Zero Punctuation

"And it might be true that it becomes tolerable if you do it with some friends around, but so is dying of bowel cancer. And that way they might even feel obliged to take you sky diving!"

"The trademark sense of isolation is another point the game misses like a champ, when you are given a spunky female sidekick. This is another peculiarly American habit that seems to always go unchallenged: why does a love interest subplot have to be shoehorned into everything? Imagine if there was some kind of parallel universe where every game and movie, regardless of genre, was required to incorporate at least one line dancing competition. We'd think they were all raving lunatics! And yet here's us forcing in an out-of-place, cheesy romance scene that's more agonizingly painful to watch than any of the actual horror the game is supposed to be about."

"I suppose this is geared to the mumorpuger crowd, who are well known for putting up with all the samey grind in the world if it means they get experience points and fancy weapons with blue names at the end of it. I've had a great idea for a game these people would love. It comes with a special USB glove peripheral and you get one experience point for each time you punch yourself in the face!"

"Alright! Fine! For fuck's sake! I'll review Borderlands if it'll make you shut up! Except it won't, will it? We both know nothing can do that short of surgically removing your fucking jaw. And even then you can still drool down my ear."

"You know how in most FPSs you're some kind of hybrid of man and refrigerator who can take an entire munitions dump to the face while the enemy all have armor made of whipped crème and skulls made of cake? Well it seems going in to this game everyone got their character sheets mixed up. The player can't survive more than a measly handful of bullets ripping through their flesh while the armored enemies can take so many rounds to the torso you'd think there'd be nothing left but a spinal column and the cornflakes they had for breakfast. They can spot you in pitch darkness even with your flashlight off, and they can shoot you from halfway to neverland because their guns have magic accuracy that evaporates the instant you get your hands on them."

"...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!"

"After two years of this, I thought I was immune to being disappointed by games. Whoops, that's my entire opinion on Dark Void given away in one sentence, isn't it? But stick with me, there's more to this! It's not that I went into Dark Void thinking it would be good, because I don't go into any games thinking they'll be good. If I have to search through a dumpster for a lost wedding ring, I could try to convince myself that the dumpster will be full of cakes and freshly-picked flowers, but I'll only be fooling myself. Dark Void is a dumpster that appeared to be full of rusty dog food tins, but once I got in I realized they were actually delicious novelty cakes made to look like rusty dog food tins. But then once I started eating them, I discovered that the icing was made from wallpaper paste and cyanide, and that's why I feel it let me down. I wonder if the Geneva Convention covers torturing metaphors?"

"I strongly advise not trying to follow the story on your first run-through, there are some things for which the human mind just isn't equipped. Bayonetta was found at the bottom of a river twenty years ago and now works with demons from Hell to kill angels, who are apparently evil because they keep attacking Bayonetta because she keeps attacking them. The baddies or possibly the goodies are trying to resurrect some big evil god thing which is linked to some ancient clan of witches and rival clan of sages and some associated evil corporation who presumably felt a bit left out. And there's this guy in a Harry Potter scarf who wants to either kill Bayonetta or bone her silly, and there's this little girl who's either Bayonetta's daughter or a younger version of herself - AAAARGH! Sometimes I miss the old Pac-Man storytelling method: eat pills, avoid ghosts. That's it. Only sometimes you can eat ghosts as well if you - AAARGH!"

"I don’t think I would do very well in a real-world combat scenario. I hate being shouted at and I can’t run very fast while wearing a backpack the size of a cow. Before I would willingly enter a gunfight, the enemy are going to have to strap big glowing red arrows to their heads and promise to stand next to windows, loudly vocalizing every thought that crosses their minds. And by the time my comrades have persuaded them to do that, I’ll have remembered that I’m a massive coward and legged it."

"War has absolutely no personality; he's a great big brick that gets in fights, going about things with an air of cold, angsty dispassion. He doesn't seem to give a toss about anything he does, so why should I? And what right does War have to be angsty about his life? He's fucking War! He's never had to queue up at the job center or pine after ex-girlfriends who left him for a surfer; he just breaks things! If I were War, and I'd just hoisted a seven-foot demon into the air and chopped him in half with a single swing, I wouldn't stand there scowling; I'd go, "Fucking hell! Did anyone see that? I am squirting machismo out of my nipples over here! I am a monster truck that walks like a man!""

"Here are the combos you will need to know to master Darksiders: The Chump Chop (square), The Double Chump Chop (square, square), and The Whipped Cream Genocide Brouhaha (square, square, square)."

"The Force Unleashed on the Wii did not endear itself to me. I don't blame the developers, and I'm not just saying that because they're based in this city and might kill me. I blame the Wii for being tightfisted with its hardware upgrades; I blame myself for failing to research the different versions; I blame Michael Atkinson, the attorney general of South Australia, for quite a few unrelated things; but most of all I blame George Lucas, that hirsute chinless git, pummeling his own franchises with such ham-handedness you could put a piece of bread around each of his mitts and call them BLTs!"

"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."

"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."

"Incidentally, the Ghosts are well-fucking-equipped for a guerrilla unit. "Oh, no, America has been attacked and is weakened and there's no defenses except an inexhaustible supply of tank battalions and an army of killer robots. And we would've had a doomsday satellite if the rest of the world hadn't gotten all weird about it!" Which they were entirely right to be because when the player wrestles control of the satellite back at the end, they immediately use it to wipe hundreds of thinking, feeling blips off the map as casually as one would use a windscreen wiper on a rainy day."

"I have a lot of respect for the fantasy peasant village economic model. It seems like those guys have got a good scam going on. First you accidentally build your settlement within easy walking distance of the local gnoll encampment or dragon cave or directly on top of a gateway to Hell, then all you have to do is build a big fat checkpoint in the village square and keep giving birth to potential kidnap victims, and your storekeeper, your blacksmith, your tailor and your innkeeper, they'll all be set for fucking life! Okay, someone's pretty daughter gets dragged off by kobolds every other night, but hey, you've cornered the lucrative adventurer market. Just buy another one! I bet this is why NPCs in RPG peasant villages never move from a single spot directly in front of their place of business; if they move, all the adventurer money in their pockets will pull their trousers down. Presumably, they pay a helper gnome to come along every morning to shovel breakfast cereal into their mouths."

"The Everything-Proof Shield Award for Most Obstinate Refusal to Die: Michael AtkinsonAfter Super Mario Bros. Wii was just an NES Mario game with four times the bullshit, I was tempted to give this award to Mario, but frankly, it's a little too obvious, and complaining about Mario's undying nature is like using a shield and claymore to take on a speeding train. So instead I'm giving it to Michael Atkinson, a South Australian attorney general who continues to ensure that half the games get banned or censored and whose ancient, black, dried-up little heart still manfully strives to keep him alive in the face of the searing waves of hatred that are broadcast to him from all over the nation and the world every second of every day. Well done, you miserable old fuck."

"Apparently the plot is supposed to tie the Star Wars prequel trilogy to the original series, which raises the obvious question: WHY WOULD WE WANT TO DO THIS TERRIBLE THING? It's like tying your breakfast to a plague rat. The grubby fingerprints of George Lucas are all over the story in that none of the characters are in the slightest bit relatable. That, however, could be because of the Wii graphics limitations making them all look like Gerry Anderson puppets of stroke victims."

"I've honestly lost count of all the ways I've killed Nazis in my life as a gamer. I've killed them in linear first- and third-person, sandbox first- and third-person, I've shot their planes down in flight sims, I've invaded their installations in RTSes, and in the Indiana Jones adventure games, I've point-and-clicked their lights out. Now The Saboteur has let me beat the Nazis in a go-kart race, so all I have to do now to have the full collection is smack a Nazi to death with a Guitar Hero controller!"

"Paris is one of those old European cities where the roads have been built up over the centuries from the ancient dirt tracks where some proto-Frenchman long ago left a sickly goat out in the sun to create the very first disgusting cheese. So that leaves us with a lot of narrow, twisty roads inhabited by lots of nuns, poodles, and strolling lovers in the brief moments before they all get tangled up in your wheel arches."

"Actually this is something I've been meaning to bring up, miss: Why does the C.E.O. of our private military company have to do all the missions personally with no backup except for an Irish chopper pilot who abandons his mission when the enemy chuck anything larger than a scone at him? Actually, working alone might be for the best. The A.I. is so thick, it might as well be living in a cave. On one occasion, I called down a platoon of soldiers from a friendly faction to help me take over an enemy base. Every single one of them stepped right off the edge of the helipad, fell six feet and died. Unhelpful, but fucking funny!"

"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 think I've realized the problem with World War II games: It's that everyone already knows how they're going to end! A load of fascists with hard-ons for sausages and hanging big red banners on everything take over continental Europe, spread themselves over too many fronts like a single-cunted hooker filling in for her triple-cunted friend, Hitler kills himself just in time for some Russians to come and laugh at his mono-bollock, and an entire sub-genre of alternate history fiction is born."

"Oh, what the fuck are you doing here? It's Christmas! Haven't you got families to resent? This is my one week off, I'm going on holiday! ... (That's summer holiday, by the way. Hope that Northern Hemisphere weather is workin' out for ya.)"

"There's an insidious thought that frequently goes through the minds of gamers; and I'm not talking about the ones you get when Ivy from Soulcaliburs pants ride up, and which are perfectly natural for growing young men. I mean the thought that goes, "But I might need it later" — the niggling little doubt that prevents you from using all your most powerful insurance policies in case there's some kind of no-claims bonus at the end of it all. So we have scenarios where you're sitting on a nuclear stockpile to shame North Korea and are throwing peas at a giant robot crab on the off-chance that there might be a bigger giant robot crab just around the corner. No game illustrates this phenomenon better than Mercenaries 2 or, as I like to call it, "Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes.""

"Eventually though I got through the first dingy castle full of jerks and found the first demon, which was a giant slow-moving cowpat. Probably fitting for the very first tier but I was starting to think the game was making fun of me. Anyway, some helpful prior player advised me via the medium of floor to use fire-based weapons, so I opened the menu to put some fire on my sword, whereupon I was cowpatted to death because opening the menu doesn't pause the game. "Pause?!" it seemed to say. "What kind of faggot are you? I don't care if you need to answer the phone, real gamers have no friends!""

"Nintendo's Mario team really don't seem to have any ambition besides subsisting on bits of crust they can scrape from the pimply underbelly of nostalgia, lest anything as dangerous as a new idea appear in their brains and give them a fucking seizure! But as the disbelieving friend said to the inventor of the feces-powered helicopter, "This shit will not fly!""

"Nostalgia is a mouthful of balls. Children will like anything — the stupid, diminutive cunts — and you weren't any different. Games, or should I say the potential for games, has only gotten better as technology advances in indirect proportion to the worsening of your memory. When the gaming kids of today become the hairy, winding twenty-somethings of the future, they'll be declaring that Halo 3 was miles better than a game of Interstellar Bum Pirates on the astral thought planes of the universal overmind, and they'll be just as wrong then as you are now. I played both Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Sunshine before I played Ocarina of Time and Mario 64, and I thought the first two were better in every buggering way! Drink down that burn sauce, fatboy! Also, I think Hitler was right!"

"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.""

"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."

"Yes! Someone at Ubisoft thankfully started taking practicality pills, and Ezio can actually run at full pelt down a street without guards getting suspicious, because this is Renaissance Italy, where it's more suspicious to not dress and act like a complete bell-end. Also thank fuck there's a fast travel system now, and you don't have to take lengthy horse journeys between every fucking mission. Unless you want to. Like if you've got a lady friend 'round and you want to hypnotize her with the sight of a horse's ass bobbing up and down for half an hour."

"Being European, there's an old saying I'm quite fond of: In Heaven, the food is Italian, the police are British, the platformers are French, the shooters are Croatian, and it's all run by two international software giants and an electronics corporation. In Hell, the food is British, the shooters are Canadian, and I forget the rest, but basically the gist of the saying is that Italians are all tossers. About the only important things Italy ever did were the Renaissance and murdering Jesus - deicide and a whole bunch of painters running around being gay. But it's in that gay painty period of history that we find the setting of Assassin's Creed 2, or to use its other name, "Ubisoft's 20-hour Assassin's Creed 1 Repentance.""

"(On Castle Crashers) While the little big-headed characters are fun to look at, in big fights with lots of similarly sized chaps, it's easy to lose sight of the one you're controlling. And this becomes doubly unfair in big boss fights when the big boss's main strategy is to conceal your character's location behind their mountainous flab. At least in Golden Axe you could play as the amazon lady and navigate by her unfeasible boobies. This is like watching midget identical twins wrestling and trying to remember which one you put money on."

"At the point when I was ramping a snowmobile over a sixty foot abyss, I realized that all pretense of realism had been savagely dropped and they had opted to write some demented and confusing James Bond story where James Bond gets murdered half an hour in to be replaced by a bloke called, "Bames Jond.""

""Unimpressed by our controversy, are you?" says Infinity Ward. "Well suck on this: Russia invades America. Bam!" Remember how, in my HAWX review, I said that in today's enlightened times modern-day war games never tie the baddies directly to a foreign power when there are loads of perfectly good terrorist groups and PMCs that no one cares about offending? Well, MW2 skullfucks all that with an American flag wrapped around a baseball bat, and the whole thing plays like the violent delusions of a Cold War fantasist with his head stuck in a lathe."

"(On Bionic Commando Rearmed) But the question this all raises is whether a remake should just blithely parrot the gameplay mechanics of the original, or take the opportunity to improve upon them with our enlightened future space technology? Well the second one obviously, you thick berk. There's nothing inherently sacred about game design from the olden days. They're just old, and wrinkly, and fat, and no one but the utterly depraved wants to sleep with them."

"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."

"I remember hearing somewhere that Dragon Age contained nine novels worth of text, which didn't really sell it to me. Who the fuck sits down to read nine novels at once, if they don't live in the fucking Bastille?! So about seventy five percent of your playtime is spent making rather creepy loving eye contact with NPCs as they talk about the weather, the political situation, and the small group of ogres who are standing behind you and who will stove in your head with lead pipes literally the very instant this conversation ends, all in the same placid tone of voice, even when you're freshly battled and your body is spotted with blood splatters like a menstruating leper, which makes everyone in the world seem a little bit mental."

"Dragon Age calls itself a "Dark Fantasy". It's rather cute, really, like a D&D nerd getting his ear pierced because he fancies the goth girl who works at Starbucks. Dragon Age isn't Dark Fantasy, nor is it Light Grey, Avocado, or Caffeine-Free Fantasy -- it's just straight Fantasy Classic; it's a straight-line Tetris block wiping out four big, fat rows of demand for traditional single-player RPGs. Its got elves, dwarves, dragons, it's got a title screen depicting a sword sticking out of the ground, and the world map looks like a fire-breathing coffee drinker's been sick on it. We're talking 100% commitment here, where every individual element could be taken out of context and every single one could make your girlfriend legitimately call you a sad bastard."

"You also get to design your own buildings and vehicles further down the line; so if all you're after is some kind of 3D art program for eight-year-olds, Spore is definitely for you. If you're holding out for an actual game, then you get to eat shit. But never mind; you can always design a creature that looks like a huge cock and imagine it pounding you in the arse."

"Like a supermodel who was considered ugly because she wears a baggy sweater, Drake is generically handsome beneath the strategically-placed grime and inexplicably green designer stubble; supernaturally athletic despite his ceaseless grunts of exertion and retarded, gibbon-armed-flailing jumping technique; and constantly spouts appalling wit and panicky self-effacement in the hope that you don't notice that he is a remorseless career thief who kills more foreigners than malaria - although having rid the world of blacks, Asians and Latinos in the last game, he has now moved on to non-American whites."

""Oh Yahtzee, we're looking forward to hearing your opinions on this one!" trilled several correspondents this week, and then they ran away like they'd just lit a firework or pushed a friend into the girl's toilets or thrown an unwanted child into a pen with a scary dog. Oh, I see! No-one wants me around when the new Call of Duty is training you to ignore yet another quality recognition instinct, but the moment something comes along that offends what few atrophied taste buds you have left, then suddenly I'm your personal attack gopher! Well, how do you know I don't actually really like Colonial Marines?! I don't; it's fucking atrocious, but you'd have looked pretty silly if I had, wouldn't you?"

"Tension? What's that? The thing that comes before elevension?"

"[Uncharted: Drake's Fortune] wasn't awful, but it had fewer original thoughts than the BBC program planning department. It had one ball from Gears of War in its mouth and another from Tomb Raider and was sucking for all it's might. The plot was removed by cesarean section from an Indiana Jones movie so sloppily that doctors were unable to save any of the relatable characters or coherent motivations; and also took a lead from the Dan Brown school of puzzles. i.e. present the viewer some ancient riddle, then immediately solve it for them because if they were smart they wouldn't be watching this piss."

"If there's one thing history has taught us (besides not to piss off people called Genghis, or put lead in your water pipes), it's that if you're going to make something incredibly good that becomes frighteningly popular, make sure it's the last thing you ever make in your entire life. Because otherwise you get to spend the rest of your creative career struggling under the weight of high expectations and bricks."

"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!"

"[South America] attack America by hijacking America's orbital missile weapon. OK, gonna stop you there again, Ghosts! Firstly, so much for the enemy being "superior" if they can't make their own superweapons and gotta pinch 'em like safari park baboons nicking the windscreen wipers. And secondly, orbital fucking missile weapon!? This invasion is sounding more justifiable by the second!"

"Just for fun, I kept a running tally of all the characters in the story campaign who aren't burly white dudes and you are under no obligation to shoot. The final total was three: a female astronaut at the start who immediately dies, one helicopter that spoke with a woman's voice, and a black member of the Ghosts unit who immediately dies. And, frankly, when that happened, the main characters displayed less emotion than when their dog got shot. "Dammit, the black guy died!" they seemed to say. "Now we can't claim to have tons of black friends while arguing on the internet!""

"So, Colonial Marines is pretty much a wash. But without meaning to absolve the developers, they get all the blame for this fucking trainwreck as soon as they figure out how to divvy it up. What gets me are the Aliens fans who have been declaring it the final betrayal. Have you seen literally anything Alien-related post Aliens the film? Your sweetums has been putting it about for decades, guys. The betrayal ship has sailed, circumnavigated the globe, and returned to port laden with exotic spice!"

""But Yahtzee, the environments are pretty!" Oh, shit, I forgot. Ten out of ten!"