Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

"Highly suspected" is an overstatement. They took the criticism into account and made a pose that addressed it without actually lessening the fanservice.

Umm, actually it's not. I've seen that sentiment expressed by quite a few people, and that was their opinion. You can't say they didn't express that opinion, they publicly said it. And Blizzard outright said they were already considering changing the pose (whether you believe them or not is a matter of opinion) but we don't know what they were going to replace it with or if they already knew what the new pose would look like. It's possible they were prepared for backlash, since it's happening all the time these days.

edited 17th Jun '16 8:23:34 PM by MainManJ

Blizzard was not "trolling" in any meaningful sense of the word. That sounds like the kind of myth the people who cried about the pose being changed would come up with to say "Blizzard is not taking any of that SJW-bullshit, which means they are agreeing with us" and feel good about themselves.

So, do you think Yahtzee will review Mighty Number 9 at some point? I can't help but imagine that this will make for a pretty amusing review in particular.

Ohhhh that'd be great.

So, the review for Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is out, and it pretty much sums up my impression of the game. Though to be fair, I think that the story in the new one is even worse simply because there's more of it, and the whole plot looks like regurgitated bits of that Divergent movie. Seriously, I've watched Power Rangers episodes more interesting and complex than that plot.

edited 29th Jun '16 1:59:45 PM by Small_Mess

I feel that although I have a Love Hate relationship with Dick Croshaw, I have to say that the more he hates stuff like Sonic, Sega, Nintendo and various things purely to rile up fandoms, the more fuel he will give to said series because at this point in my mind Sonic The Hedgehog feeds off of Croshaw's hate. (It's like his fountain of youth.)

Who's that?

Dick Croshaw is Yahtzee Croshaw. Richard is his middle name of Benjamin Richard Croshaw.

So, I just binged a bunch of ZP videos (again) after noticing them on my YouTube suggestions feed (thanks, guys!). Aside from wanting to talk like a sarcastic asshole and piss everyone off thereby, which always seems to happen when I binge Croshaw, I had a very interesting insight after watching him talk about Star Wars: Battlefront (the new one).

Competitive multiplayer shooters all seem to be about one basic thing: be the fastest person to point your reticle at someone's face and press the Fire button. This is something I generally suck at, so usually I end up playing such games using the basic method of spraying bullets in my opponents' general direction and hoping that they're too busy killing all the good players to notice me before I get in a lucky hit... that or picking a splash damage loadout and marking myself as a total noob.

Yahtzee's major point, though, is that these games encourage people to act like schoolyard bullies. If you have a better unlockable gun and a slightly faster headshot reaction time, you own the field and spend your hours making everyone else scream at their computer screens in frustration. Progression is getting good enough that you can do that to people who are less skilled than yourself, such that the most successful players are the ones who are best at making you feel like you absolutely suck at life.

I have a difficult time understanding how this is supposed to be "fun", unless we define fun as measuring your self-worth by the number of ragequits you induce. The sad part is that I actually do enjoy those rare Online Decryption sessions in Watch_Dogs (yes, yes, I know, shut up) when I get a higher kill ratio than everyone else because I get to make them feel as bad about themselves as other players made me. Then I have to peel myself away and go to bed in the wee hours throbbing with anger and adrenaline. Does that mark me as an awful person or just an addict?

edited 13th Jul '16 9:35:31 AM by Fighteer

Yes.

Real talk, you're probably just indulging in the cartharsis and/or power trip given by handing out a good old curb stomp. As long as you're not one of those types that trash talk over the mic and think down on your opponents, you should be fine.

There are multiple ways to enjoy a game, including asserting dominance over other players. And there's nothing inherently wrong with this; it's pretty common in any competitive sport or game. Yahtzee's objection to competitive shooters most likely comes from his personal distaste for multiplayer and that modern progression systems create a pseudo "rich get richer, poor get poorer" situation.

I think the only time said behavior isn't acceptable is in a game not designed for it. IE, griefing and trash-talking people in cooperative-based games. Or by using exploits in any game to make others suffer.

edited 13th Jul '16 9:26:20 AM by Nerevarine

I just don't like that the introductory experience for most new players is getting shot down like a dog with virtually no chance to fight back, rinse and repeat until you either quit in frustration, get lucky enough to spawn behind your enemy (and not get spawn camped), or happen to wave your cursor over the right pixel to shoot his head off.

I also don't like myself in terms of how violently aggravated I get by the games, turning me into some kind of adrenaline-fueled murder demon for a few hours and forcing my family to endure me yelling at the screen. I'm forty for crying out loud.

edited 13th Jul '16 9:51:01 AM by Fighteer

Well, most competitive games do have a learning curve. You can reduce said curve with good matchmaking and maybe a tutorial/training mode, but it's basically inevitable that there a set of tactics and techniques to learn if you want to get better at a game. You could argue that a lot of multiplayer games don't do a good enough job of introducing new players well enough, but if somebody buys a competitive multiplayer game and expects to never lose then that's sort of on them. I've never played Battlefront (the new one) or Watch Dogs, so I can't say anything about either.

As for your personal experiences, I can relate. Before I went to college (and became strapped for time and energy) I used to play a lot of Co D and Halo, and my family could always hear me scream from the basement. My brother did it before me, and my sister did it after me. I still play competitive multiplayer games now and again, but I don't have the same problems I did then, at least not to the same extent.

My advice would be: Learn when to take breaks or step back and say "it's only a game". Moreover, instead of trash talking about others or pushing the blame elsewhere (ie your teammates), think about what you did wrong or what you can do differently instead. It's a hard habit to adopt, but when I finally did it I found myself silently grumbling, "shoot, I messed that up" instead of screaming about the game or it's players. Lastly, if a game is being too detrimental to you or those close to you, consider putting it away for some time and spending your time on something else instead. But that's your call to make.

This is what worked for me, at any rate.

edited 13th Jul '16 10:48:41 AM by Nerevarine

Believe me, I understand all that. I suppose that my personal midlife crisis is going to be dealing with the urge to pick up the competitive multiplayer gauntlet that I left lying on the floor in my twenties and finding that it's passed me by.

I do enjoy games like World of Warcraft and Hearthstone where there's no twitch element and/or you have cooperative PvE options rather than being forced into PvP.

edited 13th Jul '16 11:08:29 AM by Fighteer

You should probably play those instead so you don't find yourself yelling. Or just play something more relaxing in general.

I think it depends on the subgenre. I've been playing a lot of Overwatch recently, and the core mechanics run counter to the "schoolyard bully" attitude — not only are the unlockables solely cosmetic so everyone's always on the same footing, but the game is heavily team-based with small team sizes, objective-based gameplay and differentiated characters. A good player of one of the harder heroes can still stomp a pub, but he needs his team to do it. Even the best Genji won't be able to get anything done with two Winstons on his ass.

What I'm getting at is that "competitive multiplayer shooter" is a rather broad genre, so judging them all by the standards of military (-esque, the Battlefield team did Battlefront after all) shooters may not give you the full picture.

I could get into Overwatch, but a multiplayer-only shooter (without even the benefit of a token one-player bot match so you can learn how to play at your own pace) has the same appeal to me as, to paraphrase Croshaw, jerking off in public. It's embarrassing at first and by the time you get inured to it and start enjoying yourself, you realize that there are no actual goals other than comparing the size of your wanker to everyone else's.

edited 13th Jul '16 1:31:08 PM by Fighteer

There's always playing vs AI. At any rate, none of my friends play it, but I find it fun as hell anyway. Considering the format I laid out above, winning feels a lot more like you're collaborating with your team to beat the other team's strategy, than using your superior frag l33t skillz to stand on top of a mountain of your enemies' corpses while your teammates look upon in awe like the love interest in a barbarian novel.

Frankly, I enjoy team shooters more than free-for-alls, so I might give it a shot. Problem is that my typical experience with those is less "team" and more "bunch of people ignoring strategy or tactics because each wants to get as many kills as possible". I admit that I may contribute to that mentality a bit, because after the fifteenth time I've died because my teammates failed to shoot back at the guy killing me from behind, I get a bit annoyed and start letting them die too.

Some of that extends to games like WoW as well, because a coordinated battleground team utterly wipes the floor with a disorganized mob and most of the time, in my limited experience, it's the other side doing the former even in a random matchmaking system.

Edited to add: The experience is vastly better with friends than queuing solo into a "team" of random blithering idiots, so maybe I just need a solid group to play with.

edited 13th Jul '16 3:46:16 PM by Fighteer

Yeah, it's definitely way more fun with friends. Still, there's several heroes specially made to be team players and/or extremely easy to play (Brazilian rollerblading DJ Lucio heals everyone around him, including himself, by existing), so if nothing else at least you can always make yourself useful.

Paper Mario Color Splash. To say that Yahtzee didn't like the game is a bit of an understatement, but his analogy of the core gameplay to Mario walking around transfusing blood back into people after Bowser's minions have violently drained it out is a bit dark. I'm sure this won't trigger more violent anger directed at the game's trope article.

edited 26th Oct '16 11:49:38 AM by Fighteer

That would be a great game, actually. The player character is Pyro, or a Little Sister, whose innocence causes them to see this horrific carnage in a cutesy- adorable light.

Today on "sentences that made me giggle like I'm eight years younger than I am": Wii Fit Trainer and the Quest for the Perfectly Bleached Asshole.

And another one: "But virtually everything in the environment disgorges money and blood like a pole dancer with the E Bola virus".

I have an opinion on Yahtzee, if you don't mind. While I do like several of his reviews, I can't call myself a fan because I feel like his style is nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking. I also tend not to like the fact that he seems to be biased against certain genres of games or the fact that he seems to diss the Xbox and Play Station consoles. Again, this is just my opinion.