Given that there's been a new episode of Zero Punctuation nearly every week for 16 years, you can guarantee there are a lot of running jokes.
- Press X to Not Die is guaranteed to show up in a review of a game with quick time events.
- The caption "Oh no everyone can see my bum." It gets Inverted in his review of Conan Exiles when his character Thinderella the Necromantic Naturist says "I hope everyone sees my bum."
- Nose-picking is mentioned frequently when talking about mundane actions on the part of either the player or NPCs.
- Yahtzee references making a supervillain sandbox game called "Mankind Has Yet To Recognize My Genius, The Game" at least twice.
- Also, the image of that red-haired guy. For those who don't know, he's one of Thomas Ruff's "Expressionless Faces" found in one of Yahtzee's Google Image searches.
- The phrase "Triple-Cunted Hooker".
- Every time Hitler makes an appearance he's accompanied by a caption saying ACH.
- "People always say to me: Yahtzee, you (description indicating manliness...)"
- Ending sentences (and reviews) with: "...not gay!"
- Game characters, personifications of concepts, and/or Yahtzee himself skipping across the screen arm-in-arm, "off to see the wizard"-style.
- Whenever a character is praised for having "personality", this is indicated by a funny hat and one-liner of some sort. Bowser wears a top hat and monocle while quoting Shakespearean verse; in Driver: San Francisco, it was a musketeer who crashes into a loaf of bread and deadpans, "Looks like I'm bread for success"; In CoD: Ghosts, the dog puts on a bowler, sunglasses, and chomps on cigars like a stand-up comic.
- In his review of Driver: San Francisco, SERVE AND PROTECT is used sarcastically on the cop protagonist's ability to possess drivers to crash into one another.
- Rattling off a list of numbered sequels and turning it into a football score, i.e., (Half-Life 2, Silent Hill 2, Thief 2, Spider-Man 2, Arsenal: 3).
- The best example comes from his review
of The Orange Box:- "...Half Life 2, Episode 2, Manchester United nil. Now then, Team Fortress 2... Liverpool 3. Sorry, I'll stop this now."
- Within the Dead to Rights: Retribution Dead to Rights: review, the Dead To Rights: recurring joke of Yahtzee Dead To Rights: replacing every RE- word with the game's title, but the RE- word in place of Retribution. Likewise a similar gag was done for Red Dead Redemption's Word Salad Title.
- In a similar fashion, Yahtzee took Red Dead Redemption and complained that the game is neither red nor dead. He then went to call the game throughout the review by several alternate names, namely Brown Alive Redemption, Blue Poo Atonement, Green Spleen Submarine, and then Purple Monkey Dishwasher.
- Yahtzee also used FTL: Faster Than Light in a similar manner. 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.
- Similar to the Red Dead Redemption example above, Yahtzee kept changing the title of Alice: Madness Returns for things like Return of the Madness, Return of the Jedi, Return of Jafar and Batman Returns.
- The title-changing has since become a regular part of his repertoire. He even points it out in his Medal of Honor: Warfighter review when he states that the actual title is already stupid enough to make him bust a gut laughing.
- A character bending over and asking to be, er, taken advantage of will always be saying "In mah butt".
- Various sound effects, such as "THRRRP" or "WURRGH".
- Pulling out his "Like God of War but" stamp.
- This one actually ended up as quite a subversion, as of the four games he created the stamp to use it for, only one game entirely fit it (Darksiders, which was "Like God of War but Zelda"). Of the remaining three, one he had to reclassify as "Like Devil May Cry but" (Bayonetta), one was such a blatant and unashamed GoW clone that he had to remove the "but", leaving it as simply "Like God of War" (Dante's Inferno), and the last was, as he'd mentioned at the start, God of War III itself.
- "Hungry Hungry Hippos" seems to becoming one of these as well.
- His evident dislike of Glasgow.
- He uses the term "Eating all the pies" to mean taking up space at least twice. This is standard British English, and comes from football fans insulting unfit players.
- Hallucinations commanding people to "KILL THE WHORES" or pointing out that "YOU KILLED MEEEE", and are typically represented by the floating head of a translucent ocelot, in call back to Jack Slate's Mad Ocelot God.
- "CHAERG"
- Ferreo Rochers may be becoming one, with occasional visits from Magner's cider and Branston pickle.
- Monsters go "abloogy woogy woo".
- Dancers or people "fannying about" wasting time go "hootah hoo".
- "Ah yer bastard!"
- Calling cookie-cutter modern military cover-based regenerating-health FPS games (such as Battlefield, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, etc.) by the term, SpunkGargleWeeWee, as he refuses to classify them as typical shooters. As of E3 2013, he's redefined the term slightly to replace "modern" with a No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom, specifically one in which the player is dragged along a linear procession of pre-determined, barely-interactive setpieces, through overcrowded war scenes that are so noisy and chaotic they become totally meaningless, with so many NPCs that any contribution you're making is negligible at best, and which have no context for who you are or who you're slaughtering, except that you are obviously the aggressor and considerably better-equipped than the enemy (e.g Ryse: Son of Rome).
- As of Ghost of Tsushima, "Jiminy Cockthroat" has joined the ranks, as a short term for "open world stealth action game with crafting and collectibles".
- Calling any example of generic zombie-based media (games or movies) "Dem Cunts Be Dead".
- Yahtzee makes a mentioning of Drake's hair behaving "like it's held in place with polymer cement." The subsequent reviews of the other Uncharted game shows bullets bouncing off Drake's hair, and when Yahtzee muses that with all the damage Drake takes, he will probably end up as "a big pile of giblets and teeth", said pile is shown with Drake's hair-do proudly sitting completely unharmed on top of it.
- Any time Yahtzee calls a game "absorbing", it's seen literally absorbing him with a "SHLORP" sound effect.
- Yahtzee getting distracted while saying something risque and going "sorry, lost my train of thought".
- Referring to many subgenres of games (namely of the Wide-Open Sandbox variety) as X-'em-ups. Far Cry 3 is a mindfuck-tiger-'em-up, Sleeping Dogs (2012) is a petty-crim-footstool-vehicle-related-inner-thighs-'em-up, etc.
- Whenever the splicers from BioShock come up, he refers to them as sploicers, as a jab at Atlas's overly thick Irish accent.
- Yahtzee replaces the colon (:) in certain videogame titles with a dry heave sound, starting with his video on Lichdom HEURGH Battlemage, out of bitterness for first installments of franchises that pretentiously colon-ize their titles with subtitles.
- Cadbury's Creme eggs tend to pop up everywhere, especially when Yahtzee finds himself in need of an analogy for something positive.
- Most moral choices are represented by having to decide between Coke and Pepsi.
- Yahtzee's implied sea mammal fetish.
- Cold semen.
- Comparing difficult games to smashing one's head against a brick wall.
- Whenever he describes an individual invading an implausibly large country (such as himself invading Europe in the Modern Warfare 3 review or Kevin Spacey invading the USA in Advanced Warfare), they'll be portrayed riding up a slope with a phonetically-spelled place name sign on it, alone in a wheely bin, brandishing a sword.
- Hypothetical questions and counterarguments from the viewer are often accompanied by images of said viewer suddenly standing behind Yahtzee, adressing him directly. Sometimes the gag gets an additional punchline, such as "What the fuck are you doing in my house, viewer?" or "Thanks for reminding me, voice inside my head".
- Games with excessive Revenue-Enhancing Devices shake a money jar at people and demand either "GIZ CASH" or "Fuck you, pay me". This is also a common way that he represents Private Military Contractors and other characters stylised as "mercenaries".
- When a female character exasperates him but isn't actively unlikeable enough to actually make him hate her, he'll often call her a "silly/dippy moo".
- Whenever a new Super Mario Bros. game comes out, Yahtzee usually comments on the sameness of the worlds by rapidly listening off "Grassland, Dessert, Ocean, Jungle, Ice world, Fire world, Boss." with accompanying imagery. It's leaked into other reviews as well.
- Whenever Sonic the Hedgehog comes up, expect Yahtzee to mention that Tails must have two buttholes to go with his two tails.
- As of 2022, there's a "recurring character" in the form of Reasonable Horse in lieu of the usual viewer-goblin interjector.
- "Excuse me, we're trying to sleep"
