Internet Shows

"XCOM traditionalists might moan a bit 'cos the original XCOM's tactical interface was about as intuitive as a control panel for a nuclear submarine but fuck those people! XCOM 2012 has some iffy design and it's glitchy at times. Soldiers on overwatch sometimes have an inexplicable ability to see enemies through walls, and these were the guys who came back negative from the psychic testing, shows how much that proves. But it basically hits the right notes. Like a first class bowel movement it's solid, it's lasting, and above all it's organic. One time I had a bunch of guys trapped in a crashed UFO's central break room with the alien equivalent of Hulk Hogan, and I only had actions left for one heavy and one sniper who were too far from the action to help. So what did I do? I got the heavy to blow a massive hole in the side of the UFO with a rocket launcher, thus granting the sniper a clear line of sight to double tap the problem right in that tash and win the mission. A masterstroke of unconventional strategizing of which I was so embarrassingly proud that I boasted furiously about it for the entire last thirty seconds of an Internet video."

"After I declared Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare as The Twin Bollock Lords of Shit Mountain, there were dissenting voices dismissing my opinion on the basis that I just don't like shooters. Oh you ignorant little bastards! Stick your balls up your arse and clench yourself castrated! I was into shooters while you were sucking on Wii-motes, you cover-loving, health-regenerating murderer-come-latelies. You don't even know what a shooter is! A shooter is fast-paced, circle-strafing, wits-about-you, rocket-jumping, last scrap of health, toodly fuckpies organic excitement in a fancy hat! It is not riding a conveyor belt to the next chest-high wall and resting your head on it until you get lulled into a lovely little sleep by other people's gunfire."

"The sandbox map gets absolutely bukakke'd with collectibles and side-quests, but what's it all in aid of, Assassin's Creed 3? "Well, at your home base, there's this ongoing thing where Connor enlists specific craftsmen to recreate his own personal theme park version of Little House on the Prairie." So? "You use the money and recipes that it seems every activity in the game rewards you with to craft everyday goods and items, and the friendlier you are with the craftsmen, the more things you can craft." Alright, I have successfully crafted a sofa. What do I do with the sofa? "You sell the sofa for money!" Ok, now I am a millionaire East Coast sofa baron. What do I DO with the money? "Well, the most expensive things in the game are upgrades for your ship which make it easier to complete the naval missions." Well, that's something, I suppose. What benefit do the naval missions provide me? "More trading routes for you to sell sofas on!" Sorry, when is this going to get back to stabbing people? "What is it with you and stabbing people?" What is it with you and NOT stabbing people?!"

"Don't be Farmville, Assassin's Creed, be Assassin's Creed. We've already got a Farmville, it's called Farmville."

"I feel sorry for 343 Industries, the company Microsoft brought in to do Halo because the company champagne fountain needed refilling and Bungie escaped from the basement. It's always awkward replacing someone everyone's gotten used to, isn't it? This must be what it's like for new popes. "Oh, sorry, the old pope always preferred golden syrup in his porridge. No, it's alright, the old pope and me had this little understanding - I'd fuck altar boys and he'd hush it up!" Still, you can't say 343 aren't grateful for the opportunity. Funny how Halo 4 was released on election day, as part of some sinister Republican conspiracy to make people who write game FAQs stay at home. 'cause at the start and end of the game, there's a little personal message from the new developers that has much of the acceptance speech about it. "Ooh, thank you so much for accepting us, o handsome and wonderful consumer! We promise not to completely diddle Halo over a doghouse, slurp-slurp, fawn-fawn!" It's just a fucking aging shooter franchise, 343 Industries, you're not the fucking UN Secretary General. Stop trying to altar-boy me!"

"People fortunate enough to have randomly been born white in the First World are the most privileged motherfuckers on this unequal fucking planet, and Modern Warfare games are basically those people complaining about how tough life can be when everyone's jealous of you. It's like when white dudes complain about being victims of racism 'cause all the people they used to enslave are making fun of them. Or when Christians cry about being persecuted because the government wants to recognize that men can be into the cock. Just to underline it, the villain is behind an organization of the world's underclasses, so you can add the poor to the growing list of peoples the audience of Black Ops 2 feels threatened by. But perhaps I shouldn't dwell on the politics. The occasionally sympathetic portrayal of the villain and that whole chapter where you're called upon to defend a repulsively-decadent future city for rich people does show a degree of self-awareness on 'Blops 2's part. I honestly can't be arsed to speculate what level of irony we may or may not be operating on, so let's just judge it by the gameplay: It's boring and stupid! Give it a miss! Fuck, that could've saved a bit of time!"

"If you're unfamiliar with standard Hitman gameplay, they're basically adventure games for the impatient. Missions take place in open-ended environments, and you can either engineer an accidental-seeming death with obscure inventory puzzles, or you can just stove their head in with a brick 'cause you've got shit to do!"

"I am a banana! I say that partly because I like taking all my clothes off and hiding in bowls of muesli, and partly because like a banana I feel like I'm going soft as I get older. I've been liking more games lately, and I know saying that has just made someone who likes modern warfare shooters spit-take a mouthful of inexpensive supermarket whiskey, but the games that exist outside that particular cum bubble have been going from strength to strength. That could just be because absolutely fucking anything looks good alongside a cum bubble, or perhaps it means I actually do have the power to make things improve as long as I unceasingly bully and insult it for half a decade. Although that seems unlikely, because as has already been established I am a banana and the only influence I have is over one's potassium intake."

"One time, I was carefully scouting an enemy base and had just about decided on the best angle of attack when a fucking tiger lolloped into the base and fucking cleared it out with strategic maulings! What a right wally Mr. Pussycat has made me look like, but it's the sort of thing that'd never fucking happen in Call of Duty, isn't it? Not unless Mr. Pussycat was a programmed setpiece with ties to Al-Qaeda."

"So, I got myself a Wii U, and as with many Nintendo products these days, the startup process feels like you're joining a cult. With the constant music that one might hear in the elevators of a methadone clinic and the crowd of Miis staring up at you as if to say, "Come and join us! The master will be home soon!" and I had to mute the fucking TV during the update process, 'cause that repeating "widdly-wee" noise felt like it was implanting hypnotic suggestions. With a drill. Here's a fun drinking game I devised for the Wii U - take a shot every time the little controller screen is doing something that couldn't have just been put on the TV screen without sacrificing anything. It's the best drinking game, because afterwards, you can legally drive home!"

"Yes it's confirmed, "Warfighter" is actually a word used by the actual military, but I don't see how that makes it any less dumb! Or Medal of Honor: Warfighter any less obnoxious, incoherent, and boring. In the year I started referring to schizophrenic, overly linear modern military shooters as 'spunkgargleweewee' with the good taste and maturity you've come to expect, I felt it would be remiss of me not to represent the genre here - a genre I would've been tempted to now to put alongside one-on-one fighters, real-time-strategy and train simulators as shit that's just not for me and not worth opinionating on. If it weren't for... Spec Ops: The Line! And thanks a fucking bunch, Yager Development, `cause now I have to keep playing modern military shooters just in case they turn out to be the most exciting thing to happen in video game narrative for fucking years!"

"I am very fond of the Paper Mario series, not just for being fun games, but for being my secret weapon. I say the Final Fantasy games are now essentially the same as glueing kaleidoscopes to your eyes and spending twenty hours in the queue at a Brazilian sex-change clinic, and then, say, a dolphin or a stoat materialises behind me and goes, "BWAAA, you just don't like RPGs!" Or I point out that, ever since Galaxy, the entire Mario franchise has just been rolling back and forth on the floor of a public bathroom trying to catch spiders in it's mouth, and I get, "BWAAA, you just don't like Nintendo! Mario games! Or fun!" But then I can go, "Have I mentioned how much I like the Paper Mario series? They're RPGs that are also Mario games developed by Nintendo and are FUN! Eat your devastated argument on a crusty bap, Flipper! WHOPAH!" and then I dance in the rain at their exploded head. Or rather, that's how it used to go. More recently, they then get to say, "So does this mean you really like Paper Mario: Sticker Star on the 3DS?" at which point I have to fall upon my secondary masterstroke, which is to smash a bottle over their head and run away."

"...an informative, if grammatically iffy title, 'cause it's about a knight in black armour who uses a sword. If only other games were willing to wear its colours so prominently in the title - it'd certainly make cataloguing them a lot easier. Like, "Orange Nerd Crowbar", or "Brown Sweaty Racism", or "Red Dead Revolv-" oh wait."

"I've had the same conversation n times this week. "I've been playing Anarchy Reigns!" I'd say to a friend or favoured bartender. "Never heard of it," they'd say, to which I'd reply, "You know, I've had this exact same conversation n-1 times this week." There's, "flying under the radar," but with zero hype and sneaking onto shelves in early January, Anarchy Reigns isn't so much flying under the radar as riding the fucking subway. All I knew was that it's by Sega, and the name is possibly intended to be ironic, because Anarchy refers to a situation in which nobody's reigning shit. It's like calling your game Dog Meows, or Margaret Thatcher Cares. But anyway, it turns out that Anarchy Reigns is a sequel to Madworld of sorts, except that it's not on the Wii, and it's not a spectacle fighter, and it's not in cel-shaded black and white. So yeah, this is starting to sound like a pretty big "of sorts", isn't it? The one connecting element is the main character Jack 'cause, you know, there's such a fucking shortage of grizzled, macho badasses voiced by Steve Blum in gaming that we have to start recycling them now. And then they say, "Are you buying a fucking drink or what?""

"So the first controversy is that Dante, the cocky, swaggering, well dressed man in a bleached moptop has been supplanted by Dante, the cocky, swaggering nine-year-old who throws on the first wife-beater and dressing gown that he could be persuaded to peel off the kitchen floor, with short dark hair, no less! Why don't you just come over here and put your cock through the middle of my Devil May Cry PS2 disc, Ninja Theory? Seriously though, I suppose if you're messing with canon, it's better to go forward with confidence and rip off the waxing strip all at once than to ask if we're okay with it for every uprooted pube. But what we could do without was that one scene near the start, where a mop contrivedly falls onto Dante's head and he stares at himself in the mirror for just long enough for it to not be funny, before smirkingly dismissing the look. There's going forward with confidence, and then there's a developer whipping the tip of my nose with its big, pleased-with-itself stiffy. Not that I think the original quippery doucebag Dante is sacrosanct; I thought he was an absolute knobend. But all you need to do is establish that new Dante is an equally big knobend and then we can all move on!"

"The Cave is an adventure game by Double Fine, not to be confused with the Double Fine adventure game that Kickstarter has already allowed to make more money than the rehab clinic next to Lindsay Lohan's house. A different Double Fine adventure game, this one written and designed by Ron Gilbert, he of the superlative Secret of Monkey Island and of course Maniac Mansion, the adventure game in which you control three protagonists from a starting pool of seven, but that's enough nostalgia. The Cave is an all new adventure game in which you control three protagonists from a starting pool of seven. What a fat lot of good the last twenty five years must have been! Oh, but Ron knows when I'm just being facetious for comic effect."

"At times, Wrath of the White Privilege pleasantly evokes the old 16 bit JRPGs I can actually tolerate, like Earthbound or Final Fantasy VI with its actually coherent plot and random monsters occasionally smart enough to scarper if you're over-leveled, but the actual combat sucks a fat one. I find I'm more tolerant of turn based combat than I used to be because it is nice for a game to constantly pause itself in case you happen to be playing it while fighting a panther, and of course real time combat would be chocolate smeared all over a consenting biscuit. But it's these hideous hybrid systems that modern JRPGs tend to have that piss in my radiators, 'cause you end up with the worst qualities of both. We find ourselves having to cycle through an option menu while simultaneously running around avoiding the hits, and I've got this lovely big controller here just covered in buttons, any one of which could be a dedicated 'defend' command. But no, I must instead wrestle my way to the 'defend' option in the half second it takes for the enemy to brew up another devastating fart."

"You know what? I fucking give up. I give up just like the bloke who said, "Hey, EA, let's make a horror game," at the start of all this must have given up. He was still around for Dead Space 2 saying, "Look! I made a crayon drawing with blood on it! Maybe you could leave it lying around somewhere in between all the ridiculous action sequences." But now at the time of Dead Space 3, that man has resigned, or been eaten, or maybe the parasitic brain worms that control EA's upper management got to him as well. "Yes, of course Dead Space should be an action shooter; more people buy those. Heaven forbid that we actually provide for an underserved niche or hold out for sleeper sales. It's not like we make the kind of money that could support an occasional risky investment with any actual integrity. Why should we stick our necks into the scary outlying territories when we could be tucked up all safe and warm in the comfortable grey dough of mediocrity that is EA's usual output? What's that? You're getting hungry? Okay, I'll just put some cat food down my ear. Yes, I know you like the chunky kind.""

"Another new feature is weapon crafting, which is part of EA's big scheme to get in on all that sweet FarmVille micro-payment action by letting you pay for more craftable resources. "Did you love blowing real money on flooding everyone's Facebook pages with news on your imaginary cows? Well, you'll love blowing real money on being able to win a non-continuous game with less effort and thus cheapen any sense of achievement!" I might be more indignant if I thought this would actually work! The scheme seems to be to walk into a bank with a gun and a ski mask on, put a bucket on the floor and say, "I'm going now, but if anyone wants to put some money in there, then you know, the option's open." And if anyone actually does put money in the bucket, then that person probably shouldn't have had financial independence in the first place."

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

""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?"

"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!"

"Maybe I just don't have the genius brain for some good old hard sci-fi, the kind of hard sci-fi where the most significant new addition is a bow and arrow. Yeah, that's some real hard fucking sci-fi right there! It really illustrates how desperate they were to find a new feature to trumpet - the amount of fuss that gets made about a fucking piece of string tied to a bendy stick. First it features prominently on the box art, and then it's introduced in the first mission with what sounds like a conversation from the fucking shopping channel. "Gosh, I just love exterminating my fellow man with the most advanced projectile weaponry in existence, but sometimes I think that if I could pick the bullets out of the ruined bodies of my victims, put them back into my guns and use them again, then I'd just be so much more productive! But there's no way I can do that, is there?" "Well, Prophet, have you tried 'Bow And Arrow'?" "Bow and Arrow, you say?" "Yes! Not only does Bow And Arrow allow ammo recovery, but it's also silent, can be fired without de-cloaking, and does about twelve times the damage of a bullet for some reason!" "Gosh, Psycho! Bow And Arrow sounds so convenient it almost makes you wonder why they were completely supplanted by guns fucking centuries ago!""

"Sometimes, I think the Metal Gear franchise is like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. It's this loud, wacky dipshit in dire need of an editor who lives in a little world of his own surrounded by people reassuring him that, no, Metal Gear Solid 4 was totally a touching, emotional character drama, especially when the funny man did a big poo in his pants! And every now and again, someone tries to parachute in wearing a t-shirt saying, "EVERYONE'S TAKING THE PISS," but gets swiftly bundled out of sight by a dog walker and a Sony executive."

"Lara Croft manages to convince a small team of ethnically-diverse archaeologists who all seem to be wearing digital clocks on their heads counting down to the point where they are unwillingly made part of someone else's character development, to investigate a mysterious island where they find a storm preventing them from leaving and a mad cult of bearded castaways who have for years been using inflated shopping bags tied to sticks as substitutes for female companionship. So all the pieces are in place for Lara Croft to get the absolute shit kicked out of her for ten hours. Oh, I see! When Lara Croft gets beaten up, we're supposed to admire her strength and character, but when the same thing happens to Nathan Drake, we're supposed to point and laugh? Why do you hate men so much, games industry? Nah, obviously that was sarcasm, because Nathan Drake has never been the subject of a controversial attempted rape scene. Although if you miss the quick-time event to fight off the attempted rapist (Which I did, because the timing is really annoying on those things), then it turns out he only wanted to throttle her to death! Phew, maybe we shouldn't be so quick to misjudge these hairy cultist murderers!"

"So tell me, little finger puppet, assuming that multiplayer elements are about as enticing to me as the sight of a dog sniffing another dog's bum (an easy thing to assume, because they are), are there any new features SimCity can offer me? "Well there's a poo map!" (beat) I beg your pardon? "We've got a special map that lets you see all the poo forming in big piles under people's houses! Then you build an outlet pipe and watch all the poo speed away on a wee-wee one-way system!" (beat) Fucking SOLD!"

"Comparisons to BioShock are as inevitable as a bear shitting on a Catholic (or however that phrase goes,) and under that light Infinite falls kinda short. What's disappointing is that the villain is basically just a racist nutter who wants to blow up the world. I listen to him frothing about how his carpet made of black people should be grateful he hasn't trod in any dog shit lately, and he becomes hard to take seriously. The truly great villain is one who talks sense; Andrew Ryan had some weird ideas about sweat ownership, but he was articulate, dangerously intelligent, and wouldn't let someone like Comstock run the fucking hot tap."

"It is, however, hairy space hopper levels of pretentious. It comes and goes in and out of its own butt the whole way through, but the ending is the point of maximum own butt penetration. It wallows in a bit of abstract meta-narrative - wanky wanky word word - that doesn't really serve the essential plot points, and I found myself thinking: "If this ends with us meeting God and God looks like Ken Levine, then I'm gonna fucking punch someone." But you know what? If it isn't boring and gives us something to talk about then it can't be bad. And Infinite isn't bad, it's good, perhaps even great. You see, sometimes it's kinda nice to be up somebody's butt if it's cozy and warm and they've put some interesting conversation pieces up there."

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

"So far, it has been like watching the most retarded game of Texas Hold 'Em ever played: Where everyone just sat and eye-balled each other for six months before someone finally called in the most wheezily, non-committed way possible, in the hopes it would make some else show their hand. Whereupon the flop cards were revealed to be: A joker, a get-out-of-jail-free, and a Magus of the Vineyard from Magic The Gathering."

"There's something slightly surreal about playing a game single-player when it's obviously designed for co-op. It's like getting through an average day with your wallet, phone and keys tied around the necks of three dogs who hang back and stare at you gormlessly while you clear out the room, at which point they all run over to the door to the next room waggling their tails in anticipation of walkies. Although one way the single-player gets spiced up a bit is that you can switch between the four characters, Clive Barker's Jericho-style - Ew, I just thought about Clive Barker's Jericho! Thanks a lot, Fuse."

"That is a direct quote and I'm going to leave it dangling here like a corpse on a gibbet while we consider that someone charged actual money to write it."

"The author wishes it to be known that the bulk of this video was written before the Microsoft DRM backtrack, and he now thinks that games exclusive to Xbox One are no more tainted by original sin than those exclusive to other consoles. He regrets now having to fall back on less popular arguments against next-gen consoles such as their blind insistence on empty spectacle above all else to make triple-A development all the more elitist and prohibitively expensive, the systematic erasure of console gaming history one generation at a time, the flagrantly anti-consumer culture of artificial exclusivity that has created a world in which games are expected to support consoles in which artwork exists to serve a medium on which artwork is presented, as if the words of a great novel exist to serve paper, or a great film exists to serve a piece of wall onto which it has been projected, and so on, and so on, and so on..."

"It's a very bleak experience. A life catching fish might seem idyllic, but do you think you're ever going to eat them? Have a little fish fry and piss-up on the beach with all your pals? No. The moment your inventory's full, it's straight down to the pawn shop to flog the lot. Oh, thank you for this thoughtful gift of a lovely sofa, goose woman; doesn't go with my place but it would just look perfect at the PAWN SHOP! Oh, what a beautiful butterfly, the morning dew beading like perfect jewels on its multicoloured- DON'T CARE, PAWN SHOP! Give me my bells, I'm in deep to the raccoon mob!"

"Ride to Hell is the kind of bad that leaves me with a smile on my face. It's a little retarded child with its head stuck in a cereal box and a massive great dump in its big-boy pants going, "I'm a real game now!" Of course you are, Ride to Hell. And that's why I think everyone should buy it, just to fuck with some heads! This could be our Plan 9 from Outer Space! We should have mass screenings of it, get everyone to dress up, put upside down pedal bins on their heads and then beat their wives!"

"I'm pleased to report that I've done at least one review for every letter of the alphabet! Thank Christ for XCOM! But if there's one letter that's over-represented, it's D. And that's because roughly 100 percent of game titles starts with the word "Dark", as in Souls, Void, -siders, -ness and -est of Days. So the subject of today's review gets refreshingly to the nub of the matter. Perhaps this represents a final culmination of the entertainment industry's long-held notion that the epitome of cool is sitting around being miserable with the lights turned off. Pity the actual game is cajun-cooked walrus dribble, but never mind. They could always patch things up with a sequel which would logically be named "dead", as in Rising, Island, Space and -pool!"

"Every vampire story has different rules, of course. In the Dark universe for example, the super-secret weakness of vampires is bullets! And cunningly, the security guards of the world all carry guns, having figured out that your Achilles heel is any kind of physical damage whatsoever! So Dark is strictly a stealth game. Such is the aversion to bullets that Eric cannot carry a gun himself. So do the maths here, sonny: Melee-only attacks, plus large numbers of enemies with guns, plus large open environments with limited cover, equals: It's a shame you have such an aversion to bullets, Eric mate, because a lot of them are going to be trying to make friends with you! And your one attack can be blocked by aware enemies, so if you get spotted sneaking up on a dude, the action becomes a rather humiliating game of Patty-cake. I wanted Eric to go back to the club after the first mission and say, "Are you sure I'm a vampire and not just a Goth with a personal trainer?""

"Hey, wait a minute. Killing someone from long distance while making a loud noise? Isn't that exactly the same super power as a man with a gun?"

"You see, it takes a lot of care to make a game that looks completely carefree. Yeah, fucking write that one down, Wikiquote!"

"There's nothing that excites me that I can point to and call the defining moment. It's just a whole load of people doing stuff, which I admit is a fairly weak argument. World War II was just "a whole load of people doing stuff," but at least getting your leg blown off gives you something for the next letter home: "Dear Mum: Remember when my dance instructor said I had two left feet? Well, I've managed to redress the balance somewhat. P.S. Fucking hell!! Aaaahhhhh!!!""

"I can only imagine the panic in Nintendo's HD remake department when they were given this job: "It still looks fine! What can HD possibly add? Make the GUI smaller so we can fill even more of the screen with featureless blue ocean?""

"...It's good! Because it's Wind Waker and Wind Waker was good! That's about the final word. Except for this one: "Mingegurgle!""

"The Ghosts, as the name might imply, are ostensibly a legendary stealth unit that specializes in taking down larger forces through sneaky guerilla tactics. So obviously, one of the first things you do in the game is ram-raid an enemy base in a burning truck and start gunning down every living thing from the dandelions on upwards. Yeah, that's some good ghostin' there, lads! Truly, thou art akin to the flicker of a candlelight shadow as you waddle around an open field being shot at from nineteen different directions!"

"[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!""

"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."

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

"Hey, Capcom villains, zombie viruses do not make good superweapons! What's easier to occupy: a city full of people shopping and mowing the lawn, or a city full of murderers with a bite-transmittable virus and no ambition in life except to bite things?!"

"I should mention there are combo vehicles now, and I'm not so proud that I can't admit that plowing through uncountable hordes of the undead in a motorbike steamroller didn't make me titter like a schoolgirl riding a bicycle with a knobbly saddle."

"So the new feature is cat suits, meaning suits made to look like cats, not Luigi running around in a skin-tight... Sorry, lost my train of thought. There is something a little bit suss about it, though. Maybe it's the way characters in cat mode stick their bums in the air as they walk in a way for which only the word "presenting" feels adequate; or the "meow" they make at the end of the level that makes me uncomfortable. But maybe that's just 'cause I'm old and jaded enough to realize that someone somewhere must be getting off to this. And I have a horrible feeling it may be Mario himself. I've been burned before by allowing hairy middle-aged men to indulge in what they called harmless fun."