Funny / Zero Punctuation 3

Funny (Non-ZP) | Zero Punctuation 1 (2007 - 2010) | Zero Punctuation 2 (2011 - 2013) | Zero Punctuation 3 (2014 - 2016) | Zero Punctuation 4 (2017 - 2019) | Zero Punctuation 5 (2020) | Zero Punctuation 6 (2021) | Zero Punctuation 7 (2022 - 2023)

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2014 Episodes

2014, Quarter 1

Top 5 Games of 2013

• The opening lines in their entirety.
  Life is an exercise in duality. One can only appreciate pleasure if there has been pain to put it into context. The delightful taste of a Knickerbocker Glory is nothing if you've never stapled your bollocks over a worktop and set about them with a toffee hammer. Anyway, that's why I'm not allowed in the ice cream parlor anymore...
• As per 2010 and 2011, the best and worst games have an analogous experience, but here, they're directly linked to one another. For example, while the fifth best is "Earning the respect of a competent middle manager," the fifth worst is "Earning the respect of a large horny dog."
  • The descriptors for tiers four and three:
    4th Best: Shaking hands with Kofi Annan
    4th Worst: Realising your flies were unzipped the whole time you were shaking hands with Kofi Annan
    3rd Best: It wasn't Kofi Annan at all, it was Nelson Mandela
    3rd Worst: Hang on, Nelson Mandela's dead, and you've just committed a massive faux pas at an open casket funeral
• Speaking of the "Shaking hands with Kofi Annan" one (Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag):
  Yahtzee: You know me, I hate a series that meanders infinitely on like a hamster in a Möbius strip so I was running out of patience for Assassin's Creed. "What the hell are you doing putting another fucking one out? I'd have thought after 3 was like watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special intercut with scenes from a very boring documentary about knives, you'd have the sense to consider winding this shit up!"
  "Sorry," replied Assassin's Creed. "Would an exciting pirate adventure on the high seas help you stomach our distasteful attitude?"
  "Yes... you fucking pricks."
• Yahtzee being outright hesitant to name-drop Ride To Hell before giving it the Lifetime Achievement Award for Total Abhorrence.
  • Yahtzee further states that Ride To Hell will hold the title until a worse game comes along, which he estimates to be "around the time apes have retaken the fucking Earth!"
• Definitely qualifies as Black Comedy, but the end-of-credits message is worthy of a laugh or two:
  "I suspect next year will just be a bottom 10 followed by a gunshot"

Knack

• Speaking on console launches:
  People tell me most consoles aim for being loss leaders these days. Well, I don't know about that but they certainly are Dross Leaders! ...Leaders in the field of Dross!
  (Beat) You know, I got paid money to write that!
• Yahtzee's epic use of assonance in the summary:
  Knack is cack. It's a fat sack of cack smoking crack. You might think smoking crack would give it some thwack, but the crack is whack and turns the lungs black, and I'd think of a better way to end this attack, but cut me some slack, I'm too much of a hack. Oh snack! I mean "snap."
• The end credits, in which a sick Yahtzee drinks too much when Knack approaches, then he takes Knack's bucket head and vomits in it; the scene then cuts to Knack, his upside-down head full of vomit, who discovers that the imp also has an upside-down head full of the same vomit.

Broken Age

• Yahtzee gives his feelings on crowdfunding and how much of a budget the game got due to it:
  Tim Schafer could've made a fucking escape-the-room flash game and it would have made the money. He could have released Space Quest IV, or Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, or a pile of owl droppings on the end of a length of rope, and it would have made the money back.
• When Yahtzee talks about how convoluted the logic of old adventure games could be he mentions starting with stabbing an inflatable clown doll and ending with an Egyptian mummy winning a beauty contest. Funny in and of itself but hilarious when you realise, he's not making a non-sequiter, that's one of the actual puzzles of Day of the Tentacle.
• He very humorously summarizes his beliefs regarding what merits the game should be judged on, and why:
  It's like saying you can't expect a racehorse to run as fast as his dad did: Then why did you charge so much for his spunk!?

Might and Magic X

• Yahtzee's critique of the game's openness is hilarious just for the sheer speed at which it's delivered:
  Yahtzee: You know me, I like a game that lets me fend for myself a bit, but not putting a sign down every ten yards pointing to the next objective in case the independent thought makes your brain explode is one thing. Giving no guidance whatsoever except the sensation of your top halves being separated from your bottom halves by a single swing of a minotaur's axe after you blunder into an area too high-level for you and send off a fireball that disperses harmlessly across his meaty buttocks like a watery cum-shot that was sufficiently offensive to him that he's prepared to chase you to the corners of the fucking Earth because you can't run away from fights even if your situation is hopeless and you only realize that after making the first strike of getting within melee range like the gormless sad sack that you are, is quite another!
  • Immediately followed up by comparing the game's story to his mother trying to make chores "fun".
    "No, really, just pretend the mop is a sword and the kitchen floor killed your parents." Don't put ideas in my head, woman!

Dark Souls

• His comparison of Dark Souls to entering a rake-filled shed.
  Last chance — I'll just keep tanking the rakes and maybe I'll somehow become really psychotically into being rake-faced just in time to be prepared for the sequel. And I'll be blatted in the face with a rake if that isn't kind of what happened!
• Yahtzee was originally against playing Dark Souls because of the secrecy and the attention it garnered.
  But then, after watching a decent Let's Play of the game, gone over the wikia a few times and gone over a six week preparation with a team of advisers and physical trainers, I was able to break through the wall.
  (cut to an image of Yahtzee looking crazy, in a cannon barrel aimed at a brick wall and screaming "DO IIIIT!")
• The cheeky grin on the "smug player" and restating him explaining a completely easy to get item.
  Oh, yes, that boss fight is easy-peasy, as long as you've got the orange Listerine ring. Which you must have found because it's right there, in the open, in a chest, in a basement, in a different post-code, behind two secret walls and a fire.
  • Even funnier in that experienced players will know precisely which ring (and boss) he's referring to.^note The Rusted Ring to make the fight against the Hydra easier, as it negates the walk-speed decrease in water, although "Orange Listerine Ring" suggests he mixed it up with the Orange Charred Ring you need to walk on lava, which you get from a boss rather than use to beat one.
  • Even better, the locations are accurate too. ^note the "Behind two secret walls and a fire" leads to The Ash Lake, where the Eternal Dragon is at, and the "In a different post-code" leads to the Undead Asylum, where the Rusted Iron Ring is at.
• Him being disappointed that the next games on his list won't be nearly as challenging.^note  Depicted by him glowing with power and levitating before firing eye-beams at one of the games
  Now that I am in the zone, I'm going to be fucking ruined at the usual standard of game difficulty. I'm going to have to play the new Thief game with a lobster on each bollock.
• Him describing that memorizing all of the enemy attack patterns turns you into fantasy Batman, complete with his animated avatar transforming from a regular knight into the Dark Knight.

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

• "Make the plot holes bigger, Final Fantasy, I don't think this trainwreck is going to fit through them yet!"
  • "Choo-choo! Now arriving at Plot Hole Station!"
• The Running Gag of referring to the Garb system as underpants.
• "The Evangelism isn't so much a subtext as it is a hot pancake to the face."
• "But as tends to be the case with JRPGs, the combat exists in another dimension to the rest of the game entirely." The accompanying slide depicts the combat taking place in a Imagine Spot inside Lightning's mind, while Lightning in reality waves around a stick around in empty air and makes incoherent noises, as a passing-by father quickly drags his child along while mumbling: "Don't stare dear."
• The image of Lightning waiting for missions to become available by having her impatiently wait in front of a clock and a velvet rope line ("c'mon, c'mon, c'mon") and giddily charging in as soon as the rope disappears ("yaaaaay"), mostly because it's so out of character for her to behave that way.
• And finally, his summation:
  So what am I supposed to do now, game? Grind? Buy better underpants? I've only got four in-game hours to do this bloody quest; I'm finding this whole timer thing very paralyzing, but not as much as the knowledge that even if I get through this, my only reward would be more time spent with Shite-ning and Hope-On-A-Rope whereas, if I just stopped playing, I could instead eat all the individual Mr. Kipling Apple Pies in the house. Sorry, Lightning Returns, you lose to pie...tning returns.

Strider

• The Running Gag of the thought processes of "pies", "cider", "Brian Cox", and "masturbation".
• The Alternative Character Interpretation of how Strider Hiryu got his name.
• And, of course, the Running Gag of imps getting whooped by Strider Hiryu.

Thief

• The beginning:
  Yahtzee: Publishers these days tend to treat gaming history like a great big party buffet full of lovely dishes; they randomly pick a sherry trifle with some nostalgia value and name recognition, do a great big squirty dump into it, and then they push it back into our face going "Look, now there's more trifle! Give us cash!"
• Yahtzee tells the difference between this game and the original Thief:
  Yahtzee: The Garrett I remember falling in love with was a straight-talking, unapologetic anti-hero who knew when things were serious but was always ready to offer a bit of dry wit to camera upon finding a nobleman's private spanking saddle. He was not Batman — but that's what they've made him into! A broody misery-guts who communicates solely in growly macho soundbites that only make sense until you think about them! If you asked Old Garrett why he stole, he'd answer "'Cause I need to pay rent, and it's the only thing I'm good at, so shut up and let go of your wallet." New Garrett would (and indeed does) give the answer "Because it's what I do." No, Garrett, it's what you are currently doing.
  Imp: Hey, Yahtzee, why are you kicking New Garrett in the stomach?
  Yahtzee: 'Cause it's what I'm currently doing!
• Yahtzee talks about the confusing humor in the game:
  Part of the identity of the Thief series was dry humour; a city of thick, drunken guards and blustering nobles. You, the wily outsider, come to take them down a peg! But there's no wit or poetic justice in this city, just miserable people being serious. "Ergh, the police are evil and everyone's got the plague, who will save us? What's that? Dishonoured? Never heard of it." And no-one says "taff" anymore; they say "fuck." That's not fun; Errol Flynn swinging off a rope onto a pirate ship is fun, but if the enemy crew just tells him to fuck off, it'd completely kill the mood!
• "...the hub world is absolutely plastered with useless doors, windows, and ledges, that are differentiated from the doors, windows, and ledges one can interact with only by whether or not a contextual button prompt comes up when you're close enough to kiss it. This is like playing a bad text adventure!"
  You see a door.
  >enter door_
  You can't enter the door.
  >search room_
  You find one door you can actually enter and several guards spinning in place 'cause their AI bollocked up.
• The ending:
  All in all, the kindest thing one can say about Thief is that it's just another soulless AAA game to add to the pile. Token nods to the originals broken up with Uncharted-style puzzles, climby bits, and action escape sequences, lest we concentrate on one thing long enough to realize what a mess we've made. Where you can't even bop a guy across the bonce without feeling a hundred meddling pairs of hands, adding irritating music stings and elaborate takedown animations, until you might as well be smashing their heads between a pair of cymbals for all the subtlety it has. By itself, it's merely tiresome; to the Thief series as a whole it's about as welcome an entrant as an agave cactus at a double penetration!

Dark Souls 2

• One of his favorite bosses from the first game was the Gaping Dragon, which he referred to as "the incomplete open-heart surgery dragon", for its creativity.
• Yahtzee describing the difficulty, and commenting on the perk of being able to easily swap routes if one is "feeding you your own eyeballs".
  So if one area is feeding you your own eyeballs, you can maybe leave it for now and look for a gentler one. And good fucking luck, you shrieking mimsy.
• His overall description of the "When Dark Souls gives you chocolate buttons, it has to take away your heart medication with the other hand" that came with Dark Souls 2, where any good changes were counterbalanced by punishing ones, culminating in the game threatening to map the buttons to the Kinect.
• Dark Souls II yelling at its daughter for only getting a B+ on her colouring assignment.
  Dark Souls II: Well, then you must have a SMACK and a SMACK and a SMACK and a SMACK and HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU HOW DARE YOU!?
  Yahtzee: Ah, that's what I love about you, Dark Souls! You don't ask for a lot, but... Um...
  (cut to Dark Souls II pouring petrol on its daughter)
  Yahtzee: Alright, you do ask for a lot.

2014, Quarter 2

Titanfall

• While explaining the vague plot that's frequently shifted to the side in favor of giant robot action, Yahtzee brings up an anecdote where he asked the other players if they had any ideas what was going on. Most of them were equally vague, except for one guy who responded by asking if he was Jewish.
• Yahtzee criticizes the plot's irrelevance from whether or not you win or lose by comparing it to the Back to the Future ride, in that it tells you that only you can save the world, rumbles for a while, and then claims that you've saved the world regardless of who was paying attention or who was crushed to death by the ride mechanism.
  • "I lost a hat on that Back to the Future ride once. In many ways I never really moved on, emotionally."
• Yahtzee represents the robots in the game as stock toy robots with cat heads. This leads to an amusing bit in the credits where he proceeds to distract an oncoming mecha using the laser sight in his gun.
  • He also describes his victories against the cat headed titans by running into a building, climbing up to the roof, and shoot at its "big stupid head". He compared the feeling to a mechanized Tom and Jerry (complete with him laughing with mouse whiskers and ears)
• In relation to his growing interest in multiplayer and his acts of murder in Dark Souls:
  Well, this may surprise you, but I've been making more of an effort to do the multiplayer thing lately, partly for therapeutic reasons. Dark Souls helped. That game feels like it's trying to wean you onto social interaction. First you find someone's note advising you to "be wary of fatty", then you hire stalwart fellows to help you out with a boss fight, none of whom have headset mics so close to their mouths that you feel like their every utterance is trying to beat your ears to death with racial epithets. The turning point came when I was invaded, but the attacker bowed upon seeing me, a gesture of recognition to mark a duel between equals. "You know what," I thought, "Maybe I don't need to be so afraid of people all the time!" So while he was bowing, I ran up and stuck my halberd up his arse. "Maybe it's people who need to be afraid of ME!"

Infamous: Second Son

• The opening:
  I was a younger brother, y'know. Presumably still am, but I haven't checked lately.
• "Still, the range of elemental powers on display are pretty creative, although the word 'elemental' is getting stretched like a mozzarella bumhole at the novelty sausage gala. (What AM I on about?)"

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes

• The entire introduction, where Yahtzee compares the Metal Gear franchise to Lennie from Of Mice and Men, stating that Metal Gear might screw up and even get weird and creepy at times, but doesn't do so out of malice.
  Yahtzee: Hey, Metal Gear? Why did you pretend MGS 2 would be about Solid Snake then replace him twenty minutes in with a cross between an albino Barbie doll and Wesley Crusher?
  Metal Gear: Duh, I'm sorry. I just wanted everyone to meet this cool new character I made up. He's a cyborg and his nipples turn into shurikens!
  Yahtzee: Hey, Metal Gear? Why are all these emotionally traumatised young women thrusting their butts at the camera?
  Metal Gear: Duh, I'm sorry. Looking at bums makes my willy feel nice!
  • Capping off with:
    Yahtzee: Did I ever tell you about the rabbits, Metal Gear?
    Metal Gear: Are they down that shotgun barrel?
    Yahtzee: Why yes, Metal Gear. Have a closer look.
• Later when discussing the scene where you extract a bomb from Paz's stomach in gory detail, Yahtzee asks "Lennie Gear" a simple question.
  Yahtzee: Metal Gear, are you being weird about female characters again?
  Metal Gear: Noooo...
  Yahtzee: What's that behind your back, Metal Gear?
  Metal Gear: It's a female character who wears bikini tops and never speaks.
  Yahtzee: Oh, Metal Gear!
• Speaking of the bomb removal scene, Yahtzee’s avatar reacts with a horrified expression and crossed legs, all while Yahtzee says “It wasn’t boring, I’ll give it that.”
• "I should probably stop harping on about the length issue...except I won't! I'm gonna harp like an angel with Parkinson's disease!"

The Elder Scrolls Online

• Yahtzee points out the inherent grinding problem of MMO games and says that people tend to return to World of Warcraft to the time investment they've already put into it.
  But since WoW starting providing an answer to the question "When have you officially put out too many expansions?" The answer being "When you start nicking ideas from animated Jack Black vehicles."
• Taking potshots at the telegraphing attacks (to compensate for latency issues):
  Don't patronize me, Mr. Skeleton! I may have a response time that would embarrass an elderly bulldog on dental anesthetic, but at least I can't be re-purposed as a xylophone!
• "It always baffles me when a franchise that built itself on its singleplayer experience suddenly decides out of nowhere that it's going to be a multiplayer, whereupon it cuts its legs of and shoves spoons up its asshole. Then the player responds: We prefered it when you had legs and didn't have cutlery up your ass; but it responds: Don't you see this was all for your benefit? I had to cut my legs of to make it easier to fit the spoons

South Park: The Stick of Truth

• "The Simpsons had already advanced animation from Josie and the Pussycats to the point that it could say 'Hey, your parents actually are still having sex', but it was South Park that went a bit further and declared 'Hey, maybe they're having sex with pigs and handfuls of their own shit and, I dunno, velociraptors.'" Made especially funny by the pig saying "I needed the money" and Yahtzee's Vomit Indiscretion Shots.
• Yahtzee's impressively bizarre metaphor where he explains how he used to watch South Park himself and eventually fell off the show because its constant willingness to transgress taboo ironically made it become pigeonholed and "old hat," but now The Stick of Truth is giving an opportunity to recapture the interest of both himself and others.
  Yahtzee: It was like a giant orange space hippo from Mars descended from the sky and started dancing about on a hill playing bagpipes, and at first we flocked to see the giant orange space hippo but after a while we realized he only knows how to play "Scotland the Brave" and all his jumping about is shaking your fillings loose. So these days I just occasionally notice him as I glance out of the window and think "Is he still playing them fucking bagpipes?"
  So South Park: The Stick of Truth in this analogy is like the giant orange space hippo is still dancing about playing bagpipes, but now he's hired a zebra to sit at his feet and read poetry, so I've come out just to maybe see where the two of them are going with all this.
• "You can't take the piss out of something that is itself taking the piss, this isn't a fucking bucket chain! Nor can one be crass about something that's already deliberately crass, it's like trying to embarrass a poo by making it wear another little poo as a hat."
• Yahtzee's criticism about how easy it is to overpower your character is illustrated by the player character firing a huge energy beam composed entirely of tigers.
• At one point, Yahtzee admits that him being sniffy and dismissive about the game leaning on Toilet Humor is Hypocritical Humor of the highest order, since he himself basically kicked off the whole review with an extended metaphor where he gets his head shoved up Queen Elizabeth's butt.
• "But on the whole, it was like lifting up a piece of furniture I hadn't moved in a while and finding a Malteser I'd forgotten about; nice Malteser while it lasted although there was something in the middle that might have been a dead wasp."

FTL: Faster Than Light

• Yahtzee's Running Gag of alternate names for the game, including Faster Than Light: Faster Than Light, Faster Than Light: Whiter Than White, Faster Than Light: Piggies In Shite, Faster Than Light: Shit's Getting Tight, and Faster Than Light: Riddled With Spite.
• Yahtzee noting that the Villain Has a Point:
  Yahtzee: There's very nearly a morality thing going on. By the end of every average game, we've learned exactly how justified this whole rebellion thing is, by how many ships have said "We surrender!" and you've replied "Sorry, you're breaking up; sounded like you said 'Blow us away and pillage us for bits!'"
  • This led to a Poem for FTL.
    I appreciate that this comes a bit late / but you've put me in quite a difficult state
    Your missiles took out our oxygen gear / and now I fear my breathing feels weird
    And it appears that we've lost the translator / in the fizzling crater that was the generator
    My guns aren't workin' and the drone's gone berserk / in the admin department and killed all the clerks
    And we're light years from a decent hull-mender / but still you reply: "We do not accept surrender."

Child of Day-Light

• Yahtzee's thoughts on one of Daylight's twists:
  And look, that whole twist where the main character has a secret history with the horror? That only works if they have a character, besides a disembodied voice going "Is there anybody there?" or squeaking like a rusty hinge! We need to have made some assumptions about them before you can start subverting our assumptions! All I have to go on is that I'm a squeaky lady in a haunted house! So I turned to my brain and asked, "Why are we in this haunted house?", and my brain goes, "Well, presumably because we've got a secret history with the place." "Brain! Fucking spoiler warning!"
• This:
  Also, I see a flaming spider in the overworld, wearing a flaming hat, spewing the words "I'm all about dat fire" in flaming letters, so I equip all my fire defence and water attack and start combat only to find that Earth Badger and Ice Dentist were hiding up his arse or something, so I have to fight them, too!
• As he's hosting a poetry show with Jim Sterling, awful rhymes in Child of Light got him angered to a rarely seen degree.
  You can't rhyme "delicious" with "ravenous"! Emphasis is on the wrong syllable, you FUCK!
  • One of the ending slates reads: "You don't fuck around at my poetry slams mate".

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

• The beginning:
  ...There's just one tiny little stumbling block in the whole system, and that's the fact that Amazing Spider-Man 2 is absolute wank... by most accounts.
  • Comes back as a Brick Joke about 30 seconds later:
    In all honesty, I haven't seen the film, but that's good; that means however absolute the wank situation, it can't possibly taint my view of Amazing Spider-Man 2, the game! So here goes: Amazing Spider-Man 2, the game, is absolute wank. (cue Yahtzee playing the game before a huge stream of jizz erupts from the TV and sends him flying) D'oh, better luck next time!
• "So, you should know the drill by now: Peter Parker, Uncle Ben, [portrayed by a bag of Uncle Ben's wild rice] bang, dead, oh no, power/responsibility, shitty villains, [portrayed by the Vulture] whine-whine, woe is me, I'm beating the pussy off with a stick, etc., and we're sandboxing around Manhattan again!"
• "Yes, random street crimes is constantly occurring, and in the traditional sandbox manner you can jump in and resolve them. And when I say "can", I of course mean "fucking have to or get shot!" Ignore too many petty crimes and the anti-crime task force will be hostile, which delivers a bit of a mixed message: 'We're against vigilante justice, Spider-Man!' 'Wait, he's not doing any vigilante justice?' 'What an asshole! Let's kill him with vigilante justice!'"
• "And one time I failed the mission because I'd gotten the last guy to the safe zone, but the 'putting-him-down' animation hadn't quite finished before the timer ran out. Oh, you're not satisfied with my performance? Fine, I'll just fucking put him back!"
• Yahtzee's representation of some of the game's bosses: Kingpin was represented by a figure with a beach ball tied to his belly, Electro was a figure with a battery tied to his head, Green Goblin was a figure with a gremlin tied to his head, but none of these compare to his representation of Carnage: A strip of bacon.
• Yahtzee explains the confusing gameplay:
  ...the series continues its lofty ambition to be like Arkham Asylum, when all it can do is press its face against Arkham Asylum's living room window until Arkham Asylum calls the police, so the mandatory stealth elements are as annoying as they were last time, dialogue trees have been thrown into cutscenes for no apparent reason except to yodel, "We have no fucking idea how exposition works!" and drive further stakes into the heart of the game's pacing. (cue Yahtzee driving a giant tooth-like stake in the game's heart) So I suppose we should summarize: Story, a fucking mess; [blood spurts from the game's heart to form the word "Story" before it splashes down on Yahtzee] gameplay, a fucking mess; [Yahtzee opens up his umbrella as more blood spurts out to form the word "Gameplay" before splashing down on him again] one-liners, heavy-goods vehicle; graphics, more like "mess-phics"! [in another Running Gag, Yahtzee plays the game before a huge stream of blood erupts from the TV, again sending him flying, followed by a turd that oozes out of the TV on the following words] The game looks like shit even on the highest graphical settings, with, amongst other things, the out-of-costume Peter Parker's head being distractingly too small for his body, like a peach on a bookcase with an extremely punch-worthy haircut.
• Concluding that, while he didn't care for the original The Amazing Spider-Man game, it was "24-carat gold" compared to The Amazing Spider-Man 2, leading to this gem:
  Well, silver. Well, copper. Copper's still good, you can wire stuff up with it, like The Amazing Spider-Man 2's nipples! [preparing to attach electric clamps to ASM2's tits]

Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure

• "But what else besides HD video could do justice to every line that Chris Jones's face has acquired since he last played Tex Murphy in 1998? Sorry, that was needlessly cruel. We can't help how we age - nor indeed can game mechanics OHHH, THIS PARAGRAPH'S GOING WELL!"

Wolfenstein: The New Order

• "One of the first things we do is watch a soldier shoot a room full of hospital patients before we stab him right up the Lebensraum."
  • Accompanied by said soldier crying "Ach mein bollocken".
• "'Hey, this guy's a Nazi; would you like to drown him in his own piss?' the game might ask. 'Sorry, did you say something? I was busy drowning a Nazi in his own piss,' we might reply." Made even funnier since Yahtzee isn't making this scenario up - players actually get to do this in the game.
• "The President's only bloody handcuffed to the launch codes because he loves to accessorize!"
• "Map screens in meat-head shooters have been rarely seen since the preferred method of navigating mission shooters became to set every single one in a fucking corridor, with Christmas lights dangling overhead in case players get distracted by an overly-decorative skirting board."
• Yahtzee ends up grouping Wolfenstein: The New Order among the "pretty good meathead shooters" along with Resistance 3 and Escape from Butcher Bay, adding, "I've started mentally crossing out 'The Chronicles of Riddick' part from that title in the hope of reducing the spread of infection."
• The ending, where Yahtzee throws in a limerick "just for old times' sake":
  With the Wolfenstein series updated,
  It's straightforward enough, I can't hate it,
  For the goodies I root
  And the baddies I shoot
  And their corpses I leave desecrated!
• "All I wanna know is whether or not MechaHitler is still canon."

WATCH DOGS

• Yahtzee calling the game "Watch Underscore Dogs" at one point.
• "WATCH_DOGS does not live up to the hype, but that's hardly fair because it would need to have made me spontaneously grow a third bollock to do that."
• Yahtzee points out the rather eccentric fashion sense of hackers in this game, likening it to "the halfway point between My Little Pony and Pinhead from Hellraiser."
• "I really liked the two or three missions where you stay on the cameras and guide an accomplice from cover to cover, because at that point you're basically playing as the tutorial voice in somebody else's video game." Complete with a loudspeaker telling Gordon Freeman "PRESS THE JUMP KEY. THINK YOU CAN HANDLE THAT, FUCKWIT?"

E3 2014

• Yahtzee starts the video coming up with 3 E words ^note Excruciating, End, and Eggnog to properly introduce E3 2014, or its true name: "The Meh heard 'round the world". Complete with a pendulum log knocking the E3 sign down.
• Microsoft, and by extension, the Xbox One, listing all sorts of exclusive games to convince people to buy the system after last year's flop, which eventually veers down to a breakdown.
  Oh, what do you want?! Please don't hit me! I didn't even mention the Kinect!
• Yahtzee pointing out that Capcom hands out exclusives "like a shilling whore," while in the background Capcom points out that it's five shillings for him personally.
• Sony's "intolerable air of smugness" is presented as the head of a smug looking cat atop a PS4 while Yahtzee is traumatized by a game suddenly sprouting out from under its skirt.
• Regarding EA's release policies: "Pants down, fist up, POUND POUND POUND." Promptly followed by Battlefield Hardline approaching his freshly pained bum with a cactus.
• His comparison of Nintendo to a slightly senile grandfather, "still lost in his own little world - gently masturbating."
• The dreariness of reporting the whole affair finally gets to him:
  ..if you don’t mind, I think I’m just going to slide to the floor and hope to get smothered to death by the Roomba. (a Roomba wanders into view, followed by a quiet thud)
• The idea of a Co-op Assassin's Creed game, Yahtzee attempting to shoot four of the assassins at once, and one of the assassins facepalming when his teammates jumped a guard and mooned him.

Murdered: Soul Suspect

• Yahtzee caps off the review by making a joke about how the protagonist looks ridiculous wearing a fedora and a vest. That's not the joke though; the joke is that, as soon as Yahtzee made this joke, an imp holds up Yahtzee's well-known publicity photo in which he wears a fedora and a vest.
  (beat, as Yahtzee looks at the picture) ...Well I never said I wasn't a hypocrite
  • Confusing the main character with Boyzone's Ronan Keating.

2014, Quarter 3

Tomodachi Life

• Senor Koquonfaes makes his glorious return, becoming the most popular Mii in Yahtzee's created world. He even winds up marrying secret agent X from his novel Jam.
  I guess only she can be trusted to keep the terrible secret of what he has instead of a cock!
  (Lights go out, and a pair of eyes at crotch level say, "'Ello.")
• In the credits sequence Senor Koquenfaes proposes to Lady Hitler and they go to the bedrom where Lady Hitler... presents herself to him and he has sex with her by mashing his face against her butt.
• Yahtzee quickly puts a stop to two males seducing an obese elderly woman.
  I gave these characters enough shit in their respective works without letting some game turn them into granny-fiddlers too.
• "Also, Mr. Wonderful from Mogworld ended up marrying Drylda from Mogworld, which was all kinds of weird."

Enemy Front & Valiant Hearts

• "Valiant Hearts is set in the first World War; rarely touched by pop-culture for lacking the clean "Us versus Bastards" fairy-tale narrative of its sequel. World War I was just Europe being such a flustercuck of grudges and alliances that when Serbia turned the little crank of Austria-Hungary, it set off the whole Mouse Trap machine of alliances and by the time the little plastic man jumped into the pool, everyone was fighting everyone else."

Shovel Knight

• "I thought I'd look for a second game to do one of my indie two-for-ones, but I opened the Steam new releases page, saw the title 'Zombie Solitaire,' and then I fucking closed the Steam new releases page."
• The challenges of creating authentically retro games, including "having to make all the music and sound effects by stamping on the tails of cats wearing voice modulators" (represented as a cat in a Bane mask).
• "I'm a trifle miffed!" accompanied by a picture of Yahtzee as an angry trifle.

EarthBound

• "To my mind, a JRPG just isn't a JRPG unless it ends with a bunch of teenagers using The Power of Friendship to kill God. It's like if you don't have the 'stallion scene', you can't really call yourself 'barnyard porn'."
• Depicting the game's "cult appeal" by giving the box art the head of Jim Jones and a pitcher of Kool-Aid.
• Describing Ness as "that one Smash Bros. character with the baseball cap and the Thousand-Yard Stare like Wario's been molesting him in the Green Room."
• "So, an important artistic cult hit was marginalized and ignored because it didn't fit within the latest standards for graphics in an industry obsessed with competitive technology? Christ, isn't it great that that kind of bollocks doesn't happen anymore?!" Complete with the PS4 and Xbox One dog-fighting in the background.
• Yahtzee theorizes that the reason Ness' mother is okay with all this is that she wants to spend more time with "Mr. Buzz-Buzz".
• And the appearances of "Weird Uncle Peter", who first lets the group of children watch From Beyond, then gets to "play the naked wrestling game" with Ness' mother.
• "[The soundtrack] alternates between fun, jaunty melodies and weird electronic ambiance, like somebody left a Theremin in Buffalo Bill's house."
• "VROOM!" "WHINNY!" "ROCK!"
• Depicting Ness with Kamina shades when describing how the game lets you automatically defeat enemies if your level is high enough.
  Why don't more games do that? Well, these days, cause if they cut out all the dull, pointless, repetitive, insultingly easy combat, then you drop half the fucking game right there.
• "It gives the game a sense of timeless nostalgia, which always strikes a nerve with veteran gamers, who long eternally for the days when their metabolism worked."
• "I confess I haven't played the other two because neither were officially released outside Japan, presumably in fear of being piddled on again, so playing them would be a dirty crime!"

Transistor

• Viewer: (appears behind Yahtzee's avatar) Didn't this game come out a while ago, Yahtzee?
  Yahtzee: What the fuck are you doing in my house, viewer!?! (a broken window appears behind the viewer, who is now holding a crowbar as he says this; the viewer then threatens him with said crowbar) ...Also; yes.
• "So all we have are questions: Who are we? Why is the ice lolly talking? Did we kill this dude? Who does our hair, it's fabulous!"

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

• "Has the dry period gotten longer and more obnoxious this year, or is it just me, getting longer and more obnoxious? No fucking hurry, publishers. You just keep putting in more of that shiny graphics you like, I'll just sit here eating my own skin."
• Yahtzee decided to create something of a mini-series since there was nothing left to review. It details the games industry making huge mistakes that it never learned from. He made an accompanying jingle to go with it:
  Let's all laugh at an industry/that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee!
  • Also the title card: "Zero Punctuation's Occasional Guide to "Special"^note originally "Retarded" Moments in Gaming History".
• Describing the Atari 2600 as "a wood-paneled console that had more joystick ports than on-screen pixel capacity and sounded like a vuvuzela attached to an elephant dying of flatulence."
• The whole part of E.T. falling off pits over and over really takes the cake.
• "When running away from an enemy, the combined footstep sound effects can be used to create a funky boom box beat, so it's at least equally as fun as rhythmically banging your head on a wall."
• Yahtzee’s summation of the game’s Troubled Production and it’s subsequent failure.
  "Honestly, though, the game itself is virtually irrelevant in the face of what was going on around it. It did not cost 125 million fucking dollars to make pixels fart at a green wall! Atari had to license the movie rights for a start, and were so confident that the game would be a hit that they threw 20 mil at that alone. Most of which was later used to mop up Steven Spielberg’s tears. Furthermore, Atari wanted the game done by September 1st to be ready for the ever-lucrative Christmas sales, but development only began at the end of July! And even for a game that would take up less memory than a plain text document of every positive thing anyone would ever say about it ("well there is that whole funky boombox beat thing"), this was a bit on the tight side! So under that kind of pressure those mewling little shits on Christmas morning should have been grateful that the result didn’t melt the console into hot slag and set fire to the tree. But mewl those shits did, and out of 4 million copies pridefully manufactured by Atari after they closed their eyes and stuck their fingers in their ears, about 3.5 million came back unsold or returned. It was then proposed that the remainder be buried in a New Mexico landfill, where they would congeal together into a vast life-form called Atarilla, that they could harness with a saddle of bone and leather and use to avenge themselves upon an uncaring world, but eventually the project was scaled back to just digging the landfill and forgetting about it."
• "E.T. was just the little brown top-hat being worn by the all-singing, all-dancing shit-show that the market had become."
• Yahtzee comparing the launch of the Xbox One and the NES.
  The difference is, after launch Nintendo threw the cover off and went "Fooled you, it's a games console!" Whereas Microsoft threw the cover off and went "Fooled you, it's shit!"'
  • And just prior to that, he asks whether any companies ever overspend on overhyped games that disappoint the public — "And how's the bear shitting in the woods index, these days?"^note Bear: Output's up
    • Followed by: "Just in: bears shitting in woods index down 2 points."
• "I dread to think how bad the game adaptation of Mac & Me would have been (Googles hastily)"

Firefall

• "This week, I've been playing Firefall, a 'Free-to-Play Massively Multiplayer Shootah'. Now there's an evocative six-word phrase, possibly right up there with 'Before running screaming from the room'."
• The "Fuck the Earth" table, which includes "Zombies" and "Zombies Again".

Sacred 3

• "You know, what pisses me off is that all the things I'm good at are things that everyone assumes they could do if they tried. Playing the bassoon or fluffing a walrus people respect, 'cause there's a specialist skill goes into those, but writing? "Pah! I learnt that in school! Fucking aced it! They made me start doing it all in joined-up letters just to give everyone else a chance! And that, Mr. Croshaw, is why I felt my background production made me qualified to rewrite all the story copy you did for us to be more like a recent popular film." "Well, you know what I say to that, Mr. Producer? Fifty dollars an hour, please!" Blimey, I wonder how people with integrity get through life."

Risen 3

• "I was never going to be able to take the game seriously, because I've just thought the sentence 'I'm Jungle King of the monkeys'."
• "The combat clicked a little better when I acquired a counter-attack move, which is why it should be given to you standard, rather than taught for a thousand gold from Generic NPC 247 of 9,812."
• Yahtzee complaining about the incredibly generic character designs: "I'm not asking for the Mass Effect thing, where they're all different species; one human, one goblin, one pistol shrimp. Nor am I asking for achingly politically-correct diversity 'til it resembles fucking Sesame Street. Just, more ways to tell the fuckers apart would be nice!"
• Yahtzee sheepishly laughing at his own "p-irate" pun.

Daikatana

• Yahtzee subverts the name of the title card by calling the segment "Guide to Retarded Moments in Retarded Retards".
  • And it is subtitled as "Guide to Special Moments in Special Specialness".
• "I speak of one of the most notorious disappointments in the entire history of first-person shooters." "Jesus Christ, Yahtzee, how many videos are you gonna do on Duke Nukem Forever?" "No, you twat, the other one!" Complete with depicting DNF as a literal dead horse.
• "I was slightly surprised to find Daikatana available on Steam, but even more so by the feature list: "25 glorious weapons to collect and utilize", "Two highly-trained sidekicks to watch your back." I'd have said it was being sarcastic if I thought publishers had any self-awareness at all."
  Publisher: <sitting calmly behind a desk> I am a monster spawned on this Earth to plague the virtuous.
  • He continues: "But, realistically, everyone knows that its infamous reputation is the only reason this game is on Steam, and the blurb should have read, 'Roll up, roll up, everyone come and see the freak!'"
• The Running Gag of mocking the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad.
• "Under what circumstances could anyone need a shotgun that fires six times with every use? (Cut to a slide reading "Topical Humour") Other than being an American police officer."
• "At this point, the universe takes two paths: one in which Romero spearheads a bold, artistic movement in game design as a misunderstood genius, burdened with the egotism that often strikes the auteur; or Romero is forever lambasted as a boob so massive that even the most determined baby would struggle to get its gob around it. And which universe we ended up with hinged on one thing: Daikatana not being a pile of execrable garbage. (Beat) Better luck next time, universe!" (A baby gnawing on a tit balloon flies away.)

Lichdom: Battlemage

• You know the review will be good when the first lines are "Oh, for fuck's sake!"
• Yathzee going on a rant for the first full minute of runtime complaining about the overuse of colons in game titles (like Beyond: Two Souls) and vowing to pronounce the colons as dry heave noises from now on.
  • Then he goes on to question the need for such a title, when the under-title works perfectly on its own:
    Are we to take it that Lichdom *hurk* Battlemage are the first installment in an on-going Lichdom series, no necessarily about battlemagery? Should we look forward to Lichdom *hurk* Dishwasher or Lichdom *hurk* Tax Accountant? Of course we fucking shouldn't! Because the game is about battlemaging and essentially nothing else! I'm pretty sure there aren't even any liches in it!
• Yahtzee explaining the card-collecting part of the game, comparing them to Yu-Gi-Oh cards like Blue Eyes White Dragon or The Creator. When he explains fusing into stronger cards, two Yu-Gi-Oh cards become one Pikachu.
• Ranting about most popular indie games having cliches like "The inevitable fucking zombies" or crafting, saying that most FPS games have crafting by combining "man" with "bullet" to make "dead man."
  • "And Battlemage crafts Crafting System with Action Fantasy to create Bored Yahtzee!"
• "I'd call my dog "Battlemage" — fuck it, I'd call my kid "Battlemage" too; the playground beatings would be very character-building!"
• "Our story starts with a literal moustache-twirling villain walking into your house, weeing on the carpet, licking on all the doorknobs, and then walking out while everyone laughs at your stupid, sad face. Whereupon a mysterious man in a hood grants you the power to shoot fire out your hands and tell you to go nuts. I suppose if you make a fantasy game there is no fantasy like power fantasy."

The Sims 4

• "What about an intervening stage between infancy and childhood, so that babies don't instantly switch from one to the other, and parents don't suddenly find themselves breastfeeding a twelve-year-old in mixed company? "Out the balloon with you, toddlers! Whoops, they didn't fly so well!""
• The "Player first!" Running Gag.
  Yahtzee: So explain, Sims 4, why you shouldn't be hurled immediately into this trough of burning slurry.
  (Beat)
  Sims 4: (pushes Yahtzee) Player first!

Destiny

• Yahtzee opens the review with a limerick (one originally used in Rhymedown Spectacular, as he mentions after reciting it. Unlike Wolfenstein, the rest neglects to follow suit by adding more verses, but it's still funny):
  There once was a game called Destiny / Looked more like a graphical test to me / It's brown, there's a gun / And it looks as much fun / As requiring a double mastectomy
• His sheer smugness at calling out the intro cinematic as a Cliché Storm:
  "This was the end but—" IT WAS ALSO THE BEGINNING! Was that what you were going to say, Destiny intro cinematic!? It was, wasn't it, you fucking hack!?
  • And on a similar note, Yahtzee complains about how unimaginatively the alien races featured in the game are named:
    The dudes in question are a succession of hostile Alien races collectively named "The Darkness" and individually after random words from the dictionary: "The Fallen", "The Hive", "The Cabal", "The Vex", "The Hinge", "The Recidivism", [and] "The Felch"^note the last three are jokes; there aren't actually Destiny mobs called those.

2014, Quarter 4

D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die

• First and foremost, Yahtzee begins the review with what may well be the most epic example of Added Alliterative Appeal ever spoken:
  "Delighting that it is the the drought is dying down, doing Destiny drained your debonair delegate. Dominant developers delay for a dog's age, then deliver a desperately drab discharge and dare to describe it as the due destination for depictions of destruction. Dammit, I don't desire to designate devotion to drudges as dull as dishwater, so I'm declaring a downloadables day, derived directly from discovering D4 (Dark Dreams Don't Die) [...]"
  • And there's also one at the end, where Yahtzee praises the game for its creativity but ultimately disparages it for its poor design:
    Yahtzee: So while it is disarmingly different from the dime-a-dozen dreariness of Destiny and derivatives, demented displays don't decrease dodgy design. Duh!
    [...]
    The Stinger: Distinctly dishy derider of dross.
    Do democratic delegates deem it dutiful to dress down during digital debates? Daily!
    Do-wa-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-do.
• Yahtzee struggling with the premise of the game, which he finds to be a complete Mind Screw. It's the slow realization of the insanity that really sells the bit.
  D4: So our hero is private detective David Young, whose life fell apart when his wife was murdered and he was shot in the head.
  Yahtzee: Alright, I’m with you so far, it’s Memento with anime haircuts.
  D4: The bullet in the head gives Young the mystical ability to travel through time and interact with events associated with specific objects.
  Yahtzee: Ok, bit of a wobble, but American television has broadcast weirder concepts.
  D4: With her dying breath, Mrs. Young mentioned the letter "D", and so David quests to solve her murder apparently by investigating every single human being on earth whose name begins with D.
  Yahtzee: Starting to lose me now. Wouldn't he realize he needed slightly more to go on the first time he was arrested for stalking Donny Osmond?
  D4: Young shares his apartment with an insane scantily-clad woman who thinks she’s a cat.
  Yahtze: Aaaaand I’m lost, Swery. I am officially lost, down the back of the fridge with a warranty card and a missing rice cooker attachment.
  Yahtzee's Avatar: [upon spotting the lost rice cooker attachment] Ooh!
• Yahtzee describes controlling a character directly with the Kinect as being akin to "talking a blind person through an obstacle course with a fruit bat stuffed in your mouth."
• Yahtzee comments on the stamina Scrappy Mechanic:
  So there's also a rather obnoxious stamina mechanic. Every action you take, from opening cupboards to asking someone an asinine question, drains a little stamina which is restored by hoovering up every random food item you find lying around, in cupboards, bins, and other people's mouths. Young seems to metabolize like a fucking nuclear submarine, but I never did find out what happens if you let stamina run out. Taking an educated guess from the rest of the game, I'll hazard that it's something not fun. (cue David getting decapitated with his head flying off his neck)

Hyrule Warriors

• Yahtzee comments on how easy Hyrule is to conquer. We then see Ganondorf conquering it from Zelda, and renaming it "Ganonland", then Link conquers it back and names it back to Hyrule, before David Hasselhoff appears out of nowhere, conquers it from Link and names it "Kickass-burg".
• Zelda mooning over a picture of CD-i Link.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

• The entire intro is spent trying to talk Monolith out of drama-filled suicide by tackling something as massive as The Lord of the Rings franchise.
  Yahtzee: invoked It's like trying to put on an all-black Nativity play for a Fundamentalist Christian and a militant Atheist, both holding megaphones.
  Monolith: Oh, I forgot, we're also introducing original characters as we dramatize an as-yet unseen aspect of the canon.
  Yahtzee: Jesus Christ, Monolith! Don't you understand you have friends who care about you and want you to live and release Condemned 2 on Steam, for fuck's sake?!
  • "Anyway, after all that, Middle-Earth, *hurk!* Shadow of Mordor is quite good. ...Fucking anticlimactic, really."
• On Talion and Celebrimbor: "It's like Calvin and Hobbes, if Calvin was a piece of wood with a frowny face drawn on it, and Hobbes was another piece of wood with a frowny face drawn on it."
• His Alternative Character Interpretation of the Orcs trying way too hard to act tough, culminating in one saying he's actually an Otherkin financial analyst, and should be referred to as "Alan".
• Yahtzee puts another spin on the "You might ask" rhetorical question.
  "Wait, Yahtzee, I thought you said this game was 'quite good'." Thanks for paying attention, voice in my head! "No worries, Yahtzee! Don't forget to kill the whores!" Alright, stop fussing!
• Yahtzee's increasingly exaggerated dramatic pronunciations of "Mordor".
  • "...named when someone noticed that their house didn't have enough means of ingress." And in the credits: "Gondor, contrarily, was named when someone noticed that the entrance to their house had mysteriously vanished."
• Yahtzee's praise for the Nemesis System — Specifically, the part where it really motivates you to not die. He then points out the fact that this is actually a normal goal to have in video games.
  Not only does this keep you invested in not being killed... Blimey, that was a weird sentence.

Alien Isolation

• "So after Aliens (hurk) Colonial Marines was as entertaining as pushing a television aerial into your nasal cavity and tuning it to the Antiques Roadshow..."
  TV Announcer: What a sterling set of milk jugs you have.
• "But never let it be said that I can't admit that I'm wrong, and I'll murder anyone who says otherwise!"
• This line where Yahtzee praises how clever and subtle Alien: Isolation is:
  "Alien Isolation is the game Dead Space wanted to be! It's so subtle that for the first hour or two, you'd be forgiven for thinking you've mistakenly bought Angry Space People Isolation instead."
• The parallels Yahtzee draws between Alien Isolation and the BioShock franchise:
  "There's a lingering waft of BioShock in the air as Amanda [Ripley] arrives at a decrepit space station where the residents have descended into a violent, self-interested survivalism, straight from the wettest dreams of libertarians. [a twitchy-eyed survivalists wards Amanda off from his stockpile of beans with a shotgun] But this failed utopia is founded not on objectivism or white supremacy, but on being piss-terrified of getting the top of your head gnawed off every time you walk under a drop ceiling."
• The description regarding how slow-paced the game is:
  "I spent more time on my hands and knees than the prostitute envoy to the mole kingdom. "
• "You built suspense, Alien Isolation! It's a very nice suspense, you don't have to keep building it! No, I don't think it would be nicer with a conservatory, put that trowel down before I smack you with it!"
• The Running Gag involving cereal bowls.

The Evil Within

• Yahtzee's opening:
  I was hiding behind a wall in an abandoned insane asylum with my face pressed up against an advanced buildup of mildew the other day when a mysterious figure in a big coat and a hat sidled up and said "Hey, you like your Outlast and your Amnesia and your creepy horror based around hiding from things and having the defensive capability of a Kinder Surprise, right? Why not check out this game we made, called The Evil Within. Look, you're in a creepy hospital and have to sneak around a chainsaw murderer."
  
  "Looks like my cup of tea," I said, but then I reached the end of the starting section, which coincidentally marked the end of the E3 gameplay video I'd seen, and the game went "Bored now! Let's have a car chase." What?! "And here's a pistol and a shotgun and a crossbow that shoots lightning somehow. And now you're in the woods massacring zombie farmers and avoiding traps that only the twitchiest caffeine-riddled paranoid would be able to anticipate!"
  
  Wait a second, I recognize that voice. Resident Evil 4! Why this deception?! "Look, I'm having some trouble with the kids right now. Resident Evil 6 has started identifying as a sea urchin."
• Yahtzee's succinct description of Shinji Mikami:
  'Course, to expect subtlety from Shinji "RE4/God Hand/Vanquish/Shadows of the Damned" Mikami is to expect birthday cake to drop out of a donkey's arse.
• Really all of the interactions between the game designer and the boss telling him to make a game, for example:
  Boss: Hey, make a horror game!
  Designer: Okay, what about?
  Boss: I just told you, about horror! (speech balloon with a skull inside)
  Designer: No, I mean what happens in it? What's the context? What are the major themes you want to work with?
  Boss: Horror (speech balloon with a skull inside), horror (speech balloon with a skull inside) and horror (speech balloon with a skull inside)! Jesus Christ, just do it, why are you so difficult to work with?!
  • And later on:
    Designer: So how about the horror's happening because reality's being overwritten by a deranged, disfigured scientist's twisted subconscious... and also he's half ostrich and rides a unicorn from space and you're not listening anymore, are you?
    Boss: Yup, sounds good! Just do it! Call me if you need money, I'm off to the cocaine tasting.

Bayonetta 2

• "Bayonetta does give representation to one severely neglected demographic, and that's to people who are capable of enjoying themselves!" Cue Tomb Raider (2013) and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor standing around going "GRIM GRIM" and "SAD SAD" while Bayonetta 2 excitedly bursts onto the scene surrounded by stars and glitter while wearing a feathered boa.
• His explanation for why using the Wii U's remote-play function feels unnecessary with ''Bayonetta 2'.
  "Wii U, I am playing a game about a pole-dancer fighting demons! Obviously, I live alone."
• Bayonetta's new hairstyle and the fact that her outfit is still made of her own hair. It has to come from somewhere. Note: If you look closely at the new design, it's clear that, when she cut off her old haircut, she attached that hair to her shoulder pads. However, Yahtzee showed "other areas of origin".
  Yahtzee (as Lara): EEEEEEEEWWWWWW!!!
• "...which is why it feels so lurchingly out of place whenever characters swear. Bayonetta’s supposed to be a classy and in-control sort of lady so when she goes 'Fuck off!' in the middle of a combo like a cockney market-stall vendor noticing a police man, it feels a bit incongruous. What, so you just disco danced a purple frog into existence and made it lick a centaur to death, but now it’s time for some gritty realism? I like my swearing but in the wrong place it brings down the whole gosh darn tone! [Beat] You cunt."

Sunset Overdrive

• Yahtzee expresses his opinion on why "trying too hard" is not a valid complaint.
  God forbid that someone try too hard! God forbid that they insert a little passion into the things they do! Forcibly if necessary! Spraying their passion all around the inside of... sorry, that got weird on me.
• Yahtzee has fun subverting the Rule of Three again.
  Why can we grind infinitely along rails and wires with no apparent means of propulsion? "Because it is a video game!" Why can we bounce three storeys up in the air off of potted bushes? "Because video game!" Why are you winking to camera with every single line of dialogue? "Because I'm having a stroke!"

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

• "It's Kevin Spacey, of COURSE he's the villain! He's got two faces: 'smart-arse' and 'recently punched for being a smart-arse'."
• "The Batman Singularity, the hypothetical point in which all characters in every video game are Batman." (Lara Croft leaps down on an enemy from a high place wearing a cape and cowl and shouting "I am the night!")
• Claiming to have deduced Irons is the villain because (in addition to being played by Kevin Spacey) he's "the only white dude in the game without atrocious facial hair".

Assassin's Creed: Unity

• "I downloaded the Steam version and my computer promptly burst into tears":
  Yahtzee's Computer: Why have you put this inside me?! Is this about that "selling your search history to the government" thing?
  • "It stuttered, it bugged out, it kept shutting down, it was like how I react when an attractive stranger attempts to flirt."
• Comparing the constant reminders to sign up for online play to "trying to find video porn in the early 2000s."
  Computer: You are not logged in to FantasyManatee.com
• "And it's a shame, because this is the game I said Assassin's Creed should make around the time Assassin's Creed 3 was tumpty-tumptying its way around the drearier of the two major global conflicts of the 18th century."
  British Guy: Motherfuckin' signing papers!
• "The French Revolution's a no-brainer, surely: sex and violence are none the less juicy for its historical accuracy^note An imp gets put in the guillotine and says, "Oh, I see what you did there" before Yahtzee decapitates him and his blood gets sprayed on Yahtzee, with the other guy getting a thumb-up plenty of classical architecture to accidentally leap off to your death,^note An assassin climbs up the Notre Dame Cathedral before jumping off and saying "Je ne regrette rien" a chance to subvert the usual Assassins-Templars-yay downtrodden boo-aristos dynamic. And none of those opportunities are missed, or should I say opport-Assassin's-Creed-Unities. That said...^note "Fat head""
• The Running Gag of Yatzhee apparently having a sea-mammal fetish.
• "This is all solid stuff, but solid stuff on a wonky table will still collapse."
• "But never mind all that gameplay shit, you wanna know if Assassin's Creed is still doing the bridging future narrative thing! ...Tokenly yes; Future Desmond's currently arranged in some specimen jar somewhere, and Future Silent Protagonist from Black Flag is off somewhere being quiet. So this time, we, the player, are playing as a random pleb sitting at home playing video games. Now that's immersion, motherfuckers!"

Far Cry 4

• Yahtzee's dislike of online co-op story modes.
  If you ask me, dropping co-op into single player only makes sense if the game is incredibly difficult and you want to teach the world about the power of friendship )all of this while Yahtzee stands on the box for Dark Souls). But who needs online co-op in Far Cry 4, when off-line had all the co-op I needed? The four player tag team of me, Colonel Tusky (an elephant appears next to Yahtzee), Stripey McBigTeeth (a tiger appears next to the elephant), and Florence The Fully Upgraded Sniper Rifle (a sniper rifle with a sex doll head strapped to its barrel appears in Yahtzee's hands)?
• Yahtzee's disappointment with Ajay Ghale as a player character, particularly when compared to Jason Brody in Far Cry 3:
  Where Brody became a killing machine out of desperate survival need and enough drugs to occupy Amy Winehouse for one lazy Sunday afternoon, Ghale only does it essentially because somebody told him to and he didn't want to make a fuss. He's just a dope who does nothing but agree with the last thing he heard. And everyone around him seems to realize it, you can tell from the way characters give him mission briefings. Every single time they make some token instructing noises, give him a little encouraging smack on the bum and close the door in his face and go back to the TV. Ajay's story eventually leads to his parent's dark secret that explains why the villain has an interest in him. But since Ajay reacts to the revelation like a St. Bernard being told he can't have another biscuit, my first thought was "Any chance we could play as your parents instead? They sound more interesting than you."
• "And furthermore, eagles. Maybe Ghale looks as much to them like an unwitting sparrow as he does to me, because those fucking birds don't give one predatory shit. You never see them coming, and so they are essentially the game's way of saying "Hey, we rolled a dice, and now we're just gonna take some of your health away. Which of your eyeballs would you say was least necessary?"
  • It's worth noting that Yahtzee evidently hated the eagles in the game so much that the subtitle for the review on YouTube is literally just "F**k Eagles."
• Yahtzee's satisfaction with riding an elephant into battle.
  What's up, motherfuckers?! The Elephant in the Room is that you're all fucking dead!!
• The credits scene has Yahtzee gleefully riding an elephant again, only to have it blown up by an imp. The image of Yahtzee's avatar despairing over the smoking stumps of elephant feet remaining where they stood is strangely hilarious.

Dragon Age: Inquisition

• The opening skit about Dragon Age: Inquisition trying to join the AAA big boy's club of next-gen games, only for Destiny to try and let it down gently, before pointing out that the series has never looked very good.
  Dragon Age: Inquisition: You let Assassin's Creed: Unity in and his characters' bits pop off like Gabe Newell's shirt buttons!
  Destiny: Alright, fine, but I'd better see some moist-looking skin textures or you're out the fucking door!
• invoked Yahtzee admitting that as much complaining and critiquing that he's going to be subjecting Dragon Age: Inquisition to, Inquisition is easily his favorite game in the series.
  "And that's probably because unlike Dragon Age II, it feels like stuff is actually happening in it, and it isn't just about the daily life of some fuck and his neighbourhood watch group. And unlike Dragon Age 1, it manages to do the epic scale while remaining focused on a central narrative, where the threat is something that one can sense constantly looming overhead and not some vague villainous force that we have to deal with at some point, but which seems happy to put its feet up and read Gardeners' World while we dither about with distractions as long as we like."
• "The plot is: the local equivalent of Satan is trying to blow up the world and you are the only one who can stop them. Done, bam, wallop! Nice strong core for everything to be built around, like an erection in a pavlova."
• "Shit, we thought we were onto something with all our existing religious and military authorities, but your particle effects have shown us the way!"
• The sign with Tamriel, Hyrule, and Lordran all being hastily crossed-off before Yahtzee remembers the Constructed World of the Dragon Age franchise is called "Thedas".
• Yahtzee's complaint about the "minimum faffing-about quota", complete with a "You Must Faff This Much To Proceed" sign.

Sonic Boom

• "You know, I don't think 'Achieved' is the word I'd use—Shat out with Cry Engine, maybe. Torturously prolonged with Cry Engine, or perhaps enabled with Cry Engine, in the same way one enables a crippling drug habit."
• "Challenge must have gotten shunted down the priority list to pay for the voice actors' humiliation insurance."
• "Saying something isn't enough to make it true, unless you say something like 'Sega are attracting derision, the massive wankers.'"
• "No, I know what it is! It’s an endurance test, you see how much of the dialogue you can listen to before you slice your own ears off with a paper guillotine! (Or perhaps turn the volume down, you spaz.)"
• The ending exchange.
  Yahtzee: What makes you think I'm this stupid, Sonic Boom?
  Sonic Boom: You bought me!
  Yahtzee: ...Touché.

Top 5 of 2014

• Yahtzee's comments on his choice for fourth worst game of the year (Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII):
  I did hesitate a little to stick in the bottom five a game I’m pretty sure I didn't get and wasn't for me, but then I tried to picture someone who it was for and did get it, and then that they were introduced as my future daughter in-law and then I pictured myself chasing them across the croquet lawn with an elephant gun.
• His comments on his third best game of the year (Alien: Isolation):
  You know me; I don't think it's a good year unless I've lost at least one piece of furniture to a game that makes me cack my pants with the force of a shotgun blast.
• And his comments on his second worst game of the year (Sonic Boom):
  Sonic Boom can suck my fat cock! I would think of a more roundabout way of saying that, but I refuse to put more effort in than the developers did.
• From his praise for his second best game of the year (Wolfenstein: The New Order): "Yes, you heard me right, I said 'killing face Yahtzees with a spoon'." Complete with Yahtzee's face plastered onto an imp's head, and with a spoon in BJ's hands.
• His complaint that it feels like the developers behind Sonic Boom and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (his third worst game of the year) "were both wearing oven mitts".

2015 Episodes

2015, Quarter 1

The Talos Principle

• While talking about the "shtory", Yahtzee finds a piece of paper that says "Have you noticed how this situation is analogous to Plato's interpretation of the Orpheus myth?" He dismissively tosses it over his shoulder, whereupon it literally says "Okay I'll go away again, then."
• Yahtzee snarking on the by-now-cliché "time travel duplicate" puzzles.
  I wish I could time-travel back to the Newgrounds flash programmer who first came up with that, and hold his arms while my temporal clone punches him in the stomach!
• Yahtzee's description of Croteam's map design aesthetics, described as a "huge, cluttered map with tons of unused space so Serious Sam-worthy you'd almost expect headless suicide bombers to come screaming around the corner at any moment." This quickly followed by one of his imps with no head and round hands running full tilt at him going "AAAAAAAAAA".
• Commenting on unexplained parts of the puzzle mechanics.
  It's possible for example to put boxes on top of the roving proximity mines. It's not fair if you don't make all the rules clear. If I'm stuck in a puzzle game, I prefer it to be because I'm a big thicky bo-bo who can't figure out where all the pieces go, not because one of the pieces was still in the box. Forgive me if it didn't occur to me to go near the bleeping explodey death ball and repurpose it as a dessert trolley!
• invoked After ultimately recommending the game, Yahtzee comments on how impressively engaging and intelligent The Talos Principle really is considering how it comes from Croteam in a major case of Playing Against Type:
  I mean, you ask Serious Sam to redirect laser beams, he'll probably just redirect his bollocks into your eye sockets.
• The song on the stinger:
  Random documents and audio logs,
  We find them stuck to notice boards, we find them under dogs,
  We're gonna put them in a file and give it a review,
  When we're bored of all the gameplay but we've nothing else to do! (drunken thud)

Elite: Dangerous

• "Man, you don't see much of that these days, a title consisting of two adjectives. Remakes of nostalgic games that rely on crowd-funding to pay for all their rose-tinted glasses, on the other hand, that's slightly more common!" Complete with the image of Elite: Dangerous, Wasteland 2, and Mighty No. 9 as pan-handlers.
• A lot of Freeze Frame Bonuses in this one include: "At 900 trillion miles, turn left", "And that I would describe as my third favourite penis anecdote", "'and over yer gold!"
  • For the Xbox One controller:
    Move aboot
    Divert power
    Go faster
    Flick v-sign out window
  • And for the street signs:
    Contacts
    Commodities
    Outfitting
    Shady alleyways
    Markets
    Black things
• Yahtzee on Elite's solo play vs. multi-player: "I get quite enough grief from all the NPC ships, thank you very much, and at least their dialogue has been spell-checked."
• After his first character died from trying to take on space pirates with his under-powered starting weapons, Yahtzee decided to build up his resources as "Commander Yahtzee II, Hero of Shopping!"
• Commander Yahtzee III died by accidentally flying into a sun. The reason for this is all but outright stated to be that Yahtzee alt-tabbed out of the game in order to change the podcast he was listening to and didn't see that he was about to hit it.
  • This becomes even more amusing after we see him nearly do it live in his Let's Drown Out video of the game, revealing that he had ample time to realize bad things were happening to his ship and just didn't notice until he'd flown into the sun.

Five Nights at Freddy's and This War of Mine

• Yahtzee nearly calls Five Nights at Freddy's Five Days a Stranger near the beginning.
• Yahtzee noting how Five Nights is up there with the newest Super Smash Bros. in terms of people clamoring for a review, but the former are much more savvy in that they know "the hungry shark is best tempted with meat, not pink wafer biscuits." Complete with picture of Yahtzee snapping up a chunk of meat from the Freddy proponents while Smash Bros holds out said treats on a fishing pole tied to the game.
• Yahtzee incredulously notes how a game like Five Nights, which looks like it was made of nothing but "a strategic arrangement of stills and animations worthy of a mid-90's CD-ROM game", can accomplish what the likes of The Evil Within with all its next-gen capabilities and first-class budget couldn't:
  It freaks my fucking balls off.
• Yahtzee eventually admits that he didn't like the game because it was too effective at scaring him.
  Yeah, look at this giant pussy over here, better pull my hat down before my clitoris starts showing.
  • Its effectiveness also ties in with his Mascot phobia mentioned in his Epic Mickey review.
• Yahtzee commenting on how he hates Jump Scares and if he suspects that they're lying in wait as he prowls around the corridors of Dead Space or Amnesia, he'd want to know that he can respond by opening fire, or legging it in the opposite direction going, “MNEHHENEEEHHEHER!!”
• After commenting on how the ESC button shuts down Five Nights at Freddy's, he ponders the practicality of it being used to get out of any tense situation.
  Yahtzee: Congratulations, Janice! When's the baby due?
  Janice: Um, I'm not pregnant, I just put on some weight.
  (Beat)
  Yahtzee: (slams ESC key) ABORT! (pulls out jetpack) FWOOOOSH.
• When he gets tired of all the Jump Scares in Five Nights at Freddy's and moves on to the more psychological horror of This War of Mine:
  Phew, I'm not tense anymore...now I'm just miserable. Hooray!
• Yahtzee singing "Live-in-able" to the Doctor Who theme. Even funnier if you remember that he did something like this in the Exclusives Showdown, too.
• Yahtzee says that FNAF is "an endurance test, not to be played for fun, but recorded for you to scream all over for the benefit of your YouTube followers." What sells it is the image of a person screaming: "AAAAAAASUPPORT MY PATREONAAAA"

Lords of the Fallen

• "We start in medias res with the protagonist, Harkyn, as in "take that dog into the garden, he's about to start harkin' all over the carpet", entering a monster infested citadel for unclear reasons,^note Harkyn: "Ah fuck it" and I can picture a conversation taking place between the creators:
  Creator A: Let's keep the story to the background and let players piece it together from context just like Dark Souls.
  Creator B: Yes, that way we can have a story that doesn't interfere with game flow.
  Creator A: But we don't want to be accused of ripping Dark Souls off, so let's also put in a bunch of clunky dialogue trees with twats!
  Creator B: Ye-mmm, uh, hmmm.
• Yahtzee keeps ridiculing the game for trying to imitate Dark Souls yet failing to grasp the essentials, while at the same time managed to amplify many of its flaws.
  Yahtzee: While Dark Souls' hit boxes were taking no small amounts of piss, Fjords of the Lawnmower is smuggling two kegs of urine under its absurdly large pauldrons. You can get hit by an attack that happened in the next room on this day four score and seven years ago!
• "Common monster here, a boss fight there, those dudes in armor everywhere."
• He also rants about the overdetailed aesthetics, in particular the character designs.
  The Stinger: I guess they took to wearing all the belts because their high school bullies kept pulling their trousers down.

Dying Light

• Yahtzee's confusion upon finding out that the developer of Dying Light, Techland, was originally the developer for Dead Island, followed by the explanation that Dead Island 2 was given to Yager Development, makers of Spec Ops: The Line, which he describes as "a game about an American agent being inserted into a Middle Eastern city on an innocuous Fetch Quest and confronting death, horror and violence while getting a lovely sun tan." Yahtzee himself reviewed both games previously, so he knows them quite well. This is then followed by the reason for his confused distress as everything starts to blur together:
  Dying Light is a game about an American agent being inserted into a Middle Eastern city on an innocuous fetch quest and confronting death, horror and- Oh God! Everything's spiraling in on itself! What are these things in front of me? Jesus Christ they're my own buttocks!
• At the end of the review, Yahtzee dramatises the the developer swap, likening developer Techland and publisher Deep Silver to an unfit parent and an appeals judge respectively.
  Techland: Please Mr. Deep Silver, we can make good zombie games now! Please let us see our child!
  Deep Silver: I don't know, Techland, Yager can do really complex storytelling...
  Techland: So can we! Look at our complex villain!
  Deep Silver: Is there a bit where he screams the protagonist's name like William Shatner in The Wrath of Khan?
  Techland: ...Maybe.
  Deep Silver: Get out of my office, Techland!

Evolve

• When he finally gets around to discussing the game after a rather extended opening rant about the AAA gaming industry: "Evolve, then. (glares at a pair of imps that look like they're about to start mating) That wasn't an instruction, sit down."
• He illustrates "the campaign mode, that strings five random games together" as a piece of string threaded through boxes for Hungry Hungry Hippos, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble and a Fifty Shades of Grey party board game.

The Order: 1886

• A few years after giving birth to the name "spunkgargleweewee", a term Yahtzee uses to describe modern military shooter games that he finds dull and uninspiring, he comes up with the new title "funkmarbleteehee" for The Order: 1886, which he deems as "a spunkgargleweewee modern shooter behind the thin disguise of an alternative setting".
• Yahtzee pointing out the protagonist's illogical and inconsistent behaviours:
  Sir Galahad: Grrr, I'm loyal to the Order.
  Resistance Member: Your Order is corrupt and I have proof.
  Sir Galahad: Grrr, I hate you, but I will come and look at your proof as long as we don't kill any people on the way to it and defend my cast-iron sense of justice.
  Resistance Member: We need to kill some people on the way to it.
  Sir Galahad: Say no more! (opens fire)^note Making it even funnier is Yahtzee making a raspberry for the machine gun fire sound.
• New Freeze Frame Bonuses when Yahtzee makes "a list of all the words that used to refer to positive things but which I now associate with pain":
  "Gameplay trailer": "This motion picture has been rated 'Fuck All to Do with Everything'"
  "Ubisoft": "Loooog intoooo uuplaay"
  "Backdoor romance": an imp offering Yahtzee flowers
• "Press X to Pattycake"
• Yahtzee talks about the plot that is cut short for time constraints:
  To go back to the Advanced Warfare comparison, it's like if Kevin Spacey just flat-out hadn't appeared in the final mission^note  Accompanied by a illustration of a note from Spacey saying, "Sorry - had to run out and audition for the role of a smug asshole. Left you a final boss fight in the fridge." and the final boss fight was instead with Kevin Spacey's pet Staffordshire Terrier, with Kevin Spacey mockingly saluting from a hang glider with 'sequel hook' written on it.
• Yahtzee calls the game The Odor: 1886 and The Snore-der: 1886.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3 D

• In contrast to how Link is typically an almighty hero of prophecy in Zelda games:
  Majora's Mask starts by taking that noble destined hero, flush with triumph from Ocarina of Time, and kicking his fucking teeth in.
• The Goron and Zora masks are represented by a lemon and a fish, respectively, each with a crude smiley face on it, while the Deku Scrub mask is described as (and depicted as) "a novelty bong".
• The reason he gives for the moon hitting the planet.
  Ere, are you lookin' at my bird? (Moon headbutts planet in retaliation)
• Yahtzee loves how cynical the game is.
  Link himself ghosts through life invisible! A permanent outsider wearing whatever face he needs to gain trust so he can steal everyone's shit without even permanently fixing their lives. It's like Quantum Leap for bastards!
• "Life would be so much simpler if all natural disasters had big angry faces on them."
• The Closing Credits.
  Still never doing Kingdom Hearts.
• "See, Ganondorf, this guy isn't even the cosmic predestined all-powerful master of evil, and he did a better job than you've ever done. He said 'I want to murder the world,' moon, smash, bam."

Resident Evil: Revelations 2

• Yahtzee misnames playable character Barry Burton as "Barry Buttons", and consequently represents him as having the head of a cuddly teddy bear for the entire review.
• "They're part of a new humanitarian group called TerraSave which has a long intro in the first episode going on about how nice they are and how you should totally trust them. So I'm assuming they'll turn out to be run by the Boston Kitten Strangler."

Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number & Ori and the Blind Forest

• Right out of the gate, we get this brilliant tortured metaphor: "Video game developers have something in common with heavy-goods vehicle operators and prostitutes who specialize in older clientele: it's extremely important that they know when to stop."
• Yahztee describes the original Hotline Miami as "a landmark in the field of gratuitous pixelated violence, a sort of dramatization of the last ten minutes of Taxi Driver on fast-forward".
• "...as the protagonist waded into yet another melee that gave him worse odds than a Shetland pony in a Gygax dungeon." Complete with "Perfectly Safe Chest".
• The "usual parade of movement power-ups" in Ori and the Blind Forest: "The double-jump, the wall-jump, the barbecue-bacon-jump with large fries..."
• His rant about the ending of Ori (calling it "misery blue balls") when the protagonists' mother is brought back to life: "I complain because it undermines the emotional impact, you see, not because I'm psychotic and want everything to die... not just because of that, anyway."

2015, Quarter 2

Battlefield: Hardline

• Calling the game Skirmish-House: Easy-Line.
• Among the things the game has done to ward off accusations of racism is making the main characters "a Scooby Gang of allies so perfectly ethnically diverse that they can all line up in order and start a novelty act called the Amazing Human Gradient."
• The cop drama Mad Libs.
  You're a cop on the ___, you've been ___ for a ___ you didn't commit and now you're out for ___ and to clear your ___.
  • Yahtzee's filling in of the blanks:
    You're a cop on the mantelpiece, you've been mistaken for a sloth you didn't commit and now you're out for a kebab and to clear your schedule.
• "INDEPENDENT THOUGHT DETECTED. CALL THE FUN POLICE."
• Pointing out the game's Fridge Logic re: being able to arrest people after getting kicked off the force, to the point were you can even arrest the (corrupt) cops out to arrest you.
  What organisation is going to come around and pick those guys up? The Criminal Police from Opposite Land who give talks to high school kids on how drugs are really great and everyone should take them?
• Yahtzee's depiction of the usual naming conventions in multiplayer is more of a Funny Background Event, but still neatly and amusingly snarks at the stereotypes of the genre's fans: a melange of various permutations of "ganja", "lone wolf", and the letter X. Among the few oddballs are "yahtz" himself, "xZaphodx", and "Gregarious_Fox".

Bloodborne

• "Thank fucking Christ I found a dead end at last, now I can try one of the other nine routes I discovered on my way here, right after I investigate this innocuous looking pile of dead crows ARGH GETOFF GETOFF GETOFF!"

Axiom Verge & Stealth Inc 2

• The leaderboard at the end of one level:
  09:05.117: World's thickest man
  09:13.184: A stuffed penguin
  09:15.981: A doorknob
  09:16.021: your dumb ass

Mortal Kombat X

• Yahtzee talking about the weird Gameplay and Story Segregation that comes from the fact that some of the new characters are related to the old ones:
  You can play the story campaign and watch Johnny Cage complain to his ex-wife, Sonya Blade, that she never makes time for their daughter any more and then you can go into one of the non-story modes and watch Johnny Cage snap his daughter in half lengthways like a giant Kit Kat.
• On a similar note, at the end of the review, Yahtzee has a hilarious theory about how parenting and discipline works in the MK universe, after a plot point where several characters are resurrected just because another character was beaten:
  Now we know why Johnny Cage was snapping his daughter in half; death has no meaning and that's just how they discipline the kids. One infraction snapped in half, two infractions take the mobile away.

GTA Online

• Yahtzee talking about how all it took was playing this game to end his newfound appreciation for multiplayer games:
  Between Dark Souls and Battlefield, I've been warming up to multiplayer lately, so I felt the time was right to indulge GTA Online for a week or so, and now at the end of that week, I would like to officially declare myself cooled right the fuck back down to multiplayer, like a birthday cake stripper mistakenly delivered to Siberia.
  • Expanding on that opinion later on in the video:
    This is a game in dire need of a violent twat fumigation.
  • Then there's Yahtzee impossibly short-lived adventures with the chat system. He heard someone say "Nigger" then immediately turned the chat off.

Broken Age: Act 2

• "...if I'd humbly asked for a few grands to make a funny little adventure game and ended up with four million, my first thought would not have been 'Wow, I'd better make this game fast.' It would have been 'I'm just going to keep inhaling cocaine until you could put me in a paper packet and call me a Sherbet Dip Dab.'"
• Describing the plot as being about "how all the problems and adversity in the world can be conquered by bumming around on a ship," and the game's climax as how "Shay and Vella realize their true potential as they engage in synchronized bumming. Wait, that came out wrong."

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

• The entire "What's that Skippy?" opening between Yahtzee and a theoretical kangaroo pet thing. It almost goes into Overly Long Gag except it's saved by his increasingly ludicrous straight-faced delivery of each bit of news, including an extremely cynical response (as if there'd be any other kind from him) to the Timmy in a Well cliche. The final one takes the cake, though.
  Yahtzee: What's that Skippy? "Kangaroo meat is a lean and tasty alternative to beef"? Oh, Skippy, I already knew that. That's why I cut off all your arms and legs! Can you wriggle back down to the basement by yourself, or do you need me to kick you down the stairs again?
• The German impression at the end is absolutely hilarious.
  German Guy 1: Gehen Sie boss fight, shooten sie massive bloke.
  (they go and notice BJ fighting with a boss roughly four times their height)
  German Guy 2: Did zey mean ze massive bloke or ze incredibly massive bloke?
  German Guy 1: It just says "massive," Hans.
  German Guy 2: Fair enough. Die, Yankee scum! (gets punched in the dick by the boss) ACH, NOT MEIN GERMAN SAUSAGE!

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

• Yahtzee opens the review expressing his ongoing disgust with the latest generation of consoles after making the mistake of trying to play the game on PS4 in the naive hope that it would work properly.
  And now your regularly scheduled reminder that the new consoles are shit. (Beat) The new consoles are shit. Thank you. For further information, look at a new console and rub shit in your eyes.
  • Yahtzee puts his baseless faith in console reliability on hallucinations of a marvellous other universe, here pictured as an XBox360 saying "Let's get rat-arsed and talk about boys!".
• The Snark-to-Snark Combat between Yahtzee and the game during the tutorial and the boss fight is comedy gold.
  Am I going the right way? Should I loot all seven milliion lootable objects in every given room just in case I need to craft something later from a broom and a colouring book? Am I knobbing the most ideal of all the knobbable whores in this brothel? So Witcher 3 sat me down and went "Alright, fuckface! How about we spend the entire first chapter of the game tutorializing the bollocks off of every feature we have. Would that help His Majesty settle in? Ride here, kill the monsters, craft that, punch these blokes, drink this, wipe that on your sword, wipe your cock off on a bedsheet, fight a griffin we have practically nailed to the floor for you. Any fucking questions?" Just one - why do you keep trying to make me play Magic: The Gathering?
  • And another Snark-to-Snark Combat between the game and Gerald:
    Meanwhile, the game watched uncomfortably from the sidelines, occasionally shouting, "Hey, there's all these fancy oils you could be using to get this done about .4 percent more efficiently. Maybe you could craft some from the entire Hanging Gardens of Babylon's worth of random herbs and flowers you've got stuffed down your trousers?" "Got any upgrades for the basic healing potion?" I shout back. "Not presently, no," replies the game. "Then I'll stick with mashing quick attack if it's all the same to you." "Well, if that's your attitude, your sword just broke again, har har har." Oh, bloody hell. Rivery Gerald's oaths of fidelity last longer than his fucking swords. I think they just stuck a hilt on an unusually long Pringle.
• The ridiculously exaggerated caricature◊ that shows up when Yahtzee is talking about the NPCs' effective facial and body animations. Also the fact that he compares this disconnect to "a badly dubbed Polish soap opera", which is rather (possibly unintentionally?) appropriate given that the source material is indeed from Poland.
  And I'd like to personally shout-out to whoever had the thankless title of Eyebrow Wrangler.
• He brings up how unpredictable some of the Nice Job Breaking It, Hero moments were. "One particularly nuanced character died as an eventual consequence of me turning an evil tree into a horse. Well, now it sounds obvious!"
• His complaint that the exaggerated British accents in the game "turn even the most dramatic scene into Monty Python Does Westeros".
  IT IS A DEAD KING
  IT HAS CEASED TO BE
• And while he recommends the game, it comes coupled with another tortured analogy.
  But as the housewife said to the randy stallion: It's possible to put TOO much in.
• Geralt is a "witcher" but he hunts monsters, not witches, as Geralt is trying to explain to a scared witch who's hiding from him behind a sofa. In fact, why don't they just call the game Monster Hunter... oh, wait.

Splatoon

• The opening of the review:
  Reports are in that Haley's Comet has been sighted and appears to be making a trail in the shape of the winning lottery numbers. But in even less likely news, Nintendo has come up with an entirely new first-party IP!
• The fact that Yahtzee plays the game in what can only be described as the most Yahtzee way possible. Run around making everything as neat and tidy as he can as far away from the other players as he can while passive aggressively undoing what anyone else with the same idea was doing.
• And the fact that his Australian Internet (represented by a Kangaroo with a satellite dish on its head) was screaming "LET'S DO THIS SHIT!" because it could actually hold it together.
• Yahtzee is clearly having fun with the game's ink puns despite deriding them.
  "Still, I think there'll be an inkrease in the number of Wii U sales with this inkredible new title.
  "But that's hardly a complaint... compaint."
  "I have an inkling that that'll be a nice little earner, or should I say 'ink-l-ink-er, mother-f-ucker.'
• Something he can't get over, however, is that the inkling tools are really all painting tools.
  "God knows why it keeps making ink puns though when everyone's very clearly throwing paint around."
  "I'd stay behind with my big paint roller; because that's something you do with ink, isn't it? Put it in a paint roller, and ink your living room with a lovely cornflower blue ink — get your fucking story straight!"
• "Nevertheless, it was fun. Obviously. Nintendo powderizes fun and snorts it off Kid Icarus's buttocks."

Hatred

• Yahtzee breaks his "no game clips or screenshots" rule for the first time in years by putting in a screenshot of the error page on Steam that comes up because Hatred was banned in Australia.
  Yahtzee: Yep you can see where all the controversy was about now, can't you? That fiery orange text could cause some real emotional damage to a pyrophobe or an Irish separatist.
• Yahtzee referring to the main protagonist as "Jeffrey Cuddletrousers" throughout the review.
• His summation of the appeal for the game.
  Try banny game make people wanty game more!
• While the trailer for the game generated quite the moral outrage, Yahtzee found it funny; it made him think of an angsty teenager barging into McDonald's with his dad's revolver, intent on starting a massacre, and immediately dropping his gun and shooting himself in the kneecap.
• In complaining about how confusing navigating the world is with the game's isometric perspective and black and white monochrome look:
  You know a button to rotate the world would be nice and might've helped us figure out if that cop is shooting because he has line of sight on us, or because he's being tormented by a refrigerator that refuses to keep its hands where he can see them.
• He also complains about how the character has difficulty for jumping of all things:
  Also, the concept of jumping over things is not something that I think should still be giving anyone trouble in the field of game design; I thought we had that done from Mario 1, but "sprint at low cover to jump over it" is the kind of design that leads to the headline "deranged killer brought down while attempting to mate with hedge".
• Yahtzee's strategy for dealing with enemies:
  Here's my pro-strategy though: start a big fire, then hide behind something on the far side of it and watch the entire highly trained police force enroll for Caveman Lessons 101: 'Fire hot, ow!'
• "Nevertheless, Hatred remains quite hard. In fact, it's an anagram of "quite hard" with a Q-U-I left over for when it's quitting time."
• The Running Gag of the sea mammal fetish continues, with Yahtzee's house having picket signs saying "Manatees can consent!", and donating to a sea mammal brothel kickstarter campaign.
• Yahtzee closes out the review with a brilliant summation of the "controversy" behind the game:
  So two groups of affluent middle class people annoy each other, Hatred makes tons of money, and the world at large gives less of a toss than a quadraplegic shot-putter, good night!
• During the part where "the world doesn't give a toss", Earth can be seen reading a newspaper with the headline "George Clooney Puts On A Hat".

E3 2015

• His increasing shock regarding the Oculus Rift's announcement of motion controls.
  "Also, there's going to be a special two-handed controller that incorporates—" No! "That incorporates motion-se—" Oh, GOD, no! "That incorporates motion-sensor tec—" No, no, no! We were SO CLOSE! We were almost FREE!
  • Before that:
    But I genuinely believe that VR represents the way forward for immersive gaming, if they can iron out that whole "playing it for more than an hour makes my stomach want to crawl up my throat and file divorce proceedings against my inner ear" problem." (cue Yahtzee getting nauseous next to an imp, before he rips off the imp's head and barfs down its neck)
• About Microsoft's "back to the formula gang":
  "You think you've been dragged along a linear sequence of set pieces before, but you've never been dragged along a linear sequence of set pieces like this, except you have. In all the other games with the same name as us, but shut up and look at the skyboxes." (Rise of the Tomb Raider drags Yahtzee by the foot with the rope and knocks his groin on a series of lampposts with different games)''
• In the credits, he shows the box art of several games, as well as a few pros and cons for each, marked by plusses and minuses. The last one is Just Cause 3. His pros?
  + I just
  + Came
  + In my pants

2015, Quarter 3

Alone in the Dark: Illumination

• "I guess we’re co-op multiplayer now! They fucked up the “Dark” thing in the last Alone in the Dark by setting the whole game on fire, so now they’re fucking up the “Alone” part instead!"
• "The central game mechanic around which the game names itself is the fact that monsters only become vulnerable in light. This is explained by a piece of story dialogue saying, 'The monster became vulnerable in light.'^note Dialogue is only seen as "The murgh became vurgh in lurgh." Nice world building there, Alone in the Dark."
• After introducing the viewer to the four characters (Theodore "Ted" Carnby, Sara "Celeste" Hartwood, Gabriella Saunders, Father Henry Giger):
  These four unique talents work extremely well together –- or extremely poorly. I don't know, because I found no functional public servers and I didn't want to lose what few Steam friends I have by asking them to download this garbage!
• On the relative usefulness of the Priest's special abilities vs. the Hunter's flamethrower: "Must've been a blow to spend your whole life currying favor with Jesus to the point that he'll let you weaponize him, and only then find out that gasoline exists!"
  • "...you might as well just stick with the Hunter, who gets as many guns as he can fit in his Y-fronts and a fucking flamethrower — I know of very few instances in which the word 'flamethrower' could not be preceded by the word 'fucking'!" (Depicts an imp replacing "flame" with "fuck", turning it into "Flamin' Fuckthrower".)
• "Let's get down to broad analysis." (An imp shows up with a blow-up doll and a magnifying glass) "Not THAT kind of broad analysis!"
• "Is it fun? No, it's as fun as playing 200 consecutive games of patty-cake during a prolonged black-out. Is it scary? No, it's as scary as see-above."
• "I stopped playing after four missions, and I can tell the developers gave up on it long before I did."
  • "...with its text dumps in place of narrative..."
    And then he arrived at the
    scary place that seemed
    really scary and something
    scary happened and he
    was scared
• Yahtzee eventually reviews the rest of the missions in the game based on their names alone.
  "Dark Crypt", as opposed to all those lovely well-illuminated crypts where all the dance parties take place! Seriously, guys, you couldn’t think of a single other word that means "foreboding?" What about "Creepy Crypt"? Or does that sound too much like a Banjo-Kazooie level? "Reflective Pond". Could’ve done with one of these before you embarked on this venture, couldn’t you, Atari? Assuming the sight of your own visage doesn’t turn you to stone! "Sonorous Sewer"?! What's that, the new album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds? "Silent Quarry"? Oh, I see what you did there. "Train Graveyard"? Well, that’s what happens when you try to get home from Toowong Station at one in the morning! "Final Facility", and how very welcome it is, but I really think the series has only been going downhill since Final Facility Seven!

Batman: Arkham Knight

• Batman having the superpower of "infinite money." Which he uses to buy a suit of armor for punching people who don't have suits of armor.
• Batman being a "boring asshole with no hobbies who compensates for this fact by ensuring that no one other than himself gets to do anything interesting", as shown by him sitting near the Bat Crime Phone waiting for a call, Robin asking if he can leave the house yet and a maddened Batman shouting "NOOOOO" and carrying him away.
• Yahtzee does an impression of Batman:
  Yahtzee (as Batman): No, really, fully equipped police force, it's too dangerous for you out there! Just leave it to me, my ridiculous car and my death wish.
  • One of the imp thugs on a car says, "Wonder where all the cops went"; the Batmobile screeches to a halt, and Batman jumps out saying, "DEAD PAREEEEENTS!"
• "If Batman's pointy ears represented his martyr complex, they'd get caught in power lines."
• "The problem with super-hero movies is that they only have three different plots: villain endangers hero's loved one, hero faces villain who is a dark reflection of themselves, villain threatens to cover city in gas that will make them as petty as they are. Arkham Knight goes through all three, multiple times, with varying degrees of disconnect and messily layering over each other like an orgy in a poorly-made lasagna."
• In regards to Gotham's citizens evacuating the city. "Batman's pledge to defend the helpless innocents who have all already fucked off is an unavoidable plot hole."
• "Now all we need is the word "ZOK" to appear every time we punch someone and we'll have the full Batman experience!"
• Batman breaking the bones of imps for giggles.
• The Running Gag of Yahtzee shamelessly plugging his new browser game Hatfall.
• Speaking of that: "The only major thing added to that aspect is the ability to instantly take down up to five lads at once,^note Batman jumps away from five beaten-up thugs while screaming, "DADDY ISSUUUUUUES!" which is an innovative addition to gameplay if holding down the fast-forward button is an innovative way to watch films." (Yahtzee says, "Let's just assume Indiana Jones survives this bit.")
• Yahtzee describing the Scarecrow in this game in comparison to Batman: Arkham Asylum:
  The Scarecrow in this game is a guy who just talks in a droning monotone, so whenever it's his turn to have to go on the citywide PA system, I think for a moment it accidentally got tuned to the shipping forecast. They turned him into Jerry Generic, the standard super villain, and he looks like exactly like Skeletor from the Masters of the Universe film. (Shows pics of Skeletor and Scarecrow, with a caption that says, "Separated at birth'')
• Batman's deadliest foe yet: A 30 frames-per-second frame rate! And the PC port being described "generously" as "a faceful of piss on a hot summer's day."
• Yahtzee's superpower? To remember things! And he remembers Arkham Origins' PC port not being too good so he played the console versions instead.
• At one point, Yahtzee plays armchair general and suggests that the Arkham Knight just tape a random guy onto one of his unmanned tanks so that when Batman inevitably blasts it to bits on reflex, he accidentally kills the random guy, breaks his no-kill code and "runs off to cry on a gargoyle for the rest of his fucking life."

Yoshi's Wooly World

• Yahtzee on Nintendo's run of "old properties remade in arts-and-crafts materials" like Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Kirby's Epic Yarn.
  Perhaps Nintendo finds some catharsis in retreading its history in a manner than can be easily set on fire.
• "We're just unravelling enemies and turning them into yarn balls... THROUGH YOUR BUTT-HOLE."
• "...when the minions of Bowser show up and kidnap most of [the Yoshis], presumably to shut them up for five minutes."
• "Fucking candy world's always messing up the Mario rhythm, as well as my diabetes."
• Yahtzee on completionism:
  No, of course you don't have to laboriously check every inch of the map for secrets. You can still move on to the next level. Also, you don't have to get As at school, do you? D's still a passing grade, there's no difference. And who cares if your mother weeps with shame every day! At least she hasn't killed herself like your dad did, you fucking loser!
• "Do you think Miiverse posts will still be going up on these games in 20 years, saying things like 'Wow, looking at these old games really puts Nintendo's recent massacre into perspective.'"
• Yahtzee referring to the game by such gems as "Yoshi's Worrywart", "Yoshi's Whirly Wonk", and "Yoshi's Weary Wank".
• "But who's the real asshole, the minions of Bowser or the guy who insists on licking everything?"

Cave Story

• Yahtzee's first two attempts to find a game to review in "the usual mid-year post-E3 release drought", which double as not-at-all-subtle swipes at ARK: Survival Evolved and Rocket League.
  Steam: You know what's top seller right now? Rocket League!
  Yahtzee: Go on...
  Steam: It's soccer meets driving...
  Yahtzee: Okay, stop going on.^note It becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when he finally plays it and finds it enjoyable, if a bit thin.invoked
• "Retro to me is anything that was ever sold in a physical medium with which you could conceivably bludgeon someone to death."
• Yahtzee decides to stop being subtle about plugging his new game and just shouts "PLAY HATFALL, YOU PRICKS!"
• "Heart and art so often go together, especially when speaking with a Cockney accent."
• "...the progression has that bad habit of Japanese games in that it's very flaggy."
  (shows Cave Story's main screen wearing giant Elton John-style glasses while preparing to commit seppuku.)
  "I said FLAGGY!"
  (Glasses are crossed out, the game then sprouts actual flags and is still attempting to commit seppuku.)
• "But Rimbly Grimbly Bim aside..."
• "If Pixel had had a friend around, let's call him "Graphical User Interface," he might have said something like 'Do you not think all the gritty violent drama experienced by these Hello Kitty fuzzy rabbit people with heads shaped like beanbag chairs lends a certain incongruity of tone?'"
• "A Metroidvania without central exploration elements is like a high-school gob-job without the vague sense of anticlimax."
• "There's health upgrades, but they're all about as hard to find as Your Mom on a nudist beach."

Godzilla

• The opening lines of the review.
  This game's shit. Oh, sorry, I usually do more of a setup than that, don't I? I'll start again. Goodness me, this game's shit!
• When he talks about the Shinjuku Ward of Tokyo declaring Godzilla an official cultural ambassador, the illustration is just a person standing on a soapbox that says "THIS TAKES PLACE IN THE SHINJUKU WARD OF TOKYO".
• Yahtzee on the game's aesthetic:
  And to its credit, the game looks exactly like those old Kaiju movies did, like a bunch of dudes in fake rubber costumes tripping over cardboard boxes with doors and windows painted on, each with so many spark packs strapped to their bodies that the only difference between them and a suicide bomber is a sense of purpose in life.
  • Relatedly, there's Yahtzee's disappointment about the game focusing more on the earlier Godzilla films than the modern interpretations.
    Oh, yes, there's no opportunity to crush Matthew Broderick underfoot, more's the pity!
• "You see, if you're not careful, the Japanese authorities might raise the effectiveness of the defense forces from zero, to zero times two."
  • And this is in response to his exasperation over the game requiring the player to go through the same mission paths multiple times in order to "gather intelligence" on Godzilla.
    How much intelligence do you need?! He's got like three attacks, and anything he steps on is not gonna be allowed on any roller coasters any time soon, that's all you need!
• Yahtzee complaining that the game's epic Kaiju fights are actually "You [Godzilla and the other Kaijus] go at each other like a pair of nursing home residents who both walked into the TV room, and simultaneously noticed there was only one free armchair."
• "I wish I could get through one day of my life without asking this question, but what the fuck am I doing here?!"
• "Godzilla's not our abusive spouse, prime minister lady! Stop rationalizing! Maybe he's just being a dick!"
• "Spay and neuter your giant radioactive lizards."

Rocket League & Tembo The Badass Elephant

• Yahtzee commenting on Rocket League's viral popularity, stating it's like HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.
• "The matches are short, it's just in, out, and satisfied, which is funnily enough my nickname among among the single ladies."
• Yahtzee's reaction when he assumed Tembo the Badass Elephant to be an indie title, only to find out it's published by Sega:
  ...That's the kind of endearing baby-giraffe stumbling you have to expect from an indie g - wait a minute, published by Sega? Developed by Game Freak? What, the Pokémon guys? You know, that actually makes a strange kind of sense; I know I'd want to do something a little bit different if I'd spent the last twenty years struggling to come up with hundreds of new ways to draw a cat wrong."

King's Quest

• Yahtzee's description of the game's plot.
  It also borrows from The Princess Bride, in the same way that Arab terrorists "borrowed" the Iranian embassy that one time.
• "Its attempt to occupy a point somewhere in the middle of comedy, fairy tales, action and drama just leaves it like a laundrette run by genies: wishy-washy."
• Yahtzee explaining the three routes you can do to solve a problem in the game being intelligence, strength, and kindness, and then using the grandpa telling a child framing device to show how it's a "child-ruining simulator" and end that segment on Grandpa!Yahtzee telling the boy that "there's a surprising amount of things you can get out of by sucking a dick or two".

Nom Nom Galaxy & Freedom Planet

• Right off the bat, Yahtzee gets ticked off by the embarrassingly named Nom Nom Galaxy, and refuses to say the title for more than twice.
  I am going to fucking stab myself in the throat if I have to say that fucking title any more.
• It turns out his strategy in Nom Nom Galaxy is phenomenally lazy, which means he can't let a perfectly good vocal jab go to waste.
  ...I found that the time I could spend building a robot production line was better spent running around gathering easy ingredients and flooding the market with as many shitty, unvaried soup combinations as I could. Essentially I was being the soup equivalent of EA!
• In the second half of the review, Yahtzee praises Freedom Planet for its gameplay, but laments that the story feels like someone's self-insert fan fiction. But the highlight is when he describes "Classic Mode":
  You came out last year, Freedom Planet; if you're a classic, then I'm a World War II veteran. You mean "classic Sonic mode", that is, just the levels back-to-back with no cutscenes, a mode that I am going to really fucking recommend, I'm going to hold that shit up like that monkey in The Lion King!
  • The criticism continues until it somehow turns into Yahtzee taking a particular jab, which turned the video's Youtube comments section into a heated battlefield of political debate.
    I know people will tell me I'm just a misery-guts who expects too much of everything, but fuck you! You know where we end up if we all stop expecting much? Two words: President Trump!

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

• Yahtzee's hilarious analogy of storytelling in Walking Simulator games. He first describes it as "trying to read a book that's been glued to the side of a nervous gazelle", then comments that in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture "the book's being chewed up by the honey badger riding on the gazelle's back", as the game doesn't unfolds its event in linear order, and finally wrapping it up by saying that the story is "read a book that was glued to a gazelle and a honey badger until they all fell into a wood chipper."
  • He then berates the developers for the gazelle cruelty.
• Explaining the mechanics of Rapture:
  ...You wander around in first-person as the story is brought across through disembodied voices. [portrayed by a mouth that says, "I've licked that one"] All that passes for gameplay is looking for the next place to stand to make another disembodied voice play. [another mouth appears and says in a Freeze-Frame Bonus, "Frankly it'd be quicker to list the things around here that I've never licked"] To that end, there's a weird glowing light trail thing that indicates towards places with slightly infuriating vagueness. It'll lead you all the way down one path and then -psyche!- turn around and lead you all the way back up it again. It's like trying to walk a dog that hasn't quite decided which tree it's going to piss up today.
• After saying the title of the game a couple times, Yahtzee casually changes the title to something funny, such as "Everybody's Going on Holiday", "Everybody Goes to Ravenholm", "Everybody Loves Raymond", "Everybody Wants to Rule the World", "Everybody Wave Your Hands in the Air Like You Just Don't Care", "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist", and "Everybody Do the Dinosaur".

Volume

• Yahtzee is perplexed at fictional works' tendency to portray near-future Britain as a fascist dictatorship.
  Yahtzee: Speaking as a British person, this never rings true for me. Now, I admit I haven't been in Britain for nigh-on ten years now so maybe Carol Vorderman founded a neo-fascist revolutionary movement while I wasn't paying attention, but most of the British people I know, if you invited them to truncheon an underclass for the greater glory of the superior British race, most of them would reply with: "Ooh, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was making a fuss", before apologizing for no reason.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

• Yahtzee calling Hideo Kojima "Hideo "Sure I know what tone is; it's the sound made by the little bell that the nice men in white coats say I have to wear" Kojima".
• His starting Take That! at Konami.
  Because of course Konami recently decided that they're going to take everything they've built over the years as a game developer, arrange it nicely in front of them, and then pick up a big hammer, and then smash and smash and smash and smash and smash! "Sorry we had to cancel Silent Hills, but we kind of lost our interest in it, around the same time we lost our fucking miiiiinds! Here, have a pachinko machine instead. We like pachinko machines because it's nice to have something around with some fucking balls! Also, fuck off, Hideo Kojima, you're too reliably bankable for our liking, we'd much rather stick our feet up our arse and bounce down the stairs making burbling noises with our lips, blrblrblrblrblrblr."
• Yahtzee's annoyance on how Hideo Kojima's name is all over the game, making him assume Kojima is worried that players have short-term memory loss.
  I know you're the director, Hideo! There's a mentally damaged woman over there with her tits hanging out, of course it's by you!
• Him saying he would normally recap the events of the Metal Gear Solid series, but he mislaid his magic hammer with which he would beat himself on the head "about 8 to 9 times" before making the attempt, so he settles on attempting to recap the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes instead.
  So let's just say that at the end of Ground Zeroes, Naked Big Snake Boss Man or whatever his name is got blown apart by the amazing exploding vagina. He wakes up from a coma nine years later just as the forces of the evil Cipher track him down and send a man made of fire and a ghost toddler to blow him up. (Has the magic hammer turned up yet? I'm starting to think this sounds weird!) But he escapes and sets about getting his private army back together while pursuing revenge against the villainous Skullface, who you'll remember is the guy with a skull face. But now he's wearing a Lone Ranger mask too, 'cause he didn't want people thinking the skull face was his only thing.
• Yahtzee's thoughts on the "online gameplay":
  Do you want to know what the online gameplay's like? So the fuck would I. Because until I put the game into offline mode, the loading times were unbearable. And not for loading levels, loading menus, for fuck's sake!

Mad Max

• The Kratos "Scale-of-Anti-Heroes-So-Riddled-With-Generic-Anger-That-It-Works-Against-Their-Best-Interest" (in which Max is apparently a .7)
• When discussing that the default sandbox game requires a unique selling point, Yahtzee highlights Shadow of Mordor's Little Black Book of Orcs, with the accompanying slide presenting Snarky Borgo, Urgot the Smelly, and Alan the Financial Advisor, who got 5 stars for getting him a really nice tax rebate.
  • Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days being described as having no unique selling point and being only "Bread and Buttocks".

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

• Having stopped playing cover-based shooting games for a while, Yahtzee decides to review this game in order to revisit the genre and find out whether his long-time grudge against it is really justified, or that it was due to overexposure to the genre. He sums up the result as such:
  I went into this thinking, "Boy, I could just do with some nice, straight forward cover-based shooting for once," and came out of it thinking, "Boy, I could just do with a mule kick to the gonads."

Until Dawn

• Despite not being a fan of Interactive Narrative games, Yahtzee admits to having quite enjoyed Until Dawn due to its Slasher-esque setting, as he finds that "there's something very essentially cathartic about watching a bunch of complete twats get completely twatted."
• "Until Dawn is an interactive story of the David Cage school pushed through the filter of slasher movie with the promise being that if we make all the right decisions, perhaps we could keep all the out-of-work twenty-something actors alive. I don't think you were paying attention, Until Dawn. I will have made the right decisions if every single one of these gurgleberks ends up upholstering the soft furnishings in Leatherface's man cave."
  • This also helps him to alleviate one of his biggest bugbears: Quick Time Events, as failing one and resulting characters being killed actually adds to his satisfaction, since he couldn't care less about them.
    Even the quick-time event sequences didn't irk as much as usual, just because characters will be really, no crossed-finger-backsies dead for the whole rest of the plot if you miss certain ones, which, aside from being the definition of win-win, actually adds some real weight to proceedings.
• "'Decisions have consequences! Is your mind blown? Let's hope so, 'cause then you won't notice our complete lack of creativity!' Because the main cast are straight from the teen slasher default creation wizard. Every single one of them could have their personalities fully summarized with one five-letter word: brave, hunky, bitch, funny, timid, weird, whore, and let's not forget, black."
  • Later on he's describing how "the cast list effectively doubles as a score board" and shows the list:
    1. SLAB NICEHAIR
    2. SLUTTY PILLOWTITS
    3. ODDBALL GOOFYTWAT
    4. CUNTY CUNT CUNTPANTS
    5. WEIRDO McSUSPICIOUS
    6. HEROINE GENERIC
    7. THE BLACK DUDE (crossed out by a bloodstained psycho in a George Bush mask holding an axe)

2015, Quarter 4

Super Mario Maker

• Yahtzee's sarcastic take on Nintendo's obvious cash-grab move by releasing this level editor, which effectively just does what third-party tools that has already existed for at least a dozen years now can do, only less efficiently and put behind a paywall.
  Nintendo: You know that thing the fans do out of love for our product? That's ours now. And we're gonna turn the screws until all that love turns into money, because goodwill is nice and all, but it's not gonna wax the Lamborghini."
• "But enough philosophy, let's get back to drawing cocks with blocks.
• "So I turned to random levels, most of which fall into one of three categories: 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."

SOMA

• Yahtzee anthropomorphises several video game developers as a group of individuals at a buffet according to their traits: Double Fine is open-minded and likes to try a bit of everything, Ubisoft just stick with the same thing (raviolis) every time, while EA is the shady bastard who "immediately grab the entire bucket of chicken wings and then sell them back to the other customers for 99 cents each." He then groups Frictional Games with Ubisoft, and the following quip ensues:
  So if you were to say, "Yahtzee, here's a new first person survival horror adventure game where you can't fight and spend half your time crouched in shadows avoiding looking at monsters and the other half clumsily flinging physics objects off shelves looking for documents and puzzle solutions, also it's by Frictional Games!", I would reply, "Why did you just say precisely the same sentence twice?"
  • He did, however, give praise for them trying to get out of their comfort zone by adding a side-dish or two, but ran back to the ravioli when asked what would carry the plot.
• Yahtzee awkwardly attempting, with great effort, not to spoil the plot:
  Especially when...ugh, this is gonna be really hard to do without spoilers, isn't it? Especially when certain things happen and he learns things about the thing from before. However, he did lose me a little bit at the end when he got really surprised and angry because a thing happened despite the exact same thing having happened about an hour previously, and he had an identical reaction to the thing you'd think he would've remembered. But all those things aside, I came away from the game quite satisfied with how the story turned out.
  • The thing in question, is illustrated as a pineapple wearing a pair of Cool Shades.
• The closing statement:
  SOMA feels like a decent, melancholy sci-fi mystery story living next door to a sci-fi horror B movie whose dog keeps escaping and jumping in our swimming pool (what a little bastard), and you can really feel the game struggling to mesh the two, right up until the end when it blows a little raspberry and gives up trying. On the way to the final area, to conclude the Simon story, a new character literally appears from nowhere, pops his head around the door, and says: "Sorry to interrupt, player, but before you tie up the main plot, could we borrow you for five minutes to tie up the shitty monster plot as well?" So you follow him into a little room, press one button labeled, "Resolve Shitty Monster Plot," and then get on with what you were doing. I'm only slightly exaggerating! So I suppose if Antoine de Saint-Exupéry were here, he'd ask, "Would SOMA be improved if they took out the monster stealthing altogether and got by with exploration, puzzles, and environmental hazards? Also, didn't I die in 1944?" Well, I'd say so, Antoine, but if they took out the scary monsters, what else are the streamers and Let's Players supposed to obnoxiously overreact to? "AAAHHH! IT'S SO EXISTENTIAL!"
  (René Descartes pops out of the television)

Rock Band 4

• Yahtzee criticises the game's unique "freestyle solo" mechanic, arguing that it ruins the original's feel:
  The original song's solo carries the band's unique sound and personality. The freestyle solo doesn't sound remotely like it's played on the same instrument, or even in the same room. It's like you're trying to listen to the radio, but your guitarist roommate keeps having seizures and falling down the stairs!

Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

• The return of the "Assassin's Creed Linegraph".
• The way it's presented, it's like one of those terrible wink-to-audience moments from bad historical films. "What did he say his name was? Da Vinci? Well, he won't amount to anything, and may the atomic bomb fall on the Japanese if I'm wrong."
• Followed by criticising the laziness of the writing in this game, which Yahtzee deems to be on par of a children's TV series, he showcases this with a brief dramatisation:
  Charles Dickens: Hello, I'm the famous Charles Dickens.
  Protagonists: Hello, the famous Charles Dickens, we're stand-ins for the audience.
  Charles Dickens: Hello, stand-ins, I guess that means I can inexplicably enlist you to solve my problems.
  Protagonists: What problems, the famous Charles Dickens?
  Charles Dickens: It's all these random thugs, stopping me from finishing the famous books I write. If only there was someone around here who could brutally stab them all to death for me.
• "There are more fiddly little differences I could bring up, but my main point is that, broadly speaking, it's just Assassin's Creed: Another One. More by-the-numbers, find-and-replace shit. Same ending as usual, too..."
  1. Jump off things
  2. Stab other things
  3. Famous historical figures weirdly quick to trust you
  4. Same ending as usual, too
• Yahtzee also calls the game Assassin's Creed: Well, Here We Are Again^note And So On, and So On, Sassy Credo, Screedo and Assassin's Creed: Another One.
• Yahtzee talks about the gender issues in the game:
  You know that opening screen that used to say, "This game was developed by a multicultural team of various faiths etcetera"? (Read as "This game was developed by a multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs and one of them was in the same room as Barack Obama once.") Well, now it says "various beliefs, sexual preferences and gender identities". ("...and social media networks.") Now, in 'S'Creedo 1 I assumed this was about preemptively dodging racism accusations before they let you slit up all the Muslims. So I wasn't sure what this new one was about until I discovered that roughly half the standard enemies seem to be women now. Go equal rights, but I wonder if this was the equality they had in mind, as I headbutt them and stab them in the tits. Slightly historically iffy of course, but let's not talk about this like it's an artistic choice. This is because of that bullshit with Unity not having a female player character that the internet randomly drew as the thing that they were going to be arbitrarily cross about that week. (one guy holds up a "Boo" sign and says "Boo!", before changing the line to "No one gives a shit about Caitlyn Jenner.")
• The sideburns Running Gag, in which Yahtzee complains graphically rendering sideburns has taken the place of actual gameplay content — culminating with the ending lines:
  There's got to be some remnant of the human being who gave us Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and sought actual creative fulfillment in there somewhere. Is he not sick of his bullshit yet? (cue Darth Vader in front of Yahtzee) "I'm afraid it's too late for me," intones Ubisoft, as it solemnly begins to remove its helmet and horror grips my heart as the sideburns begin to emerge.

Halo 5: Guardians

• "Oh yeah, spoiler alert: turns out Cortana’s big dramatic death scene in the last game wasn’t for realsies, but one could kind of predict that from the mere fact that there is a Halo 5 at all." (Cortana suddenly gets up and says, "Oh, actually I feel better now.")
• "...despite Mr. Chuffy knowing Cortana best and his grief affecting his work 'cause they had to install little windscreen wipers to get all the tears off his face plate, he is inexplicably disinvited from the mission. I guess his superiors thought they were playing XCOM and wanted to level up some of their rookies."
  "Fadge": LVL 1
  "Jools": LVL 1
  "Nobby": LVL 1
  "Twatface": LVL Like a billion
• Yahtzee describes the lazy story telling technique:
  • “Hey, third finger puppet! Here’s a quiet moment, you may now flesh out your backstory in a maximum of ten words.”
  • “Errmm...I worked for six months as a seal clubber.”
• Yahtzee is not very impressed by how the animosity between John-117 and Jameson Locke is portrayed:
  The crime for which Mr. Chuffy is being hunted is so completely fucking weak that the two parties can barely summon the effort to be cross at each other when they do meet. Two of them have a token punch-up about midway through that has more the air of two blind people trying to politely get past each other in a crowded restaurant.
• Yahtzee talks about the foes in this game:
  ...There's a boss character in that he's functionally identical to certain standard enemies but twice the size and can't shut his fucking face for five seconds, and you fight him, like, twenty times. The plot reason is that it's one guy with, like, a million bodies and I thought, "Okay, that's actually quite threatening as villains go since blowing him up over and over again isn't going to help and that's pretty much the only string to my bow", until what might as well be the final boss is just ten more of the guy. Psych! Turns out blowing him up over and over again is going to help!

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

• Yahtzee commenting on how the game shifts its theme from fighting foreign powers to fighting robots:
  But half the time you're fighting killer robots. That's not racist at all! Well, give it about thirty years, maybe it will be seen as insensitive towards AI Americans who don't have the privilege of having been born rather than procedurally generated...
  • The accompanying illustration pictures an old Yahtzee standing over a dead robot with a laptop and a plush toy behind him each holding up a sign which says "FUCK YOU" and "CHECK YOUR WOMB PRIVILEGE" respectively.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

• The Stinger:
  • "But seriously, you should always show respect to your prostitute because your future is in their hands."
• Yahtzee's impression of a breathless Lara.
• At one time Yahtzee calls the game Thighs of the Tome Raider and Exertion Noise: The Game.
• Speaking of which:
  By the end of the game, Thighs of the Tomb Raider has the Metal Gear Solid problem of giving too many solutions for problems that aren't very hard. And by "problems", I mean "human skulls." I literally upgraded the pistol for no reason except to make the menu stop bugging me about there being upgrades available - between the assault rifle, shotgun, melee attack, stealth attacks, crafted bombs, crafted Molotovs, arrows, poison arrows, bomb arrows, and Mia Farrows, the pistol spent the entire game dangling off my arse like a can on the back of a wedding car.

Fallout 4

• "Bethesda RPGs are always deeply explorative, but never immersive. They make for some great screen shots, but the moment it has to start living and animating you find it full of blank-eyed computer programs who struggle to navigate a six-lane highway without a carelessly-placed dog turd making their path-finding bugger up."
• "You play as one-half of a loving couple in possession of a comically badly-made animatronic doll you've somehow convinced yourself is a baby."
• Yahztee thinks that with the gratuitous experiments they secretly performed on the inhabitants of most Vaults, Vault-Tec is "a shoo-in for the Umbrella Award for Extremely Contrived Corporate Villainy."
• "The conversation system's been really simplified, and now it's actually quite difficult to be a complete git. The most you can do is agree to solve everyone's problems in a slighty snarky tone of voice."

Star Wars: Battlefront

• "Star Wars: Battlefront is a multiplayer shooter set in, as you could guess from the title, the Blake's 7 universe."
• Yahtzee quite enjoyed the Hero Hunt mode^note an "h" is put over the "c" in "Hero Cunt", where the player who successfully kills the hero gets to play as one next, as not only does this reward individual merits (which would make Ayn Rand proud), but it also "has the tantalising air of an exciting gang-rape scenario".
• In the beginning of the review, Yahtzee speculates that in order for the new Star Wars film to be more engaging, it should focus on a single soldier in either faction, which becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when the male protagonist of The Force Awakens turns out to be a Storm Trooper.
• He also calls the game Star Wars: Battlecunt.

Just Cause 3

• Ditching from using the game's title as a Pun-Based Title in his Just Cause 2 review, Yahtzee moves on to the other kind of lame puns, which goes all over the place:
  And then there you are, standing non-plussed in the middle of your liberated country with a profound sense of anticlimax. What do we do now? I guess we could call up some just whores.
  • And then, in The Stinger:
    I went to the hardware shop to get a new hammer but when I got there they had Just Saws, then I went to the pet shop and they had just macaws.

Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water

• Yahtzee describes the game as a cross between The Ring and Pokémon Snap, where the player takes paparazzi-esque photos of ghosts and shame them to death.
• Yahtzee says he prefers the North American title of the series to its European/Japanese title, Project Zero, because it makes more sense - it's not a prequel to a school science project dubbed "Project One", and it's also not pronounced "pruh-JECT ZE-ro", a hypothetical game about Major Zero from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater being tossed from a nightclub.
• Other nicknames for the game include Project Fatal Zero Frame and Fatal Frame: Pirates of Dark Water (who remembers that?)
• "Now, I'm no harumphing prude as you know, I'm masturbating right now!"

2016 Episodes

2016, Quarter 1

Top 5 of 2015

• Yahtzee's Loophole Abuse in order to get Undertale on the list (which he did technically sorta review in Extra Punctuation, but that doesn't count):
  Yahzee: As always, only games that have been reviewed in Zero Punctuation are in the running for the Top and Bottom 5. That being the case, bear with me a moment.
  (cut back to the opening theme)
  REVIEWS UNDERTALE
  Yahtzee: Undertale is a good game.
  (cue end credits, complete with a Lesser Dog petting gag)
  • Note that that one single line in the mini-review makes it sound like he's about to say something more, only to cut to the credits with absolutely perfect comedic timing.
  • Even better is the Rewatch Bonus nature of the mini-review: had he not done this, there would not have been a Number 1 for the Best Game list.
• Yahtzee introduces a Zero Punctuation first: the Top 5 Blandest Games list (complete with dial tone)! Followed immediately by:
  Hmm, what's that? Jim Sterling^note This was almost five years before Stephanie Sterling came out as a non-binary transwoman, going by the pronouns "she/they".just did something like this? Well, it's a good thing everyone knows that I write these a few weeks in advance, isn't it? Otherwise, they might have accused me of ripping [them] off! And made complete fucking fools of themselves!
• The intro segments for each game were particularly good this year: the "best game" intros feature Yahtzee frolicking with each game, to the strains of jaunty piano music; the "worst games" get chased around the screen and/or tortured while "Song of the Volga Boatmen" plays in the background; and the "blandest games" lie inert on top of the intro text, while Yahtzee tries to get them up and moving (and eventually walks off in disgust).
• When awarding SOMA the 4th-best slot, we get this.
  It may now go down in history as the second-best atmospheric-narrative-horror-game-with-philosophical-themes-set-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-with-an-existential-plot-twist-in-it of all time.
• His explanation of Assassin's Creed Syndicate being the 2nd blandest game:
  With Syndicate, Assassin's Creed has dribbled its way to a standstill like a camel with a leaky hump, and not the good kind of leaky hump.
• Before that, however, we get the third-blandest game, namely Rise of the Tomb Raider:
  A textbook case of a franchise in holding pattern while it figures out what to base itself around now it's taken out the funbags, Rise of the Tomb Raider. I look forward to the next installments: Beginnings of the Tomb Raider, Induction of the Tomb Raider, Tentative Steps of the Pubescence of the Tomb Raider, [while he is speaking, the game tries to make a slow step down the slope called "Progress"...] after which of course comes the reboot. [...before the game gets a boot to the head]
• In naming Halo 5: Guardians the "Blandy Blandest" game he doesn't blame the developer, because they had such uninteresting material to work with.
  "It's like trying to paint a masterpiece with used bathwater on a canvas of dryer lint. In a house made of bog roll. In Swindon.
• His take on Hatred when putting it in the 4th-worst slot:
  ...Mainstream culture has gradually been coming around to the idea that video games probably aren't all murder-porn aimed at the high-school massacre demographic, but this was not intended to be taken as a fucking challenge! The game that strutted about in its big black controversy-knickers, dropping embarrassing turds from its legholes, conveniently named after the reaction it provokes: Hatred. (Although after release, they should've renamed it: Dispassionate Ridicule.)

Devil's Third

• We start off with a Call-Back to the Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor review when Yahtzee ate a pound of brandy infused butter after locking himself in the toilet - the ocelot head pops up and says "I ain't seeing no dead whores."
• Yahtzee tells a confusing story:
  The main character is an inmate in Guantanamo Bay, which in this reality is an underground prison by way of Beyond Thunderdome populated exclusively by white American Metallica enthusiasts. The protagonist is a stock musclebound stoic called Ivan; who's Russian, because of course he is; who is enlisted by the American military after a terrorist group sets off an atmospheric EMP blast that shorts out all the world's electrics, except for all the lights, and basically everything else. (cue female imp lying in bed with a pink rod in her hand saying "Aww," and watching the news on TV, which says "Breaking news: everything's fucked.")
  • "[Ivan] must slaughter his way through a parade of former comrades, including the biggest SODs of all, the boss fights with poorly-explained superpowers."(portrayed by a giant imp wearing a cowboy hat and saying "Yee-haw!")
• "Someone clearly put a lot of thought into the backstory of these lads and Ivan's prior relationship with them but, in their frothing excitement, absentmindedly forgot to actually tell us most of it."
  And he mentored him in sunglasses wearing and then they all got married and had lemonade
• "Some of the loading screens try to pick up the slack, though."
  Woading: Did you know that Pancake Dave gets his powers from the legendary martial art named Raymond Strawberry-trousers?
  Yahtzee: Thank you for letting me know, Loading Screen, but since I killed Pancake Dave three missions ago, I'm not sure why you've brought it up.
• "The game does have big tough melee dudes that can soak up a lot of bullets, and I have fond memories of standing on top of things they couldn't climb, my gunshots forming the gay ribbons of my throbbing maypole as they danced joyously around, impotently menacing the walls of my unmoving plinth."
• "Why not just use guns, when you can mow down an entire column of advancing sword-wielding enemies before they can even begin to regret their choice of villainous specialization?" (An imp, on getting shot, says, "I wish I'd been a rocket launcher man.")
  • Speaking of ammo...
    Well, for one thing, ammo's hard to get. Not that it's uncommon, it's lying around all over the fucking place, it's just hard to get, because the collision physics are so wonky you have to do a little Mexican Hat Dance around it before the game wakes up and registers you're trying to pick it up.
• Another tidbit:
  And the other thing is that only melee attacks increase your power gauge, which lets you activate your "Rage of the Gods" mode, which presumably, in some way, helps. It doesn't seem to increase your survival chances if you get caught in a brisk shower of enemy lead, so I'm guessing it ups your damage a bit. [Ivan laughs while getting shot before falling down dead in a pool of blood] Which I might have appreciated if most enemies didn't die in one quick volley to the head region (what a bunch of pussies), and also if the game had better AI than a Tamagotchi on low battery mode. The NPCs are still mastering the difference between "empty space" and "large, immovable, heavy objects".
• Yahtzee calls the game Devil's Turd.

Mario and Luigi: Paper Jam

• "They're making [Paper Mario] share a bunk bed with the runty little brother, which is at least an improvement on the Paper Mario: Sticker Star situation, where he was being kept in the septic tank."
• "Only now, it's two princesses, and there's a scene where they're stuck in a cage together where I was absolutely convinced that they were about to start lezzing up."
• "How the crossover works is that Mario and Luigi contribute the mechanics, visual design, controls, and general style from their games while Paper Mario is also there."
• "Anyway, the real question for me is how they build these (Papercraft) things. All I know is we rounded up a bunch of Paper Toads and sent them to work at the Weapons Development Lab. Where are they getting all the cardboard fro-OH MY GOD YOU MONSTERS!"
• "Guess we're climbing up Bowser's rectal passage tonight"

Assassin's Creed Chronicles

• Yahtzee gets indignant at the game's atrocious writing:
  One entry I noticed at one point included the phrase "way too dangerous". Who the fuck wrote that, the girl from Clueless?

Xenoblade Chronicles X

• "Reading a summary of the previous game, presumably named Xenoblade Chronicles W, didn't help: Everyone lives on two giants, there's a sword that predicts the future, and it was Earth all along? What?" Funnily enough that last part is actually spoilers but it Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
• Referring to the game as "X-Blade X-icles X."
• "You get to do all of this while listening to the same four or five music tracks until you want to find whatever hip-hop artist coined the practice of going 'Uh! Uh! Yeah!' in place of lyrics, and push a small volume of Shakespearean sonnets down his windpipe."
• "So far I’m probably giving the impression that I’m down on this game, but I played it for like thirty hours, so either there’s something I like about it, or I’m severely mentally ill. (Beat while Yahtzee stares at the gun he was holding to his head) ...let’s not dwell on that.
• Yahtzee's having to wait 24 hours for his first robot.
  In fact, you know what? The main thing that kept me going was seeing how long it was gonna take before the game would finally give me the fucking giant robot advertised on the box. For most of it, it was like I was hinting to my parents what I wanted for Christmas, and the game was just going, “Well, maybe if you’re very good, the giant robot fairy will visit someday!” You wanna know how long it took? Twenty-four hours in, six or seven story chapters. Fuck me, the Spanish Inquisition wouldn’t tease you for that long. It came without warning: “Hey,” said the commander dude out of nowhere, “isn’t it time you had your giant robot license?” To which I replied: “YES FUCK YES FUCK FUCK YES FUCK.” “Fair enough, all you have to do is complete eight sidequests.”
• Yahtzee's experience with his first Skell, which will be instantly familiar to anyone who's made it that far in the game: he gleefully takes it for a joyride, only to accidentally run into a high-level enemy that destroys it in one hit.
  Gleefully I took it for a spin around the overworld, leaping, dancing, turning into a car, stepping on the toes of a level sixty elite monster, and getting destroyed in one hit. (Beat) Well, that was an anticlimax. No wait, this is an anticlimax. (review ends)

The Witness & Bombshell

• The opening lines of the review.
  Yahtzee: The Witness is a new game by Jonathan Blow. Ironically, it sucks. Obnoxious laugh.
• Yahtzee very quickly gets fed up with The Witness's storytelling style.
  Yahtzee: Hold up a Mars bar at the far end of an obstacle course of broken glass and pictures of my parents fucking, and I won’t care if it’s the most sumptuous Mars bar the factory ever crafted. By the end, I’m just gonna walk straight past it and knee you in the fucking bollocks.
• His final lines on the game:
  Yahtzee: So in summary, get The Witness if you genuinely can’t ever do enough cereal box maze puzzles. Personally, I’m more of a Junior Jumble man.
• Yahtzee on Bombshell:
  Yahtzee: I think the moment I knew my opinion wasn’t gonna change was after I died a few times to a boss monster with a strong resemblance to a huge spiney tentacled cock. Maybe that’s just my interpretation, but I think it’s a point against the game if it can’t even distract me from the phantom penis monsters.
• His summation of Bombshell's Flat Character female protagonist:
  Yahtzee: The single fact that tells you everything you need to know is that she uses a rocket launcher called "The PMS". Wow, that's some next level shit right there. Suppose we should be grateful it wasn't hot pink and fired Sex and the City DVDs.

Gravity Rush

• Comparing buying a Vita just to play a Vita-exclusive game to "adopting an incontinent chimpanzee because you fancy the lady who comes around to change his nappies."
• "I'm sick of all this mad people privilege in modern society. They get all these exclusive games, they hog all the fun medications, and there seems to be a whole bunch of them running for president at the moment."
• "Is this a story, or a series of contrived excuses to put on fetish outfits? Oh, I think you know."
• Everything he cracks about Kat's outfit.

XCOM 2

• Yahtzee ponders the plausibility of Earth's populace accepting hideous aliens as benevolent overseers, illustrated by a cobra wearing a constable's hat.
  "Good morning, PC Hissy!"
  *angry hissing sound*
  "I'm very well, thank you, PC Hissy. How's the brood?"
  • This is then immediately followed by a Credits Gag where a burglar is arrested and then promptly eaten by PC Hissy.
    PC Hissy gets along especially well with Sergeant Glurrooarrg.
  • Both of the above are particularly Hilarious in Hindsight following the release of XCOM: Chimera Squad which includes both a Viper and a Muton as playable law enforcement officers.

Firewatch & Layers of Fear

• Yahtzee guesses that with the hints of a wife and child in the backstory of Layers of Fear, the protagonist "probably murdered them, or ate them, or strapped them to the couch and forced them to watch televised snooker until they lost the ability to reason. And that's why you're now haunted by visions of men wearing very tacky waistcoats."
• "Wouldn't be much of a walking simulator without [walking], we're saving the sitting-on-the-couch simulator for when the average BMI goes up again."
• Contrasting the "to-do list" for "tiresome squares" in Firewatch (the main story objectives) to the "to-do list for cool people" (the optional collectibles and side quests, including finding a "Tiny Tortoise", "Rowdy Raccoon", and "Some People Fucking").
• "Illogical architecture is spooky. Well, before it's happened ninety bloody times anyway, and then it just becomes the new logic. And it would have been spookier if the doors went back to being sensible, because then I'd suspect they were up to something."
• "There is no end to [Layers of Fear]'s fascination with making things happen behind you. At one point the words 'DON'T LOOK BACK' appeared on a wall, and there was a creepy noise behind me, and I could almost smell the game's disappointment as I ignored it completely and kept walking." Then the words "AW UR NO FUN" appear on the wall.
• The option to turn off map markers in Firewatch is labelled "Stop holding my fucking hand like I'm a babe in the woods with the sense of direction of a Tamagotchi in a bucket of electromagnets".
• "Meanwhile, in Layers of Fear it turns out your wife's dead and you're probably in Hell or something, bloody typical, am I right fellas?"

Far Cry Primal

• The introduction:
  This really is one of those occasions that highlights the gulf between video game critics and their audience, besides the fact that we’re immeasurably sexier. I could sit here on my sexy arse complaining that Ubisoft have hacked out another addition to one of their franchises that plays pretty much the same as the previous, only now it’s wearing a different hat, but most people seem to think, “Who cares? It’s not like we’re under obligation to play every game that comes out and disproportionately demand novelty for the sake of getting through another week without jamming a steel bracket through our eye sockets and turning ourselves into a human coatrack — that’s a small, admittedly sexy minority of weirdos!” Maybe Ubisoft is just catering to normal, boring, unattractive people who like Far Cry just fine as it is but could go for seconds. The thing is, hypothetical speaker, that if it’s just Far Cry you want, then Far Cry 3 has yet to be topped and hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s even got quite a good plot and the occasional titty. So there’s got to be some shriveled part of you that expects novelty or they wouldn’t need to keep bringing out new ones in different settings. There, I win the argument, now piss off, you’re getting straw all over the place.
• "Maybe I’m experiencing sandbox fatigue, but when upcoming characters and plot elements are given away on loading screens and by looking at the locked items on the upgrade menu, something has gotten fucked up!"
  - Your hut
  - Reserved for the warrior trainer you meet soon
  - Reserved for the bloke from the enemy tribe who joins you and betrays them about six or seven missions from now
• Yahtzee's reaction to how the game doesn't have a coherent overall plot.
  But you know what? I'm with you, Ubisoft. Who needs some uppity creative trying to dictate to me how to experience their creation? I mean, where did the creators of Breaking Bad get off telling me I should watch season one before season two?! Oh, because I, quote: "won't understand what's going on"!? You don't know me! And who does this Shakespeare motherfucker think he is, putting the pages in numbered order!? I am the master of my domain! I choose to shuffle them all up and read the text from right to left!
• "There’s a pretty big emphasis on crafting, the mechanic which is to modern games what influenza was to the early twentieth century." (Shows games lying on their backs and swarmed by flies)
• "I stopped playing Far Cry Primal cause nearly all the missions were done except for three hunts against special super predators, and great big loincloth-displacing bollocks to those."
  - Grunt
  - Craft stuff
  - Hit thing with club
  - Set fire to thing
  - Put knob in thing
  - Beat up snarly thing
• "Anyway, I found the killer tiger, and the fight began. After several rounds of traps, spears, and throwing smaller tigers at it, it had lost an entire third of its health at which point it went, “BORED NOW,” took its ball, and went home. “Better wait till the following night to continue this,” advised the game. “Be fair, he needs some time to think about his choices in life.” Three times this happened before I finally wore him down, but it was worth it 'cause then I could tame him."
  Takkar: [to tiger] Now have some fucking flowers.

Stardew Valley and Superhot

• Yahtzee literally starts the review with this:
  "Stardew Valley" is a retro-style farming simulator recently released on Steam that's somewhat reminiscent of Harvest Moon. Oh sorry, I read that wrong. "Stardew Valley is Harvest Moon." It murdered Harvest Moon, stole Harvest Moon's skin, and befriended Harvest Moon's parents under the guise of consoling them in their hour of grief."
• Yahtzee says that his job is to "introduce yourself to all 28 residents of this maze-like town", while he is handed a list as follows:
  The Mayor
  The Shopkeeper
  The Rancher
  The Homeless
  The Man with No Name
  The Astronaut
  Whispering Bob Harris
  "Jeff"
• Yahtzee admitting that he ended up playing the game for 50 hours and makes jokes revolving around that:
  "Just clear a little space and try to grow some parsnips and the next thing you know, fifty hours have passed and the missing persons bureau have written you off for dead."
• Yahtzee's idea of 'making progress' involves him sprinting across the screen with his latest acquisition in hand and loudly announcing:
  I BOUGHT A COOOOOOOW
• Yahtzee's observation that he only courted and married a girl "to tick marriage off the checklist" can raise a few eyebrows when you see the checklist:
  - MARRY SOMEONE
  - BUY A PIG
  - STICK IT IN THE POOPER (EITHER ONE)
• "Stardew Valley got me temporarily hooked, but then, so did crystal meth, and I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend either."
  • "The gamepad support is absolute shit... In Stardew Valley, I mean. Gamepad support for crystal meth was perfectly alright after the day 1 update."
• Yahtzee comments on the level-end of Superhot:
  A touch I particularly like is at the end of each level you see a replay of how your performance looked in real time. Shame that they felt the need to cover the screen in garbage ("Boy, this is fun, isn't it? Just press a key when you're done watching.") and mute the sound with a computer voice reading out the name of the game over and over again, like they programmed a robot with Paris Hilton's entire vocabulary.
• His comment on the story:
  The story is told partly through a fake instant messenger during which we are expected to pretend to type in order to make the protagonist's dialogue appear. There's something faintly pathetic about that. It's like the audience participation at the Christmas panto. We all know damn well the forthcoming events will not change whether we yell "he's behind you" or not! But you're going to hold everything up until we say it, aren't you, you fucking cross-dressing bitch?
  • And the plot: "...we play a big nerd sitting in front of a computer playing games—Whoa, slow down, SUPERHOT, give me a chance to get into character!—who gets sent the hot new game by their online friend and the barriers between game and reality start to break down as a mysterious force (portrayed by an imp with a CRT for a head) within the game begins to mess with you in a rather weak sauce and desperate manner."
    CRT Imp: Hahaha, we're in control now, you cannot escape. Press ESC and see what happens.
    Yahtzee: Could I just play the next combat mission, please?
    CRT Imp: Hit ESC, you prick!
    Yahtzee: Alright, fine. [presses the Esc button]
    CRT Imp: Hahaha, it didn't work. As cat with mouse, I toy with thee. Now I'm going to make you quit the game and restart it again. What now, bitch?
    Yahtzee: I don't know, maybe I'll get some work done.
    CRT Imp: Wait, come back!
• Yahtzee calls out Superhot for trying to use The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You too early in the storyline: "Metanarrative-style fuck-abouts is like the backstroke: if you start doing it before we're immersed, you just look like a twat!"

Tom Clancy's The Division

• "Whenever a new Tom Clancy game comes out I always have to double-check his Wikipedia page to make sure he's still dead - he's prolific for a corpse!" (Cue a copy of Rainbow Six Siege popping out of Tom Clancy's coffin).
• "'Cause it turns out, Wayne LaPierre was right all along: the only thing that can stop a bad roving pack of murderous thugs is a good roving pack of murderous thugs." (portrayed by two groups of gun-wielding imps with different hats.)
• Yahtzee argues that instead of having the player characters to be all secret government agents, it'd work out a lot better if they are just citizens trying to take back the city - Charles Bronson style.
• Yahtzee talks about what the game is:
  Yahtzee: For a start, as well as being another Tom Clancy coffin-belch, it's also a Ubisoft sandbox, and you know what that means these days! A big splattery faceful of samey missions with a flimsy, overarching plot as detached as a the chocolate top from a badly-made caramel slice, and all sense of progress is conveyed solely through incrementing numbers. [Ubisoft spews out a giant stream of diarrhea that covers half of the screen, knocking out the tart Yahtzee holds before spelling out the word "Plot" that comes off followed by the words "You have taken 47% of the shit."]
• "Don't worry, there'll be plenty of opportunities to figure out which one you prefer, and after each same-y shootout you can trudge down empty streets for five minutes having a really good, hard think about it!"
  Yahtzee: I wonder if I could masturbate to the Statue of Liberty.
• Talking about mechanics:
  Yahtzee: If you ask me, the overt RPG mechanics make the game even more frighteningly tone-deaf. I mean, there are moments when certain characters beam down from Planet Sensible and call out the whole "unaccountable secret police" thing, and the game does present it like he's making a valid point. But then the cutscene ends and we go straight back to "Oh boy, time to fight some Level 20 disenfranchised citizens! Watch out for the elite enemies, they get more health from being extra disenfranchised!"
• Talking about combat:
  Yahtzee: ...if elite enemies are a chore, elite snipers are ten days chained to a sewing machine in Beijing! I swear, they can get a bullet out before they've even finished standing up properly, so either they're cheating or the speed of light has gotten as tired of this bollocks as I am. (cue the letter C^note Representing "Speed of Light" sleeping next to Yahtzee's body)
• "Can I digress for a moment? (Beat) Well, fuck you, I'm doing it anyway!"
• The ending, after Yahtzee gives up on the game halfway through:
  Yahtzee: Maybe it comes alive at the end when you and the gang leaders compete in a big tap-dance contest, but I’ll never know and I don’t care anymore. I can’t remember the last time a game left me so paralyzed with boredom! The remainder of the game stretched away in front of me, like an endless swirling vortex that absorbed all joy and interest from it’s surroundings. So I tried to put on some music, but Guns N' Roses just put their instruments down and had an earnest conversation about civil engineering.
  Slash: Once you separate it from the ideology there’s a lot to be said about Speer’s model for a new Berlin.
  Yahtzee: The Division gave me a priapism and a week-long bout of constipation. I was bored stiff and bored shitless!

Salt and Sanctuary

• "Anyway, in Salt and Sanctuary, you are drowning in semen - (cue a giant spray of jizz erupting from the TV, knocking Yahtzee off the floor) whoops, my mistake. In Salt and Sanctuary, you are a drowning seaman..."
• "When you die you lose all your Salt, which is a bit counter-intuitive because getting killed gets me fucking salty, and also a percentage of your money."
• The comparison of salt and money in both this game and Dark Souls:
  Yahtzee: In Dark Souls, you charge everything to your souls account whereas in Salt and Sanctuary, money and salt are separate things. I'm not sure why though, 'cos the only things money can buy are low level items that stop being useful about 30 seconds into the game, and you do all your weapon upgrading with salt and with specific items of vendor trash that dying enemies puke out like reverse vacuum cleaners.
• Yahtzee on navigating in Dark Souls: "Better look around and figure out where I am. Ooh, I remember now, I'm in a fantasy nightmare world, and I'm making my way towards that vast brick phallus in the distance! Gosh, can't wait to find out how many things want to murder me there!"
• Things Yahtzee sees while looking at a map:
  Forest of Plop
  Shite Town
  Castle of Pain
  Disney Store
• Yahtzee talks about the complex combat in the game:
  Where the combat rubs up against the border between Dark Souls Town and Symphony of the Night-ville is when you get hit by a heavy attack and your character goes flying gaily across the screen like a happy little tear-gas canister at a protest against police brutality, which wasn't that annoying in Symphony of the Night 'cos there was no fall damage, but guess what there's gobs of in Salty Sancho, along with the platforming emphasis, which means you're never more than ten steps from a death drop, again just like your mum and pies. [two guys offer the mother imp more pies on her command "More pies!"]
• "But Salty Sancho's flinging fuckery was also its downfall, because the final boss somehow managed to clip me into a wall in such a way that it couldn't hit me but I could hit him, because I was using a greatsword half the length of my dick. I then beat him with ease, thinking to myself 'Well I was probably about to win anyways'. And that, my friends, is how easy it is to fall to the dark side." (cue Yahtzee in a black robe and red eyes holding a Game Genie)
• "On the whole, I seem to remember enjoying my time with Saltine Crackers, but then I've never been the same since the stroke."

2016, Quarter 2

Republique

• "There's no one quite like Dwight Schultz for playing characters who seem like they could sorely use a good, hard cock up their arse." Complete with an imp with Dwight's head getting a rooster shoved up its butt.
• "I'm not gonna stop playing for half an hour to awkwardly stand by the stereo like a giraffe on an ice rink, feeding it tape after tape. I've got a lot of small walls I need to crouch behind!"

Shadow Warrior

• His reason for reviewing a 3-year old game? To give the honey badger on his bollocks a union-mandated lunch break.
• "I ain't no Tumblr tot getting my pronouns in a twist over cultural appropriation, but when a bloke with a comedy Engrish accent runs around with a samurai sword, screaming about how his name means 'Penis', you've got to wonder how it would fly at a summit of the United Nations." Complete with the American delegate (sitting next to a stone-faced Chinese delegate) covering his face in despair.
• While commenting on the game's level design, Yahtzee compares it to Duke Nukem, which he summarizes as: "Level 1: The train station, Level 2: The shopping mall, Level 3: The domestic violence shelter."
• "Still, a must-play for people who like games where the main character's name means "penis", once you're finished with Solid Snake and Jet Set Willy."

Quantum Break

• The beginning:
  Yahtzee: Every foreskin-fumigating time I have to play an Xbone game, that dusty rectangular turd has to make an adventure of it. I thought I'd get clever this time and put the disc in a few hours before I intended to play it, only to switch to the Xbone after lunch and find it saying, "Disc? Doesn't ring a bell." Take out, put back in: "Oh, that disc! Suppose we'd better install it, then! One percent, two percent, 47 percent. Phew, that was tiring, I think I'll stay at 47% for the next three hours."
• Yahtzee taking a jab at the game title: "Alan Wake, then Quantum Break? Are you guys writing a fucking limerick?"
  • "After you're finished with Alan Wake and Quantum Break, why not eat some layer cake for goodness' sake?"
• About the story:
  Yahtzee: Quantum Break is a fluffy wuffy contemporary sci-fi yarn about time-traveling digitized actors. Our hero is Jack Joyce, fat-faced everyman who returns to his home town to assist an old friend with a time-travel experiment, despite having the scientific background of a plate of pork chops. But nobody relates to scientists; why do you think Marty McFly had to do all the legwork?
  Doc: [near a sleeping imp] Pick up some milk on your way back from the action sequence.
• Yahtzee's mock IMDb page for Aidan Gillen's tongue.
  Yahtzee: Maybe his tongue in particular makes me unsettled because I remember all the shit he got up to in Queer as Folk. And I chose the words of that sentence very carefully!
• "What I haven't mentioned yet is that Quantum Break is 'a revolutionary hybrid of video game and live-action TV show', meaning that between every gameplay chapter, you're obliged to watch a twenty-minute video of the internal politics of the evil mega-corporation, which seems to involve an awful lot of punching security guards and running very urgently down corridors."
  • The "Target Audience":
    1. Pillocks who like TV shows
    2. Pillocks who like games
    3. Pillocks who don't mind not having a clue what the chuffin' blimey's going on
    4. Pillocks who like games that are shorter than Steve Irwin's trousers
• "'Time Shield'?! It just stops bullets! It's a Mario star in a pretentious haircut!"
  Starman: Fuck you, dad.
• "There's something terribly token about the combat gameplay. You only need a look at the upgrade screen ("Upgroids") to get that impression: a grand total of three upgrades per power and most of them are 'make effect last slightly longer.'"
  Time Wank:
  - Effect lasts 10% longer
  - Effect lasts 20% longer
  - Belt placed around neck
• "For example, I'd enter a large area and start exploring it for collectibles and upgrade tokens for my token upgrades, but the game attempts to continue the conversation I was having with an NPC even after I move out of earshot."
  "Blah de blah
  de blah de
  words words
  that are
  precisely too
  small to read
  anyway, glomp
  glomp, I agree
  with Stephen
  Fry."
  • "I turn on a radio, listen to the DJ for a bit, get bored and keep exploring the room, find a document that Jack comments upon, accidentally activate the TV that plays a five-minute video, then the NPC starts nagging me to come over and press the continue-plot button. Four dialogues now layer over each other; it's like my brain is trying to simultaneously pat its head, rub its tummy and read aloud a passage from Ulysses."

Dark Souls III

• "Let me say right out of the gate that you can call me Billy Blue Biased Bollocks on this one. If you are looking for a fresh perspective on Dark Souls, you can hop off to Jimmy Neutral, the sexless gamer's YouTube channel, so he can whine about getting murdered with knives over and over again, as he scratches at his boney little nubs that one day, god willing, will become his balls!"
  • "I haven't got the slightest idea what Dark Souls III would be like for a newcomer to the series. I imagine it would be like meeting your girlfriend's family in Newcastle: you get talked at like you're supposed to know what they're on about for an hour ^note  Imp: Whae aye mon and then get brutally killed with sticks."
  • He then perfectly encapsulates the Unpleasable Fanbase in one sentence.
    The point is, this is all coming from a fan, so expect me to how formulaic it's gotten while simultaneously bitching about everything that's different.
• Yahtzee expressing his disappointment about the level design turning repetitive:
  "There's such a thing as too many cathedrals, Dark Souls III. Are the undead hordes known for holding a lot of royal weddings?"
• His summation of the game (and series):
  "But I'm given to understand that From Software are declaring this the last one and that's certainly what it feels like, the last weary sigh before it lays its head down for a well-deserved sleep, followed by an idle midnight wank when the DLC comes out."

Ratchet & Clank

• "The series has passed me by so far, 'cause I'm not an ickle baby boo-boo who wants to play games about fuzzy animal characters with a permanent case of Dreamworks Eyebrow".
• "Remember how much better we did this the first time around? Good, now forget all about it!"

Star Fox Zero

• "Nintendo, you’re making this way too fucking easy for me. What shall we go with, Star Fox: Zero Interest? Star Fox: Zero Gameplay? Ooh, Star Fox: Zero Punctuation, that’s the thing we’re currently doing, isn’t it?"
• He considers Falco, Peppy and Slippy to not so much be expert wingmen as emergency rations for Fox when he gets hungry midflight. To illustrate this, the accompanying graphic features Fox gnawing on Peppy while Falco holds his own severed leg saying "I blew me leg off again."
• Yahtzee summarizes the tutorial:
  Tutorial: Aim your lasers by tilting the screen controller. Press the target button to— Hey, what the fuck are you doing in the options menu? Did you really think you could turn off the tilting controls? I'm afraid we're trapped in this hell together, matey!
  Yahtzee: Sorry, for one blindly optimistic moment I thought Nintendo might have realised that insisting on a single control scheme is unhelpful in our wonderful world of all kinds of people with varied preferences and levels of flexibility. Can I at least adjust the sensitivity, as my elbows are still sore from stabbing a policeman to death and I'd prefer not to have to make large movements?
  Tutorial: No you can't, you uppity sod. Here's your options: you can turn on a thing that makes the aiming controls somehow even worse. Or you can soak up your little vagina spillage and come and join us in the real world. Now here's how the fucking targeting controls work...
  Yahtzee: Um, sorry to be picky again, but do you have any other targeting systems available? Like, say for example, one that fucking helps? One that could maybe target the enemy ship that's closest or that my aiming reticle is pointing at, rather than the one wearing the prettiest dress?
  

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

• Right out of the gate, Yahtzee comes up with a tortured analogy for not reviewing Battleborn and Overwatch:
  Yahtzee: "That's not my bag, like, three times over," as the frustrated old woman said to the forgetful lost-property attendant.
• "Thousand-Year Door pretty swiftly goes off the usual rails. You know what I mean: grasslands, desert, ocean, jungle, My Sharona!"
• Yahtzee describes the intermission segments in the game where you play as Princess Peach while she's being held captive in the villain's hideout, attempting to send help and information to her allies on the outside. He represents this by showing Peach standing on a crate under a barred window, holding a megaphone in her hands and bellowing "OI CUNTS" to whoever is outside.

Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

• Yahtzee complains about the main cast being bland and uninteresting, comment that among them, a Shakespearean character would stand out "like a neon-pink johnny in a cucumber patch".
  Man in a ruff: "Come join me now / you gentles all, / and crouch behind / yon chest-high wall!"
• Yahtzee admits that he actually found the calm segments about Nathan Drake going about his everyday domestic life rather compelling, and wanted to see more of "the boring suburban life of the ex-douchebag adventurer", likening the experience to seeing Han Solo getting dropped into an Alan Bennett production.
• On the nature of the ending:
  "And that's pretty conclusively ended, because it got the kind of epilogue you can't roll back from without a time machine or (more realistically) a particularly exuberant check from Sony."
• "Happily, the developers made all my dreams come true, by having an American as the main villain (hooray)! And all of his henchmen are Sooth Afrikans (boooo)! Oh well; no one gets along with Sooth Afrikans, least of all other Sooth Afrikans..."

Doom (2016)

• Yahtzee still hates it when a sequel to a video game reuses the title of the first game, so he refers to Doom (2016) as Deum.
• Yahtzee listing the ways on how a video game reboot cheats its way to being classified as Revisiting the Roots, only to realize Doom 2016 really does stay faithful to its own source material.
  "You're a hardcore retro shooter focusing on fast pace and mobility while fighting off hordes of monsters? Well, it won't be truly retro unless it's level-based with open-ended maps and key hunting - oh, it does have that. Alright then, but you couldn't resist having weapon reloading. That's the one thing that shooter developers always put in these days without considering how it screws up the pace of - oh, there's no reloading. Alright, what the fuck are you up to, Bethesda?"
• Comparing Deum's monster spawn-ins with name announcements ("Lord Roger Cacodemon and Lady Cacodemon.") to Doom 3's "Hell's entire buggery squadron" assaults when picking up a small medkit. Complete with said squadron being the ZP imps with sausages taped you-know-where.
• The scenes with the Doomguy from the original Doom are downright hilarious, especially when he attacks and kills imps or wakes up from a jail cell to kill imps.
• The weapon upgrades include:
  Underbarrel Haddock Launcher
  +10% Power
  +30% Speed
  -20% Smell
• The James and Marjorie bits, especially this one:
  James and Marjorie
  fell in love when
  they met at the annual
  Phobos Dinner Dance
  and Zombie Massacre

Homefront: The Revolution

• The imps naming North Korea "Bastardstan" or "Spermany", and renaming China "Norf Koria", all in crude marker.
  • Yahtzee names the fake "North Korea" "People's Republic of Chorea", "Korth Norea", and "Scmorth Schmoreans".
• The Running Gag of Yahtzee being tied to a chair and tortured by laughing "North Korean" imps is hilarious.
• Yahtzee looking up the list:
  Villains McStab: 6/10
  Resistance O'Gouge: 8/10
  • "What purpose could these sadistic torturer speed-dating sequences sequences possibly have, except to establish that both sides are cocks? And the Schmorth Scmoreans at least have better hygiene."
• "Homefront: The Refrigerator has technical issues the way the Waffen-SS had a few bad apples."
  Chef Imp: [to a kitten] It's a real shame when they let you down.
• His snark at the game's audio mixing.
  Yahtzee: I was being talked to by an NPC on our way down a corridor and my fucking footstep sound was drowning out his speech! It was like my shoes were trying to do the Bane voice!
  • This is made even better by his feet turning into cutouts of Bane with the caption "You merely adopted the floor".
• "Backyard: The Renovation is a sandbox game, which is at an increased risk of buggering up, and there's always the chance of buggering itself to death at some point." (Game tries to use a lawnmower only for the it to act up and hack the game to death)
• His description of the game's crowning moment.
  Yahtzee: The one incident which was the defining moment of the game for me took place in the resistance hideout, where I guess I'd forgotten to flush the toilet properly before I left (Yahtzee Avatar says, "Wouldn't go in there for a while") because two NPCs came over and pinned me to a wall. They both stood staring at me refusing to move and every time I tried to get past them they'd hurl foul-mouthed abuse. Well, fuck you too, game. If I wanted this treatment I'd have attended my brother's wedding!
• The conclusion:
  Yahtzee: The problem, by which I mean the rancid underlying problem upon which all the other problems scuttle and defecate, is that it's chasing a trend that we've already left behind. No one wants contemporary shooters anymore; Battlefield has decided it's going to wring some fun out of World War I, and good luck to them, cause that's like wringing apologetic tears out of Hillary Clinton, while Call of Duty is off to fight Zargon warships on the Planet Shithouse. Meanwhile, the success of Doom and Overwatch shows a lean towards good old-fashioned fast-paced fun violence on a layer of shrink-wrapped bum cheeks. Homefront: The Revolution is just a game that's past its time. Its time was 1346 AD, when the Black Death broke out.
• "So, the current official list of acceptable villains is North Koreans, South Africans and gingers."

Overwatch VS Battleborn

• He worries about almost calling Battleborn "Bloodborne" and has to open Steam to check if Battleborn has an E on the end. And then he very nearly does it...and ends up misnaming Overwatch.
• Referring to McCree as for those with weird ideas of the masculine ideal and then referring to Reaper as for those with even weirder ideas of the masculine ideal. Complete with a cameo from Jeffrey Cuddletrousers.

Mirror's Edge Catalyst

• Yahtzee discussing the inherent limitations of the core gameplay.
  "The evil corporations are running an evil corporate scheme and we can only hope it is a scheme that can be foiled by doing parkour at it. Yes, Mirror's Edge is a first person parkour-em-up and the plot runs into a recurring issue that there are only so many situations that running somewhere very fast can assist with. The game's missions have many varied story missions behind them, but in practical terms most of them are completed by running up to the right computer and mashing our hand on the screen. There's a memorable mission when Faith is working for the resistance and they set out to kidnap some evil corporate type, a fairly significant development that drives most of what remains of the plot, but since at no point in the process of kidnapping someone does parkour become necessary, the whole thing takes place off-screen, with Faith asked to instead, open quotes, "clear the path" by — you guessed it! — following the parkour path to a series of computers and mashing your hand on each screen. You get to listen to the kidnapping through your earpiece, as you gaze heavenwards and dream about what would it be like to be the main character of the story."
• Then the follow-up about the combat:
  "Still, I suppose I shouldn't encourage the game to parkour outside its comfort zone, since it attempts to do that with the combat, and in doing that parkours straight into a brick wall. The combat was the metaphorical anchovy in the trifle last time around as well, and why on earth wouldn't it be? You're a tiny unarmed personal trainer in climbing shoes whose superpower is possessing the speed of one person on roller-skates, why the hell should we be expected to take on four fully equipped riot cops in a straight fight? The game even suggests at times that the smartest thing to do is to just keep running; maybe give the thug squad a cheeky smack on the bum as you glide past, and I'm fine with that, but I suppose someone thought it would be hard to justify putting all this work into armor designs and the prerequisite pre-animated takedowns, if it's all going to be streaking past like the end of 2001. So every now and again they lock you in a room for a few hours with the goon squad, and what do you know, it turns out that a skinny unarmed girl with the reduced perception of her surroundings that inevitably comes with a first person perspective will probably get passed around like a plate of canapés. What an informative science experiment this has been.

E3 2016

• "And then there's Resident Evil 7, which has boldly leapt into Silent Hills' smoking shoes with the new and yet hauntingly familiar playable teaser in a first-person spooky house. A style shift worked wonders for Resident Evil 4, but this is a shift so radical that even calling it Resident Evil borders on duplicitous, except for the fact that game is now literally about an evil residence. Still, what else could they do? Follow on from Resident Evil 6? That'd be like trying to serve dessert after the main course consisted of filet of asbestos in dogshit."(Resident Evil 6 holds up a sign that says, "Will disappoint for food")
• For Microsoft:
  "...with pimping the Xbone cellulite-covered ass officially written off as a lost cause, we're being introduced to two younger, hotter sisters: the slim-line One S, where the S presumably stands for "stick it up your bum", and a slightly upgraded model called Project Scorpio. If you're going with the Zodiac names, Microsoft, then personally I would have gone with Cancer."
• About the VR consoles:
  "And I don't think there's any reason that games should be exclusive to VR cause I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd want to play it but don't want to take a break every two hours for a nice, cleansing puke."
• "E3 2016 was a show of names. Lots of familiar names, some with incremental numbers on the end, some without. And I know that's pretty much the case every year, but there was an unusual spike in familiar names appearing over totally unfamiliar things. Resident Evil has never been Hoarders meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Prey was a lot of things, most of them retarded, but none of them are evident in what is now being referred to as "Prey". And since Doom, Bethesda clearly feel they're onto a good thing wiring up their milking machines to old id properties. But Quake Champions seems to have bugger-all to do with the original Quake and bugger-lots to do with Overwatch being more successful than the MMR vaccine. If they keep this up, then soon we'll enter a world where names are totally fucking meaningless which would come as a relief to my friend, Patrick Childmolester."

2016, Quarter 3

Mighty No. 9

• "On [the game's] own merit, its only crime is being a mediocre game wearing the bra of a considerably better-endowed one. You can either waste energy throwing its balled-up tissues back in its face or get over it and motorboat some cantaloupes instead."
• When Yahtzee's going on about Kickstarters, there's a man on the screen yelling "I'M GONNA INVENT THE CHOCOLATE VAGINA" through a megaphone. The sad part is, that's an accurate representation of most Kickstarters.
• On the subject of the easy way people can use Kickstarter as a hype machine:
  Yahtzee: It committed its sins before it ever saw the light of day, because the people who invested built it up too much, and were inevitably disappointed when it didn't heal their leprosy, or travel back in time to assassinate Mecha-Stalin.
  • Mecha-Stalin is shown as Robo-Godzilla with Stalin's face pasted on the head, and has glowing red eyes.
• Beck (the protagonist) is represented with a photo of the face of Beck (the musician).
• Yahtzee likens the dialogue (which is annoying and refuses to go away) to "an obnoxious uncle who came over for the holidays and is still there on January 3rd, fucking the family dog".

Inside & Shadow of the Beast

• Yahtzee gets fed up with Inside's name messing up his sentences and proceeds to call it Thatcher's Britain instead. Every time he mentions this nickname, Thatcher's head appears with glowing eyes.
• When talking about Shadow of the Beast, he wonders what that strange, cozy feeling he has inside him is - oh, it's hatred. He hates the style of combat it has on offer.
• The Stinger lampshades all the jokes about Brexit in this video and the Mighty No. 9 review with "HOW ABOUT ALL THESE BRITISH POLITICS GAGS".

The Technomancer

• Yahtzee testing the game on the RPG checklist:
  Yahtzee: Have you characters, Technomancer?
  Technomancer: You bet your bollocks we got characters! Party members and quest givers, every colour of the miserable bastard rainbow! With struggles and adversities you'll invest in like a dot-com start-up in the late 90s.
  Yahtzee: Have you built us a world, Technomancer?
  Technomancer: You gamble your gonads we've built a world! A dark and complex cyberpunk world in which factions battle the supremacy against the backdrop of post-colonization Mars and there are only shades of grey.
  Yahtzee: I ain't disputing that last part, Technomancer, but probably not in the way you intended. Now, have you combat?
  Technomancer: You wager your wobbly bits we've got combat! Exciting real-time combat with enough variety of weapons and skills to create a staggering number of alternative play styles.
  Yahtzee: What number is that, Technomancer?
  Technomancer: Three! There's three play styles.
  Yahtzee: Hmm, that is quite a staggering number. Alright, I'm down. Why don't you start by telling me the main character's overall goal?
  Technomancer: ...Oh bugger! I knew we forgot something!
• When describing the Technomancer's desire to reestablish contact with Earth, it's represented by Yahtzee talking on the phone with "The Sea-Mammal escort service".
• Yahtzee's closing comment:
  "They failed to find the interesting story in a game about lightning wizards from Mars! That's like failing to find the homoerotic subtext in professional wrestling."

Furi and Song of the Deep

• A very subtle one, but hilarious nonetheless:
  Yahtzee: You play a mute albino Bob Marley lookalike, who everyone refers to as "Stranger", we never find out what his last name is though, probably Thanfiction or Zinthenite.
  • Reversed for Shameless Self-Promotion comedy in The Stinger, where he suggests that perhaps Stranger is the character's surname, and his given name is Fivedaysa.
• Yahtzee's criticising the walk between bosses, saying it's like "[his] walk down the street to the newsagent is being directed by Alfred Hitchcock".
• Yahtzee notices the convoluted point of Furi:
  Yahtzee: The initial thought from which Furi seems to have been developed is this: what if you took No More Heroes and cut out everything but the boss fights and crazy weirdos? Well, first of all you have a fucking short game, but you'd also not have wasted hours of your life running down corridors murdering hundreds of random extras that are as much threat to you as a breadstick is to an industrial fan and shopping for t-shirts. And we'd now have all those hours spared to do something constructive, like stare at a wall or try to remember all the number one hits of the Spice Girls.
• This one:
  Yahtzee: In the actual fights, you hack and, per chance, slash with your sword, but regardless I'd be loathe to call the game a hack'n'slash when it also has many of the elements of a bullet hell shooter, such as bullets, shooting, and me yelling "Hell! I totally fucking parried that, you asshole game!" [Stranger shoots their gun, whose giant bullet cuts off Yahtzee's head]
• He also criticizes the game's Schizophrenic Difficulty as thus.
  Yahtzee: ...more resembles a line graph showing my level of emotion during an average episode of Flipper.
  • "The hardest fights were the second and I think it was the seventh, but only because it had more stages than the fucking grieving process..."
    Denial
    Anger
    Bargaining
    Depression
    Acceptance
    Dance-Off
• The Irish accented narrator in "Song of the Deep" trigged "a little voice in my head that went 'Oi, they're always after me Lucky Charms, begorra!' and I'm ashamed to admit I made myself laugh."
• The Fridge Logic of a child building a working submarine.
  Yahtzee: It's the story of a little girl who lives a simple life with her fisherman father, but when he fails to return from sea one day she builds a submarine- [split-second beat] Okay, I'm not gonna let you gloss over that, Song of the Deep. How does a prepubescent girl, whose education consists of reading the labels on the back of her dad's whiskey bottles, construct a functioning deep submergence vehicle? It's not like a box-cart derby, you silly moo!
• Yahtzee's description of Song of the Deep:
  Yahtzee: It's a Metroidvania game in about the most boring way possible, all parts are locked off until you find a specific upgrade in a fixed linear sequence of upgrades that opens them, so you might as well just follow the objective markers one by one. [a giant hand points to a spoon for the cereal boxes, saying, "Over thar"]
• After encountering a Game-Breaking Bug in Song of the Deep, he debates whether he should reset the game or spend the afternoon circumcising himself with the edge of a rusty tin.
  Yahtzee: [Googling] I SLIT UP ME TAINT

I Am Setsuna

• "I like to take a moment to draw your attention to one of the user-defined tags that was attached to this game on Steam: "Story Rich." I take slight issue with it, because you don't get "Story Rich" just from mugging Final Fantasy X in an alley-way and nicking their wallet; Final Fantasy X itself is only Story Rich in Zimbabwean dollars."
• The accompanying illustration when Yahtzee quips that the only dialogue choices the game ever offers is whether the Player Character agrees with Setsuna or slightly sarcastically agrees with Setsuna.
  Setsuna: Let's all stick our private parts in this hornet's nest!
  Option 1: Yes, let's!
  Option 2: Yes, "let's".
• While riffing on how frequently Setsuna's Ingenue behaviour tends to dip into Too Dumb to Live territory:
  Setsuna's so fucking sweet and forgiving she gives me ice cream headache, but there's a point where we go beyond naively trusting into the realms of mental handicap. When she insists on you joining her party the only thing she knows about you is that you're a hired killer, specifically hired to kill her. "Oh player-san, I feel so comfortable around your upraised dagger and coppery stench of blood money." I made myself laugh again by imagining Setsuna meeting a rabid grizzly bear; (girly voice) "Oh, I just know there's goodness in your heart, Mr. Tufty—" *RAAWWWWWR* *maul* *maul*"

Headlander & Quadrilateral Cowboy

• "Gameplay is like a jar of peanut butter; it might be fun to stick your knob in, but kindly wait 'til after I've made the sandwiches!"

Quake

• Yahtzee's brief run-down of the game's enemies:
  There's the floating Scrag, whose job is to molest you in those troublesome hard-to-reach places, and then there's the Ogre, whose job is to GET FUCKED! You think you're so great, sitting up there spamming grenades with impossible-to-predict bounce trajectories. Let's see who has the last laugh after I've quicksaved another seven or eight hundred times! And that blob monster in the last episode can get double-fucked on a bed of crispy lettuce, the way it hops about like a marble on a honeymoon mattress and hitting it is like trying to swat a fly with your jizz.
  • Then, in The Stinger:
    And those bloody homing rockets the spider things throw out can get triple bacon fucked with extra relish

No Man's Sky

• "The setup is: You wake up on a mysterious planet next to a crashed space-ship, and after repairing it with raw materials gathered from the surrounding wilderness, you can begin an epic journey to nowhere in particular for no given reason."
  YOU FOUND SOME SPACE
  NOW PISS OFF
• "Congratulations! You have scratched your arse twenty-thousand times! Here's a prolonged jingle while this text selfishly hogs the interface for thirty seconds so you can't interact with anything! Congratulations! You have contracted radiation poisoning from a planet's toxic atmosphere. Here's another ji- Congratulations! You have died a total of one hundred times from radiation poisoning while inches from safety because you can't get inside your ship while I'm telling you about all the milestones you've achieved."
• What takes the funny cake is the imp portrayed as a "quadruped with three horns and nine armpits".
• This one:
  Maybe if we'd been able to build things, complete the Minecraft comparison, give us a reason to go back to places rather than stampede through space hoovering up resources and space S.T.Ds. [Yahtzee takes a rocket ride with a three-eyed female imp] Not much creative fulfillment to be had renaming the things we discover. I discovered way too many interchangeable things and ran out of euphemisms for genitalia.
  Big jobs
  Big joobs
  Borg jibs
  Small jobs
• Yahtzee compares the hype over No Man's Sky over the hype (and subsequent let-down) over Spore:
  Yahtzee: You know what they say, he who forgets the past is condemned to re-sit history A-level.
  Paper: Divorced, beheaded, died, outsourced, embedded, contrived.

Grow Up

• Yahtzee describes the title of the game as a phrase he hears a lot while describing his job in mixed company. His avatar is depicted as saying "I swear about video games for the Internet."
• The amount of Double Entendres from this episode's opening, which are ridiculously excessive even by Yahtzee's usual standards.
  Yahtzee: Bud is supervised by a spaceship computer called Mom, and his objective in both games is to climb back inside Mom's welcoming red orifice by directing one or more swelling organic phalluses towards it.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

• The beginning:
  Put your mouth over a jet-powered soft serve dispenser and get ready to cream out of every orifice because there's a new Deu-Sex sequel - or rather a sequel to the prequel to Deu-Sex, Deu-Sex: Human Revolution, which I think was about some kind of prostitute uprising while Deu-Sex: Mankind Divided is about an agreement being reached and the sex humans going back to spreading themselves all and sundry. NONE OF THAT IS TRUE! Mankind Divided is, however, the second installment in the life of one of the gaming's newest and hottest personalities, Adam "I never asked for a throat lozenge" Jensen, best known for his iconic pointy face and voice like a coffee grinder trying to seduce an asthma inhaler. [Jensen becomes a coffee grinder and the imp becomes an asthma inhaler]
• "In the aftermath of the climax of the previous game, when someone drove all the mechanically augmented humans kill-crazy by doing the equivalent of posting an honest review for the new Ghostbusters on the Internet..."
  Imp on computer: You can't seriously think they had a better chemistry than the originals.
• "You can't split humanity into augmented and not augmented because having oven hobs instead of nipples is not a trait unique to specific families, unless babies are having their legs snapped off as they emerge from the womb and replaced with shelf brackets."
• "[Remember] that most of the conflict in the setting of that game was rooted in the divide between rich and poor and insidious population control orchestrated by corporate interests and the media?"
  - Everything fine
  - We protected you from terrorism
  - Continue chewing the cud, you big stupid cows
• "Mankind Divided is a textbook expansion pack sequel, but the problem with that is that Human Revolution was just OK. And when you do a copy-paste of a game that's just OK then any positive feeling the good bit might have given us falls away as the annoyances repeat themselves. I can't stand the way the game goes to cutscene every time you take out a guard or break a wall or break wind, with a pause, a cinematic fade to black and a musical sting as Adam ceremoniously farts with the tenor saxophone implanted in his rectum. It is about as conducive to the flow of gameplay as a fat bloke jumping on a skilift."
• About the upgrade mechanism:
  Yahtzee: The upgrade is still pretty shoddily designed as well with a lot of redundancy. 'Want the ability to mark 5 targets?' 'Not really, since I can see them all on the radar anyway and marking them requires me to pop up from cover and gormlessly stare at them for a second like they're my high school crush and I'm hiding in their dad's rose bushes.' 'Well, then, how about the ability to mark 40 targets? There is nowhere in the game where there are that many but it will come in handy after you get bored and switch to playing Serious Sam instead!'
• Yahtzee pointing out the absurdity of the game's "Augmentation racism", calling the game "Episode 2 of the Clumsiest Racism Analogy in All of Speculative Fiction":
  Alright, Mrs. Stevens, we've successfully fitted your pacemaker, now piss off to the ghetto, you aug scum!
  • "So I presume I'm not aug scum if I just have pierced ears, but would I have to go to the ghetto if I glued a blinking LED to it? I never asked for piss."

Metroid Prime: Federation Force

• Yahtzee describing Nintendo's relationship with its fanbase as a prolonged campaign of Domestic Abuse from Nintendo's side.
  Nintendo fans, don't you see that this isn't healthy? Remember when Nintendo abandoned you on the highway because it thought it had a good thing going with casual gaming audience and you had to hitch a ride home in the back of a dog catcher's van? "No, no, they apologized for that. And it was my fault anyway, I should have liked Wii Music more." Things have reached a new low with Metroid Prime: Federation Force. It's not just not catering to the fans any more, now it's going out of its way to finally break their spirit once and for all. It's like Nintendo promised to buy them a puppy, and they came downstairs on Christmas morning to find a load of Korean take-out containers under the tree.
• "Who the fuck turns to the 3DS for their online multiplayer-focused games?! I'd nominate a more suitable platform, but my list basically starts with 'All of them!'"
• Yahtzee describes the game's conspicuous absence of Samus Aran, despite being mentioned throughout the game.
  It's like the game's holding her over you like a cruel dog owner whose hand might not even contain a biscuit at all. "Samus Aran just showed up and told us about another pirate base. Shame that you missed her. She's so cool and stoic with crackin' tits. She also brought us some homemade fudge but we ate it all before you got here."
• Yahtzee blessing Nintendo on their design ideologies that went into making the game and who to market it to.
  And then someone said "Wait, people will be annoyed about this decision." And their boss popped another crazy pill and said "You're right! We'd better put in a soccer minigame to molify them. After all, the kind of fanboys who wasted their tender years learning to speedrun Metroid on the slim promise of pixel tittie are also notoriously keen on team sports."

Curious Expedition & Mother Russia Bleeds

• Yahtzee finding the inclusion of H. P. Lovecraft in Curious Expedition as a player character slightly hilarious, since "that dude never left the house, and thought Jews and black people evolved from jumping spiders and dog turds!"
• "Surely Rider Haggard would have been a more fitting novelist character than Lovecraft, but then I suppose you wouldn't have gotten the instant nerd cred one gets from mouthing 'Cthulhu' and chummily waggling your eyebrows."
• "In the grand tradition of arcade beat-em-ups, you have four characters to choose from: the fast weak one, the slow strong one, the in-betweeny one, and the other one for when your mum says you have to let your little brother join in." The last of which is depicted by H.P. Lovecraft.

Recore

• "On the whole, ReCore is ve-ry-flawed: better than Federation Force, but then so is getting your nadgers pinned to the ground by a filing cabinet full of unflattering school reports."
  School Report: Below-average performance in avoiding filing cabinets.

2016, Quarter 4

The Capcom Five

• The return of the "Zero Punctuation's Occasional Guide to "Special" Moments in Gaming History" jingle.
  Yeah, you didn't think you'd ever hear that again, did you?
• Yahtzee describing 90's era Nintendo as the "King Shit of all the Lands of Gaming", which he depicts as Nintendo sitting on a throne made of NESs while being entertained by a jester, in the form of Sega Genesis.
• On P.N.03 remaining a Gamecube exclusive:
  Here's your consolation prize, Nintendo. It's a bag of lawn clippings and dead wasps!
• "Some of my best friends are whores, as long as I keep up the payments."
• Yahtzee muses that it must have been an easy day for game journalists when Dead Phoenix was cancelled.
  (as journalist) "Dead Phoenix Is Dead". Bam! That deserves an early lunch.

Clustertruck & Lichtspeer

• "As many of you know, I like it a bit hard. This is something also well known to my escort service and my accountant..."

Paper Mario: Color Splash

• "Monsters have stolen the local six or seven important and inevitably star-shaped artifacts of power, and the person behind it all begins with 'B' and rhymes with something Inspector Gadget used to say a lot."
• "There is a difference between clever, subversive self-parody and just doing the same thing you always do, but sarcastically rolling your eyes at it. Don't kick me in the bollocks and say 'Gosh, wouldn't it be funny if I were really kicking you in the bollocks?'"
• Complaining about the hordes of generic Toad NPCs leads Yahtzee to wonder "What the fuck happened to Toadsworth? Y'know, the scholarly advisor toadstool-man with the 'stache who used to hang around Princess Peach like he was trying to wipe his arse on the toilet paper stuck to her shoe."
  • Said thought-bubble regarding Toadsworth is accompanied by "Kill the whores."
  • Speaking of generic Toad NPCs:
    Yahtzee: Yeah, Pokémon might be the money maker now but Mario is the pimp daddy; it has to pay at the end of the night. If they were going to crowbar the wallet open to create new content for any game, you'd think it'd be for Mario but nope, still using the same flea-bitten paper cutout sprites Paper Mario has been using for over a decade. And I assume some of them have gotten more flea-bitten than others over the years because every non-hostile NPC in this game is a generic toadstool man [portrayed by a red mushroom imp telling Mario, "You're in trouble."] - every single one, some palette-swapped. [a blue mushroom imp appears and says, "Yes, you are."] And they all have the same role in life: throwing out glib, sarcastic remarks on the utterly pedestrian things that surround them in half-arsed acknowledgement of the obligation for funny dialogue.
    Red Mushroom Imp: Look, it says "stop".
    Blue Mushroom Imp: You're not the boss of me, sign. [both mushroom imps then dance around the stop sign while a hand gives a thumbs up]
• He then decides to try giving the game a fair shake by the only means possible - sticking a red-hot wire coat hanger into his brain to remove his memories of the better Paper Mario games.
  Hnng, there we go! Now then — flrble blrble recidivist Mario cunt.
  • And later...
    See, now that we've established that fun and original storytelling isn't part of Paper Mario's appeal, splrgle splrgle fuckmother hairy-pipes...
• About the color in the plot:
  The gameplay of Color Splash revolves around paint. You're questing for the 6 magic paint stars and have the ability to smash paint onto white things with your hammer to restore them. I think I understand the wheeze now. Nintendo are going through every substance and object one could possibly associate with paper crafting. Last time it was adhesive, now it's paint. Next time it will probably be rescuing the 6 magic sheets of blank printer paper from the clutches of King Hole Punch. The plot establishes that the villains are draining paint from characters to make them lifeless [imp drains ZP Luigi of color-blood] which creates a 'paint as blood' metaphor that gets more fucked up the more you think about it as Mario gaily romps through the world pouring blood on things as well as smashing objects with a hammer to recover blood from them, and using blood to infuse his combat cards with power like a deranged Satanic ritualist playing Yu-Gi-Oh!. (cue Yahtzee doing a chicken sacrifice ritual in front of two imps)
• "Cards are single-use, so you might have to waste a phwoar crikey death spooge on two one-legged special needs Goombas and a soggy biscuit. The only benefit you can get is money and expanded blood capacity but virtually everything in the environment disgorges money and blood like a pole dancer with the Ebola virus."
• "If Nintendo were hoping to move Sticker Star to a non-handheld console, then the joke's on them, 'coz I ended up playing in controller-only mode just so I wouldn't have to be constantly looking up and down like I was lying on my side at a tennis match."

Mafia III

• A Crosses the Line Twice kind of funny moment happens when Yahtzee describes the developer's abuse of the N-Word Privileges they'd given themselves:
  The game opens with the very Assassin's Creed-esque disclaimer to the effect of, "A lot of people are going to be saying very horrible racist things in this game, but please understand we had to put all that in to accurately bring the era to life. I want you to think about it: not putting it in would've been even more racist. Right, now that we've gotten that out of the way: Nigger nigger nigger nigger coon coon spic!" I get that the 60s Deep South was more cartoonishly bigoted than a 2016 presidential candidate, but having granted themselves the all-clear to say the N-word, I suspect that the writer started slightly getting off on doing so.
  • He also points out that this is something of a Broken Aesop due to the gangsters conforming to pretty much every stereotypical Italian-American mobster-cliché in the book and the Irish mob underboss being "drunk and fighty and associated with the color green, because that's how committed we are to making a serious point about racism."
  • It comes into play again when Yahtzee discusses why he thinks Sal Marcano was a Designated Villain:
    By the end of the game I was struggling to remember why we should hate the main bad guy; he killed about 0.1% of the people we've killed and had been running a bunch of naughty crime rackets, which we had proceed to take over and not changed in any way, but he also had an overarching, sinister, diabolical scheme! ...To set up a legitimate business, leave the criminal life behind, and create a future for his children. Oh, hang on, he does say "Nigger!" once or twice. Well, okay, say no more: Let's drive his harmless old ass to suicide to show how much more enlightened we are these days!
• Yahtzee takes issue with the lazy way the developers named the main character:
  Mafia III takes the series as a particular brand of GTA knockoff to the Deep South in the era of the Civil Rights Movement, where we play a young black crim named Lincoln Clay. Oh for fuck's sake! "Lincoln" from Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves, "Clay" from Cassius Clay, also known as Muhammad Ali. Nice. I know the race issue was gonna be unavoidable in this plot, but you might as well have called him Jerome K. Blackperson.
• His primary complaint about the game is that it's a Quick Sandbox.
  Mafia II's problem was not having enough side-stuff and being too linear, so at least they're trying. But they're overcompensating with the steering and skidded off the road and right down the side of Mt. Boring.

Gears of War 4

• Yahtzee laments on the hard work of the artist being wasted on yet another game which players are most likely ignoring the detailed graphics 90% of the time, and wonders whether they would "dream of doing more artistically fulfilling work, like directing facial cumshots".

PlayStation VR

• The opening paragraph, in which Yahtzee explains why he's taking a break from shooters for a week:
  "So it's officially Shooter Season 2016 - the wonderful time of year when the spectre of consequence-free violence stalks the land draining the nation's supply of ADHD medication. I've got the usual variety twin pack of Battlefield and Call of Duty on the list, but after Gears of War 4 I didn't want to be that guy who played too many shooters in a row and then drank a shooter while watching Shooter, the 2007 Mark Wahlberg vehicle and then became cursed every full moon to transform into the chairman of the National Rifle Association."
• "The hardware lads are still trying to convince us that we're missing out if we're not playing Halo in 10000p, counting every piece of gravel in Master Chief's driveway."
• Yahtzee explaining the experience of VR:
  And there I was, inside the virtual world with a heavy thing hanging off my face like a tortoise was trying to mate with my cycling helmet, which doesn't help with the queasiness but a big part of that is game design, (TV says, "Welcome to 'Watching Your Parents Having Sex from Inside a Tumble Dryer'") and developers are continually finding new ways to mitigate the issue.
• "Now I know why I couldn't find a free demo of it; (PS4 holds out the game and says, "No free samples") the demo would have probably been two nanoseconds of Batman looking sad!" (PS4 looks dejected and says, "Okay, fine.")
• Yahtzee paraphrasing VR motion sickness, complete the the imps as Mr. Body, Mr. Eyes, and Mr. Mouth.
  "Hey! I thought we were sitting immobile on a couch!" says Mr. Body as we play VR. "What's all this jumping around and exploring dilapidated cities business Mr. Eyes is going on about? I'm confused, so I'm going to have a big sulk and send all this food back up to Mr. Mouth in protest." "No, wait!" said Mr. Eyes. "Look! There's a stationary cage around us. We're sitting immobile after all." "Hmm, story checks out," says Mr. Body. "My apologies. Back to normal business. Let's eat something bad for us and have a quick wank."
• "But doing only one thing can go a long way if you do it well enough..." Cue Yahtzee staring at a hammer after hammering nails all over the place (his computer monitor, his desk, his keyboard, his chair, the floor, his whole body) with a smile.

Battlefield 1

• Yahtzee's German accent, which he uses when he talks about how the game on one hand tries to play up the morally ambiguous situations of World War I, leaning on the popular understanding that no nation was truly the villain of that whole quagmire of a war, yet still seems intent on portraying the Germans as the "evil side" on the other.
  "Even if you play as the German side of the multiplayer, the bloke of the briefing menu talks with zat veri smug and efil German foice, ve vill punisch zese stupit Amerikan kovboys for ze glory of ze Kaiser! Mmmmmm..."
• The You Bastard! moment at the end, especially when Yahtzee imitates the noises of a dead soldier's sad dog, which really shouldn't be funny but still is.

Titanfall 2 vs Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

• The various "fat grandma" jokes which were utilized in comparing the two games.
  "In fact, the biggest annoyance for me in the big giant robot piloting game was having to pilot a giant robot, which I know is like saying that I'd love sucking my fat grandma's arsehole if it didn't taste so horrible, but switching between the runny-jumpy on-foot controls to thundering about like your fat grandma's clinging to your legs makes for a jarring contrast. And since you only get into your mech to fight other mechs, you don't even feel more powerful. Your heath bar is still disappearing like chocolate biscuits around your fat grandma."
• The trumpet-blowing imps take the cake.
• The Running Gag of CoD: Infinite Warfare IN SPAAAAAACE!
  • Also, the running gag of an imp or imps trying to harm a cat (one of the imps shouts "Light the cat, light the cat!") before a missile appears and blows them all sky-high.
• A long list of funny "breast" names for Titanfall 2 as follows:

1. Tittyfall 2
2. Tittyflaps 2
3. Tittyfuck 2
4. Titwank 2
5. Breastdescent 2
6. Boobytits 2
7. Breastmelons 2
   • ...followed by a list of funny "scoffing" names for CoD: Inifinite Warfare:
   1. Infinitum Warfare
   2. Informal Warfare
   3. Infantile Warfare
   4. Infy Winfy
   5. Improvised Wanking
   6. Interminable Whining
   7. Impertinent Waffling
   8. Indecent Wobbling
   9. Ignoble Weatherman

• Naming the protagonists "Brian Twatchops" (Titanfall 2) and "Barry Pisscup" (CoD: Infinite Warfare).
• "...selling Tittyfall 1 at full price without single player was like forgetting to inflate the bouncy castle, (with an imp flying out of it) and resulted in about as much head trauma for me."
• The misspellings of "meanwhile" ("meanwhiel" "weenmile").

Dishonored 2

• "More roof-hopping-based stealth fun, and the tone of the ending depends on whether you solve your problems with artful character assassination^note  Emily gleefully watches from behind the couch as her target opens a newspaper and cries "MY REPUTATION IS RUINED" or the boring old regular kind^note  Skeletor—er, Corvo, that is—jumps into the frame with a knife."
• "I think I must have accidentally condemned the teleport power to twenty years in the Chateau d'If at some point, because its revenge was elaborate and well-planned. 'You can trust me, I will totally teleport you safely onto that fifth-floor window ledge across the street. AHA! VENGEANCE IS MINE! Have fun escaping those 97 police officers with your shinbones sticking out of your armpits, motherfucker!'"
• "You can have all the passably entertaining gameplay in the world but I find it hard to give a shit when no-one around me seems to. Sort of the opposite of the problem I have with public bathrooms."

WATCH DOGS 2

• Yahtzee describing Ubisoft as an entity that "has needed to have the concept of human emotion patiently explained to it," depicted as a robot looming over a child-imp with their puppy and demanding "WHY DO YOU TOLERATE THE TINY SHITTING CREATURE." The best part is that, knowing Yahtzee, the Ubisoft-robot could honestly be asking either the dog or the kid that question. Even better, Yahtzee, a dog owner, probably asked that of himself more than once.
• Yahtzee compares the game to the trashy 1995 movie Hackers in its representation of the hacking community but finds the film's tagline, "Their only crime is curiosity", a bit inaccurate for the game, and goes on to adjust it to fit better it by modifying it to "Their only crime is curiosity, trespassing, criminal vandalism, assault, bank fraud, grand theft auto and one or two good old-fashioned first degree murders".

Final Fantasy XV

• "Even Noctis' sexy bride was assigned at birth! Some of us can only get results like that after a long back-breaking evening digging up fresh graves!"
• "So if you happen to like exploring northern California in Google Street View, then here's the game for you."
• "I'm confused as to why magic attack do friendly fire and have a huge blast radius; and consequently why the game suggests I equip my NPC pals with some, when it feels safer to entrust my kids to a chainsaw juggler as they picnic in the shade of Godzilla's swaying bollocks."

The Last Guardian

• Yahtzee's rendition of Trico has to be seen to be believed; a "sort of puppy-kitten-baby goat-budgerigar thing like a merging together of all your deceased childhood pets"^note Yahtzee, standing over a row of gravestones with a shovel: "Time for some applied science" represented by a German Shepherd head with a cat ear hoop on a duck torso and two cooked chicken drumsticks. For some reason, it keeps getting funnier as the video goes on.
• Regarding the game's camera:
  Seriously, if Fumito Ueda made a VR game then the player's body would spontaneously generate new orifices just to vomit out of.
• "The only difference is that the princess you were rescuing in ICO has been replaced with a giant winged-coyote-lamb thing.^note The Trico abomination, wearing a crown: ME A PRINCESS Which might sound like a not-insignificant difference, but there's about the same amount of brainpower on display^note Yorda, sporting the usual Fish Eyes that Yahtzee gives to slow characters: ME A PRINCESS."
• He doesn't like Trico's AI, and his outburst is hilarious:
  This is very hilarious when you're trying to chuck him a treat and it bounces off his head with a hollow clunk; not so funny when the thing he's supposed to be catching is YOU in what is probably supposed to be a heartwarming moment of relationship building at the climax of a platforming puzzle. As you leap desperately away from a collapsing ledge and fall towards the adorable Mr. Touchyface with arms outstretched, the cinematic slowmotion activates as he cranes his neck forwards, and proceeds to heroically gormlessly stare at you, confused that you didn't bring him a biscuit as you plummet past his nose to your death.
• The closing lines:
  It'd be like getting invested in the relationship between the bloke from Shenmue and the bloke from Shenmue's forklift. Imagine that: the storybook romance between a cold piece of emotionless machinery, and a forklift.

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