"Harvest Moon: One World is the game, and while it seems to have had some noble intention to sprinkle a little more adventure into the concept so you're not just waking up and urinating on potatoes day in, day out, in doing so, it loses sight of the core appeal of these games, and there's a general air of wrongness about the whole thing, which first started sinking in when it told me to go to the cave and mine some bronze ore. There's no such thing as "bronze ore", you shitwits! It's an alloy; it doesn't occur naturally! It's like telling me to go harvest a cupcake bush."

"Anyway, as the one weirdo who still thinks crops grow from seeds, you are tasked by the Goddess of Spring (or someone like that) to travel the world and reintroduce the concept of growing things; and yes, every character in this game does come across as about as stupid as this premise. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are fruit-bearing trees everywhere! What did everyone think those were? Unusually taciturn people with very delicious haircuts? The reasonable question to ask at this point would be "How does one combine a farming sim with a game about journeying around the world?"; the one certainty about farms is that they kind of can't go anywhere. Well, shows how much you know, because this society that failed to develop agriculture has mastered miniaturization technology; you know, it's like when you play Civilization against someone who researches nuclear fission before they've discovered the wheel. Because of this, you can pack up all your farm buildings into a convenient package and go establish yourself at one of several predetermined spots throughout the world because this society has also failed to develop the concept of land ownership, apparently."

"So after I reviewed Harvest Moon: One Star a few weeks back and said it was the imperfect Pod Person replica of the original franchise that got rejected for forgetting to glue its nose on properly, and that you should probably hold out for the new Story of Seasons, I immediately realised, "Oh, crunchy nut bugger-flakes, I've tied my hands on this one, haven't I?" I've basically endorsed Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town, sight unseen, so now I have to review it to make sure it doesn't leave skidmarks on the guest towels. After all, it's not like the original Harvest Moon developers are hoarding the secret formula for light farming sims like it's the recipe for Coke; you just need a twenty minute day cycle, a brace of anime hotties and an at best truncated idea of childbirth. Some of the original Harvest Moons were stinkers, like that one on the GameCube from the "make everything look like we're viewing it through a coffee filter" era of graphics that had all the visual charm of the top layer of scum on the pond behind the abattoir. If you want to know if Pioneers of Olive Drab is better than Harvest Moon: One Wank, then yes, it is, but that's not much of a bar to clear."

"Blimey, I thought video games were supposed to be violent! I've been doing so little killing lately I'm becoming dangerously well-adjusted. Just look at my last few reviews: idle games, management games, farming sims, last night a stray cat came into my front garden and I didn't stomp it to death. High time for some good old fashioned mindless violence. And who better to provide it than People Can Fly, the developers behind Painkiller, old-school boomer shooter from before old-school boomer shooters were wallpapering the fucking rumpus room, and more recently of Bulletstorm, quirky tongue-in-cheek spectacle shooter that's like Gears of War trying desperately to loosen up at the office Christmas party. I can certainly trust them to provide a murder simulator that’s at least interesting to talk about and not another bloody multiplayer-focussed looter shooter with endless copy pasted bullet sponge baddies and a cover art depicting some smug people walking slowly towards the camera. Isn’t that right, People Can Fly? Yeah, I know Outriders is all of the things I just said! I was doing a little funny, wipe that puppy dog look off your face."

"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."

"The premise is, a married couple whose relationship is bottoming out so hard it's getting carpet burns inform their friendless, presumably homeschooled and probably on the spectrum daughter that they're getting divorced. Said daughter proceeds to cry on some dolls she made of her parents for Christ knows what reason and the parents' souls get magically transferred into the dolls. Blimey! Lucky she didn't cry into some bog roll or the sandwich she was eating; that would've been a bit Kafkaesque. The parents must then work together to find a way back to normal by navigating abstract puzzle platforming fantasy worlds based on aspects of their family home, which appears to have been about the size of Windsor fucking Castle. Harangued from start to finish by an omnipotent self-help book with a slightly racist accent whom you and the protagonists will swiftly want to murder. In fact, I'd have given the game's story more points if it had ended with the family finally coming together over a cheerful backyard book burning."

"Remember the Nintendo Wii? After the Nintendo GameCube was the console equivalent of a Chinese gymnast, well crafted and colourfully dressed but painfully undernourished, remember how Nintendo followed it up with something that resembled a UFO cult's purity testing device and it sold better than mouthwash outside a blowjob factory and everyone was all like "Ooh, motion controls are the future of gaming!" and I was all like "No, they've only attracted a short-term crowd of gimmick-loving trend followers and ultimately the long-term core audience of gaming plays to relax and unwind and not morris dance around the fucking living room." And then the consoles were all like "Don't listen to grumpy trousers! Motion controls all round!" Ten years on and the Xbox has had to sheepishly remove its Kinect like a hat at a funeral. The PlayStation Move is relegated to backup Christmas-themed sex toys. And the Wii itself is consigned forever to the leaky trough of consumer history with all its brown gunk encrusted controllers and cheaply made third party hidden object games about Toy Story cast after it - and I'm still exactly where I was but with a slightly nicer chair, so looks like I won, hunter duckers."

"The plot, right, is that you're a lone sniper in a nondescript Middle Eastern oil nation with a new government that I guess didn't import enough Simpsons DVDs and therefore the Western powers want ousted. You proceed to oust it by tracking down a bunch of key power brokers and turning all their heads into very short lived and highly pressurised ornamental fountains, concluding with the big leader herself. You do all of that, then the very no nonsense voice in your head says well done, then you go home. I guess I was expecting a twist, like the big leader gets in a giant robot suit or some kind of fortified bunker at least and isn't just standing around in a courtyard looking like she's waiting to complain to the gardener about some neglected leylandiis. Or maybe the very no nonsense voice in your head could be lying about your targets - you only have his word that they're evil and the worst you ever see them do is neglect to close the Venetian blinds before you make everyone else in the room forever paranoid of distant shrubbery. There is kind of a twist in that there's one last surprise target you need to ornamental fountain after the main lady, but Mr. No-Nonsense Handler tacks it onto your to-do list with all the gravitas of a request that you pick up a carton of milk on the way home."

"The point is, you know it's a slim pickings kind of release week when I seriously give a Mario Golf game a chance, but I figured, "Hey! I just came off slightly enjoying the sniping gameplay in that Sniper: Roast Waterfowl with Carrots 2 game, and what's golf gameplay if not sniping gameplay without the body count?" And so, I set out to escape from worrying about rising income inequality by pretending to be an internationally famous public figure enjoying a sport exclusively played by rich cunts... or not. And that was the first troubling sign: when I started the main single-player campaign, and you don't get to play as Mario. The named characters are only for the multiplayer and challenge modes, I'm afraid; the peasants have to play the campaign as a custom Mii, because of course, when I play something called "Mario Golf", I want to spend the whole time playing as Richard Dean Anderson or Jeffrey Dahmer. Mario, if you can slam your name over the top of this title like an artificially enlarged penis across an unsuspecting forehead, you can damn well stop scoffing mushroom tortellini in the clubhouse and put some bloody work in!"

"Ys: Molesting Nonce is the latest in the courageously persistent and long-running Ys series of mid-budget Japanese action RPGs that's been about three steps behind the rest of the industry its whole life. But while the games have never exactly lit up gaming horizons like a napalm strike in nipple tassels, I tend to find them fucking adorable, like a little toddler coming downstairs at an adult party going, "I'm a gwown-up!", wearing Daddy's best jacket and waving Mummy's favorite clitoral stimulator."

"I'm confused, Suda51. I was under the impression there were no more heroes three games ago. Then you had a desperate struggle trying to find a few to carry the sequel the way one roots around in a stubborn nostril for the last scraps of tasty bogey before anyone notices, then the series went quiet for so long and I feel like I'd finally come to terms with there being no more heroes, only for you to find a few more lying around for another sequel. Were there ever no more heroes, Suda51? Final Fantasy never fucking ends, Mega Man is blatantly not old enough to shave - I don't know who to trust anymore."

"Ah, Psychonauts, what a great game that was... I hope your fingers are still smarting from the last time I had to bring that across. Sure, the platforming physics were a bit jank and all the characters looked like their concept art had been scanned in by someone with Parkinson's disease, but it was funny and well written and weird because it was a Tim Schafer game from that wonderful golden age of the PS2 era when games could be weird and culty - I said "CULTY"! - because they weren't expected to make enough money to pay for the CEO's moon expedition. Unfortunately they were still expected to make some amount of money and that's where Psychonauts 1 fell short on initial release, and why I had to start breaking fingers."

"You know what, fine; maybe time loop games can be a genre. They're a nice neat way to formalize the standard save/load function within the context of the plot and they let us live the fantasy of not having to advance beyond the present day and watch our civilization's gradual transformation into a gigantic consumer electronics landfill. But they can't officially be a genre without a proper exemplar. What Doom is to Doom clones, Dark Souls to Soulslikes, the bitter polyamory of Metroid and Vania. Yeah, I know there's been half a dozen time loop indie games, but there're so many indie games competing for attention none of them have a high enough profile, it's like trying to see magic eye pictures in television static."

"The premise is: you are Colt Vahn, grizzled mercenary type ('cos you can't exactly get a job at the DMV with a name like that) who wakes up with no memories on an island full of good-time Charlies who have deliberately locked themselves in a one day Time Loop so they can party forever and never have to deal with the ever-downsliding outside world, and Colt wants to escape from this situation, which is the first glaring plot hole for me. Fucking hell, airdrop in two crates of hard cider and a Real doll and show me where to sign, guys!"

"The "4" in the name comes from there being 4 playable characters, you see. Which is a bit weird, since Back 4 Blood has 8 playable characters. Yeah, you can only have four playing at a time but if you're into number puns there's a lot you can do with 8. "Running L-8", "Zombies 8 My Face"? Oh wait, not zombies, "infected"! No wait, not "infected", "Ridden"! Ridden? That's a word that just reeks of "we had to come up with a legally distinct alternative," isn't it? No one in reality would call them "The Ridden". What, are we up against a resistance group founded by disgruntled domestic horses? I keep misreading it as "the Riddler" and wondering if civilization has finally been brought down by Batman's most confounding foe."

"Oh, you want opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy, do you? Oh boy, do I have opinions on Guardians of the Galaxy. On the one hand it's a snot-squirtingly mediocre game that like so many AAA games of its ilk has the air of something that was stitched together from preexisting templates by about nine different teams who haven’t been talking to each other since a harrowing experience at the company picnic, but it also has a licensed soundtrack that includes "Kickstart My Heart", so on the other hand it's my game of the year, no more questions, please. I can only assume someone at Square must've stolen my high school crush diary, 'cos how else would they know that "Kickstart My Heart" is my one weakness? See, there's absolutely no action a living being can take that doesn't become slightly cooler when it's done to "Kickstart My Heart". Even fingerpainting with Grandma takes on a sort of air of euphoric defiance."

""Well, go on then, Yahtz, tell us World War II shooters are overdone. And while you're at it, be sure to inform us that water is wet and modern political discourse is fucked." Ironically, pointing out World War 2 shooters are overdone is, itself, overdone. We're stuck in the fucking ouroboros of tedium, the snake eating its own tail while complaining that the seasoning is bland. Actually, I wasn't going to rag on Call of Duty for going "Nazi-fartsy" on us again, because I've come to accept that while shooters can't seem to get away from World War II, it definitely hasn't been for want of trying. The Modern Warfare trend was about as valiant an attempt as one could expect, and we all know where that ended so, fuck it, let shooters have their fucking comfort zone. It's the only uncomplicatedly good setting for a quote "realistic" shooter. Get too close to the present and war's mainly decided not by the ground-level machine gun exchanges that FPSes bank on, but by whose tech can make the biggest explosion happen the furthest away. Also it's still the war with the best narrative. Where the writers weren't trying to frame the side with aircraft carriers and predator drones as the plucky underdogs struggling valiantly against an opponent armed mainly with harsh language and angry livestock. Besides, the lesson "don't be like the Nazis, you stupid fucks" is one that certain audiences still haven't properly internalised in this modern age apparently, so fuck it, all is forgiven, World War II shooters."

"Ooh, you want to be very careful about declaring any release of anything to be the "definitive" version. Partly because I think that's a subjective thing. There will be people out there for whom their "definitive" experience of watching The Crying Game was at three in the morning blitzed out on mescaline with both feet immersed in buckets of wallpaper paste. And as for removing previous versions of the thing from sale, well, let me tell you a cautionary fable about a proud little man named George Lucas who decided that no one had any need for any version of the original Star Wars trilogy that didn't have added Loony Toons sound effects and CG as dated as Sean Connery's relationship advice. And now George Lucas has to sit there and plaster on a smile as the Disney corporation peels the skin off his life's work and stretches it so thin it would disappoint a Marmite enthusiast."

"3rd Blandest"

"...Security Breach is a full-on first-person stealth shooter Metroid-vania reminiscent of Alien: Isolation, if Alien: Isolation had fucking sucked prehensile slimy dick! I don't even have to review it. I only started playing it in case my Dying Light 2 code didn't come in, and it did. But when it did, I said to myself, "Y'know what? Techland's new over-produced grind-a-thon can wait its fucking turn, because Security Breach is very bad and I want to hurt it!""

"I can only assume that using jump-scares to provoke funny reactions from streamers started getting old, and now they're seeing if similar results can be achieved from just annoying the shit out of them. And if that is the case, look at me falling right into the trap. I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of MY DIIIIIICK!"

"...Pokémon Legends: Arceus is basically Pokémon as an Isekai. Just the thing for all you Pokémon fans who were concerned that Pokémon GO had made the franchise marginally less embarrassing to talk about in grown-up conversations. The premise is, you are generic contemporary gender to be determined Pokémon trainer who I guess fell off the stage in Smash Brothers Brawl or something and wakes up in the olden days of the Pokémon world when Pokémon training has only just become a thing. The protagonist swiftly astonishes the primitive locals and is hailed as a hero from the sky when they show no fear towards some tiny adorable fluffy helpless baby animals and beans them all in the skull. Silly, yes, but finally a Pokémon game where it kinda makes sense that you seem to be the only trainer who's figured out they can carry more than three or four of the buggers. Soon we get recruited by a quote "surveying" organization who have tasked themselves to quote "survey" all the local Pokémon by capturing them and forcing them into either manual labour or gladiatorial combat. You know, the same way Columbus "surveyed" the Americas. Or how one "surveys" an ant colony with a kettle of boiling water."

"In the prologue of Final Fantasy 1, the four Light Warriors travel to a nearby castle to rescue the kidnapped Princess Sara from the corrupted knight Garland. And Stranger on Top of Paradise seems to be doing pretty much the same thing until you defeat Garland at the end of the first dungeon, at which point Garland transforms into a girl wearing nothing but a basketball jersey who explains that she was also on a quest to defeat Chaos but decided Chaos didn't exist, and so prayed to Chaos to become Chaos and get defeated, but now she's been defeated so she's failed somehow. And that specifically was the first moment that made me wonder what the fuck this game was drivelling on about, by no means the last. She joins the party and it turns out her name's "Neon". Aha, I said. Jack, Ash, Jed and Neon, is this a clever riff on how the original game would only allow you to enter names a maximum of four letters long? "Possibly. Anyway, here's your fifth party member, Sophia." Well fuck you, game."

"Would I be right in assuming that Stranger in the Vicinity of Paradise got cut down a bit during development? I assume it was going to have a full-on overworld with towns you can explore full of NPCs that all drivel out one utterly banal sentence when you press on their heads. And all that got cut, because the final game is a linear sequence of combat dungeons and cutscenes that you pick from a fucking menu that they drew a map on so you can pretend it's an overworld. And I guess they'd already written the NPC dialogue, because rather than let it go to waste they stuck a submenu at the bottom of the map screen where you can click a name on a list to get subjected to one of the copy-pasted townsfolk making an insipid observation on the current state of the plot. Very useful feature if you happen to have breast cancer and will only survive by boring your own tits off. The budget cuts also hit the combat dungeons to an extent, because so much of them consist of copy pasted identical corridors I was constantly getting turned around and confused. If you want to know where all the money did go, I'd bet on the weapons and armour department. You are constantly being showered with new equipment, every piece of which is lovingly designed and attached to your character model even in cutscenes, ensuring that the light warriors constantly look like they're going to a costume party as the donation bin in front of a second hand kitchenware shop. I wonder if the people doing the face animation for cutscenes knew that the cast would be wearing full face masks most of the time. I further wonder if the armour department's coffee machine ever didn't contain piss."

"I'll say this for Supermassive Games, they are world class experts at creating entire casts of characters that I instantly and completely despise. They should take a side gig making war propaganda. If they made one of these games starring a bunch of Russian military officers, I'd join the Ukrainian defense force before you can say "Pierre Kirillovich Bezukhov". A lot of that comes from the animation. There's still an awkwardness about the motion capture faces, because of course "Haunted Quarry" is a synonym for "Uncanny Valley". There's something very wrong with everyone's mouths and teeth, like they’ve been enlarged in post-production or something. The stock "sexy girl" character in particular looks like she's trying to talk through a bagel that’s been hot glued to her face. But the dialogue makes me hate them all, too. Everyone's got a bad case of verbally explaining their personalities to each other. "Why are you always so upbeat?" "Why are you always cracking jokes?" Those were jokes, were they? Fuckin' news to me. I couldn't decipher them through your private language of arrogant snorts, and constant needlessly abrasive digs at each other. Basically every two way dialog choice comes down to "be a complete prick" or "be a partial prick" and even exclusively taking the second option it still felt like everyone was trying to break the loathsomeness speed record: "Okay, I hated you after six words of dialogue, let’s see who can beat that. Whoa, hold the phone, the buff jock dude’s wearing a backwards baseball cap. He wins. He did it in zero.""

"Like all Supermassive's prior choose your own adventure books, if the intention is to make me feel like I'm watching a movie, I'd think it was a very poorly edited one. It's always painfully obvious when alternative dialogue has been swapped in, 'cos there'll be an awkward pause and someone's emotional state will mysteriously swivel on a dime. The geography of each scene is very poorly established. Characters have a weird habit of teleporting in and out of the room between cuts. Like, we fight off a monster and then oh no, the monster is attacking Lance Henriksen now and I'm like "When the fuck did Lance Henriksen get here?" Was I supposed to intuit that from the general air of slightly improved acting talent in the atmosphere?"

""All very well, Yahtz, but we've been stewing on the phrase 'like Conker’s Bad Fur Day without the wit' for the last two minutes and we'd like you to clarify, because that's like saying 'like Thomas the Tank Engine but without the sizzling erotic subtext.'" Alright, let me draw a direct parallel. In Conker's Bad Fur Day, you go inside a toilet and have a boss fight with a giant poo. And the poo sings an operatic song as it fights you with profane lyrics that rhyme the word "scat" with the word "twat". This exhibits wit. It's wit to rhyme with shit, but it's wit. The humour lies in a poo, a very unrefined thing, singing opera, a style of music generally considered very refined. In contrast, in Hell Pie, you go into a sewer, and there are poos. And there's no joke there. Some of the poo is alive and hostile and wearing Nazi helmets, but that's not a joke either. There's no comical through line from "Nazi" to "poo". If the poos had all resembled former British home secretary Douglas Hurd, and had been called "Douglas Turds", that would've been a joke with some wit. As it is all the game has done is dropped some poo on the floor and then looked at me as if it expected me to know what to do with it."

"The tragedy of Hell Pie is that it had a lot going for it. A strong central mechanic, a nice vibrant appearance, clear dedication and effort from its creators, but it's all let down by being really witlessly, off-puttingly crass. I'm sorry to have to side with your primary school homeroom teacher on this one, Hell Pie, but poo references just aren't big or clever. And I have no idea who this game is even aimed at. Little boys whose idea of intellectual discourse is to compete to see who can yell "fanny flaps" the loudest in a crowded assembly? And of those, the subset that also wants to see small adorable baby animals being bloodily and painfully tortured for no particular reason every time you get a horn upgrade? All I can picture is that one kid I knew in middle school who mysteriously stopped coming to school around the time his sister showed up with burn scars and an eyepatch."

"I hate to say "I told you so," constantly, with an air of smugness and perverse relish, but I called this when Saints Row 4 came out. It was, to reiterate, a banger. The series went from generic crime sandbox to being the president of space and it was fun and audacious but it was also going to kill the series stone dead because there was absolutely no topping it. You couldn't make a fourth sequel about becoming president of twice as much space. So apparently Volition didn't even bother to try and have instead nestled their face between the cozy cheeks of reboot, and Saints Row going back to relatively grounded crime sandbox after nine years feels like Jim Morrison coming back to life, crashing on my sofa and leaving skidmarks on the guest towels."

"It's the ending, again; history runs in fucking cycles. Not that it's as one-sixteenth bottomed as everything else; they're clearly making a deliberate statement with it. It's just that I interpret that statement as follows: "Oh! Have you actually invested mental energy into all these intrigues and relationships we've spent the last few hours building up, and are expecting a payoff to all that? Pah! Talk about missing the point! What a sad lame-o you must be! The end." And then, just to grind the heel in a bit, there's a personal message from the creators. "Ah, when you think about it, Monkey Island 1 was about a wide-eyed naif discovering themselves, Monkey Island 2 was about trying to recreate the success that the wider world didn't care that much about. Haven't these games always been about where we were as creators?" Oh, okay; so you're saying the final message of Return to Monkey Island is, "We've stopped giving a shit, and so should you." Message received! How about next time, you just tweet that and not charge me twenty bucks?"

"What we have here is a mission-based tactical combat game from the XCOM developers but instead of your squad being five randomly generated Scottish dudes whose names all start with "Mc", they’re officially licensed Marvel superheroes. And when you get back to base, instead of sending them to training or upgrading their equipment, you take them on romantic dinner dates. And on top of that there’s this heavy theming around black magic and the occult, so the end result is a rather awkward The Punisher meets Harry Potter fan fiction mishmash in which we find ourselves thinking "Man, I should've taken Spider-Man mushroom picking in the haunted forest before we came out to neutralize this group of armed terrorists.""

"If there was ever a game crying out for some kind of spectacle fighter mechanic that rewards the player for varying their approach, it's this one, because by the end your available variety of attacks would shame a battleship crewed by poisonous hedgehogs. Standard punch, uppercut, electric punch, clearing electric punch, sneaky interrupt-kick-in-the-bollocks, parry shield, electric lasso, six shooters, shotgun, rifle, crossbow, flamethrower, glory kills, super-duper attack with ten minute cool-down -- I haven't even gotten to the facetious made-up examples yet -- grenade launcher, minigun, hedge trimmer, angry cat in a bag, and there we go. Plus everything has the all-important satisfying feel, especially when you uppercut a dude into the air, jump up, and pound him into the exploding barrel three of his mates were standing around for their weekly gasoline tasting."

"Callisto Protocol is an almost refreshingly bad game. Riddled with misguided and frustrating design choices rather than the usual generic drivel. Although it's generic drivel as well, make no mistake, we're plumbing into new dimensions of shite-osity. Feels like Dead Space with all of Dead Spaces interesting edges sanded down. Unique limb cutting gameplay replaced with generic twatting about. Unique monster design replaced with generic cornflake zombies. Who were of course created by a generic alien parasite dredged up from a generic ancient ruin and then deliberately spread by generically evil rich people for generic super soldier reasons. And then after a generic final boss fight against a generic monster man the plot has the sheer gall to end on a cliffhanger. Read the room, Callisto Protocol!"

"Yes, Nick, I promise not to get us demonetised in the first thirty seconds. So, as I’m sure you know, Hogwarts Legacy is based on the work of JK Rowling, who is a massive TERFy C-word. As such, reviewing it puts one in an awkward position online, as the feeling in some circles is that even acknowledging it is giving oxygen to her and her horrible C-word opinions. But damn it I have a job to do and I feel bad for the no doubt hundreds of ground-level people on the dev team who probably think she’s a C-word as much as any of us at this point, so how about this: I’ll review the game strictly on its own merits, but start out by affirming as clearly as possible that I think JK Rowling is a – we’re past thirty seconds now, right? Cunt. Does that offset things enough?"

"Ah, 2002. The new millennium still fresh, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man didn’t suck yet… uh… the death of Joseph Luns, fifth Secretary General of NATO, thanks Wikipedia. And of course the year Metroid Prime came out on the Gamecube, the first fully 3D game in Nintendo’s classic moody sci-fi franchise, so called because it was about a Metroid that was only divisible by itself and one. One ass kicking space lady, that is, in a suit of armour that appears around her body by magic, which is just as well, because she’s got a gun for an arm and that’d make it really hard to tie up shoelaces. Ah, fuck it, that’s an intro."

"[...] Metroid Prime enemies are all prissy little pick-mes who insist on popping out with elaborate screeches and animations every fucking time. Relatedly, fuck Chozo ghosts. Amid those in the know you will not find a more universally agreed upon phrase besides perhaps “cake tastes nice.”"

"Oooooooh, Capcom, A remake of one of the most pivotal games of the 2000s and a personal favourite of mine? Go ask your friends at Bloober Team how much you're going to have to do to win me over on this. "Uh... wanna be one of the first outlets to get a review code?" Well, consider your foot in the door. Now let's go down the list. Is the Bingo line still in. "Yes, it is." THE BINGO LINE'S STILL IN. DISMANTLE THE PYRE. Is the Tetris inventory management still in? "Yes!" Is the overly enthusiastic Cockney merchant whose presence everyone mysteriously accepts like he's Doctor fucking Who still in? "Yes, although slightly more South African these days..." That's fine. Is squeaky voiced midget Napoleon still in? "Yes indeed!" What about being chased over a bridge by a giant robot squeaky voiced midget Napoleon? "Er... no, we cut that." WELL, WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT THEN?!"

"Oh, come on, Yahtz, you big negative Nathan, stop focussing [sic] on every single fleck of dried up turd that has been shampooed out of RE4's bum hair and tell us about what's new with the remake. Well, Leon makes a funny sort of fatty-grunt every time he switches to aim mode, now. And Ashley grunts all the time as well whenever she has to navigate terrain more complex than a partially occupied waiting room. So if you run up and down the hallway aiming at things it sounds like you're dubbing a foreign porn film. "Not that, Yahtz! Tell us about those new sidequests we've been hearing so much about." Oh yeah. I finished an early game area, and as I was leaving I found a blue note scotch taped to the door saying "Hey, why not go through that area again and kill three rats? And it took me about three hours before I was finally able to get my mouth to stop forming the "oo" at the end of "fuck you.""

"They probably rejected the idea of doing a Sonic dating sim for the obvious reason that the fanbase absolutely should not be encouraged in this area. I mean, the other day I was curious to know how rising interest rates had affected the sale price of original Genesis game cartridges and the results I saw from googling “Sonic the Hedgehog inflation” will haunt me to my dying days."

"By the end it’s just another bloody Sonic game about Sonic being great and slapping Doctor Eggman in the face with his big smug hedgehog willy. A certain light is shed, however, when the end credits roll, and after the actual development team of like, four dudes has gone past, there’s a laundry list of SEGA higherups who all fingered the pie, including more than one person credited as “lore consultants.” I wanna meet the person whose job title is “Sonic the Hedgehog lore consultant” and ask them what their mother thinks they do for a living."

"It might be worth restating that this is an early access game, and as such at time of writing it's more bugged than a foreign embassy in Moscow. Half the menu interface doesn’t know if it’s coming or going, I clipped through elevator floors more than once, important mission details occasionally fuck up so sometimes you don’t know if your finely honed detective instincts are failing you or if the evidence you’re looking for has spawned inside the fucking wall again. And if there’s any area I’d recommend the developers give particular attention to in the course of polishing the game, it’s NPC interactions. “Oh my god, I think there’s someone in my house,” declared one homeowner, alert flashing over their head to indicate awareness of my presence. Said individual was, at the time, handcuffed and kneeling on the kitchen floor while I searched all his cabinets, having already beaten him to unconsciousness twice."

"The word that defines Redballs is "flimsy." From the narrative to the game design to most of the enemies' skeletons, they're all so badly put together, a game of half baked combat encounters copy pasted and stretched out to fill an overlarge sandbox map like an ill-judged amount of flimsy tinfoil over the leftovers of a meal that nobody particularly liked. Part of me hopes that it was an act of passive aggression on Arkane's part, like someone asked them to make a multiplayer shooter with broader appeal than their usual more experimental stuff, and they plopped this down like a resentful spouse with a burnt dinner. But they were working on this for years, "passive aggressive" feels wholly inadequate to describe someone who could sustain that amount of spite for that long. You'd need a better name for that. Something like "my mum.""

"“Oh here he comes. Here comes old gloomy trousers to crash the storybook romance between Zelda and all of gaming media and widdle all over the wedding breakfast. Well go on then, Yahtzee, tell us how Tears of the Kingdom is actually bad and we’re bad for liking it ‘cos you’re such a massive cont. Rarian. Contrarian. Calm down, Youtube.” No. I was not going to say that. I think Tears of the Kingdom holds up to the highest possible standard. “Right… and now you’re going to say, because standard is exactly what it is? Bog standard? Grouse grouse, ha ha ha?” No, I wasn’t going to say that either. … “You alright, Yahtz?” Look, I’m sorry you find it so difficult to tell when I’m being sincere. But I genuinely think Tears of the Kingdom sets a new, extremely high bar. For expansion packs. “AHA!” Oh fuck you, viewer, that’s what it is."

"On the whole don’t take away that I hate the game, for Christ’s sake, but I know what you’re going to say. “Oh who cares about the story stroke copy pasted sandbox map stroke everything else you’re widdling about when you can craft a flame spewing helicopter motorbike shaped like Leonard Cohen’s left testicle.” In turn I will say what I always say: if the game did have a mind-blowing story and original sandbox map, you would not be saying that they didn’t matter. You didn’t learn your lesson when Breath of the Wild came out and you all went “It’s perfect! It’s perfect! Never change a thing!” ‘Cos now they’ve improved on it and you’re all going “Okay, NOW it’s perfect! Never change a thing!” Spurt, by all means, just don’t spurt yourself dry in case you need a little spurting room for what tomorrow may bring. My little spurting room is under the stairs."

"Fighting games are like six year olds in a playground. They’re full of energy and fun to watch but the moment you try getting your hands on them everyone beats the shit out of you."

"But then I got to the final, final boss, and I won’t mince words, he chopped my soft ass up like avocado for the summer salad. By the end of the second round I was starting to get a feel for his patterns and quietly confident about a rematch, until the game said “Oh by the way if you fail this you have to go back to the start of the tournament.” What? But I used up all my healing and buffing items getting this far! And relatedly, I wish you’d mentioned beforehand that the final round was a supposed-to-lose fight. Do I get all those items back? “No, but you could always eat some of this shit that I found. Why don’t you just buy more healing items?” I BLEW ALL MY MONEY STOCKING UP FOR THE TOURNAMENT. Lucozade’s priced like Gamer Girl bathwater these days. “Well, I suppose the thing you need to do begins with G and ends with IND.” But I don’t WANT to go blind!"

"All the cherry-picked good bits in the world can't separate Ghost of Tsushima from the usual issues of committee-driven big-money development. Yes, there's some great Kurosawa-esque boss fights, but there's also an optional grainy black-and-white video filter named "Kurosawa Mode", which is the sort of idea that probably sounded cool to a committee room full of Danish pastry-fueled sub-producers, but in practice comes across a mite flippant."

"Can I do a spot of disabusing here? The kind I always have to do whenever they put out a DAVID CAGE game, or anything else presenting a façade of dramatic depth? The following things do not make a character deep or compelling: 1.) Getting hurt a lot (Looking at you, Tomb Raider reboot.); 2.) Being sad; 3.) Doing morally questionable things; and we might as well tack on 4.) Being a member of a minority, just 'cos I've already given up hope for this video's comment section. What does matter is the characters at least be interesting to watch, and these aren't; the banter between Ellie and her girlfriend as they adventure together sizzles like a flask of slightly tepid water because they're too similar in personality, background, and motivation to have good chemistry. But the most important thing is growth. Walker in Spec Ops: The Line slowly becomes a monster as he's twisted by the constant backfiring of his good intentions, and that's why it's compelling; Ellie has no character development. Villain Lady does, a little bit, for stupid reasons, along the lines of suddenly realizing that the enemy faction she's been genociding unquestioned for months are also human beings with families and would rather not be genocided, thanks, but Ellie just sets out to do something shitty and remains a shitty person; in fact, the game keeps droning on for about two hours after you think it's finally ending just to continue establishing Ellie's shittiness!"

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

"So while the general quality could be a problem, I fear the main one, my little velvet fucksocks, is games. I know, it's such a bore, isn't it, having to sucker people into a subscription service and provide them content? It's like, running a dairy farm would be so much easier if you didn't have to keep feeding the cows and making sure they don't die and shit. Right now, there's just a limited selection of AAA titles that everyone stops talking about around the same time they stopped talking about Russia annexing the Ukraine, and as for the all-important exclusives, there's little more than what meager scraping of indie titles could be snuck out of the Epic Store's shopping basket."