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  • Eagleland: In his reviews, Yahtzee portrays Americans as Flavor #2, and covered all aspects of that flavor in the span of two reviews (Medal of Honor: Airborne and Call of Duty 4). He's had a long history of this view, though, as seen in his writings on Fully Ramblomatic.
  • Eastern European Animation: Yahtzee claims to have grown up watching Russian cartoons à la Worker and Parasite rather than The Transformers, which he states is the reason that he has no particular nostalgia for the series.
  • Edible Ammunition: A joke in Star Field singles out potatoes as the absolute top-tier of ammo available.
  • Ending Fatigue:
  • Enemy Without: As Yahtzee plods through Duke Nukem Forever while trying to like it, the part of him which "takes an almost sexual joy in ruining other peoples' fun" emerges from its thought bubble and holds a gun to his head.
    Yahtzee, you and I both know you have pushed games off of subway platforms for less problems than this.
  • Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: In-universe, he's said this of several games in his time, including two of his favourite games ever, Silent Hill 2 and Spec Ops: The Line. His description of Silent Hill 2 even provides the page quote.
  • Environmental Narrative Game: He's not a fan of the genre. He gave negative reviews to Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Layers of Fear and a mixed review to Firewatch and expanded upon why he didn't like the genre very much in this Extra Punctuation column (although he did say that he enjoyed The Stanley Parable quite a lot).
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: In-Universe. Yahtzee sometimes talks about how minor/secondary characters can have enough charm to make them eclipse the heroes or at least endear themselves to him.
    • In his review of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, he notes that he's always preferred Luigi to Mario, since he at the least isn't Peach's personal gopher. He also wonders why Tails gets so much more hate than Sonic despite the fact that he's basically Sonic with flight.
    • Also states in his Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon review that part of the appeal he has of playing as Luigi over Mario is that Luigi expresses more emotion and is more relatable as a result.
    • In Batman related properties he admits to being a fan of the Scarecrow and finds the villain's scenes in Batman Begins and Batman: Arkham Asylum to be his favorite. Though he was disappointed at Arkham Knight's portrayal of the character he still enjoyed playing as him in Injustice 2 in-spite of the fact that he feels the game is mediocre.
    • He was very fond of the Emperor in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, due to both being voiced by Patrick Stewart and his apparently-Genre Savvy nature.
  • Epic Fail: This was Yahtzee's conclusion about Ride to Hell, when all was said and done. When Yahtzee cautiously commands the game to "lie down and don't move", the floor gives way underneath it. In his Top 5 of 2013, he spoke with wonderment about how the developers could have swapped out the DVD for an empty sleeve and still achieved a higher score than the actual game did.
    • Indeed, he thought Ride to Hell was so bad that it didn't even place on his bottom 5 for that year: he considered it such a failure that it barely even qualified as a game, and hence gave it a special award for "Total Abhorrence", which it would hold until an even worse game comes along (as of 2022 it has not been supplanted yet).
    • He also claimed that the only acceptable sequel to Kane and Lynch 2, his worst game of 2010, would be "an apology letter and some chocolates".
    • In the credits of "The Most Significant Games of the 2010's" Ride to Hell is once again missing from the Top 10 Retrospectively Worst Games of the 2010's, instead appearing at the very end, the game shown drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel's with naught but a ? above its head.
  • Epileptic Trees:invoked He jokes that 50 Cent's game is a prequel to Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare showing how the West destabilised the Middle East.
  • Escalating Punchline: He uses these frequently. To give just one example, this line from his Resident Evil 5 review, in regards to his partner AI:
    It's like watching someone beat their fists against a wall before running off to hospital only to come back and do it some more. And they used my medical insurance. And it's my wall!
  • Even Evil Has Standards: From his review of The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, where Yahtzee stops himself before he finishes a joke that's too gross even for him.
    Yahtzee: But in that case, what's all the tearing-all-your-arms-and-legs-off business about? Is that a metaphor for scissoring during that time of the mo— That was the new worst thing I've ever written.
  • Everyone Has Standards: While Yahtzee isn't too keen on kids, he mentioned in this article that he was disturbed by a comment on his Modern Warfare 3 review by someone expressing a desire for the Big Bad to torture children "Holocaust style," as an "ironic statement". (He was unimpressed by a child dying in the game proper, but it was because the game was clearly just doing it for the sake of having a Big Sad Moment and he found it artificial.)
    Yahtzee: Er... thanks for your input, Mr. Poster Man, but I wasn't talking it down for not being extreme enough. Or "ironic" enough. I doubt emptying an entire lorry full of toddlers into the woodchipper would have improved my opinion any.
    • By the same token, he was rather perturbed at how quickly people are to create mods for games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which allow players to kill children.
    • While Yahtzee has admitted in interviews that he doesn't necessarily consider himself to be a "bleeding-heart progressive," he's still quick to critique a video game's (or really any artwork's) questionable ethics, especially if they're very blatant and/or offensive to him in particular. For example, he was completely disgusted by the blatant sexism in Metroid: Other M, and has a clear hatred of Ctrl Alt Delete and its infamous miscarriage plot, referring to doing art of it happening as one of the sicker things he's done. Furthermore, he was utterly revolted by the heavy Attempted Rape overtones shown in the Tomb Raider (2013) trailer, found the sexy ninja assassination attempt from the Hitman: Absolution trailer to be bizarrely sexist, and felt the forced cyber-augmentation sequence from The Surge to be pointlessly exploitative against people with disabilities.
    • He's also aggresively condemnatory of the increasing number of accounts of workplace abuse in the video game industry, particularly employees being forced to crunch obscene work hours to finish games that have far too much extraneous bullshit in them that doesn't really even need to be there in the first place. His go-to example is your horse "going plop-plops" in Red Dead Redemption II, but he really let The Last of Us Part II have both barrels (especially since, unlike RDR2, he didn't even like that game at all in the first place):
      And corporate game dev being what it is, when I think of the developers almost certainly being exploited and overworked to make this miserable game so unnecessarily long, I wince, viewer. I wince at the pointless suffering. 'Cos you could strip four or five hours of gameplay out of Last of Us 2 and lose nothing.
  • Evil Brit: Understands why people use this trope, but takes offense to the Helgast all being these since Britain fought against the Nazis (and also because while upperclass British accents sound good for that kind of villain, the Helgast have Cockney accents).
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Referred to by name in his LEGO Indiana Jones review.
  • Exact Words: At the end of his review of Silent Hill: Origins he said that, to him at least, the series was over and if the upcoming Silent Hill: Homecoming was able to convince him otherwise then he'd "remove three of my own vertebrae, curl my spine back, and eat my own arse." This received a brief Call-Back at the start of his Homecoming review, followed by Yahtzee stating that, despite Homecoming not being a terrible game, he wasn't going to be doing any arse-eating because the requirement was that the game convince him that the Silent Hill series wasn't over, and Homecoming didn't feel like a proper successor to games 1-4.
  • Expospeak Gag: Near the end of his review of Observation he complains that the game "sometimes descends into linear instruction-following", providing an on-screen list of directions as they might be parsed to a computer:
    OBJECTIVES:
    1. Locate teabag
    2. Orient teabag inside hydrothermic facility
    3. Incorporate bovine lactation
  • Face Palm: Doesn't do this very often (as his characters have free-floating circles for hands) but he did prominently do it once in response to the simply embarrassingly transparent story hoops Homefront: The Revolution was jumping through to make North Korea a plausible opponent for the US, instead of someone more controversial.
    Yahtzee: Guys, if you want the villains to be China, just make the villains China!
    • He also did it during his review of Marvel's Spider-Man when the topic of forced stealth sections with characters other than Spider-Man came up:
      Yahtzee: <facepalming> So let me see if I've got this straight, Insomniac Games' Disney's Spider-Man: You're going to interrupt your high-octane, big-balls, web-swinging, free-roam superhero power fantasy for the sake of some mandatory forced stealth sections playing as a mundane fuck going on a chest-high wall inspection tour? And you're doing this so that we don't get bored?
    • He also does it in his review of Red Dead Redemption 2:
      Yahtzee: All right, Rockstar, I know your sandbox games tend to have somewhat sprawling plots, but just give us a quick summary of RDR2, and don't be too confusing.
      Rockstar: Well, RDR2 takes place before RDR1
      Yahtzee: [facepalms] Oh, you fucked it up already, Rockstar! "2" doesn't come before "1"! Always had a blind spot for numbers, haven't you? That's probably why the ninthnote  GTA game was titled "GTA IV".
    • And again at the beginning of his review of Mortal Shell:
      Games Industry: Oh, Yahtzee~! Have we got a surprise for you!
      Yahtzee: A surprise, games industry? Is it... a PC release of Infamous 2?
      Games Industry: Nope!
      Yahtzee: Is it... Silent Hill entering the public domain?
      Games Industry: Nope!
      Yahtzee: Ooh, did the entire management team at EA contract cholera from giving each other rusty trombones?
      Games Industry: N— I don't even know what that is... No, the surprise is... a game that's an awful lot like Dark Souls!
      Yahtzee: (his avatar Face Palms) Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!
  • Failure Gambit: Suggests that Sonic Forces was so terrible because Sonic Team realized a decent Sonic game had come out, and this might mean that the franchise would be held to actual standards from now on - and worse, it might lead to a life extension on the notoriously creepy Sonic fandom.
  • Fair for Its Day: invokedIn his Lollipop Chainsaw review he notes that despite Juliet's design and position as a cheerleader she's always in control of the situation, she has a stable family life and is treated as a distinct and flawed character who's often played for comedy, and the game never calls on the player to defend her from rapists.
  • Fake Difficulty:
    • Part of the reason he despises motion controls. As he put it, "Motion controls are a system wherein a game can fail you for something that completely wasn't your fault."
    • He noted in his review of the first three Crash Bandicoot games that most of the games' difficulty has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with the bad design accompanying the Video Game 3D Leap: Camera Screw, awkward perspectives, misleading hitboxes etc.
  • Fan of the Underdog: In his review of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, which actually delves more into Nintendo's current situation, he admits that he's on Nintendo's side at this point as he feels that the Xbox One and PS4 are simply becoming inferior PCs with their large focus on online gaming (something he's never been fond of) and believes that Nintendo's sales could improve if they focused less on hardware and more on making unique yet enjoyable games that he feels they haven't been doing since Super Mario Galaxy.
  • Fan-Disliked Explanation:invoked Discussed in the review of Condemned 2: Bloodshot.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: invoked When reviewing BioShock Infinite and praising it as a worthy sequel to the original, a fan on a leash he's pulling asks him this:
    "Don't you mean second sequel, Yahtzee?
    Beat
    Yahtzee: [in an unusually raspy voice] Get out.
  • Fantastic Fantasy Is Mundane: A semi-running gag in the late New Tens is orcs playing at being humans, with a D&D campaign set at an office and an otherkin who wants to be called "Allan."
  • Faux-To Guide: Concerning the creation of Gaming Webcomics.
  • Final-Exam Boss: Has repeatedly stated that every boss should fit this trope - that is, a test of all the skills the player has learned thus far in the game, with the Final Boss testing all of the abilities the player has learnt throughout the game.
  • Fish Eyes: invoked Used very, very often to depict the many, many moments of stupidity of both Video Game characters and Real Life people. Expect said "Down's Syndrome" eyes to be the first thing you see whenever a game's "AI" or Idiot Plot is brought up.
  • Five-Man Band: Parodied as he notes the main parts of the cast of recent Final Fantasy games (Using VII, VIII, IX, X and XIII as examples), giving them names similar to the Spice Girls.
    • Specifically, "Angsty Spice"note , "Serious Spice" note , "Manly Spice"note , "Ethnic Spice"note  and "the inevitable 'Kooky Spice'"note .
  • Flanderization: Believe it or not he's actually gotten louder and faster over time. Compare his earlier reviews (for instance, Psychonauts) with with his more recent ones (for instance, Dishonored).
    • He also seems to be getting more and more jaded about the game industry, and caustic in his reviews, nitpicking about a lot of a game's flaws like a checklist. Might be just Yahtzee himself being genuinely bitter about the direction gaming has taken over the years though.
  • Flash Step: His avatar does this against a boss in MadWorld to stick a chainsaw into its back.
  • Flat "What": A visual example is used by his Author Avatar in his Condemned 2: Bloodshot review, when he describes the unusual means by which you defeat the final boss: shouting at it.
    • And another visual example in the Ride to Hell: Retribution review, showing the reaction of the stunned marketing researchers if everyone actually bought the game.
  • Flipping the Bird: Does this in his Spiritfarer review after admitting that he ending up crying over Alice's death.
  • Floating Limbs: People in the webcomic have these. When he reviews Rayman Origins, he insists this to be the reason Rayman has been out of the spotlight, while giving his own avatar limbs for just that part of the review.
  • Forced Meme: Yahtzee coined the term "Spectacle Fighter" to describe games like Viewtiful Joe or God Hand, and once joked that he was determined to "shoehorn it into common parlance". It didn't really work (something he loudly complained about in his review of Devil May Cry 5 when the industry instead decided to give the genre the insipid name "character action games"), although plenty of other terms he's used have since achieved memetic status (as various tropes on this very wiki illustrate). However "Spectacle Fighter" has seen some use; for example, Humble Bundle use it as a genre tag (called a "trait") on their store page to categorise such stylish action games as the Devil May Cry series, and it's similarly used as a tag on Steam, something he lampshades at the start of his review of Gotham Knights (2022).
  • Forgets to Eat: Mentioned in his Call of Duty 4 review.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Franchise Original Sin: Invoked frequently in his retro reviews, where he often explains how elements of a genuinely good game would be inflated into something more grievous by later games in their series or genre.
    • The original Quake and Half-Life were some of the first games in their genre to push away from the over-the-top tone of their predecessors - Quake for its dark atmosphere and Real Is Brown aesthetic, Half-Life for its realistic environment design and narrative focus. However, he contends that they hold up because they didn't compromise the core shooter experience in the name of their pursuit of realism, as opposed to modern realistic shooters which ditch half the mechanics that made the old ones fun.
      The thing about Half-Life is that most shooters at the time still had guns that floated 3' off the ground and gently spun like a barber's pole and nothing else ever felt so absorbingly real. So we can indirectly blame it for every monstrous thing done in the name of realism ever since, starting with its own multiplayer mod, Counter-Strike, game of choice for the first generation of realistic military shooter gutter cunts, whose hate-filled whims now dictate half the fucking industry.
    • His Resident Evil 4 review contends that the game finally gave the series a decisive identity - a campy but surprisingly creepy action-horror series - but did so in part by deemphasizing the horror in favor of action. However, it was still scary, because the action was frenetic, deadly, and tense, as opposed to the following games, which had a much more standard feel. He also contends that 4's action-y tone worked better when it had a Denser and Wackier plot that deliberately had very little to do with the increasingly nonsense metaplot, while the later games dove back into the metaplot and in the process removed a lot of the campy fun.
    • In a genre-wide case, he concludes that the emphasis on story with incredibly perfunctory and obtuse gameplay elements in classic adventure games was a forecast for Environmental Narrative Games with no real gameplay whatsoever outside of "walk to a place." However, he suggests it worked in those games because even though it was just a token degree of challenge, it was still a degree of challenge, which was enough to make it an actual narrative where the player and protagonist face and overcome adversity, and one that required the player to be invested in the game to figure out how to beat it. By contrast, "walking simulators" tend to feature no challenging elements whatsoever and therefore no real incentive to get invested, and as a result become incredibly uninteresting as narratives (since the protagonist is never really challenged) and even less interesting as games (since the player isn't, either).
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Freudian Excuse/Start of Darkness: His Red Faction: Guerrilla review pins all his negativity on bad experiences playing the original Red Faction when he was younger.
  • Freudian Slip: His Bayonetta review is full of these.
  • Fridge Brilliance:invoked Sometimes denoted with the expression "HOLY SHIT I JUST GOT THAT".
  • Funny Background Event: In his Super Paper Mario review, he shows the Dictionary.com definition of "game", with another tab open titled "Super Huge Tits".
  • Fun with Acronyms: In his pre-credits note for his attendance at EGLXnote , he says that "Everyone's Gotta Look eXcited", and that there will be "Entertainment, Gaiety, Laughter, and Xenophobia".
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: One of his favorite discussion topics. By his account, gameplay and story should inform one another and the gameplay should in some way reinforce the story's themes while the story should in some way provide motivation for the gameplay. Games that fail to do so, whether by ideas established in cutscenes that are ignored in gameplay and vice versa (Knack's indestructibility or Hope's reluctance vanishing in combat), massive tonal inconsistencies between the gameplay and the story (Max Payne 3's kinetic gameplay versus its maudlin narrative), or keeping the story and gameplay completely separate to the point that they might as well be unrelated (the plot of Braid being told entirely in vague text dumps), tend to receive a fair bit of mockery.
  • Gameplay Roulette: A frequent talking point for Yahtzee, one where his opinion will shift depending on how a specific game implements it. Yahtzee is a fan of innovation and taking creative risks, but the key for him is necessity: if a game has loads of different forms of gameplay but doesn't focus on any of them well enough, he's going to come down hard on the game for it, and even if he does find a diamond of a gameplay concept in the rough, he'll still going to criticize the rest of the game for its lack of focus. He's especially cynical of AAA games that indulge in this (especially "Jiminy Cockthroat" games with meandering open world action, stealth, crafting, and collectibles), which he derides as tacking various popular ideas with little rhyme or reason in a hollow attempt to appeal to the widest possible markets. However, Yahtzee is much more impressed if a game has earned its gameplay roulette, where the gameplay loops actually contribute to and advance each other, thus producing more than the sum of their parts and streamlining the game into an experience where everything actually matters, rather than existing for the sake of existing.
  • Gateway Series: invoked H.A.W.X. got him interested in air combat games, and, much to his horror, Valkyria Chronicles got him interested in tactical turn-based games (specifically, XCOM).
  • Gay Option: In his Dragon Age II review he mentioned having hooked up with Anders, more or less because Snarky!Hawke annoyed him and came off as gay to him anyway, though he later detailed that roleplaying played a major part of it and ultimately did develop a genuine fondness for Anders, even forgiving him for blowing up the Chantry and naming his Tepig after him.
  • Grammar Nazi: He employs this during the "Mailbag Showdown" video by correcting the emails in red as he reads them.
  • Gratuitous German: Yahtzee apparently studied German and he frequently points it out when games uses it incorrectly.
  • Genre Savvy: Seeing an enemy with a bull's head in Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, he correctly anticipates it to be a Bullfight Boss. He also claims "powers of clairvoyance" that mean he predict how the opening cutscene of Singularity will play out.
  • Get Out!: In the BioShock Infinite video, complete with evil voice.
  • Giant Mook: Bosses in games are sometimes portrayed by giant imps.
  • Giant Spider: These show up in the visuals occasionally. Usually they represent something being either unexpected, very difficult, or both.
    • Arachnophobic prospective viewers should take warning that they're usually taken from photos of actual tarantulas.
  • Go-Karting with Bowser: He lampshades this trope in his Super Mario Galaxy review.
    Yahtzee: For me, the interesting relationship is the one between Mario and Bowser. I mean on some days they fight to the death in fiery climatic showdowns while other days they go Go-Karting, play tennis, or even team up in some of the RPG's.
  • A God Am I: Slogging through Dark Souls imbued him super-gaming prowess, to the point where he hovers over his couch and shoots optic blasts. He lamented that he would have to self-impose-challenge his way through mainstream games in the future — possibly by attaching lobster claws to his scrotum.
  • Good Bad Bugs:invoked Depicted in Arkham Origins as a ladybug Yahtzee gleefully rides on top off of. (The aforementioned "good" bug is bat-toting enemies who freeze in mid swing.) Then there's the Game Breaking Bugs that manifest as a cockroach firing a bazooka at his set, and the "common bugs", a cricket wearing a cockney cap.
  • A Good Name for a Rock Band:
    • In the credits for his review of Super Paper Mario, he remarks that "Dullness and Slog" (the two words he used earlier to summarize the tropes of JRPGs) would be a good name for a band.
    • In the end credits for his A Way Out review, he says, "Check out my new band 'Yahtzee and the Principal Bumblecunts'."
    • In the end credits for his review of Metal: Hellsinger he says ""Rampant Bloodstained Titties" was incidentally the title of my second album".
  • Gone Horribly Right: He doesn't like Five Nights at Freddy's specifically because, in his words, it does its job of terrifying the player far too well, to the point that he considers it less of a game and more of an exercise in horrific masochism to entertain one's YouTube subscribers.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Whenever he swears in the narration, the animation will replace it with something far more innocuous.
    • Sometimes inverted—he'll say something (relatively) tactful in the narration, and the animation will unleash what he REALLY thinks.
    • For instance, in his Assassin's Creed review, he remarks, "This video review was created by a not particularly multi-cultural person, but who really loves religious extremists a big huggy bunch," where the text displayed reads "...not particularly multi-cultural person who invites religious extremists to suck out his farts and die."
    • On the flip side in his Halo Wars review when the units he runs out of time for the mission he was on (And thus the units he was escorting magically disappear when they were right at his front door) he cries out "Bull! Fucking! Shit!" which is displayed on screen by "What arbitrary silliness."
    • At one point in his Ride to Hell: Retribution review, he calls it "Ride to Heck". Rather odd, given that he generally screws up the names of games he reviews to sound more profane.
  • Grammar Nazi: In his "Mailbag Showdown" video, while reading out some of the more obnoxious examples of hate mail he received, he corrected them onscreen in the manner of a primary school teacher, coupled with letter grades, giant question marks and "SEE ME" at the bottom. Also, his "Split Stroke Second Colon Velocity" and "RIse: Son of Rome" reviews.
  • Grandfather Clause: Yahtzee and his reviewing style in Zero Punctuation are some of the last remnants of the mid-late 2000s internet critic trend of shorter reviews consisting of rapid-fire insults and vulgar comedy. Many of the other reviewers who popularized the trend have since moved on or expanded their brand, while the new generation of games critics have gone for a more introspective long-form take. Yahtzee's videos themselves still remain quite popular, with new ones quickly racking in hundreds of thousands of views, even if his style of review itself has largely fallen out of favor.
  • Guilty Pleasure:
    • Considering how critical he is of "serious" games, easily calling much of them banal, asinine, or insipid, he loves Cooking Mama and Animal Crossing. He says that despite all the criticism he gave to Animal Crossing: New Leaf, he can't stop playing it.
    • In his Saints Row 4 review, he refers to "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" by Aerosmith as "that one Aerosmith song from the Armageddon (1998) soundtrack that everyone seems faintly embarrassed to admit is kinda alright."
    • He also loves to reference Jason Voorhees, stating in his Until Dawn review that the Friday the 13th films are objectively bad but lots of fun to watch.
  • Gushing About Games You Like: invoked He's frequently held up Silent Hill 2 as the gold standard of gaming.
    "If I were Batman, Silent Hill 2 would be my murdered parents if you get what I'm saying."
    • SH2 is also the game which affected him most personally, as articulated here during the Escapist Expo.
      Jim Sterling: (Totally needed online multiplayer, though.)
      Yahtzee: Oh, fuck you.
    • Sometimes this obsession is double-edged: For his Top 5 of 2012, he compared the difficulty of XCOM: Enemy Unknown with a 3 A.M. drug-induced fever dream — which for Yahtzee usually involves an apparition of Dizzy hovering over his bed shrieking, 'YOU KILLED MEEEEE'.
    • Reared its head again in Rise of the Triad, along with Yahtzee's apparent dog fancy.
  • HA HA HA—No: In the "Hot Coffee" episode, Take 2's reaction to the Moral Guardians demands (which includes never releasing Bully, refunding all Grand Theft Auto games, and so on.)
  • Half the Man He Used to Be: Shows up in the Demon's Souls review to show that a character loses half its health when dead.
  • Hanlon's Razor: His excuse for the apparent racism on display in Resident Evil 5:
    "But one really shouldn't worry about this sort of thing unless there's genuine hatred behind it, and I don't get that impression. Capcom aren't bad people, they're just idiots!"
  • Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Yahtzee plays with this trope on several occasions, most notably his Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock review, where he very specifically lists several homosexual acts (and one heterosexual act) which he is most certainly not doing.
    "On the whole though it's just not as good as tonguing another man's balls. I mean... as it used to be. [Beat] I'm not gay."
  • Heävy Mëtal Ümlaut: He specifically pronounces the extraneous umlaut in Brütal Legend.
    "I studied German, alright? I refuse to let an umlaut go unpronounced."
  • Hell Is That Noise: Invoked during his review of Papers, Please:
    "You're gazing up at a big complex state of affairs funneled down and glimpsed through the filter of your tiny little world of passport numbers and hairy ball sacks, the effect of which being that admitting someone that seemed legit and hearing the sound of the obnoxious printer giving me a citation seized my heart more than any number of dead mums."
  • Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Yahtzee loves to abuse this whenever possible, with such examples as "Titty Shepard" to "Fagballs", "Fuck Me", "Twattycakes" or "Gareth Gobulcoque".
    • Tried "Tiddles" in Deus Ex but was slapped down by the game's system of using "JC Denton" as a codename.
      "The moment you put in your own name it goes "Wrong! Your name is JC Denton."
    • Also named his Mii "Senor Koqueonfaes" (lampshading the bizarre-looking facial customization options) in the 3DS review.
    • His review of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask brought up that he named Link "Useless" as a quick joke, but it turned out to be an unexpectedly good match with the game's portrayal of Link as an unlucky, flawed, and put-upon figure facing a far greater threat than himself, whose deeds will never be remembered.
  • Heroes Love Dogs: More likely to praise a game that has dogs in it, or to feel let down when having to play as the humans again. (Dead to Rights: Retribution, Rise of the Triad, CoD: Ghosts)
    Developer: And we've still got the power-up that turns you into a dog.
    Yahtzee: (GAAAAASP) With the little doggie nose at the bottom of the screen?♥
    Developer: Yup!
    Yahtzee: And the adorable little paw that comes up when you press buttons?♥
    Developer: Uh, no, we forgot about that.
    Yahtzee: ...........ONE STAR.
  • Heroic BSoD: After Yahtzee reviewed Spec Ops: The Line, it was brought up several times more after that in following Zero Punctuation videos and Yahtzee's Extra Punctuation column, and the actual review of the game has Yahtzee sounding depressed during it.
  • History Repeats: Yahtzee tends to be pretty observant on the nature of certain cycling trends throughout games and the gaming industry, for better and for worse.
    • Yahtzee has noted on more than a few occasions that trends by publishers devoted specifically towards maximizing profits and exploiting consumers tend to ebb and wane drastically, with capitalist demands for infinite growth always reaching a logical breaking point and crash when audiences cannot keep up and end up rejecting the trends for products they deem actually worth their time. Yahtzee observed this as what caused the The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 (an oversaturation of mediocre, hashed-out games by countless developers, far more than what audiences wanted anything to do with), the flash of PC multiplayer shooters in the 90's (games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena trying to establish the genre's ubiquity and convincing consumers there was no future in single-player games, only for the late-90's to 2000's to be a goldmine for such experiences), and the glut of MMOs of the 2000's-early 10's (made in an attempt to replicate the successful formatinvoked of World of Warcraft, only to be crushed out of the market). By the early 2020's, Yahtzee also dubbed the "live service" model a dying/dead trend for the same reasons of oversaturation and increased audience antipathy, and that in general, the only games that withstand the tests of time are those that are well-made and reasonably-priced.
    • He views the whole Resident Evil franchise as representative of a cycle that Capcom is stuck in and has looped around a few times now: create a popular landmark title before degenerating into increasingly mediocre sequels reliant on "dull-witted escalationism" of the same formulainvoked ("Survival Horror adventure in enclosed, monster-filled environment, find a secret lab and defeat the main baddie after they turn into a giant monster") before resulting in an unexpected reinvention that salvages the series, only to go back to chasing its own trends and overly-bloated mythos. Even as he gave praise to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, he already anticipated in his review that Capcom was rapidly going to descend back into its old habits (which he seemingly verified with Resident Evil Village, which he found significantly less focused than its immediate predecessor).
  • Hollywood Board Games: Ben Croshaw complains that having an Action-Based Mission in the climax of a puzzle-solving game like L.A. Noire is akin to defeating Hitler by beating him at Pictionary. It's just that absurd and that much of a Mood Whiplash.
  • Hostile Show Takeover: In his review of Halo Wars... twice.
  • Humans Are Bastards: Yahtzee says he doesn't ordinarily like multiplayer because "...human beings are grabby, entitled, selfish, ugly, stupid, evil cockstoppers..." in his review of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.
  • Humans Are Cthulhu: The credits gag for Hollow Knight/Dead Cells has a cockroach epicly fighting a stag beetle. Then Yatzee uncaringly steps on both of them on his way home from the kebab stand. He only realizes because the roach's nail sword sticks in his shoe.
  • Human Resources: Thinks the cardboard Humongous Mecha in Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam are made out of the paper Toads he's been rescuing over the course of the game.
  • Hurricane of Euphemisms: Yahtzee makes a concerted effort to get through his review of Tomb Raider: Anniversary without referencing a certain part of the female anatomy. He almost makes it.
    "Bosoms, melons, milk factories, busts, funbags, knockers, ballistics, boobies, jugs, nipples, jubblies, stonking great tits!"
  • Hypocrisy Nod: Yahtzee has noted his use of Hypocritical Humor more than once in his reviews.
  • Hypocritical Humor:
    "Fans are clingy complaining dipshits who will never ever be grateful for any concession you make. The moment you shut out their shrill, tremulous voices the happier you will be for it. Incidentally, why not buy a Zero Punctuation t-shirt?"
    • For a while before the 100th Episode special, The Escapist used this little stinger at the end of all Zero Punctuation shorts to, guess what, advertise Zero Punctuation-related merchandise.
    • In his Duke Nukem Forever review he rants about how people should be sacked for not doing their jobs, and the picture shows him being dragged out of his office with a sign saying "job: review actual games that exist" (Duke Nukem Forever had been cancelled at the time the review was made, and would not be rescued from its development hell for over a year).
    • In his Minecraft review, he calls out Americans for being uninformed about current events in countries outside the US, only to turn around and say he wasn't aware of the flooding in his own city of Brisbane because he doesn't keep up with current events.
    • From the end credits for his Left 4 Dead review: "There is a special circle in Hell 4 people who replace numbers for letters".
    • He accuses the protagonist of Fable 3 of bestiality due to the weird way he interacts with his dog, when in his review of Fable II he complains that if the game was truly open-ended he should be able to marry any NPC he wants, including his dog.
    • On Rayman: "Honestly, who can like a character whose hands and feet have no visible connection to their torso?" Of course, the irony is that Yahtzee's drawing style involves disconnected hands and feet. What makes this even better is how Yahtzee's avatar is then shown walking away from Rayman with crudely drawn lines connecting his hands and feet to his body.
    • From the South Park: The Fractured but Whole review, he mocks the South Park team for being a bunch of middle-aged people who haven't matured beyond jokes about poop, before snidely remarking that applies to himself.
      "My goodness, my glass house is sparkling delightfully in the morning sun. What a nice day to indulge in my favorite hobby of projectile minerology."
    • Mafia II's ending seems to come too soon:
      "The game just sort of cuts out halfway through resolving everyth"-[END CREDITS]

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