Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

"Yahtzee regularly neglects or criticizes Nintendo in his reviews."

He has criticized Nintendo precisely once in the last two years. Everything else has been praising or tepidly praising. Meanwhile, his reaction to the best game of the year was to whine that Kratos evolving as a character made him boring.

Wait...he's been talking about having kids! I thought he didn't like kids?

I for one think it's hilarious that anybody can accuse Yahtzee of all people of being a Nintendo fanboy when he snubbed Mario Odyssey for Hat in Time as the 2017 GOTY on the grounds of it being like rooting for the evil team in a sports movie.

Anyway the unique hardware situation of the Switch should adequately explain why there's a lack of BC to anyone.

Wait, has Yahtzee stopped spending half of his time on Nintendo reviews bitching about Nintendo as a company instead of anything about the game? I'd given up on even trying those videos somewhere around the time of Splatoon

Wasn't he highly praising of Splatoon 1? He didn't like Splatoon 2 because it was more of the same.

Anyway his review of Smash Bros. is basically a tamer, gentler version of his Brawl review; he still hates the game and it's diametrically not for him.

Meanwhile, the best Souls game that From Software ever made comes out, and he bitched about the hardware.

Edited by Shake-Master on Jan 16th 2019 at 7:38:05 AM

Admittedly yeah, that was pretty fanboyish of him. Bloodborne is Sony's game that they paid to have developed, and wouldn't exist otherwise.

As a general rule ZP hates the Nintendo franchises. He liked the gamecube as a whole and the switch has definitely won him over. According to him, there have been no good pokemon games, no good super smash, there's been exactly three good Zeldas, and basically Splatoon 1 was impressive but 2 was just more of the same. That's not "fanboy" even remotely.

Yahtzee dislikes Nintendo as a company for several reasons:

• They insist on platform exclusivity for their first-party titles, which is anti-consumer.
• They have at various times been very hostile towards third-party IP on their platforms, driving away companies that might improve the overall quality of their brand.
• They rely on nostalgia to sell many of their products, being seemingly allergic to innovation or creativity.
• Many of their platforms have relied on hardware gimmickry to sell games rather than quality in and of itself.

When Nintendo puts out good products, with actual creative effort behind them, Yahtzee applauds along with everyone else. When Nintendo inevitably retreats to its comfort zone of Mario and Zelda, Yahtzee says, "I told you so."

These complaints are entirely consistent with how he treats other brands. If you have somehow gotten the impression that he has a particular hate for Nintendo, go back and watch the reviews where he eviscerates EA, Sony, Microsoft, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc.

Now, if you have some sort of emotional attachment to Nintendo such that criticism towards it causes extra angst in your soul, then you may want to look inside and see if you aren't exactly the sort of fan that Yahtzee complains about.

This is an argument that Yahtzee regularly makes but it's also one that's insane? Nintendo is one of the few major game publishers that actually regularly comes up with new ideas instead of following trends. Some of Mario sub-series are kinda creatively stagnant, but using that as a criticism of Nintendo as a whole is unfair

You can't deny that the lead titles of every Nintendo hardware generation involve some variation of Mario rescuing Peach from Bowser and Link rescuing Zelda from Ganon. It's their moneymaker, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less creatively sterile. (And Yahtzee loved Breath of the Wild for changing the formula, let us remember.)

Also, the complaint is that he particularly or distinctly hates on Nintendo. He's just as angry at the Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Assassin's Creed franchises for releasing new iterations of the same exact thing every year. He also gives all of these creators credit when they do, in fact, innovate.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 17th 2019 at 10:14:52 AM

The big headlining Mario and Zelda games do tend to have distinct gameplay changes though?

Someone should actually go and watch the videos if we want to continue this discussion. I remember him giving games crap just for being first-party Nintendo and treating the above franchises lack of innovation as a given, but I don't really feel like taking the time verify this

As someone who loves the formula, it's undeniable that console Zeldas have basically been on the exact same formula from Oo T until they hit Bot W. They haven't innovated much because they didn't really have to. They put on a new coat of paint, a couple new gimmicks per game, but it's a straightforward formula.

Again, one that I love. But it's not breaking the mold in any way.

And now I want to play Zelda.

At least Wind Waker had cool aesthetics.

Also, didn't Majora's Mask shake up the formula a bit? You might want to start counting after that.

Edited by storyyeller on Jan 17th 2019 at 11:41:09 AM

And Yahtzee liked both of those, oddly enough. Think about it from his perspective: as a professional game critic he straight-up admits to demanding novelty from developers because he gets bored playing the exact same games over and over again.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 17th 2019 at 11:50:58 AM

Yup. WW, MM, and BOTW are the only good Zelda reviews he's ever given.

This week, we get the year's first indie double-bill: GRIS and Ashen.

Boy, Yahtzee sure isn't fond of indie games getting all pretentious and award-baity and forgetting to be functional games, is he? Well, that's GRIS, billed as an "experience" without any risk of death or indeed any real danger. So why, we ask intelligently, make a game instead of the film that you were obviously more interested in (*cough* David Cage)?

Ashen is a Dark Souls clone, but with a "seamless co-op experience" that either didn't work or matched him up with people even dumber than the default AI, making completing the game all but impossible.

So yeah, let's all talk about how Mr. Croshaw sucks off indie developers and uniformly disses mainstream companies.

I had to laugh at the part where he describes both games ten times more succinctly than their own store pages.

For another laugh, pause at 3:58 to read the crossword: MINGE, GONAD, SPANK, TWAT, ARSEHOLE, GASH, WANK, and SPAZ

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 23rd 2019 at 12:39:04 PM

Wow. I tried watching a playthrough of Gris, just to see what it was like, and it was amazingly boring. Even as an "experience" rather than a game, it doesn't seem very good.

Watching a playthrough is not quite the same as playing it yourself, though. Perhaps this is an example of a game that doesn't lend itself well to second-hand playthroughs?

Well, part of the complaint is that the actual gameplay is rudimentary to the point of insult: you literally cannot die, nor indeed fail in any way, so calling it a game at all is taking a considerable amount of liberty with the term.

It's an "interactive storytelling experience", which you might as well watch someone else play on YouTube. I certainly wouldn't pay money for it. For example, I couldn't even finish watching LPs of Life Is Strange and Beyond: Two Souls, so I can't imagine how agonizing actually playing them would have been.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 24th 2019 at 10:06:44 AM

It seems a bit like Journey without the coop element. Which was kind of the whole point of Journey.

Indie games are both privy to some of the best, most original and most lovingly-crafted experiences in gaming, as well as a ton of shovelware and some cases of wannabe auteurs who think their vision is too lofty for a mere game yet insist on making one anyway.

I'm more glass half full about indie games. They're trying their best to make fulfilling artistic experiences and lack the budget and careful Q&A of bigger games.

Sometimes you get Hollow Knight and Omensight, and sometimes you get Battle Princess Madelyn and Freedom Planet.

And sometimes you get The War Z, or Drive By Hero, or The Monster. Actually, 99.9% of the time by volume you get those asset flip games.

I think of it like fan fiction. Sturgeon's Law rules in those marketplaces because they have minimal standards for publication. With mainstream development/publication, at least somebody did market analysis and QA on the products. Doesn't mean they're good, of course. And often times the sanitization and conformity that AAA development enforces will shut down genuinely good products like Papers, Please.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 24th 2019 at 4:39:16 AM