Internet Shows

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

"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.""

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"...The gameplay clearly exists on sufferance, and yet the main story is still surprisingly short and padded out. The bit where you can't continue the plot until you complete a checklist of arbitrary gameplay grinds springs to mind -- a very poorly explained checklist at that. "Get five multikills." What the fuck's a multikill, Anthem? "Well, what do you think it is?" Erm... Killing more than two enemies with one grenade? "Oh, good guess! Wrong, though.""

"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 imagine that working for EA must be rather like living with a toddler, drunk person, or "President" of The United States. Imagine BioWare's plight: "Well, now that you spent all that money getting the Star Wars license, we did make Knights of The Old Republic back in the day, so perhaps we could..." "NO! hATe StAR WarS! sTaR waRS IS bOriNG! CANceL aLL tHE STaR wARS! I wANt THAT!" "You want what?" "i WANt tHAt!" "What, Destiny?" "YeS! I wanT ThING thaT LOOks LikE Halo wiTH sOmEHoW eVEn LeSS peRSonALiTY! "Well, you can't have Destiny; it's owned by Activision/Blizzard." "AaAAaGGgH-waAAgGgHH-WaaAGggHhh...!" "All right, all right! I suppose we could make something that's a lot like Destiny. I mean, mindless online-only looty-shootys aren't really our thing; we're more about character-based role-play... Oh, dear, please stop holding your breath, EA! Look! We made our own version of Destiny! It's called Anthem!" "UGH! HaTE iT! YoUR'e aLL fiREd! WHy diDN't yOu mAKE a StaR wArs gAME?""

"The smug, charismatic psycho du jour, the Twins, are definitely among the least effective or interesting villains Far Cry has produced; they come across like former stars of a 90's children's sitcom that went off the deep end: certainly hateable, but with no complexity or agenda besides wanting to laze around, living off other people's hard work. (Bloody typical of young people today, am I right?!) The only reason the Twins have any power seems to be that people like the main protagonist keep getting inexplicable brain farts in their presence; there's one bit where we're headed to a building to confront the Twins, and the Twins give us a ring when we're outside and say, "Hey, put all your guns in that bag and then come in and handcuff yourself to the ceiling," and we're given no choice but to obey. Hypothesize with me, Captain Protagonist Person: what if we just didn't do that? What possible consequence do you think there would be if bursting in guns blazing? "Oh, no! They might say something very fucking sassy before I blow their jawbones off with an LMG and leave their tongues to waggle like used condoms on an extractor fan!""

"Meanwhile, show up at Gameplay Land and ask if it would be possible to play single-player, and the game reacts like you sat down at an expensive restaurant and ordered a bowl of corn flakes. You go to the "Privacy Settings" - once you can find the fucking things, 'cos this game has a worse menu system than a McDonald's drive-thru after a major earthquake - What is it with ultra-AAA games having shitty interfaces these days? Is it the same principle by which Las Vegas casinos are laid out, to get you lost and unable to glimpse the Sun in the hope that you get confused and accidentally drop all your money? - and your options are "Public Match", as God intended, or "Private Match" for big stupid losers. Then, when you set it to "private" and try to start solo, a window pops up saying, "Hehehe, sorry! Someone's CLEARLY made a dreadful mistake! Surely, you don't actually want to play a solo private match? Just click here and we'll set it back to public play so you can rejoin all the NORMAL PEOPLE!" But I didn't click that, and then the tip on the fucking loading screen was something about how playing multiplayer earns more rewards and doesn't make the little baby Jesus cry. What the fuck is this, guys?! Am I on suicide watch?!"

"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."

"I want to emphasize, though, that the core combat is really good. I smash through a window on a skateboard, kick the same skateboard into somebody's eye socket, backflip over his friend shooting two guys at once, kick a frying pan into the air and shoot at it so the bullets ricochet into three other guys who were in cover and apparently left under some mad idea that it was in their power to stop me, and then, for the first time since initially entering the room, I touch the floor."

"Katamari Damacys greatness lies in the simplicity of its concept and the unrivalled catharsis in its execution. You start out with pathetic laughable sticky balls that can just about pick up drawing pins and which get gleefully batted about by the cats that patrol the living room. But then a few minutes later, after you're done hoovering up the garden furniture, you come back, and there's something very rewarding about seeing an exclamation mark appear above the head of a cat that once bullied you. "I see you remember me, Mr. Whiskers!" After all, what good are sticky balls if you can't crush pussy."

"Hi, I'm Yahtzee Croshaw, super-casual game reviewer! What's that, games industry? No new games of interest? That's cool; we're all super-caj here. Have a fun-size Twix. Yeah, so I finally finished Celeste this week. I've been playing it super-caj style for about an hour every three months, and yeah, it certainly is a game. It was okay, I dunno... The way people were banging on about it all year, I was expecting it to fire streamers and ticker tape out of its nipples. It's just like the Senua's Sacrifice thing where the main character has a mental illness and therefore it's a masterpiece, and if you think otherwise, you're Hitler. Oh, you are Hitler! Well, that's cool; I'm super-caj. Have a Twix. Heyyyyyyyy..."

"Here is my impression of a Kingdom Hearts character going to the toilet: "Ooh!" "What is it?" "I think I need the toilet!" "Hmm... Hey, look! Isn't that a toilet over there?" "Right! Let's get going!" Break into a sprint, bloke in a black trench coat appears, everyone stops dead. "I wouldn't do that if I were you." "What!? The Organization!? Why shouldn't we go to the toilet!?" "Simply because... I just did a very big poo in that toilet." "Huh!?" "Gawrsh, if he did a very big poo in the toilet, it probably still smells!" "It doesn't matter." "Hm?" "As long as we're together, we can take on the smell of any poo! That's what friendship is all about!""

"Gris is a platformer. There! I've just described the game about nine times more efficiently than the blurb on Griss Steam page, which describes it as, "A serene and evocative experience about pain and an atmospheric journey through sorrow." It's a fuckin' platformer, all right??"

"And that's why it's time for the first indie double-bill of the year. Gratifyingly for my love of connecting themes, both games are named after a word that means, "grey." Not only that, but they're both words that mean "grey" that you might use if you're a pretentious twat. Or French... For all the difference that makes."

"It'd be a good scam, wouldn't it, claiming that we're playing co-op with uncommunicative humans indistinguishable from NPCs. It'd be like an inverse of the Dumbo's Magic Feather trick. "Maybe I could have beaten that dungeon if the other guy hadn't been such a fuck-up." "Ha-hah! Don't you see? There was no other guy! The fuck-up was in you all along!""

"I didn't expect to finish Kingdom Hearts III in the time I had, so I had just set out to play until I knew my opinion wasn't going to change, and that moment came at the Winnie the Pooh section. In-between two of the actual levels, it suddenly becomes important that Sora investigate why he's not on the cover of a Winnie the Pooh book; wasn't sure why he felt he should be, except his general sense of being the centre of the fucking universe, but then we go to the Hundred Acre Wood, and it turns out everything's fine and they just wanted to hang out, although they won't let you leave until you've played some insipid colour-matching games. Sorry, why was this important? Is the plot seriously being held hostage by Winnie the Fucking Pooh?!"

"The worst game of 2018 was, like the devil and weird sex practices, known by many names: The Seven-Hour Snore, Hunt Down the Refund, Shit Down the Piss-Shit... Call it whatever you like! Just never forget what Hunt Down The Freeman was and what it represented: A cringe-fest that unstitched its thoughtless patchwork of stolen assets to whip out its deseased knob and dispense blood-flecked urine all over a once-top-rate franchise with the tacit approval of its creator! Fuck, man, what else is there to say? I suppose I could say "fuck" again... No, that's the wrong attitude. It's a new year, after all. Let's move on from the past and focus on what the future will bring. [a copy of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate appears] ...FUCK!"

"Rise of The Tomb Raider was my third most mediocre game of 2015, and now Shadow of The Tomb Raider has made it proud by hitting the number two spot. Now that the reboot trilogy has finished sandblasting the personality off Laura Croft, any chance we could go back to the old one? She might have been constantly pouting like she was trying to conceal an entire Portuguese man o' war in her mouth, but at least that was a facial expression of some kind."

"So I asked myself how I would feel about a fighting game populated with all my favorite characters -- a game in which Modesty Blaise and Major Kira can team up to bring down Horatio Hornblower and the Arkhamverse Riddler. And yes, I suppose I would get a kick out of that, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to who didn't know the characters. It would only be the superficial appearance of Modesty Blaise with none of the nuances from the comic strip that make her a great character -- the personality, the backstory, the surprising amount of gratuitous nudity. Actually, Smash Bros. has a close equivalent to that with Bayonetta and, sure enough, little of that character's actual personality is conveyed. She's even depicted with realistic human proportions, which kinda threw me."

"Frankly, RDR 2s realistic world only impresses me the same way I'd be impressed if you drank a litre of cooking oil, more so by the effort than the wisdom behind it, because so little of what you see and do in RDR 2 is actually fulfilling on a story or challenge level; the horse going "plop-plops" sums it all up nicely. I can't envision a scenario in which a lack of horse plops would knock a half-star off an otherwise-perfect score, but there it is, a drop in an ocean of pointless decadence. And this isn't one line of code, "Horse_plopplops = 1"; someone had to texture and animate it, and troll sound effect libraries for the ideal "plop-plops" sound, and they could've been using that time to cradle their children, or make something creatively fulfilling like Obra Dinn. The fact that someone had to do it for their job makes me think of a restaurant manager loudly humiliating a waiter 'cos he thinks it'll impress the customer; well, it doesn't, Mr. Rockstar, and now I'm going to have to be very cautious about ordering the meatballs."

"We are a member of a secret government agency called "The Division", that consists of agents secretly inserted throughout the general population for... no particular reason, now being activated to go into ruined Manhattan and jolly well sort it out! 'Cause it turns out, Wayne LaPierre was right all along: the only thing that can stop a bad roving pack of murderous thugs is a good roving pack of murderous thugs. So let me see if I've got this straight, the corpse of Tom Clancy: We're a member of the secret police under no official scrutiny or accountability, and our job is to go into an area of civil unrest and murder dissenting citizens without trial, and it's not set in Stalinist Russia? "Now we can take these back to the people!" said my earpiece friend after a supply recovering mission. Sorry, which people were those again? Presumably not the people in whose corpses I now stand knee-deep? Oh right, you meant the "real" people; the ones that bowed and scraped when the government assassination squad showed up. See, the premise would have worked perfectly well if we'd just been some random citizen doing our bit to take back the city, Charles Bronson style, baby! The only thing the secret police thing adds is to make us less relatable and give hard-ons to the paranoid authoritarian lot, who want to believe that the government will finally sort out those intimidating young people who stand around outside their house talking loudly."

"So we go straight from worst survival game to best. Pay attention, every other survival game, because here's how Subnautica (title drop) stands out from the crowd: Not using a focus on exploration and crafting as an excuse to skimp on good story; a beautiful exotic world so utterly hostile that you'll want to keep surviving largely out of spite; and, most importantly, no other cocking human players! Human contact is like Joss Whedon's Firefly; I tried it once or twice, but it's not really my thing."

"At its core, it's about the combat, and yeah, it's Smash Brothers. You mash buttons, and hope all those particle effects are coming out of them and not you. Every now and again, your tiny opponent gestures vaguely with a limb that's like two pixels big on screen, and you promptly get blasted into the cosmos and you're left wondering what the fuck that was and how you were supposed to predict it. So for a while, I was struggling along, not having much fun, but everything abruptly changed after I unlocked Donkey Kong, who I proceeded to exclusively play as. Why? Because A) He's big and cartoon-y enough that you can actually read his fucking movements; and B) he has this one attack that I like to call, "Fuck Off I Win (Ook Ook)," where he slaps the ground and everyone in a ten yard radius explodes. I ended up challenging myself not to use it, because I jerk off sailors for nickels and even I thought it was cheap."

"[Artyom] eventually discovers the hidden truth that parts of the world besides Moscow are still inhabitable and inhabited. In fact, most of it is, apparently, and Moscow has just been deliberately isolated by paranoid militants this whole time. Now, I'd never be so hyperbolic as to say that this fundamentally ruins the Metro series, or pisses on it, or leaves its hollowed-out corpse in an alley with an asshole like a rusty tuba, but it does mean that if I get around to replaying the first two Metros, I'm going to feel pretty fucking stupid throughout as I appreciate the horrific, lonely atmosphere of a dead world and the uplifting moments of pure humanity in a seemingly hopeless situation, now knowing that there are fucking beach parties going on a half an hour up the motorway."

"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!""

"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."

"People often say to me "Yahtzee, why is it that you avoid multiplayer games, and when will you let me off this red hot grating?" Well, you know, it's just that I prefer playing games to relax and unwind at my own pace and not be disappointed once again by other people and their unwillingness to learn how to tap dance properly."

"I did hear the game was alright, but I wasn't gonna buy a fuckin' PS Vita to play it. That'd be like adopting an incontinent chimpanzee 'cause you fancy the lady who comes 'round to change his nappies. Thankfully, a remastered version of Gravity Rush came out last week for the PS 4, which I very much appreciate, because I'm sick of all this "mad people" privilege in modern society; they get all these exclusive games, they hog all the fun medications, and there seems to be a whole bunch of them running for president at the moment."

"Twenty years have passed since the last game, the Earth has come under the control of an oppressive alien regime fronted by a dorky human collaborator, and when the silent protagonist gets released from suspended animation the resistance can finally get started. Because no one was willing to get off their ass and defend themselves without the presence of this one gormless mute. But enough about the plot of Half-Life 2; let's talk about XCOM 2 instead."

"The plot [...] is, you are in Generic JRPG Swords and Sorcery Fantasy World, east of Java; you are the last surviving heir of a deposed royal house who was found as a baby and adopted by peasant farmers. There's a weird birthmark on your hand that magic occasionally comes out of, and you grow into a strong, handsome lad with a girl's haircut, so when you come of age, your adoptive parent takes you aside and says, "Look, let's not beat around the bush; you couldn't be more obviously a destined fantasy hero if your high school graduation picture was painted by Boris Vallejo. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any global crisis going on at the moment that would require a destined hero, so why don't you just wander around the countryside for a bit, and destiny will presumably strike at some point?" I'm not being dismissive here; that's literally how we start! You go to the royal castle on the off-chance that a kidnapped princess needs rescuing, but get thrown in the dungeon 'cos the king's played too many Elder Scrolls games and thinks that's just what you do with destined heroes. You break out within minutes, and the plot becomes "go from city to city looking for the person who isn't one of the five or six endlessly-repeated NPC models, recruit them to your party, then do whatever they want to do until the next one comes along". By this method, we enlist to our cause a toddler, two hotties, an old man, a comedy stereotype of a homosexual, and an actual homosexual, and after the last party member joins, they say, "What do you mean, 'destiny hasn't struck yet'?! All right, let's just gather the six Destiny Balls; that'll wake the fucker up." I only had three or four days to play the game in, so I was under no illusion that I'd finish the fucking thing, and I dropped out after the third or fourth ball. About twenty hours in, and still no sign of a big villain; couple of "Darth Vaders", but no "Palpatines", you know?"

"As for Layers of Fear, like P.T., it's not much more than a showcase of spooky set pieces. But P.T. never claimed to be a complete game! Makes me think of Evil Within: you try to make an entire game out of a delusional nightmare sequence, and it gets boring 'cause it never lets up, and the nightmare becomes the norm. Bid us to sit down and pull the chair away as we do so, but don't keep doing it; do it once, then apologize, let us sit for a while, wait 'til we're calm, then throw spiders at our face and burn the house down!"

"Hey, Yahtzee," said Steam towards the end of the week. "Do you remember that announcement trailer you saw a while back for a game called Bombshell?"

"The exception to the "no origin stories" rule is Doctor Octopus. He gets origin story for days. There's like ninety million plot missions where you just hang around the lab so Dr. Octavius can drop another hint and make another weird face to camera, until you're going, "For fuck's sake! We know he's going to be Doctor Octopus!! Stop arseing about and bolt some Japanese rape tentacles to this motherfucker!" Marvel's Disney's Sony's Insomniac Games' Stan Lee's Steve Ditko's Giant-Size Man-Thing achieves that wonderful quality of Spider-Man 2 in which it was just fun and not a little Zen to while away the afternoon randomly swinging through the streets, stumbling on collectibles and little crimes to foil, which may ultimately be enough. But I feel like saying it's a really good game is like saying the Bible supports the ostracism of homosexuals: It's true, but only if you cherry-pick bits of it from the piles and piles of other stuff."

"That was when CoD: BlOps 4 laid its knob across my porridge for the first time: "No single-player campaign." Well, Activision, as Milorad Petrović said in response to the Invasion of Yugoslavia, "...The fuck?!" "We thought you'd be pleased, Yahtz. Every story campaign of every CoD game you've played in years, you've called racist and overblown and taken straight from what insecure NRA members see when they close their eyes and touch themselves; at least we didn't hire Kit Harington this time!" Granted, but having removed the single-player, are you going to charge less for the game? "Ohohoho, Yahtzee! I can see why people say you're a funny guy!" A hundred-and-thirty bucks, the deluxe version costs!?! As the water treatment engineer said of his favourite outflow pipe: "That's taking a lot of piss!""

"Anyway. I should probably tell you what genre of game Devil's Third is. Well, you can't pin it down as simply as that, as it drunkenly meanders between several different rooms of the Gameplay House like it just got in from a bender and can't remember where it left its kebab. It's a hack-n-slash, shooter, military, horror, character drama, bad fashion-sense simulator making the classic mistake that a bit of everything creates some kind of sumptuous buffet, when here in the real world one does not put cola cubes, live bait, and Mini Babybels in the same pick 'n' mix bag. Clearly, not enough of us gave our lives in the trenches of Ride to Hell: Retribution for everyone to learn that a brawler and a shooter don't get along in the same space."

"The Witness is a new game by Jonathan Blow. Ironically, it sucks! Mneh-eh-eh-eh-obnoxious-laugh!"

"Marvel's Spider-Man is of course a new sandbox game about Spider-Man, a genre that has seen one exemplar -- Spider-Man 2 on the GameCube -- and a whole load of Spider-Manure since then. So let's get straight to the big question: Is Disney's Marvel's Spider-Man a better Spider-Man game than Spider-Man 2? The answer is: Yye-ees... And that incidentally was my entry for the 2018 Most Subtext in A Single Syllable competition."

"You're in the wrong place if you're looking for an engaging plot, or indeed any plot. You might think the shit I described so far constitutes a plot, but you’d be wrong. The killer sabertooth tiger that sparks off the adventure we kill later on as one of the big hunt missions without even much prominence. I ousted both the rival tribes, who, I'll just reiterate, we aren't given much reason to oppose except that they'd also quite like to survive the winter. But the game still didn't end! This is the game that Ubisoft's sandboxes have been tacitly threatening to turn into for quite some time now: One where all sense of structural progress is kept as vague as possible for want of turning the game into a platform for a series of disconnected events and repetitive challenges, I suspect because it's easier for the inevitable fucking DLC to slot into like a bloodstained erection. But you know what, I'm with you, Ubisoft. Who needs some uppity creative trying to dictate to me how to experience their creation? I mean, where did the creators of Breaking Bad get off telling me I should watch season one before season two?! Oh, because I quote "won't understand what's going on?" You don't know me! And who does this Shakespeare motherfucker think he is, putting the pages in numbered order?! I am the master of my domain, I choose to shuffle them all up and read the text from right to left!"

"Awww, the mean ol' puzzles hurt Yahtzee-Boo-Boo's fragile little gamey-brainy-wain. Perhaps you'd be more suited to the kind of puzzle where you only draw straight lines connecting a shotgun barrel to a foreign insurgent's left testicle." HEY! Twat-Finder General! I solved the puzzles. I just wasn't having fun doing so. I completed the whole island, turned on all the laser beams, opened up the mountain to what I suspect was the final climactic area, and then the game threw fifteen more line-drawing puzzles at my face, and, frankly, fuck that! "Congratulations on getting through that bowl of dog food, player. Here's your reward: another helping of dog food."

"[This Is the Police 2] has pretensions to cinematic storytelling, but, well... Here's my impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene. I mean, I mean, this is me doing an impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene, right now. I'm doing it now. Can't you see I'm doing an impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene, viewers? Viewers? Viewers? Are you listening, viewers? You need to be listening to understand my impression of a This Is the Police 2 cutscene! I think they're going for an ultra-naturalistic dialogue style, but if realism was the intent, it fell flat, because, realistically, if I were stuck in a conversation like this, I'd stick my head in the nearest bread-slicing machine."

"So let me see if I've got this straight, Insomniac Games' Disney's Spider-Man: You're going to interrupt your high-octane big-balls web-swinging free-roam superhero power fantasy for the sake of some mandatory forced stealth sections playing as a mundane fuck going on a chest-high wall inspection tour. And you're doing this so that we don't get bored."

"The premise is you are an insurance investigator -- Whoa! Slow the fuck down, Lucas Pope! This roller-coaster's off to a hot start! -- and you come aboard a hitherto lost ship that drifted into English waters with its entire crew apparently suffering from a bad case of not there."

"The action is split between the four Spartans trying to hunt down Mr. Chuffy and Mr. Chuffy himself, who also has three finger puppets with him for no better reason than because his bits needs to be four player co-op as well. Any potential that might have been here for some kind of tense or dramatic character interplay is lost by the fact that Halo continues to seem like it was written by a castrated slug. The crime for which Mr. Chuffy is being hunted is so completely fucking weak that the two parties can barley summon the effort to be cross at each other when they do meet. Two of them have a token punch-up about midway through that has more the air of two blind people trying to politely get past each other in a crowded restaurant. It might have helped if it had been playable! But Halo 5's attitude seems to be that nothing ruins an action sequence faster than players."

"The game opens with the four members of the B-Team having a huge spectacular punch-up in a war zone, at which point I went, "HOLY, WOW! Look at that! The stain on the wall behind my TV is exactly the same shape as New Caladonia! If only this overblown footage of people I don't know fighting other people I don't know for reasons unexplained could be as interesting." After all, I know the backstory for that stain. It was left by an errant jet of spunk after I watched Free Willy for the first time."

"I suppose I could mention Ubisoft, but that feels like mentioning the colour of the wallpaper; they're always hanging about in the background, putting out their samey sandboxes with the clockwork regularity of an explosively copious period. New Assassin's Creed, right on cue; set in ancient Greece, which makes sense, because the ancient Greeks were really into buggery. But what made me choke on my sherbet was when the bloke narrating the gameplay video said, "For the first time, you will be able to choose between a male and female hero." YOU WHAT?! Am I on crazy pills?! Assassin's Creed Syndicate did that! What is the fucking point of doing progressive and innovative things if you're just going to pretend they didn't happen two games later and try to score innovation points a second time?! It's not "progressive" if you're progressing to the place where we already fucking are, genius! I'm genuinely mad about this; I've got no more room to snark about Beyond Good and Evil 2 now, and it's Assassin's Creed: Odysseys fault!"