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2020 Episodes

2020, Quarter 1

Top 5 of 2019

Yahtzee starts the video with a poem about how boring the games released throughout the year have been, highly reminiscent of his Rhymedown Spectaculars with Jim Sterling.
The games are pulled out of things as if they were rabbits; the best games from a magician's hat, the blandest games from a cardboard box, and the worst games from a rusty soup can. Each category is preceded by a drum roll followed by a cymbal for the best games, a dry cough for the blandest games, and a belch for the worst games.
After praising Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night for being all of Castlevania's good ideas packed into one game:
Koji Igarashi: OK, but can I make the protagonist wear a silly hat?
Yahtzee: Yes, Koji Igarashi, have all the silly hats you want!
Koji Igarashi: (brightly) I will!
Yahtzee's reasoning behind the blandest game of 2019:
Anthem is mind-numbing live service tosh with fewer original ideas than a BBC daytime television commissioner, but that's not why it's topping my "Blandest" list. The real reason? Because while I was writing down the obvious candidates, Days Gone and Ghost Recon, I suddenly noticed Anthem on the list of 2019 releases and thought "Huh, I completely forgot about that." And THAT, viewers, is what gives you the edge in a mediocrity contest!
Yahtzee still refuses to say anything about Borderlands 3, declining to put it on any of the lists or even give it a mock award.

The 2010's Most Significant Games

During the credits, the top and bottom games of the past 10 years are ranked, with Undertale taking the top spot and Hunt Down the Freeman taking the bottom — and Ride to Hell in its own category, drinking heavily.
Yahtzee brings up the Black Ops series.
Viewer: The Black Ops series, Yahtzee? Have you been mainlining Worcestershire sauce again?

Boneworks

Yahtzee opens the video by declaring that after all his recent retrospective videos, it is time to focus on current releases again:
A wise man once told me, "He who dwells on the past has eyeballs glued to his bum cheeks." (a staff-totting imp with a wizard beard appears behind Yahtzee's avatar) ...Actually he wasn't that wise. (said imp starts chugging a bottle of Jack Daniel's)
- This is also another case of Yahtzee's love of Self-Deprecation—he has actually glued eyeballs to his butt in the past for the LittleBigPlanet review, including its Nightmare Fuel ending.
The credits gag: Yahtzee is sitting on the couch wearing a VR headset, and in the game he's playing he's supposed to be hitting a punching bag. He throws a punch, but while it connects with something, his fist is several inches away from the bag. He looks confused, then takes the headset off, only to find an imp passed out on the floor. What makes it even funnier is that the last scene has the message "This week's credits gag is based on a true story," with strong implications that he accidentally punched his wife in the middle of a VR session.

Mech Warrior 5: Mercenaries and Wattam

Yahtzee's description of the AI in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.
One time dumb twat wouldn't even move until I lasered him in the face to wake him up. And that's not going to look good on the employee review, is it? How I had to mess up my nice clean laser with his face, and now it's caught a bad case of stupid.
Yahtzee describing the Player Character of Wattam as "a dude similar to but assuredly legally distinct from a Mr. Men character".
The Running Gag of Yahtzee angrily denying that he is being defensive regarding his refusal to go in depth about Pathologic 2:
Yahtzee: (to a tupperware box) I am not getting defensive, do you wanna fight?

Yahtzee: Now, video games have been mistreating the word "puzzle" for many years, ever since Quake called it a puzzle whenever there was a door that had two buttons to open it instead of one. And the puzzles in Wattam mostly run thusly: character A wants to meet character B, game literally points you to character B, bring character B over, giggles and cake ensue. If that's a puzzle then taking fists up the arse from men in truckstop bathrooms is being happily married!
Viewer: Yahtzee, are you playing a baby game for ickle kiddies and complaining it's too easy? Blimey, Pathologic 2 brought out all your insecurities, didn't it?
Yahtzee: SHUT UP!
Yahtzee doesn't buy Wattam's attempt at An Aesop:
Wattam's blurb states that it's a game about friendship, but I don't agree that it is. What this game is really saying is that the only way to be accepted by society and your peers is to blindly follow instructions, and that if someone chews you up and shits you out you should just be grateful for the attention. So apparently it's a metaphor for your first job after leaving college.

Journey to the Savage Planet

"'Climate change reversal: Don’t do it for the forest or the little hoppy bunnies, do it so you can keep sitting on your fat arse stuffing sustainably sourced Pringles into that slime-covered catcher’s mitt you call a face.' Feel free to use that slogan uncredited, ecological groups."
The premise of the game: leaving the already fucked up Earth to go and fuck up a new planet.
Out of sheer curiousity, Yahtzee picked a dog face for his nameless, faceless protagonist and was then surprised when it made the sounds and grunts a dog would for every action. Apparently, Journey to the Savage Planet managed to out "devil-may-care" Yahtzee's sense of humor and anticipated it.
Yahtzee: Well only one of us gets the last word, bitch, and my last word is "cuntburlap"!
Yahtzee tells an example of how convoluted the mash-up of different game elements are, with an example of finding the "pig Viagra" upgrade. You need to craft the upgrade necessary for it, and get the necessary crafting materials from starter enemies... and for some reason they drop more if you feed them and search their droppings. Also, there is no pig Viagra - Yahtzee made that up and apologized to anyone who was sold on the idea to fluff a bunch of pigs. There is no swimming horse vagina either.
Coming almost immediately off of the above is a pretty hilarious case of Lampshade Hanging concerning Yahtzee's habit to Accentuate the Negative:
Yahtzee: I should stress that I don't hate the game.
Viewer: [while giving Yahtzee an annoyed look] Oh, don't worry, Yahtzee; that was totally coming across, what with all your swearing and references to farm animal genitals.
"And just to raise one final point, cuntburlap."

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners

This image◊.
Yahtzee complains about the Anti-Climax of staying around until after dark.
Yahtzee: In summary, it'd be nice if this game based largely around prepping had something worth prepping for. It's almost more fun to go in as un-prepped as possible, just pick up the nearest beer bottle when there's a zombie in the way, and give him the old Newcastle astigmatism — because after I finished the final level, seen my unsatisfying ending, and gone into post-credits mode, I looked over the arsenal of weapons I'd assembled and barely used and wondered if there had been a point to any of it. I decided then to load up all my weapons, go out into the city, and finally see what happens if you stay out past the time limit when the bells ring and all the zombies allegedly go bananas. So I did that, and this really dramatic music started playing, some angry zombies shambled over, and I shot them all in the head. Then I listened to the dramatic music for a bit, then I got bored and went home. It was like working security at a disappointing Pink Floyd concert.
Zombie: There was only one encorrrre!
The post-credits Brick Joke:
"I mean, for one thing, you need to understand that it's possible to be both a nutter AND a fascist"
"I mean even I did the nutters vs fascists thing in my second novel"

Zombie Army 4: Dead War

Yahtzee discussing Call of Duty's status as a trendsetter in the First-Person Shooter genre.
If Call of Duty jumped off a bridge, then... Well, firstly Battlefield would jump too, and then Rebellion would follow after about five years of staring vacantly into space.
Yahtzee lists the Top 3 contenders of the "Least Sympathetic Villain" competition with Zombies taking the first place, Nazis coming in second... and finally Rupert Murdoch on the third place.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Yahtzee gets a lot of mileage out of the downright exaggerated Shoulders of Doom on the Player Character's mentor (aka the guy depicted on the cover art).
I mean, look at this fucking dude again. Why does he have Castle Greyskull playsets glued to his shoulder-pads? Does he keeps up his troops' morale with his variety act, "The Human Pick 'n' Mix Dispenser"? What happens when he needs to scratch his arse? Do they need to erect scaffolding?
The explanation of the Player Character's background story:
You're an orphan, who's raised to be a part of puritan army dedicated to fight demons and witchcraft, but during a battle with a demon, you suddenly turn into a giant, glowing man with huge glowing wings, and a halo, and holy armour who proceeds to kick the shit out of the demon. And your puritan friends immediately draw the obvious conclusion that you must also be a demon. Not the sharpest claymores in the armoury, these lads.
Yahtzee notices that the game is a PC-centric game through and through, which he realized when he tried testing out playing with a gamepad controller:
Yahtzee: All it did was make the cursor move around and none of the buttons worked, as if the game was saying:
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem: Oooh, look at that shiny, whiny cursor you're moving around all by yourself with your magic lump of colourful Fisher Price plastic! Do let us know when your daddy gets home, so he can play the real game with all the other grown-ups.

Dreams

The opening:
Viewer: Yahtzee, do you have Dreams?
Yahtzee: Of course I have dreams. I dream of the day you stop breaking into my house to ask me stupid questions!
Yahtzee's opening ruminations on the game's title and its visual aesthetic:
Yahtzee: I suspect because a lot of people started up Dreams, watched the intro sequence, and then said "Someone really needs to piss all over this." So that's what I'm going to do, Media Molecule, I'm going to piss all over your Dreams. And if you called it that to make me feel bad about pissing all over it then you obviously don't know me very well.
Yahtzee's Avatar: (as he is hovering over Dreams and zipping down his pants) Dammit, now I'm too erect!
As Yahtzee starts to interrogate the basic concept of Dreams, the game takes flight and drags Yahtzee along with it a la Peter Pan.
Dreams: (in a children's entertainer voice) Welcome to a magical universe of your very own where you can realize your wildest imaginings as long as they're slightly twee!
Yahtzee: Bitch, I can realize my wildest imaginings with a blank wall and a handful of shit! You didn't invent creativity! The invention of creativity occurred in 1988 when Robert Zemeckis directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and you don't look much like Robert Zemeckis!
- The end credits then add an amazing Brick Joke to this — "Experts agree that everything created before 1988 was mostly just pissing about."
Yahtzee's swear matrix◊. Special mention must be given to how Yahtzee apparently has "Calculus" ranked as one of the most generally offensive swear words possible.
The dramatic spiraling into Metaphorgotten when Yahtzee complains that Dreams has a user interface too complicated to properly serve as a Gateway Series for young children into video game design: He first equates making a game in Dreams to "cleaning a bathroom floor with the eyelashes of a horse." Then, he notes that the users' work is all for naught anyway "after Sony inevitably decides it can't be bothered to support clean bathroom floors anymore and turns the servers off, sending everyone's hard work right down the bathroom drain."
Yahztee: [looking furious while holding two severed lengths of string] Yes, I have completely lost the fucking thread of this metaphor!
invoked At one point, Yahtzee sarcastically describes playing the games developed within Dreams as one being "the societal parasite within the Objectivist utopia that is Dreams." This is depicted as Yahtzee being turned into a rat (with his head and hat remaining), while Dreams suddenly sprouts the head of Andrew Ryan and then admonishes Rat!Yahtzee with "Is a man not entitled to the plip of his plop?"
After being impressed by the colorful menus, careful curation algorithms, and few games that he felt were at least getting into the right spirit of things, all Yahtzee could think was "You know, it'll be a real shame when this all gets taken over by perverts."
- Yahtzee then backs up his suspicions on where Dreams will be likely going by referencing Second Life and how well that game's online community worked out:
  Yahtzee: Remember Second Life? Once a lovely, wholesome attempt at a community-created online world of imagination — now just zebra dicks and yiff piles as far as the eye can see!
- Second Life then gets referenced again in The Stinger:
  Yahtzee: Actually, I have no idea how Second Life is doing right now; I haven't logged in since the last time flying penises swarmed over it like a lesser known plague of Egypt.
- He also mocks the assumption that Media Molecule could just screen out NSFW games being developed in Dreams:
  Yahtzee: Smarter and more dedicated people than Media Molecule have tried to hold back the masturbators, and the masturbators always win! ...Probably 'cos they've all the stamina.
Yahtzee ends the review by brooding about the pressures of being a video game creator and critic:
See, this happy-clappy "everyone's special" approach just isn't preparing the kiddywinks for the realities of life as a creative: stress, rejection letters, audience indifference^noteViewer: HUNIEPOP REVIEW WHEN, the frustration when someone makes twice as much money as you just from drawing nipples on Princess Sally Acorn.
The Credits Gag for the Amy review declared "Fortunately, he will never breed". As Yahtzee and his wife Kess recently had a daughter, the closing gag for this episode serves as a Brick Joke:
Unfortunately, he has bred: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

Black Mesa

Yahtzee's frustration with games having the Early Access tag being critic-proof.
Yahtzee: Black Mesa was announced fifteen years ago and been in early access for five. I assume they've been waiting until the kitschy retro factor kicks in since they missed the first chance to strike while the panty was wet. As a critic this has been a right pinecone up my perineum. Back when I first played Black Mesa in those wonderful days before all sense left the Earth...
Barack Obama: (appears behind Yahtzee) I vaguely seem like I know what I'm doing!
Yahtzee: ...I had tons of shit to critic about but they kept throwing up the early access card like a crucifix to a vampire. Hey, where are the Xen levels?
Black Mesa: EARLY ACCESS!
Yahtzee: (vampire hiss) Hey, the enemy soldiers seem a bit too accurate—
Black Mesa: EARLY ACCESS!
Yahtzee: Oh, for fuck's sake! And now I'm roundly miffed to see that the release version of Black Mesa is really fucking polished. Which is all anyone should expect, since they've been polishing it for so fucking long there's a six inch layer of crystallised Mr. Sheen around the thing.
The fact that Yahtzee's "philosophy brain" is a stuffy British man wearing glasses and smoking a pipe, who comments on Black Mesa's long development time with a moralizing "tut tut", while his "down-to-earth brain" is depicted as an Akubra hat-wearing Australian with a beer in his hand who shrugs it off with a "Nao warries, mite!"
invoked Yahtzee depicts what he sees as the original Half-Life's endearing silliness as the game honking a bike horn and Yahtzee laughing it off with an "Oh, you!" Meanwhile, Black Mesa is depicted as a serious-faced Walter White with a bike horn in his hands, commenting "I am the one who honks" while Yahtzee gives them a look of mild concern.

2020, Quarter 2

DOOM Eternal

The video opens with some Black Comedy regarding the then-recent outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic:
Yahtzee: Yes, it's the explosive new doom that everybody's talking about, in which humanity faces extinction at the hands of an all-pervading terror, but that's a bit too depressing, so let's talk about a new video game instead: DOOM Eternal!
- He further references the COVID-19 pandemic when talking about the "monsters".
  Yahtzee: Some of the new monsters are fun; some are annoying. Thinking of you, Tentacle! You do not deserve a page in the bestiary. All you do is sit there and give us an unavoidable slap if we come too close. You're not a monster — you're a timely and useful reminder of the importance of social distancing. (Tentacle wears a sign reading "Flatten the Curve")
- During the credits, he posts "Send rice, toilet paper and Cadbury's Creme Eggs."
Yahtzee being amused that Doomslayer in the game is based on his "Rip and tear! RIP AND TEAR!" characterization from the DC comic book — and every time he says "the Doomslayer" he tries — and semi-succeeds — in saying it in as deep and gravelly a voice as he can muster.
- invoked It later gets referenced when Yahtzee mutters about the Fridge Logic involved in gameplay.invoked
  Yahtzee: You still get ammo pickups from your off-the-books chainsaw mastectomy clinic, and now, you get armor from using your flamethrower because... the searing heat is making the demons' pocket change fuse together? No, it still doesn't make the slightest sense in context.
  Viewer: Oh, who the fuck needs context, Yahtz? It's fast, arcade-y fun combat! Did you miss the instructions? Step 1, rip. Step 2, tear. Step 3, lunch.
"Both story and gameplay would benefit from keeping in mind the rule of K.I.S.S.: 'Keep It Simple, and Shitfaced.'"^note
During the credits: "I hate saying 'Doom Marine' 'cos I keep saying it as all one word and Doomarine sounds more like a lesser known shade of pastel blue."

Half-Life: Alyx

Yahtzee muses on Valve's unintentional bad timing concerning the game's release.
Valve: Rejoice, ye faithful, for official Half-Life games have returned from their long hibernation in a giant cocoon of money! Now, the true believers will be rewarded with— Where the fuck is everyone?
Yahtzee: We're all in quarantine 'cos of the global pandemic, Valve!
Valve: ...Oh. Would now be a bad time to ask people to buy our thousand-dollar VR headset?
Yahtzee: I rather suspect it would be, Valve, yes.
Commenting on The Other Darrin: invoked
Yahtzee: The dude now voicing Eli sounds as much like the previous dude as he does Whitney Fucking Houston.
He then goes off on how odd it is to not have a Heroic Mime protagonist, and that the Half-Life series has always had awkward tone problems:
Yahtzee: It's odd to play a Half-Life game where the main character speaks and can tell the people around them to stop being such prannies, but it's still unmistakably Half-Life, with its trademark monsters, linear narrative gameplay, and weird emotional tone. I mean, humanity has essentially been enslaved by the Borg, who systematically subject them to gory, nightmarish body horror, but everyone's really cheerful and yukking it up with their pet headcrabs. Yes, I know humans strive to be upbeat during a crisis, but there's this one very Resident Evil-y chapter in Alyx where we have to sneak around an indestructible monster who's this hideously mutated human who will tear us apart if he finds us and looks to be in immense suffering, and then we're told that their name is Jeff, and everyone talks about him like he's the one asshole in the friend group who keeps hitting on waitresses. "Oh, that Jeff; Jeff sucks." "Hey, I trapped Jeff in a garbage compactor." "Sucks to be Jeff!" Sometimes, Half-Life's storytelling feels like what happens when an entire game has Asperger syndrome.

Resident Evil 3

Yahtzee once again notes another game has bad timing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yahtzee: I wasn't going to bring up the coronavirus thing again; I mean, the site's called "The Escapist", not "The Constant Reminders of Our Inevitable Hubristic Doom". Besides, it'll pretty seriously date the video in a month or two when the virus goes away forever and everything returns to normal and all the dead people come back to life and there's a rainbow. But now I have to talk about Resident Evil 3, a game about society descending into chaos because of a viral pandemic. It could only have been less fortunately timed if the zombies ate toilet rolls instead of brains.
He also views the Hunters as The Scrappy (depicted as Leonardo), and rolls his eyes at the advice the game gives him.
Yahtzee: I was having trouble with those Hunters, the zombie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle motherfuckers who have super armor and move super-fast, so if you don't have a big weapon out they just slit you open like a bag of Maltesers. And then the "Game Over" screen kept bugging me.
Resident Evil 3: Hey, would you like to switch to a difficulty setting more suited to your clueless, girlish simpering, Player?
Yahtzee: That depends, Three-make. Would you like to be coughing up my pubes for the next three days?
Resident Evil 3: Oh, fine. Here's your loading screen tip: Hunters are close-range fighters. Remember to back up and keep your distance.
Yahtzee: Three-make, you're making me fight these things in a fucking hospital corridor! What am I supposed to "back up" into? The fucking vending machine coin return slots?!
Jill: (wedges herself into the coin return slot, gun drawn) Now what bitch.
Yahtzee adamantly tries to utterly ignore the game's much hyped multiplayer:
Yahtzee: What the fuck were Capcom even working on this whole time?
Viewer: (exasperated) Probably the multiplayer, Yahtz! Why don't you play some of it?!
(Yahtzee's avatar just stares blankly at the Viewer for a moment)
Yahtzee: (picks up his phone) Hello, doctor? I'm hearing the voices again. The ones that keep telling me to hurt myself.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Yahtzee chuckling at the easily predicted memes about DOOM Eternal and Animal Crossing coming out on the same day: "LOLLETY LOL MEMETY MEME"
- He then delivers a Bait-and-Switch Comparison while acknowledging how badly telegraphed it was:
  Yahtzee: But the two are a weirdly good pairing; what better way to unwind from a high-tension gameplay experience than with something cheerful, relaxing, and colorful like DOOM Eternal? Yeah, you figured out where this joke was going half a sentence ago, I'm sure.
- invoked Later on, during his stream of the game, he refers Isabelle as "The Doom Marine's Girlfriend" and mentions that he found the whole thing to be adorably wholesome... except for all the porn ones, which he then politely asked his viewers to not send him.
Yahtzee goes on a hilariously long-winded rant about how Tom Nook completely owns you and the town, similar to the previous "Debt is your life!" spiel from his previous Animal Crossing review.
Yahtzee: Animal Crossing is an institution at this point, one that requires commitment, and as such I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who thinks they’re ready to be committed to an institution. The setup this time around is that you and the predatory raccoon loan shark Tom Nook have come to a desert island wilderness in order to develop it into yet another wholesome capitalist paradise for animal-shaped random number generators. You know, the kind of setup where, if it were a film, you'd expect half the cast to be cannibalized by the end of act two, but don't worry, Tom Nook presumably massacred the native island population before we arrived. The process of developing the island largely entails for your part the transfer of ungodly amounts of Bells from you to Tom Nook's holdings account, and the usual Animal Crossing routine quickly sets in.
You fish, you catch bugs, you acquire furniture, you sell it all to Tom Nook for money that you then use to pay off your loans to Tom Nook. It's the all-Tom Nook economy. When Tom Nook dies, this entire society will fucking collapse into anarchy where brightly coloured animal people shiv each other for pears. And as always you're expected to come back every day in real time to pull the weeds, dig up a new set of fossils and defuse any shiv-based arguments. Very little that I didn’t already comment on the last time my path was crossing with Animal... game. With the animal game.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons: (while hanging from the ceiling above Yahtzee) It's actually quite nice up here, really.
- Tom Nook massacring the native population is depicted as him wearing a conquistador helmet and offering said natives (a tribe of Chimpanzee people) a free blanket. The fact that Yahtzee depicts Tom Nook with a photorealistic racoon head permanently wearing an conniving grin only makes it funnier.
- He later rants about how the game's goal is to turn a beautiful wilderness into an urban nightmare:
  Yahtzee: At first it's all tents and temporary housing, no shop, no museum and most of it's locked behind impassable rivers and cliffs, but with time, several large payments to Tom Nook and enough inevitable fucking crafting to soak up more PVA glue than any unsupervised schoolchild could consume in a lifetime you gradually turn this mysterious exotic wilderness into yet another Animal Crossing consumerist hellhole identical to the last one. Tom Nook is the living embodiment of the Grey Goo scenario!
Yahtzee then makes the "mistake" of introducing his wife to it, especially since she's a 100% Completionist:
Yahtzee: But I managed to gain a new perspective on Animal Tossing this time around by introducing my wife to it. Now, be warned before you show your significant other or cohabitant Animal Crossing that it's a risky play. On the one hand, they won't yell at you to stop playing video games for a while, but on the other, the house will rot and the children will starve. I'm ashamed to admit that I knew Animal Crossing would suck her in because she's one of those 100% Completion types who have always ensured that Pokémon makes bank like a 7-11 across the road from a marijuana shop.
So on day 1, she was saying she probably wouldn't be into it and by day 5, she was staying up fishing long into the night 'cos she had to catch just one fucking sturgeon before the end of March. And by day 8, she was digging holes in a series of arcane patterns in the hope of summoning a tarantula to catch and I began to worry that she might have joined a Cargo Cult. But I was gathering all kinds of interesting data on the communal experience of Animal Crossing. For example, kids, the first of your siblings who gets to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons is officially the one your parents love the most.
Yahtzee notes the suspicious good timing of the game's release with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yahtzee: Now, obviously Nintendo didn't know a pandemic and global lockdown was going to happen, and I'm certainly not saying they orchestrated it alongside a shadowy cabal of global corporations to reaffirm their grip on power –- to reiterate I am NOT saying that, Nintendo, you can stop sending the frighteners round, now -– but Animal Crossing couldn't have come out at a better time, because it offers something that is sorely needed — stability.
The ending, where he ruminates on how the success of Animal Crossing is rooted in how it creates a sense of familiarity and regular grind with its playerbase, to the point where playing it eventually becomes something like a daily routine:
Yahtzee: If you set out to masturbate once a day, within about two weeks, you're not even doing it because you want to anymore; you're all like, "Well, what can I do? Hands tied! It's wank o'clock!" (the hour and minute hands on Yahtzee's clock in the background suddenly transform into a single penis)
- Bonus points for Yahtzee having a dolphin on his lap, continuing his "masturbate to sea mammals" Running Gag.

Final Fantasy VII Remake

Yahtzee warns against jokes about the franchise being a Long Runner, with a gamer going to a videogame store which reads "IRL GAME SHOP (LOL)."
Yahtzee: Firstly, if you go in the shop and make the "Ooh, this FINAL fantasy’s going on an awfully long time!" joke then I think the staff are now legally permitted to push you down a fire escape.
Gamer: (on the ground, still grinning) Well, I'd never heard it!
He then warns that "Final Fantasy VII Remake" is extremely misleading.
Yahtzee: If you saw the title Final Fantasy VII Remake and from the words Final Fantasy VII and Remake are now expecting a remake of the game Final Fantasy VII then you might be disappointed. Final Fantasy VII Remake ends at the bit where you leave the first city, or about one third of the way through the first disc of the original PS1 game.
(Yahtzee's avatar looks at the thin sliver of game compared to the original, and thinks "R U SRS")
Yahtzee: Although it takes about forty more hours to get there 'cos it's padded like an A-cup on school picture day, so there's been some contention over whether this is false advertising or a new take on the subject matter with better character exploration. I think a lot of this could have been cleared up if they’d titled the game Final Fantasy VII Remake: Episode One. But maybe they didn't want to commit. I mean, at the rate they're going, by the time they get to the last episode, it'll probably get pushed back by the heat death of the universe.
Yahtzee also makes fun of the coterie of Manic Pixie Dream Girls that Cloud Strife attracts, saying they might as well have called the first episode "Cloud Strife vs. The Manic Pixie Dream Girls".
Cloud Strife: Shut up, it's a good name!
Yahtzee: It starts with him being dragged into an eco terrorist group by manic pixie dream girl number 1, big-titted childhood friend girl who, if this were a Dating Sim, I would have classified as "the freebie." He gets manic pixied by her for a few chapters before another terrorist bombing goes awry, he falls off a high thing and lands almost literally in the lap of manic pixie dream girl number 2, flower seller with mysterious past who drives the rest of the plot.
Yahtzee going on about how Aerith is depicted as Too Good for This Sinful Earth and an Old Man whispering to Cloud, "Ain't she a peach? Be a shame if she got impaled."
Yahtzee doesn't get why the game treats Cloud in drag as Attractive Bent-Gender.
Yahtzee: [Cloud-in-drag] looks like a frumpy Amish spinster who spent last night sleeping with her head in the feeding-trough.
- But that is not to say that he didn't find the entire sequence funny.
  Yahtzee: But that's a cultural thing. I'm English, and therefore the funniest things in the world to me are men dressing as ladies...
  (Yahtzee's avatar dressed in a Union Jack shirt and a bowler hat laughs at Cloud-in-drag)
  Yahtzee: ...And the concept of social mobility.
  Cloud-in-drag: I would like to own property some day.
  (Yahtzee's avatar laughs so hard that he falls off his chair)
Yahtzee complains that games used have a lot of content back in the days of the original Final Fantasy VII, and the lack of it in modern games feels like a slap in the face. He then realizes that applies to much of society these days:
Yahtzee: Hey, remember when games had actual depth?
Imp: SLAP! No you don't!
Yahtzee: Hey, remember when you could go out to that frozen yoghurt place you like?
Imp wearing a facemask: SLAP! No more of that!
(cut to Yahtzee's avatar lying bent over a desk)
Yahtzee: Hey, remember when you could get off on light BDSM?
Imp: No slap!
Yahtzee: Oh, you tease!

XCOM: Chimera Squad

Yahtzee notices that the management side of the gameplay works more like a board game than ever:
One of those really complicated ones with event cards and time tracks that your board game liking friend keeps trying to get you round their place to try out and then they get huffy because you drank all the red wine before they'd finished populating the encounter deck, but you fucking promised we would just be playing Scrabble this week, Doreen!
"...So it's up to us to keep the peace, largely by kicking down doors and shooting everything with a face"
(a soldier is depicted pointing a gun at a Henry Hoover)

Ion Fury & Void Bastards

Yahtzee brings his "super casual game reviewer" shtick back, but drops the façade at one point:
Viewer: Hey, [Ion Fury]'s also a retro-style sprite-based FPS and it also just came out on consoles, is this a theme?
Yahtzee: No! We don't need a theme we're super cas, fuck you! I mean, "heyyy~!".
The YouTube version was demonetized, though without YouTube ever specifying exactly what part they had an issue with^note. As a result the bulk of the spoken obscenities are replaced with an angrily whispered "[YOUTUBE]".

World of Warcraft: The Corrupted Blood Incident

After the third instance of a weird name in World of Warcraft (first Archimonde, the name of a server; then Zul'Gurub the raid instance; and finally Zul'Gurub's final boss, Hakkar the Soulflayer), Yahtzee gives an aside:
Yahtzee: Yeah, everything in World of Warcraft was named like that. You have to remember, Fortnite players, that this was before your generation invented irony.
About Corrupted Blood, the debuff behind the plague:
Yahtzee: The disease was supposed to go away after the subject died or killed Hakkar the Ballfondler, but like an irresponsible holiday-maker, Blizzard forgot about the fucking pets.
Talking about how Blizzard's early attempts to bring the plague under control didn't work (which, as Yahtzee points out later, eerily resembled some peoples' reactions to the COVID-19 Pandemic):
Yahtzee: Blizzard suggested that players observe quarantine protocols, but not enough people took them seriously, presumably because they had nine panther clitorises for a quest-giver in Ironforge, and no public health order from the actual all-knowing gods of the universe was getting between them and their slightly better pair of adventuring trousers, goddammit!
When Yahtzee gets to the measures Blizzard took to end the plague, made necessary by griefers and trolls keeping the in-game pandemic going deliberately:
Yahtzee: So between them and the tourists, it was clear that the plague was never going to get a chance to clear up, and so Blizzard had no option but to contact one of the figureheads of the quarantine effort and have him construct a giant wooden boat, in which he was directed to place two of every monster, so they could send a rainstorm for forty days and forty nights - nah, I'm fucking with you, they just hard reset the servers. Bit anticlimactic, really.
In his conclusion, Yahtzee discusses how academics took an interest in the Corrupted Blood Incident for what it might tell us about real-life pandemics, and how some people felt the data was of limited use because it took place in a video game world instead of the real one. He lays the sarcasm on really thick for this one, no doubt inspired by frustration at real-world events (this was broadcast in May 2020, early in the COVID-19 Pandemic):
Yahtzee: After all, it's not like people in the real world would just casually blow off an official quarantine order when there's honest to goodness life and death on the line, dear me, no! And as for the people who'd get the infection and try to pass it to others deliberately - why, that would require nothing less than a fundamental breakdown of education and governance! Surely people understand that there are no hard resets in real life?! (Unless you count tactical nuclear strikes).

Maneater

Yahtzee starts the review off with an insidious Ear Worm:
Yahtzee: "Uh oh, here she comes. Watch out boys, she'll chew you up." There, now you've got that song stuck in your head too; you're fucking welcome."^note
Yahtzee finding the maneating portion of the game sort of lacking in that none of the humans have any context.
Yahtzee: I think the developers were banking on the spectacle of a shark biting a dude in half somehow never getting old, and granted, watching someone's son or daughter's hopes and dreams for their existence vanish in a screaming cloud of gore and teeth is fucking hilarious, but as the core activity of a six-hour open world game? After a while, I need more context. Who is this random fat person paddling across the surface like a blob of cum in a municipal pool? Do they regret their choices in life? Are they swimming in the sea because the day had finally come to turn things around and get some exercise? That might add some poignancy to my reducing them to my morning protein smoothie, but no, it's just another copy-pasted human silhouette to add to the body count.
"There's this mission where you have to go into a cave, right, and the mission is named, brace yourself, "Third Cave Feminism"; I mean, I think the shark is established to be female, but she eats just as many women as men, so really, they just took a random phrase with a word in it that rhymes with "cave"."
Catch the Cave
Ranting and Caving
Cavings Account
Mexican Cave
Home of the Cave
Cave the Date
Cave-at Emptor
Britannia Rules the Caves
Third Cave Feminism
- "And that's not a joke; [portrayed by a dead imp with "joke" labeled on it] that's the smear on a bedsheet [portrayed by the dead imp's fart] that a joke left behind when it died."
He also gets annoyed at the Bullying the Dragon attitude of lesser predators.
Yahtzee: I wish someone would explain this to the fucking barracudas, and every other low-level predator that keeps wanting to start shit no matter how large and horrifying I get. Look, the health and XP I get from eating you are a pittance at this point. Just go home and jerk off and yell at your barracuda wife if you want to feel better. I am swimming away to try to be the bigger man — not that I need to try, 'cos I'm the size of a fucking bus. Actually, there is an unlock that makes weaker enemies non-hostile, but this, game designers, is the sort of thing you shouldn't have to unlock because it's common fucking sense! It's like needing to unlock the ability to wipe both ways.
- During the time he speaks, we are treated with this:
  Dog = Lvl 1
  Barracuda = Lvl 3.8
  Shark = Lvl 9,721
The Running Gag of wanting to be "a war correspondent".
Barbie: Would you please give it a rest with the war correspondent shit
Every time Yahtzee's representation of the recurring human villain in the game gets another limb bitten off by the shark, he has another Hook Hand where it was the next time he appears. When the shark promptly bites the top of his baseball cap off, he ends up with a Hook Hand sticking up out of his head!
One of the post-credit lines: "Why don't we kill any dolphins in Maneater? That might have earned it another half star, fuck those squeaky assholes who think they're all that"

Shantae and the Seven Sirens

Yahtzee goes off on the Animesque bouncing of characters by Western developer WayForward:
Yahtzee: Shantae and the Seven Sirens, as well as being a title tailor made to get the maximum amount of spit all over my laptop screen, is a retro-style platformer by Wayforward Games with an art style reminiscent of a certain genre of Japanese anime, the kind that projects a wholesome, upbeat, innocent vibe, but is somehow at the same time, unrelentingly horny. Shantae's thesis statement is made in the very first frame of the opening cinematic, which is a zoomed-in shot of the main character's bare midsection as it writhes about like a freshly neutered cat trying to lick its own balls.
But while anime styled, I had a hunch that it wasn't actually Japanese, which one quick google search later, was proved correct; Wayforward are based in California. What gave it away is, while the horniness of Japanese anime isn't in dispute, in the family friendly sector it's always had this air of plausible deniability. If you told the animators of Sailor Moon, for example, that people were jerking off to the transformation sequence, you might expect them to at least feign surprise. Shantae has no such subtlety. Not when all the female NPCs are wearing bikini tops and stand around jiggling like they're desperate for the loo — as do about 50-60% of the monsters.
The very first major boss fight is against a giant girl in a bikini top whose attack cycle involves yawning and throwing her arms up a lot. But hey, maybe this says more about me than Shantae. Sure, every pose Shantae adopts during dialogue sequences in some way involves stretching or leaning forward, but maybe her back hurts. Maybe I’m just projecting the horniness I brought to the table.
Imp: (holding a banana) Would you like my big banana?
Yahtzee: So let’s talk about the game. (Beat) It kinda sucks. Oh well, back to the tits.
(Yahtzee's avatar motorboats breasts jutting out of the computer monitor.)
Yahtzee's Avatar: BBLBLBLBLBLBBBLBLBBBBLBL
Yahtzee's Running Gag of describing Shantae's hair attacks as Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" lyrics.
Yahtzee: Hair attacks and dance attacks? What is this, the Bayonetta Saturday morning cartoon?!
Then Yahtzee realizes that Shantae debuted on the Game Boy Color.
Yahtzee: I looked it up and the first Shantae game came out in 2002. It was on the Game Boy Color, for fuck’s sake. Shantae’s nearly 20 years old — which does make me feel better about masturbating to it.
On reflection of the devs:
Yahtzee: What happened to the ambition, WayForward Games? What happened to the creative drive that brought us, er... Silent Hill: Book of Memories?! Wait, what? That was you?! Well, fucking forget I said anything. Less ambition, please, bikini tops all round! (Credits Roll)
- Even better, a closer look at the picture reveals that they made The Smurfs 2 video game, which Yahtzee for some reason has already looked at.

Desperados 3

Yahtzee talking about boyhood fantasies of living in the Old West, before Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs.
Yahtzee: Who among us has not hooked their thumbs into their jeans while waiting for a bus, or tried on a long duster coat they found in a charity shop, and then looked at themselves in the reflection off a window and thought, "Man, I would be so much cooler if I smelled like shit, 24-7, without having to move to downtown San Francisco."...
Hobo: (standing next to freshly made feces) I made you a present.
Yahtzee: ..."Oh, if only I could have been born in that wild, romantic age of the American frontier, where too many people had guns, minorities were oppressed, and people died constantly of preventable disease"? (Beat) Whoa! Let's leave that thought precisely where it is!^note
The triumphant return of the Cockup Cascade and the game's not-so-subtle hint to Save Scum.
Yahtzee: You remember cockup cascade, right? The term I came up with for an unfortunate feature of many stealth action games where the slightest misstep means getting caught in a pile on of escalating fuckups so you might as well just reload the instant you get spotted? Well, Desperados 3 is the patron saint of cockup cascade.
Desperados 3: (wearing a bishop's mitre and croisier) Go in peace.
Yahtzee: The cocks barely have a chance to come down again. The enemies all have visibility cones spread wider than your mum’s legs when she hears a bottle opener and you can only see one guard's cone at a time. On top of that, a lot of guards who look like they’re staring straight ahead are in fact glancing back and forth like a nervous gazelle at a tennis match covering an area the size of a conservatively proportioned aircraft hangar. So half the time you’ll settle into the nice long slitting a throat animation and only then be informed that someone offscreen is looking at you from their table at a delightful Parisian-style street cafe on the surface of Mars.
And thus the cascade begins. Everyone in the map is alerted and rushes your position, more guards spawn in on top of the existing ones, it's like the fucking fight scene at the end of the original Casino Royale. And while you do have a gun, you fire it once and then can't fire it again until you’ve remembered all the lyrics to "The British Grenadiers", and your special power to pause the game and queue up your next few actions at this point provides nothing besides the chance to take a moment and really drink in just how completely fucked you are, so don't kid yourself about making a stand, you're just gonna fucking quickload.

2020, Quarter 3

The Last of Us Part II

Yahtzee opens the video by shilling The Escapist Store and subscribing to The Escapist's site and/or the YouTube channel — after which he sighs and remarks, "Alright, now we can shit all over The Last of Us 2."
Yahtzee: Now, don't get me wrong, viewer; playing The Last of Us 2 was a pretty miserable experience.
(long pause)
Viewer: ...Kinda sounded like you were going to say "but" there, Yahtzee.
Yahtzee: Mmm, no. It's really fucking miserable and depressing, and I would have enjoyed my weekend more had I spent it teasing out my bum hairs with pliers.
Yahtzee goes off on the game's lazy attempt to invoke What Measure Is a Mook?.
Yahtzee: They even all have individual names which they cry out in horror whenever they find a corpse, a feature that I assume exists to make the protagonists seem even more like bastards. Especially when the dudes with adorable sniffer dogs show up and after you murder them everyone yells "No! You killed Doctor Sniffybum! And his dog!"
invoked Yahtzee definitely thinks the game suffers from Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, thanks to his despising the characters in it.
Yahtzee: Actually there’s a token open world section early on, perhaps because of algorithms again, but the side objectives only really provide optional loot and very little in the way of extra challenge or story, so it’s only there if you feel like putting off the rest of the plot. Which you might, if you hate watching horrible people take the most irrational course of action available.
Ellie: (attacking a baby seal) Fuck you, seal!
Yahtzee summarizes a very familiar plot.
Yahtzee: 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!
He then goes off on the Protagonist-Centered Morality of the game.
Yahtzee: 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 2 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 Doctor 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.
(Team Ellie holding signs saying "REVENGE IS GRAET" and "END BUM SNIFFING")
Yahtzee: 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 — ooooh! — they have redemptive qualities as well and from their perspective Ellie is basically a less eloquent Jason Voorhees.
(Hockey-masked Ellie appears with machete as Doctor Sniffybum gets googly Oh, Crap! eyes.)
The review ending on a Brick Joke for both this review and the earlier Maneater review.
Yahtzee: ...Then use the money you saved to make a low budget platformer on the side about a funny cartoon dog on a quest to sniff all the butts. Whose character grows when he realizes he doesn't have to define himself by sniffing butts.
Doctor Sniffybum: I'm gonna become a war correspondent!
Yahtzee: Bam! Compelling plot and we didn't even have to retroactively make him a lesbian.
** Sidebar: this is actually a lie, as Ellie was portrayed as in a relationship with a girl in the Left Behind DLC of the first game, and was never explicitly shown to be heterosexual .

Persona 4 Golden

Yahtzee musing on Golden's origins.
Yahtzee: Long term viewers will know there were a lot of things standing in the way of me liking Persona 5. It was a JRPG for one thing. And even for a JRPG it was anime as dicks, being set in a high school and centered around characters slightly too young to be constantly giving off the vibe of wanting to bone each other senseless. But against all odds, I loved it, and it was suggested I try out Persona 4 Golden, previously a PS Vita game but recently out on Steam, which is like a goldfish moving from a bowl to a nine-acre sewage treatment facility.
The comment on the game's Mood Whiplash issues:
Yahtzee: The P4G intro is breezy and colourful and kicks things off with just the right setting of tone. Here's some happy music, some dancing anime kids, several corpses strung up from telegraph poles, and oh look! Now everyone's riding scooters! WHAT FUN!
invoked Yahtzee's many Take Thats aimed at The Simpsons, calling it "monsters conjured from the darkness of the human soul" and defeating it will "prevent disaster in the real world", which is depicted by Yahtzee's avatar cheerily winking at the viewer as a television announces "We're cancelling The Simpsons".
"More useful is a thing during the life sim part that tells you what activity a majority of other players are doing at the same moment."
(the screen is filled with thought balloons saying, "HAVE A WANK", with one small balloon saying "STUDY W/ YOSUKE WHILE HAVING A WANK")
The post-credits has Yahtzee acknowledging the old controversy about P4G: "Also Persona 4 handles repressed homosexuality about as maturely as a 12 year old anime might but it could lose a more modern audience"

Google Stadia

"So the PS5 is going to be a souped up PS4 that looks like someone sat on a giant liquorice allsort and the Xbox is just gonna keep adding X's to its name like a serial divorcee, but who fucking cares? Why are we still tethering huge plastic bricks to televisions like millstones around the neck of the future? It’s 2020 for fuck's sake. We should be downloading multicolored tech dreams from cyberspace to our holographic skateboards."
Google Stadia's main issue.
Yahtzee: 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.
A brief review of Stadia exclusive Gylt.
Yahtzee: It's a stealth horror adventure where you're a little girl in a red coat — in the world of arty indie games, a character wearing a red or hooded coat goes right next to the free space on the bingo card because "Ooh, Red Riding Hood lost in the scary woods!" I got your clever allusion, Mr. Writer! Let's rub our massive brains together in mutual recognition! -– who goes looking for their missing cousin who was being bullied and ends up in a dark spooky version of their high school full of monsters unsubtly themed around bullying, and it'll probably turn out that the bullies was you the whole time. Hardly a spoiler, the game’s named Gylt for fuck's sake, not Gynerally Feeling Pretty Okay About Thyngs.
Yahtzee notes that he found the game too easy and therefore not scary.
Gylt: Hide from the monster, it'll kill ya, oh shit! Wait, here's a flashlight, it kills the monster if you aim it at their weak spot.
Yahtzee: Well, I guess that’s still pretty skillful.
Gylt: Is it? Sorry, here's an instant kill stealth attack as well.
Yahtzee: No, I wasn't criticizing, I meant...
Gylt: (increasingly panicked) And here’s an instant stun attack. And a freeze attack. Oh god, there aren't enough chest-high walls around, are there? Here's ten billion more!
Yahtzee: Jesus. I know this has a kiddie vibe, but for most of the time I was using health items for idle mid-afternoon snacking, I had so fucking many.
"The only other exclusive worth mentioning is Crayta, a game creation tool kinda like Dreams, but if you thought Dreams' problem was that there was just a little bit too much incentive to do unpaid work to prop up someone else's IP on a delivery system you have no stake in that might not exist in two years, then here's all that with less features."

Deadly Premonition 2

Yahtzee on the unlikelihood of the first game being a cult hit.
Yahtzee: Usually when you say "cult hit" you mean "reviewed well, sold like garbage". Deadly Premonition was an interesting case of selling like shit and reviewing like shit but ending up a cult hit regardless. Because if you could push your way through the dense hedge of janky graphics and horrible design, there was a discarded porn mag of uniqueness and character there that made it worth the brambles. The creator, Swery, is like the poor man’s Hideo Kojima got together with the poor man’s Suda51 and had a very undernourished baby. But he's been able to carve an identity for himself making games usually themed around an outsider’s view of American culture as seen through the lens of TV, and that began with Deadly Premonition, which was basically Twin Peaks...
Viewer: Sounded like you were gonna say "but" there, Yahtz.
Yahtzee: You keep falling for that one, don’t you, viewer? No, Twin Peaks about sums it up. But with Deadly Premonition 2, Swery is telling us that he’s moved on from Twin Peaks and started watching True Detective instead.
Yahtzee being charmed by the suited federal agent getting around on a skateboard.
Yahtzee: The game needs to provide a fast way to get around the sandbox, so it opts for a skateboard, and honestly, I kind of love that it’s a skateboard; it’s quick to pull out, more maneuverable than a car, and it's just hilarious to watch Agent York gliding along at full speed in his business suit having a very placid and reasonable conversation with himself about his favourite Charles Bronson film.
Agent York: I, too, enjoyed Death Wish.
- The Stinger has Agent York riding his skateboard up a ramp to crash though a window... right into his bed to sleep.
invoked He then goes off on the game's Scrappy Mechanics.
Yahtzee: The game is a sandbox action adventure, if the sandbox was a hundred yards wide and half a centimeter deep, with a Dead Rising-esque in-game clock defining when certain shops and missions are available, but the clock just runs too fucking slowly! I got up at nine, skateboarded across town to do a crime scene analysis, skateboarded all the way back, did four more story missions and shot nine squirrels; the next mission didn't unlock until 6pm. I looked at the clock; it was only 9:15! There just weren't enough activities or enough hate in my heart for the squirrels of the world to fill the time.
Then it got worse. Story progress is suddenly gated by some viciously arbitrary fetch quests, and one of the items needed is only sold from one of the shops on a Monday. I looked at the clock; it was Wednesday. And so FBI special agent Francis York Morgan went back to his hotel room and proceeded to sleep to a degree that would imply either severe depression or coma. And if the grindy fetch quests in the critical path weren't enough, and you're still waiting on your sharp objects license, you can also grind up a bunch more 'random objects to craft charms that upgrade your skills — except a feature that improves your skill kinda hinges upon the gameplay requiring any! Every combat section can be very easily beaten with no charms and the starting gun, because all the enemy monsters are slow moving with no ranged attack, and a single ammo box contains enough bullets to assassinate every US president, even if you need to use two on the fat ones.
William Howard Taft: (with a bullet hole in his chest) Not enough gun.

Paper Mario: The Origami King

Yahtzee's sudden realization about the one Nintendo franchise he truly likes:
Yahtzee: ("Eureka!" Moment) I think Paper Mario might be my Sonic the Hedgehog. Every time they bring out another one I go "Maybe this time it'll be good again!" and dutifully jam my dick in the beehive, and I'm beginning to think that the one time I didn't get stung on the pisshole might've been the outlier. The first three Paper Marios were like there was this one really cool teacher at Nintendo High school, then one time he showed up a little the worse for drink and after that he mysteriously vanished and his classes have been taught by one poorly informed substitute after another.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star: OK, apparently you were working on this thing where everyone’s made of paper, I guess you were doing stationery?
Paper Mario: (panicked) Not the safety scissors!
Yahtzee: NO! We were doing a party-based RPG based around fun interesting characters!
Paper Mario: Sticker Star: Er. I don’t have any notes about that. Let’s just do stationery.
He then engages in some Hilarious in Hindsight on himself. invoked
Yahtzee: So once again we're basing the game around one of the fundamentals of papercraft. Sticker Star was glue, Color Splash was paint, now Origami King is about paper folding. And I seem to remember calling this in my Color Splash review. I also made a silly joke about fighting a boss fight against a hole punch. Well guess what? In Origami King, there’s a boss fight against a hole punch. (resigned) No really, there actually is.
Yahtzee's avatar: What next, Minecraft without building? (Microsoft starts taking notes)
Yahtzee: And if the games industry is taking ideas from my sarcastic exaggerated examples of things that would be stupid, that would fucking explain a few things.
(Yahtzee gives a Death Glare at Minecraft Dungeons.)
- At the end of the review, he decide to engage in some Power Perversion:
  Yahtzee: My main takeaway is that they used my idea for a hole punch boss monster, 'cause I didn't realize I had that kind of power. I think the next Paper Mario game should have a boss fight against a giant battery powered dildo that can only be defeated with the legendary special move "Send Yahtzee Croshaw the password to your checking account."
He then goes off on the formula of Princess Peach yet again being kidnapped, with Mario groaning "Uuuuurrrrrgh" next to a sign pointing right that says: "Wipe Her Majesty's big stupid bottom for her", with a flying toilet roll representing the usual flying Assist Character who accompanies Mario saying, "Ooh, ooh! I'll help!"
The Running Gag of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door being chained to the ceiling, all the way to the end credits. For example:
Yahtzee: So, yeah, [The Origami King is] an improvement on the last two, but still the clueless substitute teacher.
[cut to The Thousand Year Door singing "That's the Way (I Like It)" on "clueless substitute teacher"]

Ghost of Tsushima

Yahtzee opens the review complaining about every modern action game essentially being an Assassin's Creed clone with open world and crafting elements.
Yahtzee: I'm so fucking sick of open world stealth action games with crafting and collectibles! Remember when Far Cry was a shooter, Tomb Raider was a precision platformer, and God of War was a high octane hack-and-slash? All of them have been pulled into open world stealth action with crafting and collectibles like paper boats to an open sewer. I'm so fucking bored of squatting in a bush like a hiker who didn't go before he left.
Yahtzee's avatar: Wish I'd brought trousers.
Yahtzee: Of having to nose around every shelf and drawer, hoovering up crafting materials so I may one day make a new man purse that can hold more than four paperclips!
- He then dubs "open world stealth action with crafting and collectibles" as "Jiminy Cockthroat" for the rest of the review.
Even Yahtzee's praise for the combat can't help but be backhanded due to his continued dislike for the game seeming to chase other trends regarding its implementation:
Yahtzee: The combat fares better some ways better into the game, after you unlock a few different stances, as it turns out certain stances are very specifically intended for use against certain enemies, and if you're using the wrong stance, you might as well be dusting off their health bar with a pastry brush. But the combat is better once you've unlocked things that make it work, almost as if they should have been unlocked from the very start, but no, everything has to be unlocked through the nine different upgrade systems, because that's what the template says!
Jiminy Cockthroat: Read 'em and weep.
Yahtzee represents the final duel between two individuals divided by an impassible difference in philosophy as a sword fight between Ayn Rand and Karl Marx.
The ending:
Yahtzee: If Ghost of Tsushima had been named Assassin's Creed: Samurai, I wouldn't have questioned it for an instant and that's not good.
Yahtzee's avatar: (looking at "Assassin's Creed: Samurai") Seems legit.
Yahtzee: Why don't you try to fix this like you fix hoarding? Take all these templates, and alogrithms and standard practices that make up the Jiminy Cockthroat model and go through each one, and if you can't see how it specifically improves the game, chuck it in the bin.
BASE ASSAULTS
UPGRADE CRAFTING
ANIMAL SKINNING
SEE ENEMIES THROUGH WALLS O VISION
MAP REVEALING
FLOWER COLLECTING (circled)
THAT ONE PLOT MISSION WHERE YOU GET CAPTURED AND LOSE ALL YOUR STUFF
HORSE GOING PLOP PLOPS
Yahtzee: What's this, flower collecting?!
Jiminy Cockthroat Designer: Oh, yes, you collect flowers to give to the merchant, to craft clothing dye, so you can make your armor red instead of black, in the brief moment before it's obscured by mud and gore effects and ...that's going in the bin, isn't i–
Yahtzee: IT'S GOING IN THE BIN, YES!!

Carrion and Beyond a Steel Sky

Yahtzee naming the blob monster from Carrion "Harold", and at one point grabbing an Imp who says, "Beats working at Amazon!"
On Beyond A Steel Sky:
Yahtzee: I mean, fuck me, Dave Gibbons worked on Beneath a Steel Sky, a really good 2D artist, the artist of Watchmen for fuck's sake! They brought him back on for this one, and then did most of the game in 3D. That's like hiring Professor Stephen Hawking to do YouTube essays about how Rey should have porked Finn!

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

Yahtzee opens attacking Battle Royale Games:
Yahtzee: (heavy Sarcasm Mode) Boy, isn't Battle Royale great? Squat in a bush for 20 minutes before getting forced to move on an sniped by a guy who might as well have been on the fucking moon.
Speck on the Moon: Git gud, scrub.
He then sarcastically applies the mode to other games:
Yahtzee: Battle Royale L.A. Noire — 100 detectives in a living room, and all the ones who failed to notice the 1940's housewife guiltily breaking eye contact get kicked out.
Yahtzee constantly describing the players of Fall Guys as "butt plugs" but depicted as people wearing butternut squash suits.
Yahtzee's avatar: (dressed in a butternut squash suit staring at purple dildo platforms) Are these dildos?
He also takes potshots at skilled Battle Royale players:
Yahtzee: No more worrying about snipers with 4K monitors and twitch mouse reflexes with literally nothing to do all day but practice and wait for the conveyor belt to deposit chicken nuggets into their mouths.
Buck-tooth nerd: I require sustenance, mother!^note
One can almost hear Yahtzee ready to burst out laughing at people cheating at Fall Guys:
Yahtzee: One time I was in the final round when someone got declared the winner when everyone else was still halfway up the hill. (amused to the point of nearly giggling) Don't tell me people are actually hacking this fucking game or finding physics exploits! That's like rigging up a sophisticated concealed vacuum device to cheat at Hungry Hungry Hippos! Seems like a lot of misplaced effort to win something that other people win fairly reliably just by flinging themselves at the controls for long enough.
"I wish this shit would cunting well fuck off, if you'll pardon my dense academic jargon."

Mortal Shell

Yahtzee's disappointment over how the "exciting new announcement" is... a Souls-like RPG:
Games Industry: Oh, Yahtzee~! Have we got a surprise for you!
Yahtzee: A surprise, games industry? Is it... a PC release of Infamous 2?
Games Industry: Nope!
Yahtzee: Is it... Silent Hill entering the public domain?
Games Industry: Nope!
Yahtzee: Ooh, did the entire management team at EA contract cholera from giving each other rusty trombones?
Games Industry: N— I don't even know what that is... No, the surprise is... a game that's an awful lot like Dark Souls!
Yahtzee: (his avatar Face Palms) Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!
Games Industry: I thought you liked Dark Souls, Yahtzee.
Yahtzee: I did! I also had a nice time at Disneyland when I was ten but I never wanted to fucking live there. I might just be over the whole Souls-like thing. Lovely meditations on the inevitability of entropy and death as they are, I feel like I've meditated enough. I'm confident if I'm ever in a sinking ship or a crashing plane I could probably be philosophical about my impending doom, now, and I'd like to move on and meditate on some other things. Like prawn cocktail flavour crisps. So the game is Mortal Shell, and this is normally the point where I'd summarize the plot and the setting, but I think "it is a Dark Souls clone" will do the job well enough. You're a walking husk of a person in a dying dark fantasy world and everything else in the world has apparently been led to believe that if they hit you hard enough then prizes will come out.
He then grumbles about Mortal Shell's Scrappy Mechanic fetish.
Yahtzee: Mortal Shell seems to be trying as hard as it can to out-inscrutable Dark Souls. The game won't even tell you what consumable items do until you consume one.
(Yahtzee's avatar holds a toadstool whose description reads: "You're on your own".)
Yahtzee: And that's the kind of learning process that got me kicked out of medical school.
(Yahtzee's avatar eats it, and the description changes to "Causes volcanic diarrhea".)
Yahtzee using Jenny Agutter as a Running Gag, highlighted by:
Yahtzee: So if I were to summarize Mortal Shell in one word, it would be "Jenny Agutter." Then, after jerking off, I'd update the word to "demoralizing".

Spiritfarer

The review kicks off on a rather disturbing note:
Yahtzee: It's always nice when a random game really grabs me. It's like hitting it off with an attractive stranger in a bar who doesn’t keep an eye on their drink and doesn't question my unmarked van.
Yahtzee depicting Stella and her allies as wearing "Have a Nice Day" Smile masks, with the "nice world" depicting barren trees having the smiley masks as leaves.
Yahtzee: Quite a nice world, actually, all hand drawn in a lovely clean art style that reminds me of Franco-Belgian cartoons. Full of light and wonder and melancholy humour which does rather juxtapose against the underlying knowledge that our job is essentially to take our passengers one by one into the woods and ice them in the back of the head.
- Now faithfully recreated in the style of the game! With Yahtzee's approval on Twitter to boot.◊
  - Before that:
  Yahtzee: We play as Stella, a constantly smiling young girl with a hat slightly larger than she is, and a second player can optionally play as Stella's cat. I'll take "Completely Unnecessary Multiplayer Modes" for $200, Alex!
  [screen says, "It is a game in which Player Two controls Player One's headgear and both end up as effective as a blind fish in a tractor."]
  Yahtzee: Ooh, what is Mario Odyssey?
He then contrasts Spiritfarer with both GRIS and Sea of Solitude.
Yahtzee: The main point is, Spiritfarer has both underlying and surface meaning. If you want, you can forget all about the metaphor business, I'm certainly fucking sick of saying the word. If you want, it could just be a story about a little girl on a magical adventure, making a bunch of animal friends, hanging out, doing their sidequests, hugging them with the dedicated Hug button, then icing them in the woods. And then you feel sad because you're actually sad about never getting to see your friend again, not because there’s a huge symbolic statue of the main character telling you to be sad.
His analysis of the actual game, with him first starting out by comparing it to Subnautica:
Yahtzee: It's a 2D platforming base building exploration craft your way up the tech tree 'em up structurally reminiscent of, say, Subnautica: craft upgrades to explore more of the map to find new resources to craft more upgrades. How it differs from Subnautica is that you carry your base around with you on your ship and all the sea monsters actually sincerely want to be your friend...
Green puppet monster: I made brownies!
Yahtzee: ...And aren't just saying that to get you into devouring range.
(The shark from Jaws appears behind Yahtzee's avatar.)
Then he discusses the effectiveness of the game's Guilt-Based Gaming.
Yahtzee: The primary gameplay loop is a workaday routine that your passengers are woven into just enough to get you used to seeing them around, and that's why it's an emotional lurch when it's time to take them behind the woodshed. 'Cause when you get back from seeing off Dennis the Slug, for a while you're not harvesting lettuce anymore, you're harvesting the lettuce Dennis the Slug used to like. You can't do the stud farm minigame without thinking about how Dennis the Slug taught you the optimal method for bringing off a horse.
Dennis the Slug: Remember to make eye contact!
Yahtzee: And of course that lovely house you built for Dennis the Slug stands empty on your boat for the rest of the game, and by the end your ship is struggling to stay afloat under the weight of countless two-story tombstones.
Blobfish◊: Treasure always the memory of my beauty.
Shortly after, an imp rings a bell to signal Yahtzee shifting back to Caustic Critic mode.
Yahtzee: Whoops, I think I heard the bell! That means it's time to qualify that praise!
- His extended rant about the game's excessive dialogue.
  Yahtzee: Yes, the final monologue before a character gets iced is usually a bit of a knee in the feely parts, but at other times, there are too many characters whose quirk is that they talk too much...
  Deer: Let me tell you all about this website I read about white genocide.
  [ZP Stella face palms]
  Yahtzee: ...accidentally press "Talk" instead of "Buy" while interacting with the merchant, and you're locked into the Mash "Message Skip" Mambo for thirty seconds.
  TV: Boy howdy sure
  is fine to see a
  nice young girl
  out getting some
  sun and murdering
  her animal friends
  Yes indeedy do
  good to see the
  young generation
  pay a fond
  hello to old
  Mister Euthanasia

No Straight Roads and Battletoads

Yahtzee starts the review with a caustic attack on Battletoads that is somehow at once vicious and mild at the same time.
Yahtzee: Sometimes I like to picture game developers watching these videos. "Ooh! Look everyone! That weirdo on the internet did one of ours! Let's all gather round to good-naturedly laugh off his exaggerated criticism and bask in the occasional qualified praise. Come on, Steve. Bob. Fiona. Adolf. Lionel. Big Smelly Janet^note." I wonder if the developers of Battletoads are doing that now. Well, developers of Battletoads, here's the thing: I hate your game. In fact, I don't think I've ever realized I hated a game quite as fast as I realized I hated yours. I'm trying to avoid swearing here, so you understand how totally sincere I am when I say I played five or six levels into Battletoads and decided I would rather spend the afternoon cleaning out the shower drains. But hey, I don't hold it against you. At least it didn't waste my time, and I've got a really clean shower now.
His description of No Straight Roads as "the most Double Fine-iest game to ever not be made by Double Fine."
Yahtzee: Pretty buggy game, too, actually. That, fellas, was where you needed to stop imitating Double Fine.
When talking about the musicians the player has to battle against, he puts up images of Daft Punk, Hatsune Miku, Mozart and Lady Gaga.

Marvel's Avengers

Yahtzee going off on the Poor Man's Substitute characters.
Yahtzee: You know, Robert Downey Jr. deserves more praise for his portrayal of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies. Yes, I know he's made more money than a glazier in the Gaza Strip, but he did a really quite impressive job playing a character who could be simultaneously abrasive, charismatic, and sympathetic. I was thinking about this while watching Tony Stark as portrayed in Marvel's Avengers, Square Enix's new shiny chrome-plated hamster wheel for the micropayment masses. Because if all of his dialogue lines had been cut out and been replaced by Tony Stark getting clipped around the ear by whoever was standing closest to him then that would have earned the game at least another star. It's still confusing to me that this game that is obviously trying to crib off the success of the Marvel movies deliberately replaced all the leads with their poorly received spin-off low budget TV show versions, but maybe it's easier on the kiddies this way; they don’t have to watch their heroes repeating an infinite cycle of copy pasted combat missions and resource grinds and ask their parents, "Mummy, why is Iron Man trapped in a hypothetical tenth layer of Dante's Hell?"
Tony Stark: (from TV set) Oh, God, why can't I die?
He then questions the choice of Ms. Marvel the game used.
Yahtzee: It starts with a bunch of linear story missions focussing on Kamala Khan, the amazing human diversity quota, attending an Avengers convention and just totally impressing the shoulder pads off of several poorly dressed smug white dudes with her obsequious fangirling. It’s about as excruciating as it sounds, and not a little Mary Sue-y, but I leave that discussion to my frothier correspondents.^note
Yahtzee "congratulates" the game for not immediately revealing its live games service, but eventually:
Yahtzee: It's up to Kamala to reunite the Avengers and remind them that being a hero isn't about glory or power, it's about having ready access to a cosmetics retailer.
(later)
Yahtzee: But then the live service shit starts insidiously to creep in. Funnily enough, immediately after Tony Stark rejoins the crew.
Yahtzee's avatar: (to Bland Tony Stark, angrily) You really are the fucking monkey's paw curse on this game, aren't you, Tone.
Yahtzee: The lovely approachable face flakes off bit by bit to reveal the cold, eyeless skull underneath. You unlocked the confusingly laid out mission hub area. You unlocked the gear crafting station. The cosmetic crafting station. The faction missions. The storage lockers. Your next mission objective is to talk to all the gear vendors. We will literally hold up the plot until you fucking do that, and every single one of them has a line of dialogue specifically designed to guilt you if you leave without buying anything.
Vending machine: Oh, you don't want any new emotes? Welp, better tell the kids that it'll be sawdust porridge for dinner again.
Yahtzee: Then all those story-focused corridor missions are replaced by missions in which we go to one of a handful of pocket sandboxes, are directed to a specific location, and all the way there copy pasted side objectives appear all around us like we're dodging mortar shells in fucking No Man's Land.
Marvel's Avengers: There's a treasure box nearby! There's a group of bland copy-pasted enemies nearby! Why not kill them before you kill the group of bland copy-pasted enemies you actually came here to deal with?
Yahtzee: It's like being trapped in the IKEA showroom when all you want is a fucking egg whisk.
Yahtzee also states that knowing that the game is a lootbox-infested, algorithm-smothering bore didn't prevent him from falling into the trap of caring about random loot:
Viewer: Oh, those tactics don't work on me, Yahtzee. I am a savvy consumer.
Yahtzee: Yeah, we all think that! That's how they get you! I didn't particularly want those level 9 uncommon Underpants of Facetious Example, but then my gear inventory filled up and the game said I couldn't them 'til I cleared a space. Why the game thought I wanted to hold onto my old level 2 underpants I found in a bin I did not know, nor why I needed to laboriously hold down the dismantle button to get rid of every unwanted item one-by-one... until I'd realized that they'd done it. They made me want the new underpants I didn't want, just by slightly withholding them until I proved I could efficiently pack a suitcase. How else have you rewired my brain, games industry? Are these actually my thoughts I'm having? Do I actually fancy Jenny Agutter?
Yahtzee depicting Taskmaster® as Skeletor and Abomination® as a hedgehog atop a giant green rectangle body, and yes, saying "registered trademark" after each character.
His complaint about the combat:
Yahtzee: Play as the Hulk or Kamala Khan and your blows have a satisfying enough impact to them, but play as Iron Man and it feels like we're attacking the enemy by very aggressively shining flashlights at them. Yes, I'm ripping on you again, Tony Stark, but it's your own fault for still being in this game and not choking to death on your own cum!
He ends the review with a pointed takedown of the Walt Disney Corporation.
Yahtzee: In summary, Marvel's Avengers is exactly what it always seemed to be: a game designed not to engage or electrify, but to take up space, inside your head, on your hard drive, in human culture in general. But the plot takes on a deeper meaning if you look at the Avengers as an analogy for the Disney Corporation, assembling a team of franchise and media companies in order to fight against an oppressive government-backed regime bent on corporate regulation, taxation, and the dreaded monopolies commission. So in this metaphor, Kamala Khan as the protagonist represents an approved citizen of the corporatocracy who buys all the merch and dutifully wets her Stan Lee autographed knickers over the right brands, and then each Avenger represents one of Disney's acquisitions. Thor represents Pixar; old school fantasy hero popular with the kids. The Hulk represents Fox; a veneer of respectability over an instrument of total societal destruction. And Iron Man represents Star Wars; used to be good when better actors were involved, now deserves to choke to death on its own cum.
- Followed by a stinger in the end credits:
  I guess Black Widow represents National Geographic or something

BPM: Bullets Per Minute

Yahtzee, long-time critic of Colon Cancer in titles, especially dislikes it in combination with Department of Redundancy Department.
Johnny Game Developer: Ooh, let's use a cool three-letter abbreviation as our title! (says Johnny Game Developer) That way it will be remembered just as fondly as the film LXG: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Susie Game Developer: Good idea! (says Susie Game Developer, no relation) And on that note, just in case people don't realize what it's supposed to stand for, we should put the full sentence somewhere nice and subtle and barely noticeable, like on the end of the same fucking title.
Johnny Game Developer: Yes! That way, we will enjoy the dual benefit of abbreviating, i.e. shortening the name, while simultaneously making it slightly longer. We are both screaming twats.
This delightful Call-Back:
Yahtzee: Last week you may recall I reviewed No Straight Roads that was sort of trying to do a music-based combat thing, but fell flat because the rhythm tended to get lost. Well, there's absolutely no risk of that happening with this game, since you boot it up and the rhythm immediately starts smashing you about the face and neck with a driving bass drumbeat and screaming guitars. Although, the game has a Norse Mythology theme, so I should say the music's relatively tame compared to most Scandinavian metal, as it doesn't mix in the sound of goats being slaughtered or feature people singing like emotionally repressed camels who have been putting up with their rider's bullshit for years and finally have a chance to give vent.
Yahtzee's chief complaint is that the game has no real reward for the player being especially skilled.
Yahtzee: You get the same treasure whether you flawlessly clear the room or were moving like your trousers were 'round your ankles. The only thing an unbroken combo gets you is a points multiplier. Points?! High scores?! What year is this? You gonna ask me to enter my initials next, so I can enter BUM and make all the other little snipes in the arcade laugh before we run home and watch Saved by the Bell?
"Every time I got to the final boss the motherfucker rolled over like a dog in a tumble dryer, because if I'd gotten that far it was always because I'd picked up one of the random power-ups or weapons that completely break the difficulty, like the regenerating shield or the grenade launcher."
Imp: I am behind a shield and cannot be attacked head on! (crow several late game enemies) What're you gonna do about that, dipshit? Ha, you missed! Oh, I'm dead, as are all my friends.

Serious Sam 4

Yahtzee on the Status Quo Is God of the Serious Sam series:
Yahtzee: The Earth will continue to turn, the sun will continue to rise, if partially concealed by a haze of orange smoke like the face of a loved one appearing briefly at the surface of an unsanitary piranha tank, and the new Serious Sam game is going to play pretty much like all the other ones. God bless you, Croteam, for being as reliably unmoving as a donkey on a staircase.
He then notes the necessity of an Excuse Plot:
Yahtzee: You are a big strong man who can carry more guns than a military grade attack helicopter and run backwards faster than most ordinary men can sprint, here’s ten billion monsters in a series of open environments, piddly bam, pimply bum. There is very little Back Story that would meaningfully enhance such a purely cathartic experience, although you might distract from it. Gunning down nine thousand zombie soldiers might lose some appeal if we know that Sam’s doing it instead of picking up his daughter from hockey practice.
Yahtzee also muses on the Mood Whiplash:
Yahtzee: Logo T-shirt wearing kooky loudmouth Serious Sam Stone finds himself having to be haunted and sad over the death of an ally and it’s like watching Barney the Dinosaur trying to play Macbeth, then two seconds later they’re doing that running gag where they’re constantly struggling to come up with good one liners after killing something.
Sam's Henchman: I bet his favorite John Woo movie is Face/Off.
Jiminy Cockthroat also makes their return.
Yahtzee: The feature that most gave me the foreboding belly squirts was the skill tree. Oh, Serious Sam, the creepy boundary overstepping boy scout leader of modern trends touches the genitals of even the best of us. Skill trees are a defining part of the Jiminy Cockthroat experience and at worst they can give a game the Ghost of Tsushima problem where you have to unlock nine things before the gameplay actually fucking works.
This line:
Yahtzee: One skill you can get is the ability to ride certain monsters. When I saw that I said "Jesus, that's the kind of new feature you want to put front and centre, Croteam, not buried five upgrade points deep! I wanna burst onto the scene riding a Syrian Werebull and go 'Knock knock, motherfuckers, who’s ready for the gymkhana?!'"
The closing comment:
Yahtzee: If you're after more of that Serious Sam horde shooter action in all new bigger environments, Serious Sam 4 obliges, and maybe that's all you wanted to know. In which case, sorry it took me five minutes of your time to say that. But what else were you going to do with it? Have sex five times?
Yahtzee's Avatar: (in the dark) I have a good nineteen seconds in me tonight.

2020, Quarter 4

Hades

The opening, where Yahtzee complains that video games only seem to draw from either Classical Mythology or Norse Mythology, and wishes that other ancient belief systems were highlighted instead:
Yahtzee: Video games have always gotten a lot of mileage out of mythology, but it's disappointing how it only ever seems to fall back on either Greek or Norse. I already know way too much about Greek and Norse mythology, why don't you ever make games about Zoroastrianism? I don't know anything about Zarathustra. I know that he spake once.
Zarathustra: Lend us a quid.
Yahtzee's praise for Supergiant Games' Signature Style:
Yahtzee: Supergiant Games have a very distinct style. You know you're playing a Supergiant Game if it's got colourful hand-painted graphics, isometric gameplay, very strong writing focused on worldbuilding and characters, and all the voice acting sounds like it's coming from very sexy people.
Barry White: Hey baby.
Yahtzee has fun with the plot that has Zagreus portrayed as a moody teenager.
Yahtzee: Hades is about Zagreus, the son of the titular deity, who has gotten sick of kicking around the depths of Tartarus playing Halo and very deliberately pretending not to notice the pamphlets for vocational schools his dad rather unsubtly keeps leaving on the coffee table.
Hades: (holding pamphlet) Gosh, boilermaking sounds interesting.
Yahtzee: And so he decides to pull what's known as the "reverse Orpheus" and journey out of the underworld for the first time in his life.
Zagreus: And there's nothing you can do to stop me, dad!
Hades: Um, I literally rule over legions of immortal warriors with nothing to do all day but try to stop you, Zagreus.
Zagreus: (whiny) Shut up! You never bought me a car!
- Hades being a somewhat hands-off parent in general:
  Hades himself, the end boss, is there, just sitting in his armchair watching Inspector Morse and rolling his eyes at you 'cos he said you'd hurt yourself if you went sledding at the quarry but you didn't listen and now you've hurt yourself and he's not mad, he's just disappointed.
The Freeze-Frame Bonus on "mythic twist":
"MYTHIC TWIST"
1 pt gin
1 pt peach schnapps
1 pt lemon juice
1 dollop of vegemite
He then vents about the sheer number of Roguelikes on the market.
Yahtzee: There are so many roguelikes now they can be subcategorised up the arse. Roguelikes (The Binding of Isaac) and Roguelites (Rogue Legacy) and Rogue-Lionels (FTL: Faster Than Light) and Rogue-Patricias (The Consuming Shadow). Hades is of a Rogue-Legacy sort of flavour where you do have to start from the beginning if you die but you have upgrades and resources that you keep from run to run, and so success is basically inevitable 'cos if you just keep trying eventually you'll be powered up enough to plow across the Grecian afterlife like a combine harvester in a petting zoo. Always the same brick wall, but eventually your sewing needle is made of titanium and the size of a tent peg and you know exactly where the mortar between the bricks has gone all crumbly. The Roguelike purists among you might get sniffy but the inevitable success model is more fitting for what Supergiant is trying to do here. That is: tell a story with an ending.
Hades the game: You won a pony!
Yahtzee admits that while the Level Grinding is a clever instance of Gameplay and Story Integration, it can't really stop the game from eventually starting to bore after a while.
Yahtzee: As I said, Supergiant are very big on integrating narrative with gameplay and that's very much what's going on here. If Zagreus could just cruise through the underworld first go on a surfboard made of skeletons...
Yahtzee's avatar: (wearing sunglasses) The underworld is my bitch!
Yahtzee: ...Then you'd never get the intended sense of hopelessness. But even knowing that, the obligation to grind runs past the point where it starts feeling samey is what just loses me at the end.
At the point where Yahtzee mentions the difficulty settings, the easiest one (below both "Easy" and "Super Easy") is depicted as being "Me Hands Don't Work".

Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time

Yahtzee opens with this line:
Yahtzee: It must feel weird when somebody else makes a sequel to your franchise, like when the babysitter insists on being called Mummy. It must be doubly weird when you thought your franchise died years ago and the babysitter has just shown up at your door at the dead of night with a shovel and a weird smile. I think it's fair to say that Crash Bandicoot didn't exactly leave loose ends untied. It wasn't The fucking Wheel Of Time, it was pretty thoroughly explored out as a concept. You don't bring out a fucking kart racing tie-in game when you can't see the bottom of the idea bucket. And yet, here comes Toys for Bob twenty years down the line clutching its big shiny shovel going "Don't worry, Naughty Dog, we will continue the great work in the original spirit you intended", and meanwhile Naughty Dog moved on years ago and are now more concerned with making terribly serious and important games about very unpleasant people fucking each other on smallpox blankets.
Yahtzee's issue with Event-Obscuring Camera issues in 3D platformers:
Yahtzee: The main problem that has always stuck out of fixed camera 3D platformers like a traumatically botched nipple piercing is depth perception. Sure, Crash Bandicoot gets a nice obvious shadow under him but why doesn't anything else? So if I'm trying to land on a hovering crate or enemy, I'm once again playing bottomless pit Russian roulette. If you're going to demand consistent perfection from me, it'd be nice if the mechanics could be fucking consistent in return, is me point. Tawna's unique mechanic is a grappling hook gun (because of course it fucking is) but it's contextual, and more than once I was in midair and the grapple prompt apparently decided I was a couple of nanometres off for its tastes and so I was cordially invited to eat shit. "Man", I thought, "if I'd been going for the no deaths run then I'd be frothing like a poorly supervised coffee machine right about now." Fortunately, I long ago came to terms with my own mediocrity, as it seems have most of my viewership. At first, I thought the checkpoints were too far apart, but then I noticed that new checkpoints appear if you die enough times, so I guess it's like the American healthcare system where they'll give you the baseline amount of necessary care but only if you can prove that you're oozing out of at least three places. And it's not just a matter of high difficulty because the loading times on the PS4 at least are slow enough to qualify for handicapped parking, so if you're having to restart a level a lot then you'll spend a lot of time alone with your private thoughts and that's how we get serial murderers. So in summary, again I must congratulate the developers for successfully recreating what feels like a late 90's PS1 platformer with absolutely none of the conveniences, design innovations and quality of life improvements we've come up with in the meantime.
He then gets nostalgic and compares Crash with the character he'd been accused of ripping off:
Yahtzee: And hey, Crash Bandicoot as a franchise is still doing a hell of a lot better than Sonic The Hedgehog. But that makes me wonder where the difference lies. I mean they're both 90's mascot platformers about an edgy forest animal in comically oversized shoes fighting a mad scientist with vaguely ecological themes. They both at various times featured female characters that left very confused feelings in developing minds. So where did Sonic put his comically oversized foot in it? I've thought about it and I think it's because Crash Bandicoot never nicked any ideas from Dragon Ball Z.^note Third law of the universe, guys. Light speed, the gravitational constant, and anime ruins everything.

Amnesia: Rebirth

invoked Yahtzee starts to get annoyed that it seems like publishers are taking his predictions of unwanted features way too seriously.
Yahtzee: It’s been so long since the last Amnesia game I almost forgot it existed — ironically, lol — and even longer since the last installment by Frictional Games. A Machine for Pigs was of course developed by The Chinese Room, and had all the gameplay of a supermarket conveyer belt covered in pork products. Not to mention a rather off-putting subtitle, but I remember saying at the time at least it didn’t go for some incredibly generic one-word sequel name, inevitably beginning with the letters "R-E". In which case: oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, Amnesia: Rebirth. You left the starting blocks and one of your shoes has already fallen off. Between this and the Paper Mario hole punch boss, I really need to figure out a way to exploit my power to make exaggerated terrible ideas reality. Hey, wouldn’t it be crazy if the post office stopped delivering letters and instead delivered free money to my house?
He then announces "the triumphant return of the jam that comes out of the walls".
Yahtzee's complaint about how the enemies in Amnesia: Rebirth are less scary than those in The Dark Descent:
Yahtzee: I can tell from my pristine trousers that the monsters just don’t command the same terror that they did in Dark Descent. Probably because in this case, you get a good look at them enough times that you can see they’re just generic zombie dudes, and suspense only lasts as long as the mysterious, snarly thing lurking in the dark could be anything from a gelatinous cube to a hungover Orson Welles.
Orson Welles: (head stuck on top of the gelatinous cube) What the fuck did I agree to now?
This line:
Yahtzee: At one point, [Tasi] takes the public subway train in the evil Lovecraftian dimension and misses her stop because the map was confusing. No, really, this happens; it's one of the things that draws out the run-time like your mum's waistband at the cock buffet. So maybe it's The Dark Descent's stronger grounding in reality that made it more effective. Remember the rhyme: "Monster in a scary world? That's just where monsters come from, girl. Monster in your living room? Better sense of creeping doom."
Yahtzee calls Rebirth "Amnesia: Reloaded", "Amnesia: Recalcitrant", and "Amnesia: Revengeance".

Remothered: Broken Porcelain

The entire opening spiel by Yahtzee, where he takes potshots at both the Remothered franchise and the year of 2020 in general:
Yahtzee: Hey everybody, it's October! At time of writing. The month when all the ooky spooky games pop up like rigor mortis erections at an open casket funeral. And hey, it's also 2020, the year of shit! Where everything is shit and human civilization circles the toilet bowl like the latter two thirds of last night's sweetcorn burrito. So what better way to mark the occasion than with a really shit horror game...
(Amy appears in front of Yahtzee's avatar, who turns to see Remothered: Broken Porcelain behind him.)
Yahtzee's avatar: Oh, never mind.
Yahtzee: Step forward, the Remothered franchise. Which began in 2018 with Remothered: Tormented Fathers, a unique survival horror IP that collectively made a lot of people go "Wow! That's the most awkward fucking title I've ever seen outside of Japanese games and Philip K. Dick novels." I didn't even do the dry heave because I feel the title is dry heave enough. And then the developers said "Oh you think that title’s awkward, do you? Well I'm sure we can beat that record." So here's the sequel, Remothered: Broken Porcelain, which sounds like something you'd find on a label in an antique shop owned by someone for whom English is a second language. It's not second hand, it's remothered! Don't worry, it still pours tea as long as you don't lift it by the handle or any other part.
Yahtzee then starts to go into more detail about Remother: Broken Porcelain being terrible:
Yahtzee: It's a good thing Remothered: Broken Porcelain doesn't work in a uranium mine 'cos it'd cause severe morale issues with the horrible things it leaves in the communal latrine. It's a bad one, friends — so bad I want to bend it over my autopsy table and really work out what the fuck happened. It's a continuation of the plot from the last game that gets summed up for us in a story so far video, whose principal effect was to get me completely lost before we'd even fucking started.
Yahtzee pinpoints the moment he Stopped Caring.
Yahtzee: I made it all the way through about nine confusing plot developments to a puzzle where I was supposed to open a voice activated safe. Now I could hear one of the villains talking to his sock puppets in a nearby room, and I had a tape recorder. I felt like I was ready to put all the pieces of this mind-melter together. So I stood where the dialogue was loudest and press the "use" button, and my big-titted Jodie Foster-lookalike protagonist got out her sound recorder and sort of waved it a bit like she was using it to check for ghosts. So... did that do it? I went back to the safe, and I pressed "use" on it, and the lady said "Bingo!" and then nothing happened. I gave up at that point. I'm not gonna stand here being made to feel silly because you gave me a square peg and a square hole and then stretched cling film around the latter, Remothered: Audacious Wallpaper. I took enough of that bullshit from 90s adventure games.
Viewer: Could the game be saved if they patch out the bugs, Yahtz?
Yahtzee: Well, the design's bad and the story's a mess, so that's like asking if I could suck a turd up through a drinking straw if it was mixed with water first. Possibly, but on the whole I'd rather just find a different juice box.

Ghostrunner

invoked Yahtzee opens by commenting on how Real Life is starting to increasingly feel like the stereotypical Crapsack World as foretold by the Cyberpunk genre:
Yahtzee: I'll say one thing for the age in which we live, at least we might finally get that evil Cyberpunk future we've always dreamed about. Yes, it'll mean an age of corporate oppression and rampant income inequality, but on the bright side, roller blading might come back. Probably why everyone's looking forward to Cyberpunk 20 Whatever-It-Was, they're keen to get some practice in before Amazon starts reserving breathable air for Prime subscribers.
He goes off on the Strictly Formula Cyberpunk standard plot:
Yahtzee: The good thing about Ghostrunner's plot is that it's so fucking mind-numbingly predictable it's virtually impossible to spoil. If I were to tell you that Mr. G. Runner Esquire has two voices in his earpiece: one a stern taskmaster who keeps downplaying our humanity...
Darth Vader: (Vader Breath) Compassion is weakness!
Yahtzee: ... And advising us not to stop to save civilians because piles of bodies are useful for reaching high shelves, the other a tearful bunny rabbit who dreams with glimmering eyes of a better world for all who asks you to pwease save all their wittle fowest fwiends because it'd be such a shame to waste all the lovely cakes she baked for tea, which of those two characters would you think turns on us before the end?
Bunny: (as Yahtzee's avatar clings to a ledge) I Am Your Father.
Yahtzee: And without wishing to give any more away, I had a mystical premonition halfway through that the ending of the game was going to rip off the ending of Robocop. And funnily enough that’s exactly what it did.
This part:
Yahtzee: It's first-person, and what's first-person good for, kids?
Imp Kids: (popping up and shouting in unison) Ranged combat!
Yahtzee: What's it not so good for?
Imp Kids: (popping up and shouting in unison) Melee combat and anything that relies upon situational awareness!
Yahtzee: That's right! Let's not mince words.
Hero: (at a vending machine) Ooh, Doritos!
Yahtzee: If you ever stop moving in a combat section, you're already dead; the message just hasn't reached your brain yet.
(Gun bullets decapitate the hero.)
Hero's Head: I like Cool Ranch.

Watch Dogs: Legion

Yahtzee opens the review by disclosing that he worked on the game, insofar as he was hired to "punch up" the dialogue of an AI support character who makes inappropriate jokes ("And they didn’t use all my lines, I think they felt some of my inappropriate jokes weren’t appropriate."). He then promises to be as unbiased in his review as he always is. Barely thirty seconds later, he brings up the AI and its "quite remarkably well punched-up dialogue."
Yahtzee admits that the game's openness allows for a lot of emergent gameplay and story, which he abuses.
Yahtzee: As I said, the lack of strong characterization does hurt the story—I mean, I'm pretty sure most real people would respond to complete strangers asking them to join their "best-friends-no-oppressive-regimes-allowed" treehouse club with either bafflement or a faceful of commercial grade pepper spray—but it does mean it's easier to amuse yourself by making up your own stories for your characters. The game forces you to recruit a construction worker as part of the tutorial, and I ended up using that dude to complete the final mission, because fuck, from token member hired only 'cos we wanted to play on his rideable drone to champion of the resistance; this dude's had a motherfucking arc! Also, for the sake of extra challenge, I decided that he refuses to use any form of transport other than riding on top of double decker buses, because of a childhood trauma involving a model train set and a crab. Also, he strictly avoids violence while on missions because the sight of blood reminds him of Cheltenham F.C., and when combat is required he defers to his teammate, Crazy Mildred the Elderly Nail Gun Murderer, who has to knock down every lamp post she sees to raise awareness of child leukemia, and who wears a... really stupid hat.
(a split-second later)
Credits: LIKE, *REALLY* STUPID

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

The opening.
Yahtzee: So you remember that Dark Pictures: Man of Medan thing that Supermassive Games burped out, and how they were threatening to make it a full-on horror anthology series? Well, apparently their demands weren’t met, so they’ve been forced to inflict another one upon us.
A helpful reminder to all viewers.
Yahtzee: Supermassive Games should not be confused with Supergiant Games. I know they mean the same thing, but Supergiant Games makes interesting games that push the boundaries of the interactive storytelling medium, and Supermassive Games makes "interactive movies", a phrase which for me remains almost as foreboding as "Hey, is your nuclear reactor supposed to be doing that?"
For his spoiler warning, Yahtzee nicks a gag from another British comedy show:
Yahtzee: The game does stumblingly create a certain amount of intrigue between mysterious flashbacks to the past and intense monster encounters. Just a shame all of it gets squashed by the big reveal, like kindergarten chairs under the arse of a morbidly obese parent. So let's talk about the en—
(Monty Python Intermission track) SPOILERS UNTIL END OF VIDEO
Yahtzee: —ding.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

Yahtzee notes that Horny Vikings is the current fad in the industry.
Yahtzee: Ah, Vikings. Who doesn't like Vikings?
Viewer: English monasteries?
Yahtzee: Oh, right.
Viewer: Anyone who's ever been forced to listen to Norwegian Black Metal?
Yahtzee: Yes, thank you. The point was, in the games industry, it seems to be only a matter of time before you go full Viking. God Of War did it, Assassin's Creed are doing it, that new Elden Ring thing that FromSoftware are doing isn't strictly full Viking, I know, but it's definitely giving it some funny looks. Fair play to Assassin's Creed, it held out longer than a lot of series would. I mean, it did the fucking American War for Independence before it did Vikings. That's like forcing yourself to eat all the party napkins before you can have any of the birthday cake, but there's no putting off going full Viking forever. It's one of the points on the graph. Ninjas, pirates, vikings. And I guess maybe cowboys. Hey! Is that a Ubisoft drone? Oh shit, it's taking notes! Sorry everyone, don't know how they keep getting in here. If they announce Assassin's Creed: Deadwood next year, I guess you can all blame me.
Yahtzee: For want of something to do, and in the wake of Norway being peacefully united under Harald Fairhair towards the end of the first millennium and becoming all lame and non-murdery, Eivor decides to sail to medieval England to start a new life. This being probably the only era in history where people went to England to make their lives more interesting. Most other times, that's like going to the Arctic circle for the beaches.
Yahtzee: So we have the second Ubisoft sandbox in as many weeks to be set in England. I guess we’re making the most of it before Brexit really kicks in and the British government starts selling off national monuments for bread.
The credits Brick Joke:
Credits: After they've done ninjas, pirates, Vikings AND cowboys, it's probably going to have to be astronauts.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Yahtzee stating The Ninth Generation of Console Video Games hasn't excited him.
Yahtzee: Huh. That's odd. Records seem to indicate that a new console generation began at some point in the last few weeks, and yet, mysteriously, I don't seem to care. I just double checked and yes, I'm still mostly just feeling the usual blend of boredom and alcohol-saturated dread.
(Yahtzee's avatar in bed with the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X.)
Yahtzee's avatar: Sorry, Sony and Microsoft, this doesn't usually happen to me. Maybe I'd get in the mood if the two of you make out while I watch...
(Yahtzee's avatar now sitting in a chair watching the two consoles get it on)
Yahtzee's avatar: ... But you know, it does kind of feel like absolutely fuck all has changed. (looks down into his underwear and notes a lack of an erection)
Yahtzee: Maybe I’ll feel differently once I actually have access to a PS5 and the console doesn't exist merely as a glint in an eBay scalper's eye. Sony’s going to have to do a lot fucking better than a remake of an eleven year old game (Demon's Souls) and an expansion pack sequel (Spider-Man: Miles Morales Edition) if it wants my shiny purple helmet to rise out of the trenches of No Man’s Land, especially since one of them came out on PS4 as well. Sony, I'm not gonna date your spoiled overweight daughter just because your house has a new pool. Your older, more experienced daughter can let me into the pool as well, and she still has my credit cards.
(Yahtzee and the PlayStation 4 run off, hand-in-hand)
Yahtzee takes another shot at playing as normal people in Spider-Man.
Yahtzee: Hopefully we learned our lesson last time that not playing as Spider-Man in the Spider-Man game is like throwing away the condom and sticking the wrapper on your cock.
Spider-Man game: Press X To Pick Nose
- He later refers to "that afore-hinted-at business where Spider-Man takes five every now and again and you have to play as his fucking roommate trying to knock out a crafty one without the squeaky bedsprings alerting a guard."
Peter Parker being depicted as the Jerry Lewis version of The Nutty Professor, later joined by Sherman Klump as Miles Morales.
Yahtzee then attacks the lack of originality in comic books:
Yahtzee: I know Miles Morales is an established character in the comics, because comic nerds will only tolerate permanent change when it isn't a fucking change at all. Peter Parker takes under his wing a freshly spider-powered up Miles Morales and swiftly forces him to use the same codename and wear the same outfit, which, lets be blunt, is a bit weird and narcissistic and not a little gatekeeper-y.
Peter Parker: (creepily) I'm your new daddy.
Yahtzee: Peter Parker goes on his holidays and leaves his new Mini-Me to defend the city alone, but Miles finally proves worthy of Peter’s crusty Spider-Man pyjamas when half the people he knows turn out to be supervillains. Turns out you can only make it as a supervillain in New York if you've been to at least three of Spider-Man’s birthday parties. Nepotism, I call it. These days, Spider-Man probably gets more thrown if supervillains don't turn out to be someone he knows. He wrestles them to the ground and the mask falls off and he goes "Gasp! No, it can't be! I have no idea who you are!"
Villain: I wish I had friends.
He also goes off on the Game-Breaker ability to cloak.invoked
Yahtzee: Smash a dude into a drum kit with a howler monkey in front of seven of his mates! Who cares? We can fucking cloak!
Imp: He's a sly one!
His snark in the credits.
Credits: I hope everyone enjoyed how Spider-Man was recast as someone who hasn't physically aged since leaving middle school.
Credits: Buy Season Pass to unlock even more cum jokes.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Yahtzee being apprehensive over Yakuza: Like A Dragon switching to using turn-based combat in a significant first for the Yakuza series.
Yahtzee: If there's any franchise where the combat has never needed any drastic fixes, it's Yakuza, the games that routinely cut from grown men making understated threats to each other with very serious faces to those same grown men twatting the absolute three bean salad out of each other with benches, traffic cones and passing old ladies.
Like Maneater, Yahtzee gets impatient with low level enemies' Suicidal Overconfidence and Bullying a Dragon^notePun not intended.
Yahtzee: The combat is definitely wearing out its welcome when you're still being constantly pulled into random fights on the streets of Yokohama with low-level dudes, long past the point that they can be dispatched in one punch or half an expertly timed fart.
Yahtzee also calls the game Yakuza: Like a Rolling Stone, Yakuza: Like a G6, and Yakuza: Like, Like, Y'know.

Immortals Fenyx Rising

Yahtzee starts the video with a general complaint about how the "soulless Daleks that run the games industry" seem been on squeezing the originality out of everything, using The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as an example, as the review subject can easily qualify as a BotW Clone.
Yahtzee: Ooh, we like [Breath of the Wild]! [...] We think it's atmospheric and mechanically intricate and offers a bold new take on the interactive narrative experience.
Dalek: (silence)
Yahtzee: (resigned) Also, it made a lot of money...
Dalek: REPLICATE! REPLI-CATE! REGURGITATE!
- Also turns into a Brick Joke in the end credits:
  "COMMUNICATE! COMMUNICATE!" went the Dalek marriage counselor
Yahtzee cannot help but push out an exasperated groan before reading the game's title aloud.
Yahtzee: What's the strategy here, guys? "Hey, if we give our game the worst title in the history of anything, maybe the rest of the game will look good by comparison?"
- He then goes on to call the game Immortals Vomit Rising, Immortals Bile Churning, Immortals Violent Diarrhea and Immortals Penis Softening.

Cyberpunk 2077

Yahtzee throws in his two cents about the unfinished state of the game.^note
Yahtzee: I say immersive sim, I feel that description hinges on the game being in some way immersive. I was playing the Steam version, which might more accurately be termed a "buggier than a party sub that got left on the floor of a motel bathroom" sim. The bugs were ceaseless. Mostly non-game breaking animation fuckups and voice lines not playing, but every now and again I'd have to reload a save because I accidentally crossed a cutscene trigger while grabbing an enemy, and I'd come back from the loading screen with my head jammed up their arse like the result of some Cronenberg-esque teleportation accident. It's a shame, because when I looked up at the dizzying neon towers of Night City, and the crowds of NPCs where no two are the same and they're all uniquely dressed in some way like a cross between a character from LazyTown and a Cenobite, I thought to myself "Man, this game would probably be really immersive if my trousers hadn't just turned invisible again."
He then notes Johnny Silverhand is a bit of a Marty Stu.invoked
Yahtzee: After a heist on a corpo stronghold goes cyber-tits up, V finds themselves with six months to live and a piece of classified tech jammed in their bonce which makes them hallucinate the ghost of Keanu Reeves, who in this world was a legendary freedom fighter who died in a blaze of glory sticking it to the man and was also a hard-drinking rock guitarist that everyone wanted to fuck and probably had a really big knob. Bit laughable, really. It's like what used to happen whenever Gene Simmons got cast in a film and was given any amount of creative control.
Gene Simmons: (sitting with a scriptwriter at a table read) So how big is my character's knob?
- Yahtzee notes that Reeves' roles lately outside of John Wick have not been good.
  Yahtzee: V's task is to continue being a gigging mercenary while seeking a way to purge their brain of Keanu thoughts before their consciousness gets overwritten and they start seriously considering signing onto the The Day the Earth Stood Still remake.
Yahtzee has a bit of a quirk about the upgrade mechanic:
Yahtzee: And I was initially impressed by the vast range of perks and cyber-enhancement slots available for building your character, but after a certain point, a lot of those didn't offer enough benefit to be worth a bother, either.
[bricks say "+1 Blinks Per Minute", "+1 Health", "+1 Defense Against Sausage Based Weapons"]
Imp Vendor: Would you like a robot foot with +5% defense against verrucas?
Yahtzee's avatar: Well, I do hate wearing a rubber sock at the swimming pool, so hacking off a limb does sound like a perfectly level-headed alternative.
- "Better move on; looks like I've hit the "backhanded compliment" layer of this review trifle."
  Make Fun of Title
  Plot Summary
  Nitpicks
  Backhanded Compliment (circled)
  More Nitpicks
  Ejaculate
Yahtzee attacks a Scrappy Mechanic:invoked
Yahtzee: Incidentally, if one more AAA game has me navigate its menus by moving a mouse pointer with the gamepad, I'm going to lock it in a basement and only feed it when it's caught a fly with a pair of lead salad tongs.
Finally, Yahtzee recalls the "horse plop plops" from Red Dead Redemption 2:
Yahtzee: So I'd say this is the AAA Horse Plop Plops Syndrome again: the result of too many people working on the game who were trying to look busy. Sure, there's a theoretically nice plate of steak fries here but it's partially buried in potato peelings and I don't understand why you peeled so many more potatoes than you actually needed, nor why you literally enslaved a few people to get them all peeled in time.
Yahtzee's Avatar: (angry) Also, not to make a fuss, but I ordered a salad!

Funny / Zero Punctuation 5

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Funny / Zero Punctuation 5

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2020 Episodes

2020, Quarter 1

2020, Quarter 2

2020, Quarter 3

2020, Quarter 4

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