"I played a bit of it co-op, but cooperative it is not; it's more competitive than fucking Bushido Blade. All possible enjoyment was replaced by stress and bitterness because, at the end of the level, whoever got the most points is given a fucking crown, and with that largesse on the table camaraderie was only the first thing to drop off the map as we both tried to sprint ahead, snatching up coins. And once one person touches the flag at the end the other has a deadline the length of an average pull-out procedure before the level ends and the players who made it are showered with confetti and accolades, while everyone else harbors the kind of seething resentment usually reserved for Palestinians and bridesmaids."

"Find me one case in which random user comments enrich an online experience. Scroll down now and read the first five comments under this video! You should start feeling a cold metallic sensation because you're now holding a gun to your head!"

"I thought modern military shooters were bad a year ago, but it turns out we were still merely poised on the diving board above the frozen shit. Even Black Ops 2 now seems comparatively self-aware alongside something like Call of Duty: Ghosts, an experience coldly designed to appeal to the worst instincts of a sad majority of unpleasant fucks. I'm not sure the genre could get any lower but I've been wrong before. Maybe next year we can look forward to a game in which we stop all terrorism in the world by releasing a deadly virus that only targets people who aren't three-quarters white and one-quarter bald eagle. Now, I know what you're thinking: "What about that game, Yahztee? You know, that one?" Well, I was hesitant to place it even on a Worst Games list, 'cause it's not a game - it's congealed failure! I speak no hyperbole when I say that releasing every box with no disc inside would have been less of a mistake. So, for one time only, I grant the Zero Punctuation Lifetime Achievement Award for Total Abhorrence to Ride to Hell: Retribution, which it will hold indefinitely until a worse game comes along. That should roughly be around the time apes have retaken the earth."

"People tell me most consoles aim for being loss leaders these days. Well, I don't know about that, but they certainly are dross leaders... Leaders in the field of dross... Y'know, I got paid money to write that."

"...The level design is as bland as it gets. Corridor after corridor after empty room after empty room. You can design every single fucking level with one very long piece of string threaded through some ping-pong balls. I asked myself a short ways in, "Why do the words "Crash Bandicoot" keep crossing my mind?" 'Cos that's what it plays like! This is as far as we've come, people! Right back around to PS1 era gameplay: moving along a line and hitting things. Except Crash Bandicoot had colour and life and secrets and challenges and character and humour and squealing pigs you can ride on after looking at the camera with a slightly suspect look on your face. And what does Knack have? Twelve different varieties of rock texture! You spend more time in caves than a hibernating bear."

"...In future, if I review a game on the X-Bone or the Piss-Poor, every time I say something in the slightest bit positive, I want you to mentally append the phrase, "...but it doesn't justify forcing us to buy a clunky new console with no backwards compatibility." I've banged that drum with my raging hate stiffy so many times I figure it can go without saying."

"Maybe I should judge it by its own merits and stop dragging in comparisons to older games. Maybe. But the game was fucking funded on nostalgia for those older games. It's like saying you can't expect a racehorse to run as fast as his dad did. Then why did you charge so much for his spunk?!"

"Now, I never reviewed Dark Souls because other titles were out and my play time was limited, and every time I sat down to it, it was like walking into a dark shed full of rakes, immediately treading on one and getting blatted in the face. Other people with more time on their hands started telling me it was the greatest thing since tummy rubs. So I'd go back in the shed thinking, "Well maybe there was just the one rake," before *blat* in the face again. So I left it for a while, but this week with plenty of free time in my schedule, I thought to myself, "Last chance; I'll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I'll somehow become really psychotically into being rake-faced just in time to be prepared for the sequel." And I'll be blatted in the face with a rake if that isn't kinda what happened."

"It's always a good sign when, by the end, you're actively seeking out difficult fights because the last time you cleared a room with minimal hits using a combination of slashes, kunais, and generic ninja flip-outs, you felt like your bollocks sprouted pins and turned into little grenades (if male). Otherwise, your clitoris extended six feet and flew the American flag."

"...Thief is a reboot of a series in which a bloke steals money from people with too much disposable income because he doesn't feel like putting any effort into working for a living, so it's good to see the creators of this new one taking that particular attitude on board, if nothing else. I wondered if it might be better to assess it by its own merits rather than how it differs from the originals, but on the other hand that's like wondering whether to use a fish slicer or a butterfly net to get shit out of the trifle."

"...If you asked old Garrett why he stole, he'd answer "Because I need to pay rent and it's the only thing I'm good at. So shut up and let go of your wallet." New Garrett would, and indeed does, give the answer "Because it's what I do." No, Garrett, it's what you're currently doing. Hey, Yahtzee, why are you kicking new Garrett in the stomach? BECAUSE IT'S WHAT I'M CURRENTLY DOING!"

"It is a nice idea to be able to play Dracula. I look forward to the game that allows us to do so, rather than the shirtless, mopey pantywaist presented for us here. Despite constant lip service to him being the Prince of Darkness, all the creatures of Darkness are trying to kill him as well. Dracula does not tussle with the groundlings, like a terrier at the bear baiting; Dracula does not do mandatory stealth sections; Dracula does not fetch quest! Dracula is the guy at the far end of an army of minions, slouched on a throne, tossing expensive wine glasses aside 'cause he couldn't give two licks of a used tampon for whoever has to shampoo the carpet!"

"Full disclosure: I've not finished the game yet, because I've only been playing for about a 30-hour stretch at time of writing, or – as it's known in the Dark Souls community – a sample."

"Was there much clamoring for a spin-off game about Lightning? I don't remember signing that particular petition. Although I concede that it's a good idea, because among the casts of the many Final Fantasy games there have been she's a real standout character - she's broody with a big sword and stupid hair and dresses weird. Talk about a round peg in a Square Enix."

"The flimsy excuse given for nobody aging is that the world is ending. So, apparently the first thing that falls victim to entropy is entropy itself. Make the plot holes bigger, Final Fantasy, I don't think this train wreck's gonna fit through them yet. Lightning is then literally given a mission from God. God's building a new world with black jack and hookers, and Lightning has to save everyone she can on the dying one. In return, God will bring Serah back to life. Also, it is discussed in an early scene that God appears to have taken away Lightning's emotions, which explains why the end of the world can be six days away and she's not running around flapping her arms going, "MNEEENENEMENEEEMEE!" Hang on, though! God takes away her emotions and then motivates her with a chance of an emotional reunion with the dead sister?! Choo-choo! Now arriving at Plot Hole Station!"

"Well, this may surprise you, but I've been making more of an effort to do the multiplayer thing lately, partly for therapeutic reasons. Dark Souls helped; that game feels like it's trying to wean you on to social interaction. First you find someone's note advising you to be wary of fatty, then you hire stalwart fellows to help you out with the boss fight (none of whom have headset mics so close to their mouths that you feel like their every utterance is trying to beat your ears to death with racial epithets). The turning point came when I was invaded, but the attacker bowed upon seeing me, a gesture of recognition to mark a duel between equals. "You know what?" I thought, "Maybe I don't need to be so afraid of people all the time." So while he was bowing, I ran up and stuck my halberd up his ass. "MAYBE IT'S PEOPLE WHO NEED TO BE AFRAID OF ME!!""

"While the voiceover in the briefing lobby droned on about all the cool story they had written for the next mission, I conducted a brief experiment by asking in the text chat if anyone knew what the fuck the plot was about. Most people said "Nope", some people said "War", and then started quoting Edwin Starr lyrics, and one rather odd bloke asked me if I was Jewish."

"It is interesting that the rebels are the bad guys for once. 'Cause, you know, the government might be oppressing your freedoms and shit, but they also run sewer systems and post offices, and things won't get better just because they've been overthrown, although there might be more poo lying around."

"And look, that whole twist where the main character has a secret history with the horror? That only works if they have a character, besides a disembodied voice occasionally going, "Is anybody there?" or squeaking like a rusty hinge! We need to have made some assumptions about them before you can start subverting our assumptions! All I had to go on is that I'm a squeaky lady in a haunted house! So I turned to my brain and asked, "Why are we in this haunted house?" and my brain goes: "Well, presumably because we've got a secret history with the place." "Brain! Fucking spoiler warning!""

"It's hard not to feel spoiled when the film studios take enough money to solve all of the developing world's problems and pour it all into a portrayal of your favourite nancy boys prancing about in leotards. And lest we think Sony's generosity ends with Amazing Spider-Man 2: The Film, you don't have to go five fucking minutes without being reminded of Amazing Spider-Man 2 if you don't want to. You can wake up in the morning and go from Amazing Spider-Man 2 Toothbrush to Amazing Spider-Man 2 Happy Meal to Amazing Spider-Man 2 Nitrogen Asphyxiation Chamber. There's just one tiny little stumbling block in the whole system and that's the fact Amazing Spider-Man 2 is absolute wank, by most accounts. But I'm sure that problem will go away if they keep throwing money at it. Ethiopia doesn't strictly speaking need all those schools, do they? In all honesty, I haven't seen the film, but that's good. That means however absolute the wank situation, it can't possibly taint my view of Amazing Spider-Man 2: The Game. So here goes... Amazing Spider-Man 2: The Game is absolute wank. D'oh! Better luck next time."

"Tesla Effect is a brand new, successfully Kickstarted Tex Murphy adventure, boldly bringing its signature FMV style to an age of HD. Although it does mean that a little lighthearted, niche adventure game ends up clocking up 12 sodding gigabytes of space. But what else besides HD video could do justice to every line that Chris Jones' face has acquired since he last played Tex Murphy in 1998? Sorry, that was needlessly cruel. We can't help how we age, nor, indeed, can game mechanics."

"One of the many advantages of Nazis is that you don't have to justify shit. "Hey, this guy's a Nazi; would you like to drown him in his own piss?" the game might ask. "Sorry, did you say something? I was busy drowning a Nazi in his own piss," we might reply. But despite that, New Order puts the effort into making hating Nazis feel fresh again. One of the first things we do is watch a soldier shoot a room full of hospital patients before we stab him right up the lebensraum, and the principal villains only need to smile and play card games to become infinitely hateable."

"...The story is competent as murder mystery goes: You're wrong-footed by obvious suspects; events recontextualize as the facts unfold; and some people get murdered in it, which I always think is crucial to the genre. And the supernatural elements throw a few curve balls, but at least remain internally consistent, unlike the fact that a man who wears a fedora and vest somehow managed to convince someone to marry him without choking on their own vomit during the vows. [An imp holds up a publicity photo of Yahtzee, which depicts him wearing a fedora and a vest] ... Well I never said I wasn't a hypocrite!"

"If a game like, say The Witcher, wants to have a relationship system but slap the player's knuckles whenever they reach for the sausage-platter, then fair enough. Even in branching fiction, the creator is entitled to declare some things to be out of character. Tomodachi Life, meanwhile, encourages you to populate it with the Miis of real-life friends and family, and to disallow same-sex relationships in it is to tacitly deny that they exist in reality. Or at least to assume that no gay person or friend of a gay person could possibly be playing it, 'cause they're all off playing their special gay games for gay people that come in pink boxes adorned with chest-hair."

"Let's not dismiss the relationship system, for it is one of the few ways we are granted agency. When someone wants to make a friend or take a friendship to the next level, they must request your approval, like you're the stern, overseeing patriarch of a Jonestown-style death-cult. Maybe you'll want to seize the opportunity to finally enforce your will and make your community completely racially segregated to appease Lady Hitler. But personally, I just allowed whatever, except when a love triangle arose between two strapping, young fellows and an obese, elderly woman, which I swiftly put a stop to. I'd given these character enough shit in their respective works without letting some game turning them into granny-fiddlers, too."

"If genealogy is your thing, Shovel Knight lies at the bottom of a family tree more rampantly incestuous than the fucking Lannisters, combining DNA from Super Mario 3, Zelda 2, Castlevania, DuckTales, and a big, eager, sticky mouthful of Mega Man. It's like the fucking Captain Planet of NES games: "By your powers combined, I will now bleep like someone doing squeaky farts in a tin elevator.""

"Five minutes ago, a bloke the size of a pregnant bus jumped down and hit me with a metal windsurfing sail that he seems to think is a sword, and that didn't even take off a whole health point. Now I'm being splattered across four dimensions 'cause my elbow brushed against the stucco ceiling. I'm a trifle miffed!"

"It's a quirky game above all else. You name your character - standard JRPG practice - but you also have to name his favourite food that appears in dialogue a whole bunch. And if your first instinct is not to enter something along the lines of "cock" then you simply do not possess a soul. You use baseball bats and frying pans as weapons and fight animated STOP signs and hippies, so the 'quirky random humour' thing runs along the surface like baked beans sliding down a clown's face. But there's a dark surrealism running under it as well, as indicated by a soundtrack that alternates between fun, jaunty melodies and weird electronic ambiènce, like someone left a theremin in Buffalo Bill's house."

"When I said the game is, "hack and slash," it might be better described as, 10 HACK; 20 SLASH; 30 GOTO 10. You're given numerous "functions" that can either be assigned to a button as an attack, or assigned to an already-assigned attack as a modifier, or assigned to a passive slot as a buff. That probably needs clarifying, so let's say you have a function called Tits (bracket, close brackets), assign it to the X button, and pressing that button will launch a pair of big sweaty baps that will smash a single enemy's head around like a chickpea in a ball pit. Or: You can assign SoapyWank (brackets, close brackets) to the X button and then modify it with Tits(), so that an enemy hit by SoapyWank() will suffer the additional effect of soapy tit wank. OR: Assign Tits() to the passive buff slot to give your character higher defense against incoming mammary-based damage. And like a big lovely pair of sweaty baps, this also took me a while to get my head around."

"Atari were of a mind that giving game designers credit for the games made about as much sense as crediting the office carpet or venetian blinds, and a bunch of designers disagreed and split off to form Activision. Essentially, this blew the starting whistle for 3rd-party development, flooding the market with badly-made, derivative garbage by inexperienced companies. The enormous letdown of such a hugely anticipated game as E.T. merely caused the scales to fall from the eyes of the buying public: "Hey! All these overpriced, bleep-y games with pixels the size of Post-It notes are actually kinda shit!" Yeah, seems obvious to us, but cut them some slack. It was the '80s; they still thought Bananarama was good."

"Firefall has a plot. And frankly, after a bunch of hours playing, that's all I'm prepared to state with certainty. From what I remember, Earth's fucked. A dice was rolled on the usual "Fuck the Earth" table and on this occasion it landed on, "Big Asteroid." But wait! Firefall plays its "Roll Again" card with a +1 modifier and the Earth gets fucked a second time when the dice lands on, "Misuse of Miracle Element." Slow down, intro cinematic; I'm still mentally digesting the first round of fucking! Thankfully, neither fucking is the kind that means we don't get to fly cool spaceships or wear glowing armor, so we boldly step into this bleak arena now the backstory's been hurled at us like a fucking custard pie."

"You know, what pisses me off is that all the things I'm good at are things that everyone assumes they could do if they tried. Playing the bassoon or fluffing a walrus people respect, 'cause there's a specialist skill goes into those, but writing? "Pah! I learnt that in school! Fucking aced it! They made me start doing it all in joined-up letters just to give everyone else a chance! And that, Mr. Croshaw, is why I felt my background in production made me qualified to rewrite all the story copy you did for us to be more like a recent popular film." "Well, you know what I say to that, Mr. Producer? Fifty dollars an hour, please." Blimey, I wonder how people with integrity get through life?"

"Risen may have more skills than the size of its world can support, distributing them rather unevenly among a dense population of same-y NPCs. And the necessity of having to converse with every single one of the dreary fuckwits to determine the quests they can give and the skills they can teach gives Risen a little bit too much trough and not enough peak. It's all rather monotone — converse with one white dude with brown hair and a regional British accent, conversed with them all. Even the first three recruitable crew members are all white dudes with brown hair and regional British accents. I'm not asking for the Mass Effect thing, where they're all different species: one human, one goblin, one pistol shrimp. Nor am I asking for achingly politically correct diversity until it resembles fucking Sesame Street. Just more ways to tell the fuckers apart would be nice!"

"I was slightly surprised to find Daikatana available on Steam, but even more so by the feature list: "25 glorious weapons to collect and utilize", "Two highly-trained sidekicks to watch your back." I'd have said it was being sarcastic if I thought publishers had any self-awareness at all. But, realistically, everyone knows that its infamous reputation is the only reason this game is on Steam, and the blurb should have read, "Roll up, roll up, everyone! Come and see the freak!""

"As negative press grew and grew concerning nepotism and mass resignations, and magazine ads informed a restless gaming public that they were John Romero's cellmate and he'd claimed the top bunk (as it were), outright hostility was brewing. At this point, the universe takes two paths: One in which Romero spearheads a bold artistic movement in game design as a misunderstood genius, burdened with the egotism that often strikes the auteur; or Romero is forever lambasted as a boob, so massive that even the most determined baby would struggle to get its gob around it. And which universe we ended up with hinged on one thing: Daikatana not being a pile of execrable garbage. Better luck next time, universe."

"Today's faceless triple-A industry rarely indulges auteurism, as throwing babies out with bathwater is now so routine to big business that the babies have formed their own society in the outflow pipe."

"Oh, for fuck's sake! Why didn't they just call it, "Battlemage?" That's a really fucking good title -- punchy, memorable, gets the point across. I'd call my dog, "Battlemage!" Fuck it; I'd call my kid "Battlemage" (the playground beatings would be very character building)! Best of all, you feel like you can say it in conversation without having to prize the words through your teeth, like a stubborn Werther's Original."

"I'm so sick of the endless colon-ization of new games that feel like they're too special to make do with one title! It's so mind-bogglingly self-important it makes me want to spit! So from now on, I'm going to pronounce colons as dry-heaves. Did you hear that, Beyond (HRUUH) Two Souls? Murdered (HRUUH) Soul Suspect?"

"Are we to take it that Lichdom (HRUUH) Battlemage is merely the first installment of an ongoing Lichdom series, not necessarily about battlemagery? Should we look forward to "Lichdom (HRUUH) Dishwasher," and "Lichdom (HRUUH) Tax Accountant?" No, of course we fucking shouldn't, because it's a game about battlemaging and essentially nothing else! I'm pretty sure there aren't even liches in it!"

"Our story starts with a literal moustache-twirling villain walking into your house, weeing on your carpet and licking all the doorknobs, and then walking out while everyone laughs at your stupid, sad face. Whereupon a mysterious man in a hood grants you the power to shoot fire out of your hands and tells you to go nuts. I suppose if you're making a fantasy game, there is no fantasy like power fantasy."

"So presumably, you know what The Sims is by this point: It's the best possible argument against the existence of a benevolent interventionist god, in which you direct small groups of dollhouse residents until they cease to amuse, then burn their lives to the ground and laugh at their betrayed tears. But before you start assembling your psychotic single white female-esque campaign of torment, do bear in mind that there isn't any swimming in Sims 4. So you can no longer lure them into the pool and delete the ladder, which was so iconic to the series, they might as well have removed the green diamond thing."

"I wonder if, in their snip-happy way, EA truly realizes how devastating to the core principle removing swimming pools really is. What The Sims is is a consumerist middle class fantasy about walling yourself off from the real world and reducing all measurement of human development and personal success to one's possessions -- your dragon's hoard of crass, suburban decadence. And in that game of Top Trumps, the swimming pool is a kingly crown. It's always the first thing on my progress list when I play The Sims, after a second toilet and a TV bigger than my left bumcheek."

"I suppose it might be shallow to pick apart every individual detail that has been cut down, and a broader perspective might appreciate the formula being streamlined a bit. But on the other hand, it's the fucking Sims! It's the poster boy for shallowness. It's about smooth-skinned Stepford Wives competing to have the nicest wallpaper, as they willfully ignore the emaciated children sucking on a rat's armpit for nourishment, somewhere outside the pastel walls of their gated community. And to start removing the flatscreen tellies and power showers of gameplay features shows more blatant misunderstanding of its audience than the Black-And-White Minstrels tour of the South African prison system."

"It plays like somebody said, "Hey, make a horror game!" And somebody else said, "Okay, what about?" "I've just told you, about horror." "No, I mean, what happens in it? What's the context? What are the major themes you want to work with?" "Horror, horror, and horror! Jesus Christ, just do it! Why are you so difficult to work with?" And so the result is this undisciplined mishmash of horror set pieces and imagery barely justified by a toilet-tissue-flimsy plot, populated entirely by stock characters."

"CODAW starts off on the right foot when we're introduced to our hero taking off his helmet to reveal that he's a white dude with awful facial hair. We then turn to his best friend who takes off his helmet to reveal that he's the exact same, identical white dude with awful facial hair. Then they start talking about their dads because it's always dads, isn't it? There are no mothers in Call of Duty's world. Soldiers are birthed fully formed from the tail pipes of their father's restored Cadillacs."

"Our friend, who's identical to ourselves, dies in a very heroic and insecure way, and at the funeral, we are introduced to his father, Kevin Spacey, who is the only white guy in the plot who doesn't have atrocious facial hair which I suppose means that he's the baddie. I'd spoiler that since he doesn't properly villain it up until a ways in the game, but come on! It's Kevin Spacey; of course he's the villain. He's got two faces: smart arsed and recently punched for being a smart arse."

"Kevin Spacey essentially becomes a G.I. Joe villain. The usual anomalously well-organized terrorist strike cripples most of the world, so Kevin Spacey rolls in, takes the credit for ending terrorism, and becomes the most powerful corporation on Earth. And then, having essentially conquered the world with money and minimal force, Kevin Spacey decides his next course of action will be to invade the United States. Yeah, this is where I sort of lose his train of logic. I mean, he practically runs the world already at that point; but I guess conquest just doesn't feel like conquest 'till you've stuck a flag in someone else's shit. And he openly announces his intentions to take over the world in a speech at the United Nations, after which the world turns against him and I want to know what the fuck he was expecting would happen after he stopped talking - pyjama party?"

"Where Brody became a killing machine out of desperate survival need and enough drugs to occupy Amy Winehouse for one lazy Sunday afternoon, Ghale only does it essentially because somebody told him to and he didn't want to make a fuss. He's just a dope who does nothing but agree with the last thing he heard. And everyone around him seems to realize it, you can tell from the way characters give him mission briefings. Every single time they make some token instructing noises, give him a little encouraging smack on the bum and close the door in his face and go back to the TV. Ajay's story eventually leads to his parent's dark secret that explains why the villain has an interest in him. But since Ajay reacts to the revelation like a St. Bernard being told he can't have another biscuit, my first thought was "Any chance we could play as your parents instead? They sound more interesting than you.""

"The main plot thread concerns the resistance being torn between two leaders, one old-fashioned and moralistic, and the other extreme but pragmatic, and you have to decide which one to support. They both have good points, it was a somewhat interesting dilemma and I put quite a bit of thought into my decisions. But what I wanted was some sodding payoff. And at the end of it all, you install you preferred dictator and they go "Cheers, for that", smack on the bum, close door in face. This must be what it's like to be the American secretary of state. And then you trudge up main villain's house and they're all like "Don't look at me, my ending's completely anticlimactic as well.""

"Eventually, I got to the final boss who didn't hold still long enough for my stupidly overpowered dark spell to be effective, so all I could do was whack it repeatedly over the head with my sword while it chewed constantly on my lower body. But I had so many health potions by that point that I could basically drip-feed myself with the stuff and, after the boss popped its scaly clogs, I still had enough left over to throw a health potion keg party."