badasses who make tons more money and like it rough from men with hairy bums — NO! Bad Yahtzee! I meant to say: and you get to wear funky skull masks like it's Halloween every day, except that it's you giving out the candy, and the candy is bullets."

"Having grown tired of my AI partner's insect-filled brain, I tried playing co-op split-screen with a friend. In one shootout sequence, there was an elevated hold-out position that I gave him a boostie up to as part of a cunning higher ground strategy. But since my friend had trouble understanding that enemy bullets were something to be avoided, he was taken down. When this happens, you basically can't move or get up until your partner comes over to stick a healing foot up your arse. But since there was now no one to give me a boostie up to where he was, all I could do was hop impotently up and down like a skull-faced bunny until his bad case of idiocy proved terminal."

"It's repetitive and broken and nothing you haven't seen before. If you can play Gears of War with one hand and Splinter Cell with the other, then you don't need to play Army of Two. And make sure you film it because that's a pretty impressive talent you have there."

"[Suda 51's] last game was killer7, and let's get one thing straight: I fucking loved killer7! There we were, living our gray, predictable lives, playing our gray, predictable games when along came killer7 in a technicolour dream coat, leaving slightly perplexed joy in the wake of its huge motorbike, showing exactly what could be done when you flaunt [sic] all established convention and just start exploring what can really be done with gaming as an art form. I still don't know how to classify it: puzzle, action/adventure, rail shooter... well, whatever it was, it was a preciously unique amusing cartoon whale in an ocean of second-hand bong water. Now we have No More Heroes, a Grand Theft Auto clone. "Shine on you crazy diamond," said Yahtzee, his voice thick like sarcastic Marmite."

"So, I'll say the same thing about No More Heroes that I say about Killer 7, Earthbound, and Branston pickle: As flawed as it is, get it anyway because you will never experience anything else like it. God knows what would happen if you spread Branston pickle onto No More Heroes, possibly the universe would end. And it would be awesome!"

"There's a final boss sequence in Condemned 1 in which you run through a dark claustrophobic labyrinth with a serial killer in hot pursuit. It's really intense and genuinely terrifying, and part of what makes it so effective is that it takes place in a normal house, exactly like, oh say for example, YOURS! Right down to the psychotic serial killer who lives under your bed and is standing behind you right now but don't look because that'll really piss him off! Condemned 2, by contrast, ends on a stupid sci-fi tower thing resembling something the Combine would throw together if they were all drunk, and a piss-easy final boss fight which you win by shouting at him so loud his brain explodes. I wish I was fucking kidding."

"As I've said, time and again, Nintendo is a company that does altogether too much wanking off of its old franchises. That might be fine while the Wii is riding high, but all it'll take is a few more Virtual Boys and they'll wank the whole company away! Some of it gets really obscure too. Who the fuck is Marth, and why is unlocking him considered a reward? Oh and thanks, Nintendo, for putting in a character from Mother 3, a game you're never going to fucking release outside Japan despite the fact I can fucking guarantee that more people would play it than Mario Kart Eleventy Billion: The Next Generation!"

"But really, reviewing Smash Bros. Brawl is pointless. Chances are you already know if you like it. There's a simple test: When the name "Nintendo Wii" was first revealed, did you ever seriously try to defend it on an Internet forum? If yes, you will enjoy this game whatever its faults, and you might as well start spamming my email address with hatred right now, you miserable, fanboy twat."

"It's true, I didn't like Brawl before I even started playing; but then the same is true of every game, object, animal and human being I encounter these days. Since the Internet is almost diametrically opposed to the notion of quality control, in recent years it's been a lot easier to just assume everything's shit until it can prove itself otherwise. I like to call it the "Guantanamo Bay" approach to reviewing."