Zero Punctuation / Tropes A to D

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• Absurdly Long Wait: In the Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond review, when Yahtzee tries to download the game, he discovers that it's 130 gigabytes. The computer screen humorously displays "Ready to play in one million billion years".
• Accentuate the Negative:
  • Yahtzee's style, to the point where he'll occasionally rattle off a four-minute list of a game's flaws and then sum up by saying how much he enjoyed it. ("But having now whinged myself inside-out, I have to say that I find S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky weirdly compelling.") Presumably this means there are some positive qualities, but listing them isn't his department and has claimed "people don't like me being nice to a game".
  • He begins his Mindjack review expressing disbelief that people have trouble telling whether he recommends a game or not, but acknowledges this trope (along with the mesmerizing fat folds of a close relative) as the cause.
    Yes, I exaggerate every slightish negative feature regardless of overall quality, but how else would developers learn? It's like Chinese parenting, but less nightmarish.
  • Lampshaded in his reviews, where he describes his job as "ruining the developer's retirement plans." His standard operating procedure after playing a game, according to animation, is to toss aside the controller and boast, "And now to tell the world it sucks".
  • In his response to a fan letter saying if he doesn't like a game he points out everything that's wrong with it. "Hands up, you've got me there. I do point out everything that's wrong with a game, but then again, I'm a critic; it'd be weird if I didn't."
  • He stated in his inFAMOUS review that he views his job as tearing the bad and the mediocre games to shreds so that the rare game that could be called great can shine all the brighter.
  • In his review for Batman: Arkham Asylum Yahtzee says that he's more of a QA man and that anything he doesn't mention in his review is a good part of the game.
  • As he put it in the same review: "You don't call a sewer technician to redecorate your bathroom, and you don't come to me to hear about how a game is good."
  • Played with during his review of Wii Sports Resort, where he attempts to appeal to a fan who'd left when Yahtzee's constant railing on the Wii upset him by sarcastically portraying the game's negatives as positives. He notably skips over two sports that work too well to criticize.
  • "In fact, I might go so far as to say that Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. has sold me on air combat games. But that's not funny, so let's find more things to rip on."
  • From the Orange Box review: "If I did have to criticize it — and I do..." [Cue Escapist logo holding up a contract.]
  • Portal: "If you're a regular viewer you'll understand how insane these words feel coming out of my mouth, but I can't think of any criticism for it." [Cue Escapist logo holding up a contract, and Yahtzee's avatar apologizing] and "Absolutely sublime from start to finish and I will jam forks into my eyes if I ever have to use those words to describe anything else, ever again." He stuck to that promise too, having never given another game a flawless review since, not even Silent Hill 2, which he only reviewed retrospectively for the purpose of explaining why it's possibly his favourite game of all time.^note His five-word "review" of Undertale ("Undertale is a good game.") doesn't count, as he only did that so it would meet the requirement that any game on his Top/Bottom 5 of the year must be a game he's reviewed.
  • From the Clive Barker's Jericho review: "I could go on listing the stupid design decisions...so I will."
  • Even going back to his BioShock review: "If my Psychonauts review taught me anything it's that no one likes it when I'm being nice to a game..."
  • Inverted: when he finally got the chance to play Duke Nukem Forever, Yahtzee was actively trying to like it and ignore the faults, but eventually had to relent because he'd been harsh to games for far lesser reasons.
  • Spoofed in his Gears of War 2 review, where he tries as much as he can to hate it, but lists off some of the stuff it does well that prevents him from hating it. It ends with, "There aren't even any quick-time events! Oh, wait, there is one. A little one. I guess that means I have to hate it."
  • Retroactively played straight again; he bashed the entire Gears series with the release of Gears of War 3. In that case, he acknowledged that he thought it was okay back then, but then he tried to look back on the experience, and realized that he couldn't recall anything meaningful from it.
• Acid Reflux Nightmare: While mentioning how Five Nights at Freddy's is "a remarkable recreation of the kind of logic one encounters in a nightmare", Yahtzee's avatar is shown sleeping while surrounded by pieces of cheese.
• Action-Adventure: He once observed that this genre is little more than a catch-all term for any game that's difficult to classify, under which one can comfortably lump together everything from Deus Ex to Killer7.
• Action-Based Mission: Wasn't fond of this in L.A. Noire, the final part of which involves running around with a flamethrower after many sequences of analyzing suspects.
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • His opinion on E3, taken from the E3 2014 video:
    End this execrable endurance event entailing eager editors endlessly entreating eminent entertainment egotists for efficacious endowments of effluence!
  • The review for D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die takes this trope and runs a marathon with it.
    Delighting as it is that the drought is dying down, doing Destiny drained your debonair delegate. Dominant developers delay for a dog’s age, then deliver a desperately draft discharge and dare to describe it as the due destination for depictions of destruction. Dammit, I don’t desire the designate devotion to drudges as dull as ditchwater, so I’m declaring a downloadables day, derived directly from discovering D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die!
  • To a lesser extent, it persists for his next two videos. In the review of Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, he says he's trying to break the habit.
  • From his review of Pikmin 3.
    And all of the sudden, pinpointing the previous Pikmin protagonist is your party of pillocks' primary priority.
  • And from his review of Mortal Shell:
    ...constructing a custom character to carthically carve a chasm out of the cartilage of countless craven creeps...
• Adolf Hitlarious: In the "Top 5 of 2012" review, he compares Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days^note his Worst Game of 2010, which he describes as "offensively bad", to the #1 Worst Game of that year, Amy, which he describes as "the kind of bad that dresses up like Hitler and starts doing impressions of people with cerebral palsy."
• Adventure Game: When he first started playing games these were his favourite genre, and he's made several of them himself, though he admitted in an Extra Punctuation column that he's grown to strongly dislike the genre more recently, and noted that he's always liked adventure games in spite of their gameplay rather than because of itinvoked.
• Air Quotes: Yahtzee goes overboard with them in the opening to his Cyberpunk-themed double review of Dex and Invisible, Inc.:
  Good cyber-morning to all you "script kiddies" and "leet haxors" out there, "surfing" the "information superhighway" like a bunch of "fucking wankers".
• Alas, Poor Scrappy:invoked Yahtzee said during his "review" for Duke Nukem Forever that the cancellation of the game wasn't the end of the world since it had been overshadowed by other franchises, most notably Half-Life. However, in his Extra Punctuation article, while reflecting on the plans of bringing it out in 2011, Yahtzee admitted that too many FPS have taken the cover-based combat route and he'd like a return to the basics with one guy facing armies all at once.
• All Men Are Perverts:
  • He jokes about being an example himself, but he still expresses dismay at how widespread this trope is in real life, lamenting that all a crappy game has to do to become wildly successful is stick a picture of a busty scantily-clad woman on the cover.
  • The above criticism in particular comes up heavily during his review of Shantae And The Seven Sirens, where he bemoans the excessive focus on Fanservice over making the game actually interesting or fun to play, to the point that it started to become Fetish Retardant in his eyes. invoked
• All Women Are Lustful: Brings this up in The Witcher, but subverts it through mocking it as a blatant sign of the game including Fanservice in a token attempt to come off as "mature".
• Alternative Character Interpretation: invoked Yahtzee loves that trope.
• Almighty Idiot: "God" is represented as a giant, ethereal ocelot (something like a Fun Size leopard)'s head telling whoever He appears to to "Kill the whores!" It's implied that this isn't actually God Himself (usually, the Big Guy is represented as a classical Grandpa God), but a remarkably similar hallucination seen by various lunatics.
• Ambiguously Gay: His rundown of Dragon Quest XI's playable cast includes hanging a lampshade on the queer subtext in some of the character writing (specifically, regarding Sylvando and Erik):
  "...and by this method, we recruit to our cause: a toddler, two hotties, an old man, a comedy stereotype of a homosexual, and an actual homosexual."
  • invoked Amusingly, after he discusses the similarly blatant Ho Yay in Army of Two between the two leads Salem and Rios, he then gives a Verbal Backspace and muses that in practice, since he found the two characters to be Psychopathic Manchildren, their relationship came across as more platonic than romantic (directly analogizing it as equivalent to "a pair of eight-year-old boys running around the schoolyard kicking girls in the shins").
• Ambivalent Anglican: Yahtzee has this to say when the Church of England came out with a blistering denounciation of Acclaim when Acclaim offered to pay the funeral costs of anyone willing to put a Shadow Man 2 advert on the headstone of a recently deceased family member.
  Yes, Church-of-Tea-and-Crumpets-with-the-Vicar-England. It takes a lot to upset those lads; they don't even hate gays that much!
• Anachronism Stew: In his review of Skate 2, when arguing that skateboarding is an activity which could only exist in the decadent modern world: "Take any other period of history, a guy puts wheels on a plank, grinds down the steps of the Parthenon and breaks both his kneecaps on a pikestaff, they'd have him slung in Bedlam to be gawked at by gin-addled chimneysweeps for the rest of his life."
• Analogy Backfire:
  • His reason for suspending judgment on the Kinect. "Pope Urban VIII probably thought he was very clever when he condemned Galileo, but who got the last laugh there? ...Well, he did when Galileo died in poverty and dishonour but what I'm saying is I'm basically like the Pope."
  • Then there's this example, about the characteristion in Catherine:
    ...it's as if men are all directionless tidal waves and women are all dikes built in the path of their raging floods. Blimey, what a badly worded metaphor.
    "WOMEN ARE ALL DYKES" ~Yahtzee Croshaw
• And I Must Scream: He starts off his review of Animal Crossing: New Leaf describing a hypothetical situation in which a person's mind is locked out of his body, but is still fully conscious as his body proceeds to move around on its own... only doing utterly mundane and insignificant things.
  The higher part of your brain can see how utterly asinine the experience is but it's just getting dragged along for the ride, like a bunch of helium balloons tied to a wonky supermarket trolley. "Sure, lower part of the brain, a blue-tiled roof probably would solve all our constantly crushing sense of emptiness— OH GOD, STOOOP!"
• …And That Little Girl Was Me: Invoked in his Red Faction: Guerrilla review, where he talks about how he got the original Red Faction when he was younger and it served as his Start of Darkness.
• Angst? What Angst?invoked: Identified during his Half-Life: Alyx review as one of the weirdly defining parts of Half-Life's Signature Style, where in spite of apocalyptically tense circumstances, characters all retain a very casual and laid-back sense of humor, creating a very bizarre emotional tone.
• Annoying Arrows: Averted and Lampshaded in his review of Crysis 3 where the guy exclaims to Prophet that the Bow and Arrow is 12 times more powerful than any gun for some reason.
• Anti-Climax Boss: invoked One of his Pet Peeves, with him often lamenting when a boss either goes down with little effort or just isn't well-designed.
• Apocalypse Wow: Yahtzee states that if No More Heroes was combined with Branston Pickle that the world would end. And it would be AWESOME.
• April Fools:
  • In 2009, the hosts of Unskippable pretended to stage a Hostile Show Takeover and reviewed X-Blades before Yahtzee seized the show back to review Halo Wars. Yahtzee also guest-commentated on Unskippable.
  • In 2010, the usually Motor Mouth Yahtzee recited Ode on Melancholy in a very slow, ponderous manner.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: Yahtzee sardonically refers to this trope as the "sandbox paradox", referring to Wide-Open Sandbox games in which the player is given complete freedom to do what they like outside of missions, but within missions must precisely follow a linear series of instructions.
• Arch-Enemy:
  • Lee Drummond, apparently a bully in his childhood.
  • Michael Atkinson, Australian politician and chief Moral Guardian against the evil of video games.
  • Quicktime events.
  • The new console generation, specifically the big two PS4 and Xbox One, which he persistently calls the "Pisspoor" and the "Exbone" respectively.
  • EA games.
  • Ubisoft
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • A few blink-and-you'll-miss-it examples. (As a rule, a list of things - such as skills to buff in RPGs - will get silly at the end, or all the way through.)
  • In Batman: Arkham Asylum:
    "I could talk about how the combat flows, and how the atmosphere is solid, and how the highlights for me were the Scarecrow sections where Batman's perceptions of reality are skewed in favor of a nightmarish introspective delusional glimpse into the darkest recesses of his soul and how jumping on people is cool."
  • On a signpost in the Witcher review:
    SHAME
    FAILURE
    IGNOMINY
    SWINDON
  • The list of things George Lucas will never do: Definitely end popular moneyspinning franchise, refuse a second helping of pancakes, admit failure, survive in vacuum, shave.
  • In his Resistance 3 review, he accuses the game of copying Half-Life 2. Amongst his accusations are identical mechanics, a straight Expy of the Ravenholm level, and as the final straw, "the scientist has a beard." Because, you know, Gordon Freeman and Dr. Breen have beards.
  • From his Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles review: "Umbrella Chronicles is a heavily cut down retread of three of the major Resident Evil games, starring Johnny Bravo,^note Albert Wesker a prostitute,^note Jill Valentine an idiot,^note Chris Redfield a mullet,^note Billy Coen a 9 year old boy,^note Rebecca Chambers a brick shit-house,^note Tyrant and Carlos.^note Carlos Oliviera"
  • In his review of Shovel Knight (posted on July 16, 2014), he talks about the July games drought (which for Australia takes place during the winter) and his efforts to alleviate the boredom caused by it:
    "It's bad enough that we have to huddle in our homes trapped by the cruel blast of one degree below ideal surfing weather without AAA releases drying up and forcing us to pass the time with games like 'Guess how many kicks to the bollocks it takes to draw blood' or Frozen Grandparent Tetris, or, for those who are truly lost, Boggle."
  • While reviewing Alpha Protocol, there's a claim that Deus Ex lets you specialise in "combat, hacking, or playing the cello".
  • In the E3 2014 video, the three E's stand for "Excruciating", "End", and "Eggnog".
• Aroused by Their Voice: His opinion on Stephen Fry in LittleBigPlanet as well as Rucks in Bastion; he's a fan of famous voices in general, and feels that having them as One Scene Wondersinvoked is a waste of potential.
• The Artifact:
  • His Author Avatar is differentiated by all the other Zero Punctuation limbless stick figures by him having a fedora-like hat, even though he doesn't really wear them anymore. This gets referenced during his plug for his book "Existentially Challenged":
    "No, I don't still wear this hat in real life."
  • Feels that the Vigors, the stand-ins for the plasmids in BioShock Infinite, are this since they're kept around for the sake of retaining a gameplay element for the earlier games, an element that he feels is fun to keep around, but lack the significance to the story the plasmids had.
• Artistic License – History:
  • In his famous limerick review of Wolfenstein (2009), he included the rhyme "At the secret service of Queen Lizzie/B.J.'s bosses find themselves in a tizzy". Elizabeth II was still only Princess Elizabeth during WWII when the game is set; it was her father George VI who ruled England during the war (and for 6 years afterwards).
  • In his review of A Plague Tale: Innocence he admitted to feeling slightly biased against it, theorising "maybe it's just all the French-ness about it stirring up my English blood and making me seek vengeance for Agincourt." As responses in the comments field pointed out , the Battle of Agincourt was a famous battle from The Hundred Years War where the English absolutely massacred the French, and hardly something that any Englishman would feel a need to see avenged.
• Ascended Meme: He originally coined the "Glorious PC Gaming Master Race" phrase as a jab at elitists. That said, when he wrote an article on building himself a new gaming PC, he referred to it as himself returning to the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race. Said article was written long after the phrase became a memetic badge of honor for PC gamers.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: In "Where I Get My Ideas", Yahtzee ascribes his writing process to listening to talking ravens, aliens and leprechauns. We can surmise he gets asked about this a lot.
• Ass Pull: invokedAfter playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow he accuses the writer of pulling the Dracula plot twist out of his "biggest and sweatiest ass".
  • Also invoked in his Gears of War 3, where he describes the "exploding planet" plot point as still having "a few stray taint hairs" on it.
• As the Good Book Says...:
  • Lampshaded in his review of MindJack:
    "...but at all other times you're stuck with the starting pistol, which is the worst gun in the history of warfare, because it only works when you recite the 83rd Psalm between every shot." [the player is shown reading the KJV version of Psalm 83:2/3]
  • In the "Survival Special" he says that "the survival game cup has been runneth-ing over lately on Steam", a pun on the KJV version of Psalm 23:5.
  • In his review of DeathSpank and Limbo, he makes a Mad Libs Dialogue version of 1 Timothy 6:10:
    Yahtzee: They say that money is the root of all evil^note It's actually "The love of money is the root of all evils", but somehow I doubt Mrs. Hitler was being impregnated by a roll of Deutsche Marks. The saying works better if you replace "money" with "rich businessmen in tight suits who won't even put twenty cents in a gumball machine if they can't expect a return of investment" and "evil" with "bland, samey action-adventure clones kneeling on the bed of a dried-up watering hole licking the dirt for moisture." (And "is" with "are," if we want to be grammatically correct.)
  • In his review of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, Yahtzee imagines the protagonist North saying that he will "kill all those motherfuckers and then leave Bible verses on their corpses in spunk from my incredibly huge cock." One of the dead imps has "Job 3:14" on it, which indicates "kings and rulers of the earth, who built for themselves places now lying in ruins" (NIV).
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: In his review of F.I.F.A. 13, he keeps getting distracted by downloadable games.
• Attention Whore: From what we see of the Mario Bros. back in the old days, fixing toilets in Brooklyn, Mario was already a giant egomaniac who shouts "ITSA MEEEE" at any provocation. (Luigi's Mansion 2)
• Author Appeal: He notes some of this in Ni no Kuni with his Studio Ghibli bingo card◊.
• Author Filibuster: Occasionally.
  • He stops whatever he's saying during a Wii game review to remind people that he really hates the Wii.
  • Whenever he reviews a Sonic game, expect him to go on a tangent on how he finds that the franchise is beyond saving and that Sega should just put it out of its misery already.
  • If the American Military is involved in a shooter, expect a rant that decries them as imperialists.
  • In his A Link Between Worlds review, he went on a tangent making fun of Nintendo relying on Nostalgia and gimmicks.
  • In his The Order: 1886 review, he stops talking about the game itself to rant a bit about how far exclusive titles have fallen over the years, going from great titles that show what the console can do and getting people to buy them, to generic mediocre games with their only claim to fame being that they are visually impressive.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Briefly discussed in his Gears 5 review, where he discusses an encounter in the game where a battle against a monster in a theatre suddenly turns into an extended parody of Hamilton, with spotlights turning on and jazzy music starting up as you fight it. Yahtzee describes this kind of moment "when the game starts singing at you" as usually being a highlight, such as with the Ashtray Maze in Control or The Joker's musical number in Batman: Arkham Knight, but for Gears 5, he felt it just abruptly stops to move onto another generic setpiece, highlighting just how meandering and lifeless the game feels.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • In any video game involving some kind of supersoldier or genetic engineering program (which is a lot of them), you can count on him to point out that the millions of dollars spent engineering a super-strong warrior or a zombie plague could probably just be spent on conventional weapons that are just as good at killing people but don't have a habit of being Turned Against Their Masters.
  • Discussed as a big reason for why he doesn't believe VR gaming is going to really take off as a mainstream phenomenon. While Yahtzee ultimately has high hopes for the medium and its potential for innovative game design, he believes it inherently works anathema to what actually appeals to mainstream audiences (high accessibility and more social design), and VR is both expensive and technically complex, meaning it likely will remain a very niche thing. Not that he believes it's a bad thing:
    Yahtzee: But so fucking what, frankly? You really need something to have mainstream popularity to like it? That's like only liking caviar when it's had peanut M&Ms mixed through it.
• Awesomeness Is Volatile: Yahtzee implied this would happen if No More Heroes were combined with Branston Pickle (the universe would end).
• Awesomeness Withdrawalinvoked: Mentioned in his review of Firefall, one of the more highly-regarded MMOs he's reviewed for the show. Yahtzee found much to enjoy about the game (the fun combat and right balance of exploration and progression), but was aware that he only gave himself a week of time to play through it in the face of MMOs being a long-term commitment, and wondered if it was good business for such a game to actually have fun gameplay as a central focus, because once it starts feeling repetitive, you'll lose interest faster. He compares this in light of the vastly more successful World of Warcraft that strings along a mediocre grind punctuated by the occasional jolt of satisfaction from a level-up, with Firefall in comparison being a brighter flame that burns out quicker.
• Ax-Crazy: Yahtzee (or at least his avatar) tends to kill people from slight provocation, like setting a Dark Souls fan on fire for refusing to tell him what the game was like until he tried it.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • His review of The Witcher asks what would happen if you ground up J.R.R. Tolkien's corpse into powder and snorted it off the breasts of a prostitute with Tourette's Syndrome, implying this is similar to the experience. He then describes the actual logical consequences (i.e. getting in trouble with the police) and advises you to just buy The Witcher from a store if you want it.
  • He opens his review of Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water, his last video before Christmas 2015, with one:
    Well it's that time of year again: the stockings have gone up, and the owner of the stockings has been paid $20 and left my hotel room.
  • At the end his Trine review:
    If you can imagine The Lost Vikings knocking up LittleBigPlanet, then the internet has clearly desensitized you to retarded sexualization.
• Bathos: On occasion, sometimes overlapping with Mood Whiplash. The end of his Hunt Down the Freeman review combines a genuine lament at the state of the industry and Valve's fall from grace and then finishes it off with a Daikatana joke.
• Beat Without a "But":
  • In the review of The Last of Us Part II, Yahtzee starts out by saying how miserable he felt playing the game, pauses for a second, and then spends the rest of the review outlining his numerous issues with it:
    Yahtzee: Now, don't get me wrong, viewer: playing The Last of Us II was a pretty miserable experience.
    (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've enjoyed my weekend more had I spent it teasing out my bum hairs with pliers.invoked
  • Three weeks later he reviewed Deadly Premonition 2 and gave a bit of background about the franchise and its creator.
    Yahtzee: 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.
    (pause)
    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.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: A surprising amount of people write in with requests and then get offended when he rips into the game.
• Bestiality Is Depraved:
  • A gag in many videos, with a particularly favored one being the implication that he masturbates to dolphins.
  • About 1/3 of the jokes in the Sonic Forces review were about how all Sonic the Hedgehog fans enjoy raping the family dog.
• Better by a Different Name:invoked
  • Claimed that Dark Void was a better Transformers games than Transformers: War for Cybertron, since it featured dual-mode gameplay mixing mobile airborne combat and ground-based cover-shooting that he felt integrated the switching in a better fashion (and it even featured a protagonist about as human and relatable as most Transformers).
  • Felt that Rage (2011) was "basically Borderlands but better", since they had similar core gameplay but Rage also featured better graphics and the interface wasn't horrible.
• Bewildering Punishment: Yahtzee notes that you never find out what one's character did in the backstory to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion to get thrown in jail. He comes up with the most badass crime he can think of, namely, screwing the Emperor's wife and daughter on top of the desecrated corpse of one of the local deities.
• Bias Steamroller: He openly jokes about how he enjoys Valve and Supergiant Games, with the former saying he'll stab forks into his eyes if he ever calls any other game besides Portal perfect and the latter saying that he really wants to be mean to them, but can't, and stating he enjoyed Hades a lot more than usual roguelikes because of Supergiant's personal touches (story, voice acting, etc.)
• Big Bad: Electronic Arts, whose abhorrent business practices and representing of all that is wrong with the video game industry he has a habit of going into Author Filibusters about.
• Big Eater: Several references have been made to Yahtzee eating (or at least wanting to eat) some absurdly huge quantity of food in one sitting. For example:
  • In his review for The Talos Principle, Yahtzee's avatar can be seen lying on his back next to a conveyor belt rolling an entire cake towards his open mouth.
  • In his The Bureau: XCOM Declassified review, he talks about wanting to call Domino's to ask if they'll make "...a sandwich with pizzas instead of bread. And nine pizzas instead of filling."
• Big First Choice: Not a fan of it, as he feels it's just a fairly arbitrary way to extend playtime, although he wrote a lengthy Extra Punctuation column about it and argued that Wolfenstein: The New Order's use of it was probably the best implementation he'd seen.
• Big "NO!": The Spore review. Twice. But with a twist.
  "So can his new game, Spore, possibly live up to that legacy? In short: no. In long: nooooo...." (for 15 seconds without taking a breath)
• Big "SHUT UP!": The dialogue in Gears 5 aggravated him so much that he screamed "SHUT THE FUCK UUUUUUUP!!!" at it so hard that his voice cracked.
• Bile Fascination:invoked
  • Yahtzee genuinely recommends buying Ride to Hell: Retribution since it's so bad it has to be played to be believed.
    "It's bad. It's explosively, apocalyptically bad, and you should totally buy it. I'm serious, you have to see this shit!"
  • He also claims the only reason Daikatana was released on Steam was so people could see how bad it is.
  • Yahtzee's opinion of Swery65 could be described as a more affectionate version of thisinvoked. In all of his reviews of Swery's games, Yahtzee highlights that Swery has a chronically very clunky approach to writing and game design, but has avoided his bad side in large part due to how earnestly eccentric he is as an auteur, being confusing and atonal in a way Yahtzee sees as someone overstepping their creative ability and ambition more than anything cynical. Even when he does get genuinely negative about his games (such as Deadly Premonition 2, which ended up making number 5 of his "Worst of 2020" list), Yahtzee reiterates that Swery is a likeable creator whose complete disregard for norms and fundamentals in game design is both his biggest weakness and strength.
    "It's fun being inside your head, SWERY! But every time I'm in here, I wonder why the wallpaper's so badly-hung, and why there's no furniture besides a TV and a piss bucket."
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • When Yahtzee "quotes" a ZP fan extolling Siren: Blood Curse to him, said fan starts spouting off about Yahtzee's love of Japanese horror, eventually devolving into random Japanese words: "Watashi wa baka gaijin," which translates to "I'm a stupid foreigner."
  • In his Sniper Elite V2 review: "I love Russians! Worked with a Russian girl as an office temp and I imagine we would've gotten along great if I'd understood a word she was saying." And what is she saying? "I hate you."
  • Speaking of Russian, in the review for Prototype 2, Yahtzee says that Blackwatch is "the ever morally dubious PMC who could only be called cartoonishly evil if we're talking about one of those cartoons that goes out at three in the morning on a foreign-language TV station", while the villain says, in a Cyrillic form of Russian, "PEYTE DETI KOLBASU", which, when roughly translated, means "DRINK YOUR SAUSAGE, KIDS".
  • In his review for Yakuza 4, when he notes that the game is set in a particularly peculiar Japanese-style sandbox, one of the little black imps has the Kanji character for Oni (demonic ogre-like creatures) on its body.
  • In his review of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice he talks about how in combat a red kanji will flash on the screen when the enemy is about to do a certain power move, which he can't understand. He illustrates this by putting up the kanji for "nipples".
• Bilingual Rhyme: The last Limerick in Yahtzee's review of Wolfenstein (2009) goes as follows:
  Well, if you like starting beatups in bars,
  Or your head has been lodged up your arse,
  Wolfenstein may give
  at least some joie de vivre;
  Otherwise, don?t bother. Two stars.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor:
  • "I made this chart to see how many people visit The Escapist on days besides Wednesday..."
  • The crack at Destructoid videos in the Shenmue episode counts, since the Escapist had been bought out a few months ago by the same company that had bailed out Destructoid. A fact Yahtzee must have been aware of, since he'd just attended a panel at PAX about the Escapist's revival.
• Black Comedy Rape: When remembering the time he lost his virginity to an obese black woman in his review of Dragon's Dogma, you can see an image of said obese black woman dragging him away by his leg as he is obviously horrified by her. Complete with claw marks on the ground by his fingernails.
• Black-and-White Insanity:
  • One of Yahtzee biggest issues with any game that has a Karma Meter is that, inevitably, since the best options are usually found by playing through the game as either "all evil" or "all good", it results in neither side making any sense, since they stick to their prescribed morality regardless of whether it makes sense for them to do so — the former plays as a cackling moron who murders and extorts For the Evulz, while the latter plays as either a bland Vanilla Protagonistinvoked or a suicidal Technical Pacifist.
    "Look, if you have two equally viable, equally difficult solutions to a problem, then the evil option is just irrational. And you can't relate to a character whose actions don't make any fucking sense."
  • This criticism would later evolve for games with faction alliance mechanics, usually based on conflicts of Order Versus Chaos. While Yahtzee does consider this a relative step up from "do good vs. do evil", that's not saying much — in his Extra Punctuation "What If I Don’t Want to Be an Authoritarian or a Hippy?", Yahtzee feels the trend has rapidly flanderized into "fascists vs. nutters", usually trying to convey both sides as having their pros and cons, but ultimately lacking in nuance as there's still one side that's more narratively satisfying than the other, and it's almost always the pro-chaos rebellious side. This falls into the same trap as playing for authoritarian-style order tends to resist any form of narrative pushback and thus makes things unengaging and boring, while it's also unflattering to be playing a form of "chaos" that pins the group as stupid or naïve. Yahtzee also recognizes that the format doesn't endear itself well to many discussions of compromise or centrism, as it usually clumps "desiring a bit of both liberty and security" on the same caliber as "a little bit of extremism is okay."
• Black Dude Dies First:
  • Is fairly amused that the only black member of the Ghosts dies very early on in a game that already had a pitifully small nonwhite cast.
  • He describes Lara Croft's support team as "a small team of ethnically-diverse archaeologists who all seem to be wearing digital clocks on their heads counting down to the point at which they are unwillingly made part of someone else's character development". The black woman's readout is nearly at zero.
  • In his review of Until Dawn, when he mentioned that "the cast list effectively doubles as a scoreboard", the killer then wandered onto the screen, stained with blood, and crossed off "The Black Dude" from the bottom of the list of Stock Characters with a marker.
  • In his review of Watch_Dogs 2, when describing the main cast, he singles out Horatio as a "fairly indistinct black dude" that he points out "That motherfucker is gonna die soon", including drawing a bullseye on his character.
• Bland-Name Product: In order to avoid mentioning any real gaming webcomics in his review of the genre, he used Benny Barcade and Bontrol Bolt Belete as names instead. This was a Shout-Out to Monty Python's Flying Circus, with its National Bocialist Party and their boncentration bamps.
• Blank White Eyes: Used frequently in the series's art; characters having dot-eyes means this is their signifier for "mind control", "berserk fury", or "in serious pain."
• Blatant Lies: In his Heavy Rain review, Yahtzee claims that Scott Shelby is a "fat private investigator, not interesting enough to dwell on", which is only true if you overlook the fact that Scott is the Origami Killer, and thus arguably the most important character in the game.
• Boobs-and-Butt Pose: Makes reference to this at the end of his review for The Darkness 2
  Yahtzee: Darkness 2 is more like an attempt to recreate the comics...[a]nd I've never liked [the] sort of comic...[that features] women proportioned like ice lollies balanced on two chicken drumsticks standing around like God gave them a vicious Chinese burn around their waists.
• Book Ends:
  • Before reviewing Fable II, Yahtzee notes that all he needs to do now is review The Darkness a second time then be "sucked into a grown woman's vagina" and his life will have been more-or-less symmetrical.
  • The review of Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands (which totally wasn't made to cash in on a movie) starts with a Take That! against Roger Ebert's (then-recent) remark that video games couldn't be art. He then ignores it for the rest of the review until the very end when he yells at Ebert again.
• Boring, but Practical: As Persona 5 reveals (and some other reviews), he's actually not all against stories with simple plots if the rest of the game is good enough. Using Persona 5 for reference: "The story works because here's a bad guy and we hate him for the same reason we may like McDonald's but hate spiders hiding in McDonald's Cheeseburgers: It's simple but it gets the job done." Simple doesn't correlate to boring though, as a boring story will definitely turn him off.
• Bowdlerise:
  • In the video for the review on Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and Papers, Please, he originally commented on the single-player co-op mode in the former game, which was just like saying, "I'm not gay, I only suck off pre-op transsexuals." According to Yahtzee, it was supposed to be a joke about cognitive dissonance; but once he discovered his mistake on a poor choice of words because some people who identify as female also have their manhood, he had to change the line in the video review, which now says, "I'm not gay, I only suck off pantomime dames" (which is a British term for "Drag Queen").
  • The "Every [Given Year] Zero Punctuation" compilation videos cover up nudity and delete various politically incorrect jokes. For example, a school shooting reference is deleted from the Sonic Generations review and the "Schindler's List Easy Bake Oven" joke is cut from the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II review.
  • His review of Ion Fury and Void Bastards was demonetized by YouTube for swearing and adult content. Yahtzee explains the reasons in this YouTube video:
    "Since some comments think we're doing this as a "ploy" to get you on the website (really?) YouTube demonetized the video without explaining why. So we did the YouTube thing as a joke back at them. Next week's video is already available for members, uncensored and monetized. This is not a regular thing going forward, so you can relax."
• Brain Bleach: His debate with Jack about Mario vs. Sonic leads him to warning him not googling "[Jack] the Hedgehog", accompanied by his avatar pouring bleach into his own eyes.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • Yahtzee's description of the three types of levels that typically come up in a random pull in Super Mario Maker:
    Yahtzee: A level with ten million of something, the kind of obnoxious difficulty a Roald Dahl villain would come up with, or ten million of something being obnoxiously difficult.
  • When he mentions the Opening Scroll of >OBSERVER_ and provides an on-screen mock-up of it:
    In the grim darkness of the twenty-second century, mankind has been decimated by war, then by plague, then by meteorite strike, and then by a plague of meteorite strikes.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • He describes Catherine as "a Japanese game centrally about the difficulties of relationships, such as unexpected pregnancy, the impetus of commitment, and being chased up a infinite staircase by a giant, monstrous girlfriend trying to eat you with her butt. Did I mention it's Japanese?"
  • In the "Remastered Editions" episode:
    Yahtzee: Ah, spring is in the air; the daisies are in bloom; the mild April breeze is bringing the sweet smell of rotting flesh that emanates from the vacant lot full of disinterred corpses that the winter snows once mercifully preserved, which is as good an explanation as any for why so many fucking remasters have come out this month.
  • An entirely visual one: during his review of Ocarina of Time 3D he describes how the original is supposedly one of the best games ever, with the game standing proudly on a winners podium. The #2 podium is occupied by Fantasy World Dizzy^note it's a Running Gag that Yahtzee constantly considers that game one of the greatest ever made which is harmless enough, but the #3 podium is occupied by RapeLay, an infamous Japanese Eroge that is exactly as horrible as its name implies.
  • In his review of House Flipper and Far: Lone Sails, he describes the synopsis of the former:
    Yahtzee: So you play a sort of mercenary handyman and at first, to get to grips, you're given some contract jobs where someone just wants you to come into their house and clean, repaint, buy specific furniture, and/or shank the missus. [cue the Yahtzee avatar banging the female imp] And in the case of the latter, "...maybe the attempt at a thoughtful, understated tone doesn't match the inherent concept of piloting a fuck-off giant roadster that wouldn't have looked too out of place with Mad Max hanging off the front, looking like he's undergoing a wasteland teeth-whitening procedure, the sort of thing I'd want to have push up to top speed and then ride on top of, going,

    Clang, clang, clang goes the trolleeeeeeey!
    Ring, ring, ring goes the beeeeeell!
    Crunch, crunch, crunch go the bones of the old people not getting out of the waaaaaaaay!f"
  • While taking a shot at Sony's marketing and merchandising onslaught for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 while reviewing the tie-in game:
    "Unless you think Sony's generosity ends with Amazing Spider-Man 2 the film, you don't have to go five fucking minutes without being reminded of Amazing Spider-Man 2 if you don't want to! You can wake up in the morning and go from Amazing Spider-Man 2 toothbrush to Amazing Spider-Man 2 Happy Meal to Amazing Spider-Man 2 nitrogen asphyxiation chamber..."
  • In Yahtzee's review of Trek to Yomi and Ravenous Devils, he says in the latter that "buying all the different ingredients to cook with didn't seem to do anything except add needless complications". Cue ZP Percival buying tomatoes, eggs, and onions, while ZP Hildred appears scribbling what's on the menu with an imp as a customer on the table.
    Imp: I'll have the egg, tomato, onion and cannibalism sandwich.
• Breathless Non Sequitur: Yahtzee's stock in trade. Some of the jokes come out so offhandedly that you have to pause the video to make sure he did actually just say that.
• Bring My Brown Pants:
  • Standard procedure for many horror games, where he tends to invoke pants-shitting or pants-pissing in their reviews. Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent both involve this. Exaggerated for Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, where the force of such blew a hole through his chair.
• Brain Bleach: It's a favorite reaction by Croshaw, with several reviews having him remark about attempts to remove a particularly awful section from his mind.
• Brick Joke:
  • The No More Heroes review opens with the Stranglers song of the same name. However, the song's abruptly cut off: "No, no, that's a bit too obvious." This isn't mentioned throughout the entire review. Finally, in the credits, the songs used in the video are listed as normal, except that "No More Heroes" has been thoroughly scribbled out.
  • One episode had a spoiler warning in mid-episode, where Yahtzee told spoiler-sensitive viewers to plug their ears and wait for the credits. The credits mini-comic consisted of a series of famous spoilers from other works. (It was his sled, Keyser Soze = Kevin Spacey, etc.)
  • In his Quantum Conundrum review, he makes a reference to his contract with the Escapist, which is represented by a piece of paper with "say cunt a lot" on it. At the end of the review, naturally, he launches into a Cluster C-Bomb.
  • In the Super Mario 3D Land review, he contemplates how a more faithful depiction of Tanooki would work, "in which case it's the Thwomps I feel sorry for." Later, in the Star Wars: The Old Republic review, he mentions as one of the smugglers' moves being "crafty knees to the bollocks, which for some reason also works on robots. Perhaps they're wearing Tanooki suits."
  • A subtle one, in his Mass Effect review he explains how he named his character Titty Shepard. Several years later when Mass Effect 3 came out, he refers to Shepard as Titty with no prior mention of the earlier review. It should also be noted that it isn't mentioned in his Mass Effect 2 review, at all. Also, throughout the Mass Effect 3 review, Shepard is wearing the pink armour that Yahtzee had dressed him in the first review.
  • In the review for Painkiller, Yahtzee sees a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning and says, "It would only be more awesome if it had tits and was on fire." Then came the review for Hard Reset, when he sees that the game copied Painkiller, and about a few scenes later, the guy from said Painkiller game has a lightning-shuriken gun that indeed has breasts and is on fire.
  • In Epic Mickey Yahtzee talks about his fear of Theme Park Mascots. In Hitman he mentions how he has killed many Theme Park Mascots.
  • The "Whipped Cream Genocide Brouhaha" from his review of Darksiders reappears at the bottom of the list of "build-your-own combos" in his review of Remember Me.
  • His review of Halo Wars has one with a shorter setup than most. While talking about the unit selection issues in the game:
    Yahtzee: "Lacking click-and-drag, all you can do is select one prick, select one prick and all his prick friends standing within a fixed diameter, select all the pricks on the current screen, or call a great big all-map prick hoedown. So if you just want to, say, select all your flying pricks for a strategic insertion then you're going to have a bit of prick trouble beyond the might of any soothing cream."
  • In his Alien Isolation review:
    • At the beginning:
      Yahtzee: "Welcome back to the second week of our excursion to opposite-land, where the carpets go on the ceilings, people eat feces and poo out breakfast cereal and somehow the best games going are AAA movie franchise tie-ins."
    • In the middle:
      Yahtzee: "When the alien finally does show up, uncoiling and plopping down from the ceiling in front of you like a big drippy shit into the cereal bowl that is your life"
    • At the end:
      Yahtzee: "Sure, I could go alone into hostile territory yet again to fetch your key card. But how about instead, you eat the contents of this cereal bowl."
  • His double-review of Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons and Papers, Please opened with a rather drawn-out metaphor involving a potential sex partner being turned off by talking about your anime obsession, where after first talking about Neon Genesis Evangelion the demonstrating imp follows up with "Now moving onto Cowboy Bebop". At the end of the review when he brings up samey, unengaging military war shooters, Yahtzee is crouching behind a chest-high wall with another imp, both holding guns and under fire, and he turns to the imp and asks "You ever watch Cowboy Bebop".
  • A couple of minutes into his review of Journey to the Savage Planet he remarks that being the reviewer means he gets the last word, "and my last word is 'cuntburlap'". He then continues the review for several more minutes, before concluding, "And just to raise one final point: 'cuntburlap'."
• Broken Record: "You couldn't get away with releasing a buggy game in the cartridge and cassette days; you'd be trampled under the company Brontosaurus. But I'll tell you the worst part- worst part- worst part- worst part- *system error* ...and whistled for a baboon!
• Broke the Rating Scale: Ride to Hell: Retribution "won" the #0 spot on Top Worst of 2013. This was being charitable, as Yahtzee's reasoning was that "it's not a game; it's congealed failure." It wasn't just for worst game of 2013 either. It was a reward for worst game that he had ever reviewed and a title that he said that it would hold until an even WORSE game came around. Which would be around the time apes had retaken the earth.
  • Called back at the end of Yahtzee's Most Influential Games of the Decade video; the credit sequence displayed his #1 best and #1 worst games of the previous 10 years, ranked from 10 to 1 on the scale of his own personal enjoyment, and the last credits screen showed... Ride to Hell with a "?" instead of a number rating, while tottering around and drinking heavily
• Brutal Honesty: Yahtzee definitely doesn't sugarcoat anything when reviewing games. Especially critically acclaimed games.
• Buffy Speak: His metaphors descend into this while reviewing LittleBigPlanet. Lampshaded in the same review — it was very hot that week and he couldn't think of anything better.
  "But the level design is really, really good, like... something good that's... made of chocolate"
• Bullet Dancing: Why do developers shun the Wii U? Because, Yahtzee explains, Nintendo has a somewhat strained relationship with developers who don't wish to incorporate their horrible hardware gimmicks into the games. We then cut to the Nintendo logo firing a six-shooter at EA while barking, "DANCE". (A Link Between Worlds)
• …But He Sounds Handsome: A variant. Yahtzee notes that, out of the entire cast of Assassin's Creed II, he really enjoyed the snarky Brit who makes fun of a lot of the other characters...
  "CAN'T IMAGINE WHY."
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Yahtzee's avatar gets hurt in a variety of ways throughout his reviews.
  • The black imp also seems to get a fair amount of pain dealt to him. Especially when he gets a Nazi helmet, at which point Yahtzee will do things like pulling his toenails out with pliers.
• Button Mashing: In his review of DmC: Devil May Cry, he notes that he always ends up doing this reflexively in action games so moves that require him to pause in the middle of a combo are extremely difficult for him to pull off.
• Call-Back: As far as the eye can see.
  • "Señor Koquonfaes and Gareth Gobelcoque are cousins by marriage." And it turns out that Gareth is a long-forgotten comrade of Titty Shepard.
  • Plot summary for Dead to Rights:
    "Bang! Punch! Bang! Punch! Bang! Punch! Woof!"
  • And for Dead Island:
    "Grr! Kick! Grr! Kick! Grr! Kick! Splat!"
  • In the Hard Reset review, Yahtzee compares the game to Painkiller by dint of the fact that many who worked on the former were also among the crew of the latter. While praising Painkiller for its array of creative death distribution implements, the avatar onscreen wields a shotgun that has tits and is on fire — precisely the phrasing Yahtzee used in his review of Painkiller.
  • In the New Super Mario Bros. Wii review the credits state that Yahtzee only has two friends. Later in the NieR review we find out that this was referring to the imp and the extremely bored looking man respectively, hence why they are the only recurring characters in his videos.
  • The "paddling pool full of disembodied breasts" analogy in the Saints Row 2 review returns in an exaggerated form in the Saints Row: The Third review.
  • In his The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings review, he refers to Geralt as "Gerald", which continues a Running Gag that began in his review of the first game and carried on in his review of the third.
  • In Dead to Rights Retribution he imagines that Jack Slate worships "some mad ocelot god only he can see". Years later, in Max Payne 3, another tortured ex-cop murder spree game, the head of an ocelot appears on screen when Yahtzee says the phrase "the face of God".
  • In the Hitman: Absolution review, the ocelot returns to urge Yahtzee to take therapy for his (fictional) habit of killing theme park mascots.
  • He mocks the Word Salad Title Black Knight Sword by calling it "Purple Monkey Dishwasher," which is what he called Red Dead Redemption in a previous review. It doubles as a Shout-Out to The Simpsons.
  • In his review of Paper Mario: Sticker Star he calls out the habit of recent Mario games to always have a world order of "grasslands, desert, forest, jungle, ice world, fire world, boss (nn-ch-nn-ch-nn-ch-nn)." This surfaces again in his review of Ni no Kuni in a completely non-Mario context.
  • His review of Alone in the Dark: Illumination has him comment on how the game is behind the times by having the game portrayed as saying, "Boy, I'm looking forward to the Watchmen movie", referencing Yahtzee's video on E3 2008 when he finished the video by doing exactly that.
  • In his review of Animal Crossing: New Leaf he quoted "Just" by Radiohead when describing the way the game makes you get yourself into debt in order to prolong the gameplay ("Radiohead put it best: You do it to yourself, be-dow-dow, and that's what really hurts"). Back in the days before he had his own theme song, he'd used the same song (and indeed, the same part of the song) as the outro music for his review of Silent Hill: Origins.
  • The Stinger for his review of Braid by indie developer Jonathan Blow was "I wish this game had been shit, then I could have used the line 'Jonathan Blow? More like Jonathan Suck!'". The very first line of his review of Jonathan Blow's next game, The Witness (a double bill review with Bombshell) was "The Witness is a new game by Jonathan Blow. Ironically, it sucks. Mnehhh, obnoxious laugh!"
  • His E3 2016 video ended with him talking about how a lot of games using the names of old franchises for new games that seem to have precious little to do with the originals might lead to to a world where names end up being totally meaningless, "which would come as a relief to my friend, Patrick Childmolester." About a month later his review of The Technomancer saw him discuss how on Mars everyone's name (like playable character Zachariah Mancer, a technomancer) describes their job "like a village of medieval serfs", and right after Johnny Barrowpusher walks by with his wheelbarrow, "Patrick Childmolestor" appears (holding a teddy bear and wearing a Sonic shirt).
• Captain Morgan Pose: Used to deify certain characters in a game, ranging from (most frequently) Yahtzee wearing a halo, to Andrew Ryan in BioShock Infinite, to a nutter survivalist in Rust who shoots Yahtzee in self-defense after spotting a rock in his hand.
  "How fortunate this community must be to have a watchman so dedicated to rigidly enforcing the laws against unlicensed rocks."
• Cargo Ship:invoked
  • In his Red Faction: Guerrilla review, Yahtzee admitted he pretty much proposed to Saints Row 2 in his review of it — complete with picture of him and the game in bride and groom attire, respectively.
  • In his Silent Hill 2 retro review, he lampshades his fondness for "dropping to my knees and wrapping my lips around old titles from time to time", and another review shows him humping the Silent Hill 2 box art.
  • He made a similar comment about the Prince of Persia series, saying "If I suck that particular dick any harder, it's going to drop off."
  • The Yahtzee/Silent Hill 2 obsession returns in his review of Silent Hill: Downpour, when he and the game are shown wearing a bridal veil and groom's tuxedo respectively, and he admits that "Yes, maybe I will marry Silent Hill 2, shut up!"
• Caustic Critic: The Trope Launch Pad for Caustic Critic was named "Parent Genre of Zero Punctuation".
  • Lampshaded and deconstructed in his review of the Resident Evil 2 remake, where he insisted that just because he's a caustic critic that doesn't necessarily mean that anything he gives the slightest nod of approval to is a brilliant genre-defining masterpiece.
    This is the part where all the cockthroats swoop down on the comments like flies to a dead dog and go, "Ooh, an 'alright' from Yahtzee is high praise anywhere else! Buzz, buzz!" Eat that dead dog's last panicky burst of diuretic shit, cockthroats! Resident Evil at its best is something I found electrifying, and this conflux of old ideas and slightly-less-old-but-still-old ideas is barely two licks of a 9-volt.
• Chained to a Railway: Used as a metaphor for why Andrew Ryan is a sympathetic villain. A Dastardly Whiplash character advises the girl to "maybe not stand there", apropos railroad tracks.
  • Also done to Jill Valentine in the credits of Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, as part of the gag on the game in question being a rail-shooter.
• Challenge Gamer: Sometimes Yahtzee will like a game because it's murderously hard, as with DayZ and the hardcore mode in Minecraft.
• Chaotic Neutral: Yahtzee claims to be this alignment in his Spider-Man: Web of Shadows review and encourages his fans to argue on the forum as to whether he is or not. invoked
• Character Catch Phrase: "But I digress."
• Chew Bubblegum: A zombie Duke Nukem says "Time to kick ass and chew brains" in the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 review.
• Child Hater: Every so often, he's made it very clear that he finds children annoying. He's even said that he'd rather commit suicide than to have kids of his own. Granted, this is Yahtzee we're talking here — eventually he addressed and updated this perception at the start of his review of A Plague Tale: Requiem, explaining that since becoming a father himself he'd come to love children, to the point that he can't even enjoy Dead Baby Comedy any more because it makes him fear for his own babies... solely to lend context to the fact that he still absolutely loathes the main character's little brother and wants him to die.
• Cliffhanger: Strongly dislikes them, especially in cases where a brand new IP ends on one under the creators' mistaken assumption that the game is destined to become the first entry in a franchise (which turns out not to be the caseinvoked, thereby leaving the game's story permanently unresolved). In an Extra Punctuation column he went so far as to argue that a game with an unresolved story is effectively an incomplete product, and hence selling it is tantamount to fraud.
• Clip Show: The Holiday 2010 episode, after Yahtzee mocks the viewer for showing up when they should know that he gets that week off.
• Clumsy Copyright Censorship:
  • The 2009 compilation of reviews replace Quincy Jones' "Soul Bossa Nova" (aka the Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery theme) with a generic tune seen during the LittleBigPlanet review.
  • His review of... something. Yahtz pauses his video to mention the fact that he reviewed the game, but the embargo date for when he's allowed to talk about it got pushed, and because he didn't play any other games nor have the time to make a review another game, he instead kept the review of the game in the video, only removing any identifiable elements — so replacing the "game box person" stick figure with a white question mark on a black rectangle, swapping mentions of characters from the game with static noise, and censoring the studio's written name. The only hints are that invokedit had "a relatively well-known IP attached", Yahtzee hated it, "[it] tries to knock off Hades" ie. roguelite dungeoncrawling, "it's a beat'em up with a third person Always Over the Shoulder", it's (implicitly) an indie game since it's featured in an Indie Double Bill with El Paso, Elsewhere, and "it's not Armored Core 6."^note The popular guess was that it was actually Hellboy Web of Wyrd, something that Yahtz would later confirm on Fully Ramblomatic.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: Seen in his review of Monster Hunter Tri, in relation to '"Japanese Sex Games":
  I waggled my (CENSORED) at her (CENSORED) until her (CENSORED)ed at her (CENSORED) until it started emitting a sorrowful howl.
• Cluster F-Bomb:
  • At least once per episode. One of his most infamous clusters was delivered in the opening to his MindJack review:
  So in the name of keeping things nice and clear for you touchy sods, let me as unambiguous as possible in this critique: MindJack is FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING BAD BAD BAD BAD. DON'T DON'T DON'T DON'T PLAY IT!
  • In the review for Sacred 3:
    And that's how we came to be spending the whole game with a support character whose constant ditzy fucking valley girl Joss fucking Whedon fucking sar-fucking-castic observations tormented my stomach lining like a jagged metal enchilada. [cue Yahtzee grabbing the valley girl, ripping her head off and drinking her blood]
  • From his review of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team:
    And if we must tilt something to control a game, I'd prefer it not be the thing on which I'm fucking trying to fucking view the fucking ga-fucking-me!
  • His Quantum Conundrum review ended with him giving it from both barrels to a snotty commenter on the Steam forum who apparently claimed that if you didn't have both expert computer skills and dedicated gaming PC you had no business playing PC games.
    This review is dedicated to you, anonymous forums poster, because you're a cunt, what are you, you're a cunt, yes you are. You live in a cunty cottage and you drive a cunty car.
• The Coconut Effect: Discussed in his Extra Punctuation column on Boss Battles, where he notes that many people expect boss fights even when they don't make much sense because games have simply drilled in the idea that bosses have to be there.
• Colon Cancer: After getting fed-up with unnecessary colons in video-game titles, he started pronouncing them as a dry heave, rather than pausing. This has also led to him congratulating a game when it has a sensible colon in the title instead of this trope.
  Yahtzee: Did you hear that, Beyond -- HRUUUHHH -- Two Souls? Murdered -- HRUUUHHH -- Soul Suspect?
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Referred to by the exact name during his Overlord II review, when describing how the imps vary by color.
• Company Cross References: During the review of Baldur's Gate III, Yahtzee builds his character to be his actual Dungeons & Dragons character Mortimer Rafflesworth Everwind-Smythe from Adventure Is Nigh (also hosted by The Escapist at the review's release). The review promotes Adventure Is Nigh a couple times as well.
• Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch:invoked He has accused the Zelda series of being incredibly formulaic. However, he also admits to being very unfamiliar with the franchise. To wit; he's used Majora's Mask, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, and The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (which are some of the most non-formulaic games in the franchise) to represent the series when discussing this.
• Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For: In this Extra Punctuation blog, Yahtzee announces that there will not be an update next week, and informs anyone who has a problem with this, "Now, you only have a right to complain about this if you are actually paying money to watch and read this stuff. And even then, only because someone appears to be pulling a fast one on you."
• Complexity Addiction: One of Yahtzee's annoyances and his main quibble with Doom Eternal: he feels the game piling on more gameplay mechanics, story/lore, and enemies that need relatively more complex tactics to deal with on an already complicated (for Doom) setup makes it feel unfocused, especially when compared to Doom (2016) (and even back then he'd suggested that Doom 2016 included a few too many different upgrade systems that it didn't really need).
• Conspicuous Trenchcoat:
  • Resident Evil 4 disguised itself with this and a face-obscuring hat to try and convince Yahtzee that The Evil Within was actually a subtle, tense stealth-based horror game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, rather than an in-your-face explosive survival horror/action one. Yahtzee was quite hurt when the truth came to light.
  • He observes that Beyond: Two Souls stealth mechanics come into play only once, "which by staggering coincidence happens to be the bit that was in the gameplay trailers." Developer David Cage then creeps behind the sofa wearing one of these disguises while Yahtzee admonishes him.
• Continuity Nod: In the Mass Effect 2 review, Yahtzee's Shepard dons hot pink armor in memory of Gareth Gobulcoque, his character from Tabula Rasa.
  • He will genuinely continue or at least reference character-related gags when reviewing the sequels of games he's previously covered, but rarely brings attention to this fact. For instance, Shepard kept wearing pink armor in 3.
• Continuity Snarl: Says the metaplot of Resident Evil "sprawls all over itself like an incestuous farming cult."
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • Apparently whoever designed the inventory system for Resident Evil 5 should be sent to a special Hell where he has to pack shopping for old ladies... or just get punched in the stomach.
  • Says that any developer that holds back stuff for DLC should have their hands cut off, and then put back on after paying 1200 Microsoft points.
• Cool, but Inefficient: A recurring critique in his reviews is when designers add gimmicks to spice up their mechanics which inevitably turn out to be worse than just playing normally. For instance, in Spec Ops, you have the ability to order a squadmate to shoot an enemy, but by that point you have your crosshairs over them already, so you might as well just shoot them yourself and cut out the middleman.^note Though in Spec Ops this is sometimes necessary, as ammunition is much scarcer and it's easy to run dry even without spraying ammo away.
• Cosmic Deadline: Yahtzee has accused several games of falling prey to this, including Dark Void, Splatterhouse, and of course Indigo Prophecy aka "Baron von Teapot's Fucking Ludicrous Adventures." All of them have conclusions that either happen abruptly or end up becoming very strange, suggesting there wasn't enough time to get them polished.
• *Cough* Snark *Cough*: In his Lollipop Chainsaw review:
  "But there are certainly games with worse combat, and games with more offensive depictions of women, cough Metroid: Other M unconvincing-cough."
• Crack Pairing: invoked His Tomb Raider: Underworld opens with Yahtzee remarking on the best potential husband for Lara Croft - Jason Voorhees.
  "They've got so much in common! They both have an embarrassing amount of adventures that all follow an extremely specific formula^note Jason's is "Teenagers + having sex = death slice bleed wahey", Lara's is "Anything + doing anything = death slice bleed wahey", they both have an irresistible compulsion to murder God's creatures, they both spend lots of time underground, and most importantly neither of them will ever just fucking die!"
• Creator Backlash: Invoked: he noted that 99% of artists claim to loathe everything they made more than five years ago and the remaining 1% are liars.
• Creator Thumbprint:
  • Platformers and games that don't use bloom and brown gritty graphics earn a somewhat higher note in his book.
  • "Survival Horror is what I call a pet genre. A pet I keep in a tool shed and feed with broken glass."
  • Saints Row 2 is one of the few games that pleased him, resulting in a review that sounded like, in his own words, "an overlong wedding proposal" due to the fact that it entertainingly combines Rule of Fun and Video Game Cruelty Potential.
  • He has a great love for anything that does things differently like Portal and No More Heroes; he complimented Mirror's Edge for trying something new even after tearing the actual gameplay apart, and Assassin's Creed got praise for being original even though it was let down by highly repetitive gameplay. Similarly, he praised Dark Void for being an ambitious failure, and as such, better than "committee-designed sludge". He also liked Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, despite hating Silent Hill spinoffs and saying that the monsters and chase scenes weren't scary and the psych test gimmicks weren't enough, for actually being a decent remake, and removing what didn't work the first time. He raves about Shadow of the Colossus for creating and codifying the Colossus Climb, and ICO got a love note from him for making him care about a Cute Mute Love Interest.
    • Croshaw later elaborated on this in an Extra Punctuation article, with him even noting that he often tries to give more credit when a game does anything unique, and he even considers his "Blandest 5" games lists to be worse in a sense than his actual "Bottom 5" games since the vast majority of his "Bottom 5" games at least took risks and can serve as learning experiences moving forward, while the "Blandest 5" games instead do the equivalent of wasting cultural oxygen from more genuinely interesting fare by just "treading water" and not daring to do anything actually interesting out of fear for not making back their costs.
  • He has a taste for Scenery Porn, although he has said in his reviews that while he loves a good beautiful skybox as much as the next person, he much prefers exploring said beautiful skybox.
  • Cats seem to pop up a lot in his reviews (which sort of makes sense), as do dogs. In fact, he said that one of his three wishes would be a puppy, and more often than not his pet dog "Pepper" can be seen accompanying him in his Slightly Something Else podcast episodes.
  • A warped sense of humor (often overlapping with Black Comedy) is also a big plus for him, as in Psychonauts, the Monkey Island series and the aforementioned Portal. One of his few criticisms of Psychonauts 2 was that he felt the humor leaning too hard to be politically correct at some points to stay funny.
  • Good writing impresses him as well; the Mass Effect series has led him to give BioWare a dirt-cheap offer of his soul.
    "When the bottom falls out of the game criticism market and I have to start prostituting myself to developers, BioWare will be one of my first ports of call, because there are few enough developers in the world who treat writing as an integral part of the game rather than an optional set of colorful tassels to put on the handlebars."
    • In his review for Mass Effect 2, he spends almost the whole review talking about the changes in gameplay, then mentions casually how the writing and characters have gotten better, but because it's BioWare they don't get any points for it. Similarly, while he gave an exceptionally negative review of Anthem for its incredibly dull gameplay and setting, he did note that while the characters and their interactions were not precisely interesting, there was still clear effort put into them and he felt that they were severely underutilized.
  • Considering his positive mentions of Serious Sam 3: BFE and his love of Painkiller, along with his positive review of Dead Rising 2, Yahtzee also seems to like games that pit the player against large hordes and give them the freedom to just go wild.
  • The worse you can act towards Nazis, the better, by his books. Bonus points if it's spectacular or amusing.
  • He mentioned a particular fondness for Shaun of the Assassin's Creed series, partly because he reminds him of himself and partly because he often insults Desmond Miles.
  • He has fondness for games that actively embrace Video Game Cruelty Potential and particularly creative ways of The Joys of Torturing Mooks.
  • He has a thing for large open environments with interesting ways to traverse the world, such as Le Parkour or flight. Jetpacks in particular, which he even admitted in The Stinger for his review of Dark Void: "I guess jetpacks for me are a pretty easy sell".
  • His distaste of America, with him often painting the nation as full of overly decadent bigoted whiners who try to make a world empire. At least part of his glowing praise for Spec Ops: The Line was related to how refreshing he found it to have the game unconditionally condemning modern American neo-imperialism.
  • He's also a fan of first person games that allow a bit of freedom and reward exploration such as Half-Life, Thief, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex.
  • Nautical-themed settings are a very easy sell for Yahtzee; he has freely admitted to being a big fan of Horatio Hornblower, and has heaped praise upon five different games (The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Subnautica, Return Of The Obra Dinn, and Spiritfarer, the latter two of which he has even labeled to be the best games to be released for their respective years) for how well he felt the marine-related mechanics in each game played into both their stories and primary gameplay loops.
  • As several of the above examples demonstrate, what he really likes above all else is the opportunity to be creative in games, which leads to an inclination towards any game that uses procedural generation to allow the player to make their own stories. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was his game of the year in 2014 because of the individual orc character arcs that could be generated by the Nemesis System, he was very close to being the only critic with anything nice to say about the otherwise universally despised The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct for its procedurally-generated scavenging gameplay and survivor management system, and he even went rather easy on Watch Dogs: Legion (despite not liking the first two games much and having several issues with its gameplay balance) for letting him create personalized stories for his various resistance fighters.
  • Yahtzee also seems to be a big fan of the Magical Realism genre, loving stories that juxtapose the mundane against the supernatural in interesting ways. While he has given negative reviews to all of the games developed by Swery65, his criticisms have been more aimed at each game being poorly-designed Obvious Betasinvoked and he has praised each of them for their Mind Screwy Urban Fantasy plots. Similarly, Croshaw is a huge fan of both Earthbound 1994 and the Persona franchise in large parts due to how well each game juxtaposes their mundane Slice of Life plots against a Cosmic Horror Story for the former and epic pseudo-High Fantasy for the latter. He also gave both Control and Unavowed props for executing their New Weird storylines in compelling manners (though he lamented that the combat for the former was very derivative and frustrating, and he also felt the latter was a bit too close to The Dresden Files for his comfort), and his favorite parts of Hades was him being able to wade into the Mundane Afterlife and family drama-focused interludes found in the House of Hades following each of Zagreus' deaths.
  • Also, for whatever reason, he likes to somehow include or feature Marmite and Branston Pickle in his reviews, preferably at the most unfitting times. He must be really fond of Marmite and Branston Pickle. That's the British Marmite made by Unilever which is sold in Australia as Our Mate, not the New Zealand Marmite made by the Sanatarium which is sold in Australia as Marmite.
• Credits Gag:
  • The text next to his name at the end. For most of the series' early work, a clip from a song whose name and/or content was a pun on the content of the review would play, but this was dropped due to copyright concerns. For example, Haze, about drug-fueled mercenary super-soldiers, used Afroman's "Because I Got High".
  • The credits themselves have a little minicomic going on, acted out by the little figures he uses in the reviews. The one for Spore had a flying saucer alien abducting Batman, who then beat it up and stole the flying saucer. Additionally, there is generally a caption referring to something earlier in the video.
• Crossover:
  • With Unskippable. Yahtzee appeared in their Star Ocean: The Last Hope riff and Graham Stark of Unskippable appeared in the first section of the Halo Wars review to review X-Blades before running out of things to say and getting kicked out by Yahtzee.
  • A throwaway gag, mere seconds into the aforementioned Halo Wars review, poked fun at Eternal Sonata, which was Unskippable's premiere episode.
  • In the review of both Left 4 Dead 2 and New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the Credit Sequence features a short mix-type crossover of the two reviewed games.
• Cross Player: Yahtzee becomes one for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. He claims to have done so solely because he disliked how limited the character customization was and so decided to create a character as far distinct from the Conan archetype as possible: a black female necromancer with the thinnest build the game would allow. (She made her return in Conan Exiles.)
• Crying Indian: The Fallout 3 review featured a deer crying over the landscape being littered with rubble.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: Any time Yahtzee unambiguously praises a game (or even ambiguously praises a game in a genre he normally despises, such as when he liked Persona 5 despite his usual stance on JRPGs) you can expect the comments to fill up with people wondering if the sky is about to start falling (and often swearing to go out and buy the game in question, since if Yahtzee likes it then it must be good). As mentioned under Caustic Critic, however, Yahtzee himself hates this perception- when he says a game is "fine", he actually means it's fine, not the Second Coming of Christ.
• Curse Cut Short:
  • He spends the entirety of his 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand review carefully wording his criticisms so that nothing can be misconstrued as racist, then ends the episode on an inspiring speech, saying people of all creeds and colors should try to put aside their differences and work together to build a better world for everyone, but then punctuates that speech with this sentence:
    "Not that they'd know anything about work, the lazy nig-" [END CREDITS]
  • From his Half-Life review, after bemoaning the lack of any new games to review before Christmas: "at this point there's only one thing I can do, MASTURBA- I mean RETRO-REVIEW!"
• Cursed with Awesome: In his review of Never Dead:
  "Bryce is also immortal, capable of regenerating from any injury, having been cursed by the king of the demons 500 years ago, when the king of the demons wasn't entirely sure what the word 'curse' means."
• Cute Kitten:
  • At one point in the Top 5 of 2013 episode, the #2 best spot for Papers, Please says "Drifting away to sleep while surrounded by kittens and money." Which is then followed by a Black Comedy one for the #2 worst spot (for Beyond: Two Souls), which says, "Rolling onto a kitten while you sleep and getting the money all dirty."
  • Almost the entirety of the Just Cause 2 review involves cats, which are added for hilarity.
  • In an Extra Puncuation video about "cozy games" potentially being the next big wave in video games, he points out that Stray is technically a cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic exploration game, but will be forever remembered as "the game with the cat" because you play as, in Yahtzee's own words, "an adorable kitty-witty."
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: Wonders aloud if Deus Ex: Human Revolution's ending is intentionally bad, so players will purchase the DLC, and notes that if this is true, then "anyone who pulls that shit deserves to have their hands cut off and sold back to them for 1200 Microsoft Points."
• Damage-Proof Vehicle: His review of The Crew 2 calls this out specifically, pointing out that the game deliberately avoids putting any focus on crash mechanics and surmising (correctly) that this is probably due to Product Placement.
• Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!: This trope, and the infrequency with which it is played straight, is discussed in his Mafia II review.
• Damned by Faint Praise:
  • In the Killzone: Shadow Fall review, Yahtzee mentions that Knack "looked pretty spectacular after I fired it out of my clay pigeon launching machine."
  • In his Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review, after saying he liked it more than Call of Duty: Ghosts, he then says "In order news, I also enjoy Chinese water torture more than the hobbling wheel".
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Overlapping with Camera Screw, one of his more persistent complaints is a dislike for games that try to use the right analog stick for things aside from camera controls.
• Dare to Be Badass: Well, at least "dare to be different", in his Super Mario Galaxy 2 review. In spite of his bashing of it he does admit in the end it is fun and if people want to play the same games he can't really do anything to stop them, but he does request that those people go out and do one thing they never have before.
• Darker and Edgier: Once a simple story, "the new Bionic Commando (2009) has taken the dark and edgy route", illustrated with said commando slashing his wrist and singing "CRAAAWLING IIIIN MY SKIIIN".
• Deadpan Snarker: Of course.
  • However, most Deadpan Snarkers in games tend to annoy him, notably Nathan Drake of Uncharted and the Snarky dialogue options of Dragon Age II.
• Dear Negative Reader: invoked Most notably in his video on webcomics and the grandly titled "Mailbag Showdown", both of which involved fairly directly making fun of reader criticism, though Yahtzee more often than not turns his gun barrel back on himself.
  • An Extra Punctuation column following his Kid Icarus: Uprising featured a segment at the end where he addressed a particularly harsh tweet in his direction concerning his apparent "bias" against Nintendo, which he already tried to dispell once in the video itself.
  • His review of Ride to Hell has him address the fans of The Last of Us concerning their negative reaction to his review of the latter, inviting them to bond with him in taking the piss out of the former.
  • The Extra Punctuation video "For Everyone Who Says I Hate Video Games" directly addresses the most common criticisms thrown at him in the comments of his videos in general.
• Death Seeker:
  • More of a Suicide as Comedy, but noticeable in this line for Batman: Arkham City.
    "If you are like me: handsome, talented, and secretly longing for death..."
  • While fielding questions about Mogworld, he mentioned someone recommending a webcomic with a resemblance to his own novel. Yahtzee feigned indifference, but his hand kept spasming upward to point a pistol at his head.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: Commonly done, with his avatar being shown both on the couch and taking the place of the protagonist.
• Delayed Ripple Effect: Or, to give his own name for it from his Darkest of Days review, "The Back to the Future rules of Time Travel", where one can change things, "but the timeline is rather easygoing about it".
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • "So you've looked at Penny Arcade seen the massive amount of money, prestige, and money those guys get for nine panels a week, and decided you want in on that." The visuals go a step further: when he says "money", "prestige", and "money" again, ever-increasing piles of cash and swanky clothes appear on the two people meant to represent Gabe and Tycho... and even when he gets to the word "decided" another layer of largesse is added.
  • Clive Barker's Clive Barker's Jericho by Clive Barker.
  • Devil May Cry Colon Devil May Cry
  • Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. by Tom Clancy.
  • Brew-tal Legend, a game about Jack Black playing Jack Black starring Jack Black made with a guy who looks like Jack Black.
  • From Darksiders, describing the first few games he will review starting in 2010: "God of War ripoff, God Of War ripoff (though when he reviews it he admits it's more like Devil May Cry), God Of War ripoff, and God of War... well, God of War."
  • "Have I mentioned that I wrote a novel and you can preorder it from Amazon and Amazon.co.uk? Well, I wrote a novel and you can preorder it from Amazon and Amazon.co.uk."
  • "Fallout: New Vegas is really just an expansion pack for Fallout 3, and I said everything I need to say about Fallout 3 in my Fallout 3 review of Fallout 3."
  • "Father Comstock marks out DeWitt as the guy who's going to fuck everyone up, so he's forced to fuck everyone up after they all turn on him for being the guy who's going to fuck everyone up."
• Designated Hero:invoked
  • In his Extra Punctuation article of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Yahtzee portrays Nathan Drake as one, due to the massive number of people he kills while looking to get rich. (He also makes a Running Gag out of claiming Drake is a racist, as the majority of antagonists are dark-skinned.)
  • The ZP review of Mirror's Edge also suggests this: we only have the plot's say-so that the police chasing you are the bad guys, and as far as we know, the packages could be bombs to blow up someone's grandma.
  • He has this reaction to the ISA of Killzone, suggesting that the entire series is basically them being horrible to the Helghast and the Helghast being treated as evil for retaliating.
  • He also believes this about most spunkgargleweewee protagonists, noting "We've got killdroids, they've got rocks!" in his review of Medal of Honor: Warfighter. In one column, he suggests that this is because they tend to treat a threat to America as self-evidently evil, which he doesn't get, not being an American.
  • Similar to Nathan Drake, he considers Lara Croft to be this, given her high body count and rather self-centered motivations.
• Designated Villain:invoked A common topic, but his review of Call of Duty: Ghosts especially considered the Federation of the Americas to be this. As far as he was concerned, it made no sense for the antagonists of a Call of Duty game to be a fictional South American superpower (at least most of the time, spunkgargleweewee antagonists were based on real-life threats to the USA), and the USA in the game comes across as in top military form, racially homogeneous, and possessing an orbital superweapon that made the invasion seem very justified (despite the fact that the orbital weapon had destroyed the majority of the USA and the fact the federation invaded neutral countries).
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Yahtzee's review of Spec Ops: The Line is barely humorous, with Yahtzee even apologizing for the lack of humor and giving the aforementioned review a downright depressing wrap-up.
    Yahtzee: [lengthy weary sigh] Remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of gaming growing up as our childish fantasies are torn from us, and we are forced to confront consequences in an unfair, uncaring and unavoidable world of hatred, misery, and death. (Farting noises.)
  • His review of Hunt Down the Freeman doesn't end any better, concluding with a genuinely heartbroken musing on the current state of the game industry:
    Yahtzee: The only reason I wanted to talk about (Hunt Down The Freeman) was because of the depressing indictment of modern gaming it creates; not by itself, but by Valve's apparent indifference to this waterfall of piss trickling down either side of its legacy's nose. Twenty years ago, Half-Life was a focal point in gaming's ongoing development as an artistic narrative medium. The next few years saw a slew of titles that combined triple-A game design with genuine emotional storytelling. But what happened between then and now!? Why are the games routinely rewarded with triple-A status and income exclusively lootbox-infested live service bullshit — games designed not to inspire or stimulate our emotions, but to numb them and hypnotize us into lab rats mindlessly pawing the button that makes the treats come out — while the games created with love and artistic integrity drown beneath waves of bottom-feeders like Hunt Down The Freeman that tear chunks of rotten flesh from the corpses of Valve's children, as Valve itself — once habitual founders of new ages of narrative gaming — merely waves them on, barely glancing up from their tax paperwork? What happened to you? What happened to us?! To the people we were supposed to become? ...I don't know, but it's probably safe to blame John Romero.
• Developers Cannot Do Math: From the Grand Theft Auto V review:
  Yahtzee: So GTA5 then. The fifth Grand Theft Auto after 1, 2, 3, Vice City, San Andreas, 4, Chinatown Wars and all the other ones. Adding up not being one of Rockstar's strong points.
• Developer's Foresight: Discussed in his Alpha Protocol review, where he was surprised to see that the game kept track of the missions he was doing in dialogue and even spawned more guards in the following level when he got aggressive with his informant. He also devoted a column to discussing games that have done it well, singling out Metal Gear Solid for particular praise.
• Diagonal Cut: The credits gag at the end of the Ghost of Tsushima review has the samurai protagonist and an opponent facing off in front of a picturesque tree. They go at each other with their swords: for a moment, nothing seems to have happened, then the opponent's top half slides off. Then the tree's top half slides off. Then the backdrop's bottom half falls off.
• Didn't See That Coming: At the end of his Prototype vs. inFAMOUS review he declared both games to be equally good and couldn't decide which one was better. So he jokingly suggested the two developers (Radical Entertainment and Sucker Punch Productions respectively) to send him a picture of the opposing main character wearing a bra, and whoever made the better one would win. They went with it. At the end it was narrow, but Sucker Punch Productions and inFAMOUS won.
• Disappointing Last Level: invoked Yahtzee described this trope in his review of BioShock Infinite where he discussed both it and the original game suffering from "Shitty Final Level Syndrome" or "the Shinfles".
• Disaster Dominoes: Or as Yahtzee Croshaw calls it, the Cockup Cascade, most famously invoked in his reviews of Hitman (2016) and Desperados III.
• Discretion Shot:
  • The statement that a premise has been "stretched wider than a catamite's rectum" is accompanied by a black screen with the text "IMAGE VERY CENSORED".
  • The captions in censor boxes are a Running Gag:
    "Think of something wholesome."
    "OH DEAR GOD"
    "Look it up"
    "Thanks DeviantArt!"
    "NEIN!"
    "BELIEVE IN CHRIST"
    "THE BABY IS FINE THE BABY IS OKAY"
• Disposable Vagrant: Yahtzee keeps a spare vagrant chained in his basement — in case he needs to review a co-op game.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Comes up often. In his Bionic Commando review, for example, he's on the fence about whether or not it's a bad game, but ultimately decides that it is because of all the Product Placement for Pepsi, which he doesn't like.
  "Yes, I can be petty."
• Dissimile: Extremely commonly-used for comedy. For instance:
  While I was able to deduce that the Microsoft Kinect would be a crap gaming system simply by using my magnificent brain, I recently picked one up anyway, because Pope Urban XIII probably thought he was very clever when he condemned Galileo but who got the last laugh there? ...Well he did when Galileo died in poverty and dishonour, but what I'm saying is that I'm basically like the Pope.
• Does This Remind You of Anything??: Subverted/Lampshaded in the video where Yahtzee takes a tour of Washington, D.C. He makes a few mentions that certain buildings or monuments remind him of something, but goes on to mention something mundane and non-sexual. He then double subverts it while looking at the Washington Monument:
  Yahtzee: It's really long and tall, has those trees at the bottom from this angle. Kinda like, uh... a big cock and balls.
• Dolled-Up Installment: Lampshaded in his "Best of 2012" video, noting that neither Far Cry 3 nor Spec Ops: The Line are related in any meaningful way with their respective franchises.
• Do Not Call Me "Paul": Apparently he hates being called Ben by people on the internet. In one podcast, Yug and Matt of Australian Gamer (his best buds) stated that they don't even call him that in real life. Matt says everyone except his parents calls him Yahtzee. Summed up best during one of his Let's Drown Out videos on YouTube:
  Gabriel: His name is Benjamin. Call him Benjamin.
  Yahtzee: Don't call me that.
• Don't Try This at Home: Lampshaded in the review of Split/Second: Velocity, where the game's opening advises players not to try and recreate the scenarios in it. As Yahtzee points out, doing so would take a staggering amount of money and resources, and anyone who was that wealthy wouldn't even need video games for their entertainment at that point.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: In his Medal of Honor: Airborne review, he refers to the German flak tower as a "doom fortress".
• Doorstopper: Excessive length is one of Yahtzee's pet peeves, as an extremely long game almost always outstays its welcome and is a sign of unnecessary padding (it's also mentioned to be hell on Yahtzee for the show's weekly deadlines). This a recurring criticism he has for games by Hideo Kojima, finding both his writing and approach to gameplay overthought and excessive even without his infamously lopsided bias towards the former, that they falter from having too much going on. He also came down hard on The Last of Us Part II for this in conjunction with its incredibly bleak and unlikeable plot and the behind-the-scenes horror stories of developers forced into crunch to make itinvoked, which he felt was a complete waste of time, money, and effort for everyone.
• Dope Slap:
  • Yahtzee's been known to do this to viewers for continuing to buy sequels ("Sonic doesn't need another game; he needs help!").
  • He headslapped anyone who chooses to play as the Alliance.
  • For retrogressing back into a plain villain again, Bowser earned a slap with a rolled-up newspaper.
• Double Subversion: In commenting on how out-of-place the swearing in Bayonetta 2.
  I like my swearing, but in the wrong place it brings down the whole gosh darn tone. You cunt.
• Drinking Game: invoked
  • Suggested one for his review of Brink!, which was to take a drink every time he compared the game to Team Fortress 2.
  • Suggested one for Rise of the Tomb Raider: take a drink every time Lara makes a specific panting noise, and every time Lara says she's "got to" do something.
• Dumb and Drummer: Invoked in his Guitar Hero World Tour review in response to some of the songs having non-English lyrics.
  Yahtzee: If you don't speak Spanish, singing them is like if the guitarist was required to play wearing mittens. Or if the drummer were required to think.

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