Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

Holy crap, is that happened to After Hours?

Yep. They fired every video producer overnight, no warning to them or content viewers.

They even had already filmed a finale for After Hours and are just sitting on it.

So, here's the Assassin's Creed: Odyssey review on YT. I don't have a lot to add personally, since I have been following our own AC thread. I will say that it's noteworthy that this is the first game in the series that Yahtzee couldn't bring himself to finish, so I suspect it'll be making an appearance on the Blandest Five at the end of the year.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 25th 2018 at 11:36:35 AM

:(

I do admit Origins hit me a lot harder.

Really? I am enjoying Odyssey WAY more than Origins. It's the most fun I've had in the franchise since, like, AC 2?

Quests feel more varied than Origin's 9 billion "Go to camp, put guy on your shoulders, walk out of camp". The Combat is so much better than Origins (Even if mercenaries are sword-spongey). The story's not deep, but more engaging that Origin's.

It does have a bit of the Ubisoft "Do everything rather than focus on fewer systems and do those REALLY well"

Edited by Ghilz on Oct 25th 2018 at 1:05:12 PM

Today, unexpectedly, we see the review of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. I've been curious about this one ever since Blizzard's client started pushing it (like Destiny 2) along with their first-party titles, and if someone's going to cross-promote at me so blatantly, I'm going to check out that faint smell to make sure it's not a pile of dead rats.

To hope that maybe he liked COD BLOPS this time is obviously insane, but it seems like Activision thought they might be able to sneak out from under Yahtzee's critical gaze by not including a single-player campaign. Oh, such adorable dreams. (At least they can legitimately dodge accusations of racism this time.)

To summarize: it's blatantly ripping off PUBG and Overwatch with its two main game modes, charging a fortune for the privilege of playing a blander version of each. Now, this sort of game is absolutely not my bag, so I'm hardly the kind of person who would buy it even if it was the newest and coolest thing ever, but now I can have my knee-jerk prejudgment completely confirmed.

Oh, and there's a zombie mode. Obviously.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 31st 2018 at 3:23:54 PM

Shrug. Most of what I've heard about this game is "PUBG but fun", so I see where the popularity comes from. Battle Royale isn't my jam but I can respect what they're going for at least.

Battle Royale is extremely popular, but as I said, it's not for me. Getting sniped all day just turns up my blood pressure to no good result.

This week on YT: The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

What. The. Oh, it's one of those artsy, quirky Japanese games. 2D Limbo-like where the gimmick is that you have to strategically crush and dismember your own character to make progress. And the character is a schoolgirl, so this is definitely somebody's fetish. Apparently the game is a metaphor for acceptance of transgenderism or something? Alrighty, then.

I think Yahtzee reviews some of these just because he enjoys making fun of them. Also, around 4:20 is, by his own admission, possibly the most offensive joke he's ever made. And yet I laughed, so who's the worse person?

I also love the closing line: "How dare you oppress me, I identify as someone who isn't oppressive!"

Oh! I just realized that I forgot to post last week's ZP: Return Of The Obra Dinn.

This is another Lucas Pope game: an indie novelty that Yahtzee places in his remarkably thin category of games that he unconditionally likes. You're playing what is essentially an insurance agent whose job it is to investigate the disappearance of the crew of a ship, all in a black and white freeze-frame 3D style. The objective is to figure out each crew member's identity and manner of death, and in doing so, discover what happened.

I have to admit, as a concept it's definitely unique. Not really my style, but definitely on my radar now that it has received the Croshaw seal of approval. His only real complaint is that it has no replay value.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 14th 2018 at 12:58:19 PM

Goddamn, that truly was some hilariously fucked up stuff.

Adventure games usually aren't a genre made for replay value, so I don't get the complaint. You wanna solve the same puzzles you now know again?

You absolutely can design adventure and/or puzzle games for replayability. You can have branching narratives, randomize the story elements (in this case, who was killed where and by what), all sorts of things.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 14th 2018 at 3:46:03 PM

A branching narrative is fair, but randomizing elements with Obra Dinn's setup will just sacrifice logic behind the sequences you're trying to discover. The game's ending changes depending on how you perform, so I guess you can be a jackass if you want.

Personally, looking for replay values in certain genres is a futile goal, as the design behind them is very elaborate that any case of replayability so far has been very shallow.

Maybe my "diminishing returns" rationale is fallacious since nothing can top a blind run, but with adventures games I just can't help it. This might come from the fact that these games are past their "prime" and now handled by very small teams, and expecting something they can't pull off in a resonable period due to how careful and eleborate the game design in that genre is. Or I'm just weird like that.

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 14th 2018 at 1:04:03 AM

"How dare you oppress me, I identify as someone who isn't oppressive!"

This is barely one step above anti-sjw weirdos who say: "I identify as an ATTACK HELICOPTER you're triggering me! xDDD" I'm not sure I'd even consider it above that at all.

Not surprising that someone who makes this kind of joke has a very shallow interpretation of the themes in this game. The dismembering thing is a metaphor for self-harm, Yahtzee. And I don't care if Swery is trying too hard to seem progressive, at least he's trying. I know that concept is kind of beyond you, since you enjoy whining about PC culture in your videos pretty consistently.

The only thing I agree with is the gameplay criticism. It's really just too slow and sluggish and everything takes forever. An enhanced speed option would have done a lot to improve the experience.

I think the thing with Yahtzee is that he tries to be "above it all", which honestly is not much of an improvement.

To be honest as much as I like his content his views creeping in have made me worried.

Have they gotten rid of the credits sections? I just watched the last two reviews on Youtube and didn't see any. I miss the credit gags.

I believe the credits gags are kept for the videos published on The Escapist's website.

As for the PC stuff, I'm pretty sure that Yahtzee is not a covert bigot. He's an equal-opportunity offender, and he illustrates that it is hypocritical to enjoy humor directed at someone whose views you disagree with whilst taking offense at the same kind of humor directed at your own views.

Anyway, he is getting on the game's case for being so over-the-top and absurdist that any message it might otherwise have had is lost, much like he ragged on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice for its reductive portrayal of psychosis as tied to screaming, kill-crazy violence.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 14th 2018 at 12:03:14 PM

Yahtzee is one of those gamer dudes who don't support right-wing nutjobs and occasionally point out sexism/racism/etc. in video games, but still get pissy when, say, women want more female characters in gaming and then goes on to whine about the ess jay woos. There's much worse than him, but that's not exactly high praise. Anyone who claims themself to be an "equal opportunity offender" is usually like this, really. Not that he does, as far as i know. I like to think he's self-aware enough not to actually call himself something that embarrassing.

And it's really not that absurdist. Yeah, there's some weird stuff in the game, but the themes really aren't hard to grasp when you pay a little attention, which he didn't seem to do much if he didn't even grasp the self-harm metaphor. It really just seems like this isn't a game for Yahtzee, because he can't relate or just doesn't Get It (which is usually a bad complaint, but I think it applies in this case). I mean the guy makes a transphobic "I identify as a sea urchin lol!!!" kind of joke in a game that's about a trans girl getting bullied into attempted suicide. That joke is always dumb, but here in particular it's just tone-deaf.

Edited by lara16 on Nov 15th 2018 at 1:26:04 AM

I'd argue he was also pretty reductive on Hellblade's attempt at handling of psychosis. The link with violence is due to the main character's warrior upbringing, and the game is not even that action-heavy so that straw kinda breaks. It uses its other aspects for the audiovisual aspects and Senua is shown to be capable of rational behavior, her illnesses are not some quirk that's played on queue. The game has a strange mix of hope and despair but it's ultimately about her coming out on top, resulting in a very well done journey. Sometimes Yahtzee's reasoning come across as "These elements are surreal/absurd so we can segue into something else."

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 15th 2018 at 4:02:10 AM

Dude's not a bastion of progressive ideals, but if you take issue with "I identify as someone who isn't oppressive" as mocking anyone but the kind of "I identify as an attack helicopter!" people, then we're at something of an impasse.

It's that and it's also a dig at people who make a big show of being offended on behalf of other people, less out of personal moral outrage and more out of a desire to look progressive. Not that you can't be genuinely concerned about such things, but my personal inclination is more to say, "Dude, that's fucked up," than to pretend that insulting some other group injures me personally.

I'm not entirely sure what "not a bastion of progressive ideals" even means in this context, though. Yahtzee hasn't made any sort of deal whatsoever about his personal politics, although considering how much he enjoys tearing apart right-wing power fantasies, Brexit voters, and racism/misogyny in games, it would be extraordinarily difficult to make a case that he's a raging conservative.

Anyway, it would have been entirely fine to make a game exploring issues of depression, self-harm, and suicide in the lives of people dealing with gender and sexual identity crises. But Swery seems to have taken it well beyond that point to make self-mutilation a core gameplay element, which seems to me to be severely fucked up. I haven't heard about any young people gaining regenerative super-powers and using their own severed limbs to solve life problems lately.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2018 at 12:30:31 PM

It's not really played up as a good thing, especially when the game is short, and you get more stuff about what I guess you can say "the real world" which is more mundane. The climax actually dismisses the core mechanic. There is more but it'd veer into spoiler territory. To me it just seems like the surface level absurdity is used as an excuse by Yaktzee to dimiss it, which is actually something that's easy to do. Sounds like he'd hate certain filmmakers.

And I haven't heard of people with an existential crisis being practically immortal, or obsessive self-centered assholes learning to change their way a bit after fighting with a lightsaber from ebay, but what can you do?

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 15th 2018 at 10:07:13 AM

Most games don't try to market themselves as containing some kind of deeply applicable real life message. Even one of Yahtzee's favorite games of all time, Spec Ops: The Line, earned some criticism for the fact that it's still glorifying war violence in its gameplay, even if the story doesn't agree.

The funny thing about the review for J.J. Macfield is that he seems to have enjoyed the game itself; he certainly didn't give it the treatment of Dark or Kane and Lynch. One has to remember that about ZP: he's going to expound on the faults of every game, even the ones he likes.

Edited by Fighteer on Nov 15th 2018 at 1:30:03 PM

I mean, neither did this game (or Spec Ops, obviously) so I dunno why are we even talking about that. Video games are inherently hypocrytical in a way.

Anyway I think all has has been said so let's have some segue.

Edited by UltraWanker on Nov 15th 2018 at 11:21:14 AM