Zero Punctuation

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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!""

"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!"

"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?"

"Well, anyway, the war against the Locust, I mean the Lambent, I mean the Swarm, I mean actually I think it's the Locust again now, continues, and is showing no sign of clearing up because this game ends on an unsatisfying cliffhanger. I guess Microsoft are still paying off the death-ray satellite."

"Set after the alien wars depicted in the retro Contras, Contra: Rogue Corps is concerned with a mysterious alien city that rises from the ruins, which is supposed to be full of treasure that we assuredly want, but doesn't seem to be doing anything besides sitting there and having treasure and monsters, which is a classic example of a "non-plot." A depressingly common setting for live-service multiplayer video games: A plot with no active villain, or ticking clock, or clear solution, just an environment with a sense of permanent, non-specific peril that can never change or develop for fear that XxNobChopsxX might stop his grindy, 8-hour quest to make themselves able to grind 1.8% more efficiently."

"Between missions, we go back to home base and have to deal with the "looty" half of "looty-shooty" by laboriously sorting through our latest crop of equips and weapon add-ons that apply completely mystifying upgrades. "+5% defence against generic damage"? What the fuck is "generic" damage? Damage that basically does the job but isn't focused on innovating at this time?"

"The problem is, there's a moment in the game - and it's remarkable how finely I can pinpoint it - where an invisible lever gets thrown and the bottom drops out, and it stops being fun. It's about the point when you meet the pirate lesbian, and the world opens up, and you know we're in trouble when a pirate lesbian marks anything but an upturn in events. The problem is in the numbers; I don't know if they were originally making another fighting game and just got bored, but that might explain the ridiculous number of party members you get. This is some Chrono Cross-level shit; the primest real estate in the world is a teenage girl's noggin, apparently, and Ajna's beating the tenants off with a stick. But the combat isn't very deep, and all that really matters is doing the most damage as fast as you can, so you might as well just find four guys you like and stick with them. And post-pirate lesbian, something goes horribly wrong with the enemy's stats; I went into battle with a small, unassuming frog, bum-bounced them between my four lads for twenty minutes, then in that awkward post-coital cigarette-break while I wait for everyone's bars to refill, I realized that the frog still had nine-tenths of their health bar left. I hit that frog 400 times! In a sane world, they would no longer have more than one dimension, let alone health points! And they couldn't do much damage to me, either, so now I'm just disinterestedly doing my super-combo six times to kill one fucking frog! I feel like Rachmaninoff playing for pocket change in a dive bar, and the crowd won't stop requesting "Free Bird"."

"The Obsidian-brand depth of player choice is here; you can even side with the corporations if you want, but they are both evil and failing horribly, so it's like betting on the Nazis to win World War II even as Magda Goebbels is biting down on her suicide pill."

"[Outer Wilds]'s nice when you're roaming the skies with a song in your heart. It's less nice you're lost in an underground labyrinth trying to find a fucking outpost you found two loops ago, but couldn't finish exploring because you misfired your jetpack, fell, broke both your legs and then the sun exploded. It's a game that can simultaneously be very chilled out and very demoralizing. Like going bankrupt because you blew all your money on BBC nature documentaries."

"...Oh yeah, I've got tons of things to say about Borderlands 3. Wait here, and I'll go get them. *walks off screen followed by the sound of a car pulling away as Borderlands 3 awkwardly stands around in silence*"

"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."

"If I'm serious about VR being good and the way forward for immersive gaming -- and I should stress I do genuinely think that; people tell me they often can't tell if I'm being sarcastic because I have what's medically known as Resting Bitch Voice -- then, like the coronavirus, we'd all better get used to hearing about it."

"But somehow they [the weapons] don't have the same satisfying feel. It's the little things. It's the sound; it's the slides being a bit more finicky. It's the way ammunition doesn't go in to the gun so much as disappear the moment it's vaguely near it: "GUN-TOR ACCEPTS YOUR SACRIFICE! (*om-nom-nom-nom-nom!*) YOU ARE GRANTED A BOON OF SIX MORE DEAD CUNTS!""

"I made sure to leave a like on the small number of games that I felt got into the right spirit of things, offering nice straightforward gameplay loops, occasionally even original ones, and as I looked around at the colourful menus and the careful curation algorithms at work, I found myself thinking "Y'know, it'll be a real shame when this all gets taken over by perverts." These things always are, Media Molecule. The Sonic the Hedgehog fans are the warning sign. Now Sonic fans aren't necessarily perverts, basketball players aren't necessarily tall but it fucking helps. Sooner or later they bring in that one character who's a bat with tits and the furries have got a foot in your door. Remember Second Life? Once a lovely wholesome attempt at a community-created online world of pure imagination, now just zebra dicks and yiff piles as far as the eye can see. The earnest creators will all return or graduate to more efficient systems once the novelty wears off and then all your fancy 3D art tools are so much fantasy penis shaping equipment. What're you gonna do, screen all incoming content for the rest of your fucking life? Smarter and more dedicated people than you have tried to hold back the masturbators, and the masturbators always win, probably because they've got all the stamina."

"Once again the nebulous negative force we’re up against is "the darkness", which has no agenda beyond making all the nice people sad and the local boss monsters bastards, requiring that we help out through therapeutic beating the glowing snot out of them. Look, I know this isn't Tinker Tailor Soldier Cat Rabbit Thing and I shouldn't expect complex plotting from my fantasy animal platformers, but the mythic tone and sweeping soundtrack makes me think that it thinks its story is epic and profound, when it's actually kinda shallow. Drive out the darkness and restore the light? Ooh, good idea, maybe I wouldn't bump into things so much. The game's backed by Microsoft and there's a vibe of corporate committee thinking around it. It reminds me of how Hollywood pumps its most crassly gigantic budgets into movies with no more profound message than "it's bad to murder everyone with explosions" because any more controversial statement would offend the Chinese government."

"Doom Eternal is the sequel to Doom 2016, in which we step back into the chunky, elephantine boots of THE DOOM SLAYER, and the plot picks up where Doom 2016 left off, give or take an explanation for how we escaped from Mars, and where we got a fucking spaceship from, or how demons have conquered most of Planet Earth. Okay, so maybe it doesn't start where Doom 2016 left off, although the "demons invading Earth" bit, we could probably have safely assumed. Ooh, what has humanity learned from the previous disaster? The usual amount: somewhere in the region between "bugger" and "all". How timely. But as for how THE DOOM SLAYER got here, maybe that was explained in the DLC or a comic book somewhere; and incidentally, I do appreciate how it's now canon that THE DOOM SLAYER does actually talk like he did in the Doom comic book: like an abattoir worker on enough coke to floor an elephant seal."

"It's odd to play a Half-Life game where the main character speaks and can tell the people around them to stop being such prannies, but it's still unmistakably Half-Life, with its trademark monsters, linear narrative gameplay, and weird emotional tone. I mean, humanity has essentially been enslaved by the Borg, who systematically subject them to gory, nightmarish body horror, but everyone's really cheerful and yucking it up with their pet headcrabs. Yes, I know humans strive to be upbeat during a crisis, but there's this one very Resident Evil-y chapter in Alyx where we have to sneak around an indestructible monster who's this hideously mutated human who will tear us apart if he finds us and looks to be in immense suffering, and then we're told that their name is Jeff, and everyone talks about him like he's the one asshole in the friend group who keeps hitting on waitresses. "Oh, that Jeff; Jeff sucks." "Hey, I trapped Jeff in a garbage compactor." "Sucks to be Jeff!" Sometimes, Half-Lifes storytelling feels like what happens when an entire game has Asperger syndrome."

"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."

"If you saw the title "Final Fantasy VII Remake", and from the words "Final Fantasy VII" and "Remake" are now expecting a remake of the game Final Fantasy VII, then you might be disappointed; Final Fantasy VII Remake ends at the bit where you leave the first city, or about one-third of the way through the first disc of the original PS1 game, although it takes about forty more hours to get there, 'cos it's padded like an A-cup on School Picture Day. So there's been some contention over whether this is false advertising or a new take on the subject matter with better character exploration. I think a lot of this could've been cleared up if they'd titled the game "Final Fantasy VII Remake: Episode One". But maybe they didn't want to commit; I mean, at the rate they're going, by the time they get to the last episode, it'll probably get pushed back by the heat death of the universe. I hope they are doing more episodes, 'cos the plot, as it stands, is painfully unresolved; the bulk of what we get might as well be re-titled "Cloud Strife vs. The Manic Pixie Dream Girls"."

"I was having fun when I was in the gambling town and Cloud had to dress up as a lady and becomes somehow irresistible to men, despite looking like a frumpy Amish spinster who spent last night sleeping with her head in the feeding trough. But that's a cultural thing; I'm English, and therefore, the funniest things in the world to me are men dressing as ladies and the concept of social mobility."

"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."

"My problem with Shreets of Shrage Shfour is that it's a game designed for confident people; your devastating special moves cost health to use, but you get the health back if you can land the next few hits without getting hit yourself, meaning that you become more effective the more confidence you have in your skills, and I doubt that this is the arena for a breakthrough where several years of therapy and alcohol abuse has fallen short. But I'd replay the level enough times, memorize enough encounters, and dodge enough devastating enemy attacks by move-walking six inches downwards, and I'd eventually struggle through and defeat the boss, whereupon the status screen would usually very grandly award my performance a "D" rank, which is always a buzzkill; it's like I finally collapsed into my tent after a long day of successful Arctic exploration, whereupon one of the huskies trotted over and pissed on my head. And this was only Normal difficulty! Talk about a skill ceiling; this is the Sistine Fucking Chapel!"

"Here's the plot: protagonist of last game gets murdered by group seeking revenge for thing protagonist did in last game; adopted daughter of protagonist goes to group's home base to get double-backsy revenge, which happens to be in a really shitty holiday destination, and no, it didn't escape me that this is the same plot as Silent Hill 3. Now, Joel in the last game was a basically relatable gruff hairy dad learning to love again who made one very questionable decision at the end, but Ellie in Last of Us II seems to be of a mind that the best way to commemorate Gruff Hairy Dad would be to beat his "questionable decision" speed record as many times as possible. And already, I hear the same people who gave me shit about not liking the last game slithering out from behind the fridge to make the same argument: "You're not supposed to like or agree with the characters! It's complex and challenging drama!" Yeah, thanks, Professor; I got we weren't supposed to be entirely on Ellie's side around the Dr. Sniffybum incident. But the message is muddled by everyone in Ellie's conventionally attractive mumblecore support group assuring her that revenge is the tops and totally justified, and the villains' equivalent act of revenge against Joel for doing something a lot worse was totally not justified because they hadn't had nearly enough screen time. Which is presumably why, just as the plot is starting to look like it's wrapping up, the game suddenly flashes back and makes us play as the main villain for way, way too fucking long: to show that, ooh, they have redemptive qualities as well and, from their perspective, Ellie is basically a less eloquent Jason Voorhees."

"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!"

"It's official; you're getting too old if you can remember any of the following: Jerry O'Connell, pop music where they don't sing like they just banged their foot on a coffee table, and tentpole games by Western AAA developers being capable of more than one genre. I'm so fucking sick of open world stealth action games with crafting and collectibles! Remember when Far Cry was a shooter, Tomb Raider was a precision platformer, and God of War was a high-octane hack and slash? All of them have now been pulled into open world stealth action with crafting and collectibles, like paper boats to an open sewer. I'm so fucking bored of squatting in a bush like a hiker who didn't go before he left, of having to nose around every shelf and drawer hoovering up crafting materials so I might one day make a new man-purse that can hold more than four paper clips. So if you're waiting for the next electrifying sea change in AAA games, Ghost of Tsushima ain't it, mate. It's the same shit with new wallpaper; nice wallpaper, granted. None of your "default Sims house" rubbish; this is the classy stuff you put behind a respected historian in a documentary about the Renaissance, but wallpaper nonetheless. Felt like I should put that up front, along with this: the standard crafting resource in this game is "supplies", and every time I saw that word while on shelf safari, I'm ashamed to admit I kept thinking about a very racist joke I once heard about a Chinese person at a birthday party."

"The combat felt a lot better some ways into the game, after you unlock a few different stances, as it turns out that certain stances are very specifically intended for use against certain enemies, and if you're using the wrong stance, you might as well be dusting off their health bar with a pastry brush. So the combat is better once you've unlocked the things that make it work, almost like they should've been unlocked from the start, but no, everything has to be unlocked through one of the nine different upgrade systems, because that's what the template says to do, and we outsourced all our independent thought to Eastern Europe."

"You know, Robert Downey Jr. deserves more praise for his portrayal of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies; yes, I know he's made more money than a glazier in the Gaza Strip, but he did a really quite impressive job playing a character who could be simultaneously abrasive, charismatic, and sympathetic. I was thinking about this while watching Tony Stark as portrayed in Marvel's Avengers, Square Enix's new, shiny chrome-plated hamster wheel for the micropayment masses, because if all of his dialogue lines had been cut out and been replaced by Tony Stark getting clipped around the ear by whoever was standing closest to him, then that would've earned the game at least another star. It's still confusing to me that this game that is obviously trying to crib off the success of the Marvel movies deliberately replaced all the leads with their poorly-received spinoff low-budget TV show versions, but maybe it's easier on the kiddies this way; they don't have to watch their heroes repeating an infinite cycle of copy-pasted combat missions and resource grinds and ask their parents, "Mummy, why is Iron Man trapped in a hypothetical tenth layer of Dante's Hell?""

"Marvel's Avarvels puts an almost admirable degree of effort into not resembling a live service game for some ways into the campaign. [...] These first few missions mostly play like running down one corridor after another, but hey, they're nice corridors; there's an actual story focus, and at the end of some of the corridors, there's colorful boss fights against Marvel supervillains like Taskmaster (registered trademark) and Abomination (registered trademark). But then the live service shit starts insidiously to creep in. [...] The lovely, approachable face flakes off bit by bit to reveal the cold, eyeless skull underneath. "You unlocked the confusingly laid-out mission hub area! You unlocked the gear-crafting station! The cosmetic-crafting station! The faction missions! The storage lockers! Your next mission objective is to talk to all the gear vendors; we will literally hold up the plot until you fucking do that!" And every single one of them has a line of dialogue specifically designed to guilt you if you leave without buying anything. "Oh, you don't want any new emotes? Welp, better tell the kids that it'll be sawdust porridge for dinner again." Then all those story-focused corridor missions are replaced by missions in which you go to one of a handful of pocket sandboxes, are directed to a specific location, and all the way there, copy-pasted side objectives appear all around us like we're dodging mortar shells in fucking no man's land. "There's a treasure box nearby! There's a group of bland copy-pasted enemies nearby! Why not kill them before you kill the group of bland copy-pasted enemies you actually came here to deal with?" It's like being trapped in the IKEA showroom when all you want is a fucking egg whisk!"

"Heavy Rain is the spiritual sequel to Fahrenheit (aka Indigo Prophecy, aka Baron Von Teapot's Fucking Ludicrous Adventure) and is presumably an attempt to make this particular brand of brown, drippy lightning strike twice. Now, say what you like about Fahrenheit - thank you, I think I will; it was a pretentious river of quick-time events with a plot that got its head caught in a bucket of doolally halfway through, but say what you like about Fahrenheit - at least stuff happened in it! Game starts: BOOM - you stabbed a bloke, you've got thirty seconds to wash off the blood and stuff the corpse into a bin, and you haven't even pulled your socks up. Meanwhile, Heavy Rain starts: You wake up, have a shower, get dressed, slap yourself in the face, have a drink, go sit in the garden for a while, your kids come home, you play with your kids, then you stab your kids with a knife! (Oh no, wait, that was just me stabbing an electrical socket to make something interesting happen.)"

"As usual, there are three story campaigns, and in spite of the title the Marine campaign is the longest, probably because of racism. It's also by far the weakest, a fairly generic FPS that at first takes the Doom 3 route to creating easy horror by putting you in dark rooms with a flashlight circle the size of a leprechaun's testicle, but after a while it gets bored and flicks the light on for the remainder in a spirited attempt for the generic gold medal. It's not even that scary because, current generation graphics being what they are, the Aliens all have this wet glisten effect that make them easy to spot, like they're adorned with Christmas lights. That's when they even bother to show up. There's a fine line between atmospheric pacing and just having fuck all happen. Half an hour in, I'd gone to three or four empty control rooms to press magic plot continuation buttons, and was starting to wonder if the Aliens hadn't gone to the wrong address or something. The side quest is to collect audio logs, and they're all the usual suspects: Passive-aggressive man who complains about how the guys running the place are all evil and stupid, hysterical man in a cupboard who gets abruptly cut off by grisly noises, and that one very credulous fellow who starts worshiping the aliens as gods, and who will probably end up deliberately sucking on a face hugger, nature's communion wafer."

"Saints Row 2 shows a much better understanding of its audience: it is fully aware that most gamers are dickheads and if you give them any kind of freedom, their first instinct will be to abuse it. If you give them guns, they will shoot old ladies. If you give them cars, they will run over old ladies. If you give them aircraft, they will ascend to the highest possible heights and hurl themselves out onto an old lady. And if you give them customizable outfits, their first instinct will be to take off their clothes and run around the streets hip thrusting in the faces of old ladies. If you try to stop them doing all this, they'll hate you for it. Not only does Saints Row 2 not stop you, but it keeps score."

"This is Aliens vs. Predator, though, so there are Predators too, who show up now and then to a chorus of "What the fuck was that?" from nearby human NPCs. And I'm waiting for someone to reply, "It's a fucking Predator, you moron; the human race has only encountered them like fifty times. Did no one document anything? Didn't at least one survivor put an entry on his fucking LiveJournal? Or did we use up all the data storage media recording all these fucking audio logs?""

"Aliens vs. Predator is one of those concepts you're probably not supposed to think too much about, especially not the title. Surely they're both aliens, and come to think of it they're both predators, too. Perhaps a more explanatory title is necessary, like Big Dribbly Black Thing That Likes Eating Lance Henriksen and Has a Head That Makes You Wonder About What Sort of Relationship H. R. Giger Had With His Father vs. Big Clicky Invisible Thing with a Crab for a Face That Always Seems to End Up Getting Beaten Up By Big Stupid Lads Wearing Dirty Pants. Really, any title would be better than Aliens vs. Predator, or at least easier on the filing system. Try not to confuse this Aliens vs. Predator with the Alien vs. Predator for the SNES from 1993 nor the arcade Alien vs. Predator from 1994 nor indeed the Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar from the same year, although feel free to confuse it with the Aliens vs. Predator released for PC and Mac in 1999, because it's the same fucking game!"

"It just struck me that whenever there's a sandbox crime game, it's always the same gangs: Italians, Yakuza, or street gangsters. You're always either going on about respect, honor, or wearing your belt around your thighs. Y'know what there needs to be? A sandbox crime game where you play a Batman villain! You run around doing dastardly crime equipped with freeze rays and jetpacks, completing story missions that lead up to you building a giant brightly colored doomsday machine shaped like a top hat or something. Then Batman comes along and beats you up because you forgot to strap him into your overly-elaborate, slow-moving death trap, then you mysteriously evade capture in order to come back and do it all again next week. Sadly mankind has yet to recognize my genius, which is incidentally the title I have mind for this project."

"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."

"So the wallpaper paste-squirting bean counters from 2K asked themselves what was a popular aspect of BioShock 1 we could focus on in the sequel in order to wring as many pennies as we can out of the property, and someone said "The Big Daddies of course! I think you should get to play as one." "What?" said someone else. "Those haunting monstrous things that trudge around as if they can barely support their own weight? Those tragic figures reduced to single-function robots with no trace of humanity left that seem to embody the downfall of the city as a whole? That's a stupid fucking idea, it'd be like a sequel to Half-Life where you get to play as a gun turret.""

"You have one set of upgrades for holy experience and one for unholy. "Ah ha ha ha ha ha!" you might say. "Moral choice system, hmmm?" "Well, not really," I would reply. "More a violent option or equally violent but better spirited option." "And I suppose," you would continue, "that since holy points are slightly harder to get that holy upgrades would be slightly better, and that it all might be leading toward some alternative ending scenario where too many damnations land you a big, fat, steaming two-bedroom apartment made of poo and sawblades on the Ninth Circle?" "No," say I. "I presume that was the original intention, but I guess they used up the ending cinematic budget rendering Dante's hairy bum (spoiler alert) and the upgrade tracks are pretty much equivocal." "So what's the point of having two separate experience levels?" you ask. "Well, it's like my right hand on a Sunday night," I say. "Why is that?" you ask. "It beats the fuck out of me!""

"Maybe if the original creators of something don't want to continue it then you should listen to them, because otherwise you're only making it to please the fans. And why would you want to do anything for fans? I mean, I'm a Silent Hill fan and I've just spent the whole review whining like a broken motor. Fans are clingy, complaining dipshits who will never ever be grateful for any concession you make. The moment you shut out their shrill, tremulous voices, the happier you'll be for it. Incidentally, why not buy a Zero Punctuation t-shirt?"

"The Divine Comedy really does paint God as a little bit, "Two choir boys short of a molestation racket," if all that Old Testament business didn't already tip you off. "Hey!" says God, "I've made it so it feels really really good to stick certain body parts together and jiggle them around, and hard-wired your brain to want to do it pretty much twenty-four/seven between the ages of thirteen and seventy. But if you actually do it without a special permission slip from the church, then I'm going to light you on fire! And that's just in purgatory. If you also didn't spend every Sunday reminding me what a level-headed and, if I may say so, strikingly handsome fellow I am, then I'm also going to staple your cock shut and feed you to a wolf.""

"So Mass Effect 2 is very well-written and epic and immersive and all that, but gameplay-wise, it's still flailing around like a neurotic twenty-something checkout girl trying to find the right combination of hats and dresses. They discarded the ugly yellow sunhat of vehicle sections, and tried on the frumpy brown frock of resource mining and it's still not quite working. For Mass Effect 3 - and I know there will be a Mass Effect 3 because the loading screens rather unsubtly remind you to hang onto your save games - they should try bringing back the planet surface exploration, but let you navigate the terrain with jetpacks! And populate it with giant wolves that shoot lasers out of their mouths! If I wanted to be a space quantity surveyor, I'd play EVE Online!"

"It's like they had some kind of generic Hollywood movie checklist to fill in. Which makes sense, because the game borrows heavily from the similarly overdone Silent Hill movie, to the point that I half-expected there to be a level where you play as Sean Bean doing something totally fucking irrelevant."

"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."

"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."

"The writing's solid, but then Bioware don't score points for that anymore. Birds fly, fish swim, Michael Attkinson molests dogs, and Bioware games have good writing. But when the characters deliver the dialogue, they always come down with the "Bioware face" -- that uncanny valley-esque look of oddness because the voices and the physical movements are created separately. You can almost see them going over their stage directions in their heads: "Hello, Commander Shepard (wave hand). I heard you might show up today (nod head). How about those freaky aliens, eh (shake fist, grr grr, slightly racist undercurrent)?""