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Funny: Zero Punctuation
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Heavenly Sword and Other Stuff
- Nariko's outfit:
The whole effect does not so much as scream "battle-hardened swordswoman" as it does the phrase, "Try and pull this one off, cosplayers."
- The demo's stand-out line "We may need you to play twing-twang.":
My first thought when I heard that was, "I am so going to quote that out of context, but on reflection it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in context, either. If the developers were hoping Id consider buying the full game just to see what twing-twang is, then mission fucking accomplished, I suppose, but I'm going to be very disappointed if it isn't a cutesy euphemism for lesbian cunnilingus yeah I went there.
- In fact, that provides the page quote for Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
- "Since Nariko wasn't quite finished expressing her death wish, she then cut the support ropes that held up the big stone erection and rode it down to the ground, where it collapsed upon a bunch of soldiers who were doing manly things like arm wrestling and grunting, and if you're seeing a sort of Freudian motif going on here, then rest assured you're not the only one."
- The experiment in the beginning of the episode is actually a punishment for not buying Psychonauts.
- (If you did buy Psychonauts, please disregard the preceding.)
- Yahtzees description of the games Love It or Hate It status: "Psychonauts seems like a rather polarizing game in that some people seem to think it's the kind of thing Jesus would make if he was alive and wasn't a pussy and some other people feel it's a chunky vomit milkshake severely overhyped by the people in party A."
Console Rundown
- The subtitle: an adventure in fanboy baiting.
- While talking about Final Fantasy 13 Lightning herself is suprised that she is actually a woman and not another androgynous male.
- A line about boiling water apparently being able to form allegiances in the game is accompanied by a jar of water on a Bunsen burner screaming "FUCK THE POPE!"
- The rant on the extremely binary nature of the Karma Meter:
"There are only two endings, a good one and a bad one, and the extreme contrast between them is rather jarring. In the good ending, you're a virtuous flower child with love and a smile for all the shiny-coated beasts of God's kingdom, and in the bad ending you're some kind of hybrid of Hitler and Skeletor whose very piss is pure liquid malevolence. I'm sick of games that claim to have choice but that only really come down to either Mother Teresa or baby-eating. All I'm saying is that a little middle ground is nice now and then." (cue picture of Mother Teresa eating a baby)
- Made even funnier since Mother Teresa was hardly the saint she's often made out to be and actually did some pretty terrible things.
Tomb Raider Anniversary
- After spending the whole review trying to avoid referring to breasts, Yahtzee falls prey to the Freudian Slippery Slope, which culminates in a Hurricane of Euphemisms for boobies.
- Before that, his musings on playing the original Tomb Raider as a kid:
Yahtzee: It kind of takes me back to when I was fifteen and playing the original Tomb Raider and I'd back her up into a corner to get the best viewnote of her juicy—thighsnote .
(Caption reading "Phew, That Was a Close One" pops up)
- Before that, his musings on playing the original Tomb Raider as a kid:
- It's hard to catch, but in the review he claims the game "only stands out in the area of juvenile gore", illustrated with a graph that asserts that Barbie Horse Riding has over twice as much hardcore violence as Resistance: Fall of Man.
- Yahtzee's "No, and go fuck yourself, you ignorant scaremongering cockbags!" being captioned as "No, and I consider your argument misinformed."
Halo 3
- Describing the companion AI as "Pants-on-head retarded", complete with image of companion wearing pants on head. (Also keep in mind that Yahtzee is British, so by "pants" he means "underpants".)
Tabula Rasa
- "Some people also find fat people sexy. I don't understand them myself, but then most people don't understand why I like putting lettuce around my cock and hiding it in other people's salad."
The Orange Box
- "It's short, it's cheap, and it comes with lots of fun extras, not unlike yer mum."
- Comparing Half Life 2: Episode Two's use of Remember the New Guy to "coming home from school to find a walrus sitting at the dinner table, and you're the only one who seems to notice."
More potatoes, Uncle Tusky?
- Comparing playing a Sniper in Team Fortress 2 to playing an adventure game where "the only puzzle is 'Use GUN on MAN'."
- Admitting that he can't find any serious problems with Portal: "This is the most fun you'll have with your PC until they invent a force-feedback codpiece."
- "If you like blazing action peppered with variety and cleverness you could do a hell of a lot worse than Half-Life 2: Episode 2 (Manchester United nil). Now then, Team Fortress 2 (Liverpool 3, sorry, I'll stop this now)."
- It's always funny when Yahtzee takes game titles that contain numbers and turn them into the final scores of sporting events.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
- "The Hero called "Link" on the few occasions I'm mature enough not to abuse the "Enter Name" feature, and "Fagballs" on all the others."
- "Also sometimes I like to name him 'I Say' so that everyone sounds like Foghorn Leghorn."
Clive Barker's Jericho
Guitar Hero III
- The review being stuffed with Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?, before ending:
"On the whole though it's just not as good as tonguing another man's balls. [both figures stop playing and stare at the fourth wall] I mean... as it used to be. [awkward silence] I'm not gay."
- Even funnier when you realize that one of the two players is his own Author Avatar.
Super Mario Galaxy
- "You could transplant the head of Joseph Goebbels onto the body of a praying mantis, and it would still compare favorable to Super Mario Sunshine."
- The return of Uncle Tusky!
Silent Hill: Origins
- Yahtzee compares Silent Hill 2's writing compared to the rest of the video game industry, like Charles Dickens joining a forum for Invader Zim Fan Fiction. Yahtzee appears in the crowd of the dorky-looking fanfic writers.
- "Also, you have one second to name any game in which weapon degradation has been a good idea. (beat) Time's up. That's what I thought! There's something very wrong about a katana that shatters after five or six hits, one that ostensibly isn't made out of glass or chocolate."
- Yahtzee wonders where Travis found a body warmer that was spacious enough to store 18 portable TVs. Cue a animation of pile of TVs falling out of Travis' vest and him hastily stating "I don't know how they got in there, officer!"
- "But it's impossible to care about [Travis] because A) he's a breathtaking nonentity with all the emotion of a polystyrene block, and B) there's no reason for him to be in the town at all. There's no missing wife or daughter keeping him motivated; the only conceivable reason for not turning on his heel and fleeing with nary a backward glance or stop at the gift shop is sheer determined retardation."
The Witcher
- "What would you get if you took the corpse of J. R. R. Tolkien, ground it into a fine powder, and snorted it off the doughy breasts of a prostitute suffering from Tourette's Syndrome? Well, first you'd get a throatful of dead writer, then the police will probably like to talk to you and you'll no doubt make an enemy of Mrs. Tolkien."
- "20 minutes. Out front. Puffer fish."
- "Okay, now I just have to figure out if that was a man or a woman..."
- "You might say it's sexist to treat women like a baseball card collecting mini-game, so you can ogle their luscious rounded boobies and melt away between their smooth milky thighs as the sweat runs in rivulets from their writhing, sensuous bodies, but...sorry, I forgot where I was going with that."
Call of Duty 4
- (Waffle about game physics)... "and now, to counteract the seriousness of that last sentence, Boingo Boingo Whoopsy Knickers".
- When Yahtzee describes Call of Duty's deconstruction of typical war tropes he says it is what elevates Call of Duty 4 from average to excellent, before clarifying that the word excellent shouldn't just be tossed around and even so it doesn't rank far on the scale of other excellent things, where Call of Duty is on the far left, Portal is to the right, and at the very end of the scale there is a picture of Jesus Christ.
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
- The drawing of Nathan Drake juggling a torch, a chainsaw, and a baby. The next frame shows the baby and chainsaw on the floor, along with some blood, covered up by a black censor box that says "THE BABY IS FINE THE BABY IS OKAY."
- The bit where Yahtzee shifts from his usual style to a video recording of himself, where he patiently explains that a Quick Time Event should not be used in a way that promotes Fake Difficulty, especially if they're done in a way the player can't expect - before a "Press X to Dodge" message suddenly flashes on the screen, and Yahtzee nonchalantly dodges a thrown object, all while still calmly explaining his point.
- The titlecards for each chapter of the review, which suffer increasing degrees of typos and other abuse.
- Yahtzee's explanation for why First-Person Shooter games of recent have abandoned health meters: "Maybe someone threw a big party for video game interfaces, and Mr. Health Meter got drunk and acted like a tit, so now everyone shuns him".
- The Funny Background Event in the ending credits. The heads-up display from Doom is shown on the bottom of the screen, with Yahtzees cartoon head replacing that of the game's protagonist, when an imp removes the head and sits in its place.
- "Instead of doing what I normally do i.e crucify the game with big blunt rusty nails shaped like penises, let's instead use turok as an example to go through a few of the mistakes first person shooters keep consistently making. Perhaps I could persuade developers to stop making them, then maybe I could persuade the tide to turn back and ride a winged marshmallow to the sherbet kingdom."
- On the game completely disregarding the backstory to the series and instead just making another generic first person shooter with a cast based off of aliens: "They've approached ripping off Aliens with the same determination that most developers would approach making a game that's actually good, and that's sort of admirable, I guess. In a retarded kind of way" with a bug eyed pug in the foreground.
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure
- "I didn't [find the voice acting] all that annoying, but my roommate said it was like having his ear canals raped by a man wearing a sandpaper condom. Not in those exact words, obviously."
- Yahtzee continuing to get Zack and Wiki's names wrong (intentionally), eventually ending up calling them "Whack and Sticky".
Condemned 2: Bloodshot
- Yahtzee trying to pour in the Paranoia Fuel into your brain by telling you there is a serial killer living under your bed at this very moment, but "don't look or that'll really piss him off!" And his utter bemusement at the ending of the game:
"Condemned: Bloodshot, by contrast, ends on a stupid sci-fi tower thing resembling something the Combine would throw together if they were all drunk, and a piss-easy final boss fight which you win by shouting at him so loud his brain explodes. I wish I was fucking kidding."
- And when comparing the first game's "Forensics" mini-game to clicking an "OK" button, we're treated to this Freeze-Frame Bonus.
LISTEN UP CHUCKLES - Session9 was actually pretty good.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Yahtzee mentioning that he bought the game illegally (from Gametraders Robina) due to it not being officially released in Australia. He then went on to name the store he bought it from (Gametraders Robina) over and over again, the final time (Gametraders Robina) actually giving the exact address of the store.
- Yahtzee complains about having to unlock Solid Snake and Sonic the Hedgehog, prompting Mario to pop up.
Mario: Looks like-a you'll have to play with a-me instead.
- Yahtzee responds by shooting Mario in the head.
Mailbag Showdown
- Arguably the most controversial episode, but also one of the funniest if you have thicker skin. Yahtzee got more hate mail than normal after panning Super Smash so he decided to do a video as an open response to the criticism. The first line before responding to the emails set the tone:
Yahtzee: So without further ado, Go Team Retard!
- "I do point out every little thing that is bad about a game, but then, I'm a critic! It'd be weird if I didn't. If I put people's balls in my mouth for a living, I'd be a prostitute, or possibly a Gamespot employee..."
The World Ends With You
- "And [the protagonist] has to team up with a partner, partly to make the most of the DS dual screen, but mostly to teach him a valuable life lesson about friendship and acceptance and everything else Sesame Street used to bang on about whenever Cookie Monster wasn't around."
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
- "Every now and again, the planets would align and I'll be affected by weird cosmic rays, and suddenly all I want to do is play a nice fantasy RPG. Not a JRPG, God no - it's just space radiation, not the infinite power of Christ."
- "My only previous experience with The Elder Scrolls series was a brief spell of Morrowind during the previous planetary alignment, in which I ran around some muddy countryside in the rain for a few hours fending off weird sub-human creatures. So basically it was just like Glastonbury Festival."
- Yahtzee's explanation for why he thinks the Player Character was in jail in the first place - for shagging the Emperor's wife and daughter at the same time, while playing a guitar solo on the corpse of God.
Metal Gear Solid 4
- After describing Snake and Otacon's relationship: "That oozing sound you just heard was all the world's homoerotic fanfiction writers simultaneously emitting torrents of hot lady-spunk." At which point the screen reads "THAT'S ENOUGH OF THAT."
- Also for the genuinely batshit plot of the Metal Gear series:
"Anyway, Solid Snake is tasked with the assassination of his evil clone brother, who is dead, but lives on through his possessed arm, which was grafted onto the body of OH CHRIST I CAN'T GO ON THIS SHIT IS BANANAS" ([Image of a turd] = [Image of a banana] )
LEGO Indy
- "... I thought I'd better go undercover, drill holes into my head until I'm mentally twelve years old, and try out the new flippity gombo spletch."
Alone in the Dark
- The B Roll Rebus for the phrase "terrible execution" involves a guy stuck in a guillotine backwards so that his feet are about to be chopped off.
- The "Terry vs Gonad" sequence.
"Hey!" said Terry. "Let's have a damage system where you actually see persistent wound decals on your character's body." "Okay!" replies Gonad. "But let's put them on the outside of his clothes so they look like someone glued slices of ham to his jumper!" "Hey again!" says Terry, "how about a dangerous gooey black floor that becomes neutralized by bright light?" "Okay again!" says Gonad. "Now let's make the flashlight incredibly ineffectual against it and make it a one-hit kill!" Then a broken and jaded Terry starts sniffing glue while Gonad goes into the fetal position and softly giggles to himself
- The bit about the female sidekick, Sarah Flores:
Perhaps the crowning moment of her hideousness is when she nearly dies and the game forces you to press a button sequence in order to revive her with CPR. Although the spiteful cow never actually dies, no matter how many times you deliberately fuck up. (The accompanying animation depicts the game prompt first saying "Press X to Not Die" before turning into "You going to Press X or What", as Edward casually sits around in a chair and ignores both the prompt and Sarah.)
- If someone serves you a dead dog for lunch, you do not stick around for the pudding.
The E3 Trailer Park
- "Those of you that are paying attention will no doubt notice that all these games are sequels, And for those of you not paying attention..." *claps* "OI!"
Ninja Gaiden II
- From Ninja Gaiden 2: "So the gore's been ramped up, and as always, hand-in-hand with Gore comes Titties, his lovely wife and business partner."
- Summing up the Excuse Plot: demons over there, kill they ass.
Prince Of Persia Retrospective
- The "Don't stick your dick in a pudding" metaphor.
(summing up Warrior Within) It just goes to show: never stick your dick in a pudding. It might still be good pudding and you can spend all afterrnon explaining that to people but no one's still going to eat it because YOU STUCK YOUR DICK IN IT!
It seems that Ubisoft decided that emo culture was "in," so they went around the office one morning and fired everyone who was smiling.
- About Warrior Within's darker atmosphere:
Soul Calibur IV
- Yahtzee creating a character modeled after himself, with the "Charisma" and "Morals" sliders set to zero while "Bile", "Articulation", "Standards" and "Hat" are all maxed.
- While ranting on the lack of innovation in the games industry:
"And do you know who I blame for all this? YOU! Yes, you, the public. Especially you, ADRIAN! (That probably isn't your name, but it was worth it to freak out all the Adrians in the world.)"
- "Will Wright created The Sims, a franchise which by shrewdly combining user-created assets, the powers of a malevolent trickster god and a massive amount of implied nudity, now annually makes about twice as much money as Belgium. So can his new game, Spore, possibly live up to that legacy? In short: No. In long: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo...."
- Said "Nooooo..." lasts for roughly 15 seconds.
Mercenaries 2
- "There's an insidious thought that frequently goes through the minds of gamers; and I'm not talking about the ones you get when Ivy from Soul Calibur's pants ride up, which are perfectly natural for growing young men."
- On the fear of Always a Bigger Fish, one of his complaints about Mercenaries 2: "So we have scenarios where you're sitting on a nuclear stockpile to shame North Korea and are throwing peas at a giant robot crab on the off-chance that there might be a bigger giant robot crab at the end of it all."
- Yahtzee's new name for the game: "Airstrikes 2: Hooray for Airstrikes".
- The immortal line: "Forgiveness, however, isn't a strong point of mine, so I'll just conclude by saying that Mercenaries 2 can eat a dick pavlova."
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky
- Yahtzee always refers to the game by spelling out the letters in "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.", i.e. "Ess-Tee-Ay-Ell-Kay-Ee-Ar: Clear Sky".
- "You couldn't release a buggy game during the cartridge and cassette days, you'd get sentenced to trampling under the company Brontosaurus. But I'll tell you the worst part worst part worst part worst part worst part *System error* And whistled for a baboon!"
This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. Angry policemen are en route and resistance will only make them angrier.
- Even funnier is the Freeze-Frame Bonus error message at this part.
This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If problems persist, sing gentle lullabies and lovingly stroke its hair.
- Then repeated at the end of the video:
- Also, "Lying prone only lowers your eye level another inch or so, so your character is either extremely fat or uncomfortably well-endowed."
- When he illustrates the difficulty settings with pictures of a kitten, a bigger kitten, a tiger, and then for the hardest setting he shows a picture of fursuited guy. With all the former ones terrified!
- "We've all been made complacent by tutorial levels and health regeneration. It's up to games like Ess Tee Ay Ell Kay Ee Arr to remind you that you're going to be just as useless after the downfall of society as you are now, nerd.
Silent Hill: Homecoming
- Yahtzee's tangent on Romantic Plot Tumors:
"This is another peculiarly American habit that seems to always go unchallenged: why does a love interest subplot have to be shoehorned into everything? Imagine if there was some kind of parallel universe where every game and movie, regardless of genre, was required to incorporate at least one line dancing competition."
(Illustrated by Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker suddenly interrupting during their climatic lightsaber duel to put on cowboy-hats and start dancing)
"We'd think they were all raving lunatics! And yet here's us forcing in an out-of-place, cheesy romance scene that's more agonizingly painful to watch than any of the actual horror the game is supposed to be about."
- And then the follow up:
"And if that's not enough, you get a wise-cracking black friend drenched in stereotype. Towards the end, there's a bit where you're given the choice to either save him or let him die, and I could not hit that "No" button fast enough, I tell you that."
- Then finally the conclusion:
It's like they had some kind of generic Hollywood movie checklist to fill in. Which makes sense, because the game borrows heavily from the similarly overdone Silent Hill movie, to the point that I half-expected there to be a level where you play as Sean Bean doing something totally fucking irrelevant.
(Slide with Sean Bean playing with a paper airplane)
- Yahtzee's repurposed title for the game: "The Adventures of Captain Scowlyface (and his Angsty Little Pal)"
Saints Row 2
- Yahtzee on giving gamers too much freedom, coinciding with his belief that Humans Are Morons Who Kill For Fun
"If you give them guns, they will shoot old ladies. If you give them cars, they will run over old ladies. If you give them aircraft, they will ascend to the highest possible height and hurl themselves out onto an old lady."
- "Pure, mindless fun, like wrestling an excitable dog in a paddling pool full of disembodied breasts. [beat] Don't think too much about that simile, I certainly didn't."
Fable II
- How he ends the review, claiming that the developers distract players from the game's flaws by going "Ooooh wook, it's a doggy! Mash up his widdle face and call him Chips."
- The completely random and unremarked on cameo by Fyodor Dostoevsky, who briefly joins the Author Avatar in the animation.
Fallout 3
- The beginning of the review:
...Yeah, it's pretty good. (cue credits, which get cut short after two slides) Alright, alright!
Guitar Hero: World Tour
- Wait until after the credits to hear Yahtzee sing his "Deus Ex Song."
Mirror's Edge
- At the end of his paragraph decrying the excessive use of bloom effects, Yahtzee says the last two sentences in a tone that is matter-of-fact yet filled to the brim with weary resignation mixed with mild disgust. The way it caps the Bathos of the bit turns it into comic gold.
"So he did. And then he ate his own shoes."
Left 4 Dead
- The poster for a Zombie Apocalypse film, with the title been: "Oh Christ, Them Cunts Be Dead."
- "...but the repetition is eased by the so-called AI Director, an omnipotent figure watching silently from the shadows who creates dramatic tension by conjuring health and ammo at the point when you need it and a billion zombies whenever hes bored; which is all the time. "
Tomb Raider Underworld
- "Innovation is to this franchise what a double cheeseburger would be to a lactose-intolerant Hindu!"
- And the image of vampire Lara recoiling and hissing at the sight of the double cheeseburger.
- Not to mention his hilarious matchmaking of Lara: Jason Voorhees.
They've got so much in common: they both have an embarrassing amount of adventures that all follow an extremely specific formula; they both have an irresistible compulsion to murder God's creatures; they've both spent a lot of time underground; and most importantly neither of them will ever JUST FUCKING DIE!"
- Lara staring at her hands in a way that indicates My God, What Have I Done? after shooting someone. Followed by her casually brushing off some dust and wearing the dead guy's brain on her head, saying "I'M MISTER BRAIN HAT!"
Far Cry 2
- Whenever he turns on the South African accent.
- During the same review: "It brings to mind an animal rights activist freeing a captive bunny rabbit into the wild only for it to bewilderedly sit among daisies for several hours before a predator [the predator being Bear Grylls] comes along and bites its entire body off."
Little Big Planet
- "There's a very in-depth level designer built in, with a host of tutorials you'll be tempted to go through just to have Stephen Fry tonguing your coc....hleah for hours on end"
- Topped during the middle of the video when he "finishes" the review.
Thief: The Dark Project
- The "masterfully executed Link", with accompanying visual gag, was an almost painfully hilarious Lampshade Hanging segue.
House of the Dead: Overkill
- The part with Bowser in front of an arcade game.
Yahtzee: Fittingly it's totally retro with the entirety of the controls being little more than "press B to shoot" and "don't press B to not shoot".
[Bowser demonstrates by repeatedly smashing his nose into the button on the machine until he falls onto his back having bloodied his face and knocked himself out, with the game then telling him "You need to shoot some more."
- This bit.
Yahtzee's TV: Btw dem cunts be dead.Yahtzee's Author Avatar: YOU IS DE CUNT!
- His metaphor of Creator/Nintendo as the first survivor killed in a Zombie Apocalypse, Xbox as the heroine, and PS3 as Ving Rhames, culminating in a Visual Pun about the "tortured metaphor" with Jack Bauer at a computer.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand
- "Remove your presumptions and we find ourself playing a game about an extremely rich man (who wears two hats for no adequate reason) destabilizing a developing nation in order to steal what little wealth it has for himself. Presumably to spend on fur coats made of diamonds to wear on stage while singing about how great he is."
- The credits blurb about the game being the story about how 50 Cent destabilized the Middle East and thereby caused the events of Modern Warfare series.
Resident Evil 5
- "It's like watching someone beat their fists against a wall and run off to hospital only to do it some more. And they used my medical insurance. And it's my wall."
- Which is just a small part of Yahtzee's hilarious rant about the Artificial Stupidity of his NPC sidekick.
- "One time I was low on health - but not too low - and was about to use a small herb to keep myself going when I saw my partner coming towards me brandishing a valuable large herb. And when you're running away from your support character with more desperate terror than you feel for any of the actual monsters, something has definitely gone wrong somewhere!"
- Which is just a small part of Yahtzee's hilarious rant about the Artificial Stupidity of his NPC sidekick.
- "If you want to wear armor, that takes up a space too. You're carrying your armor in a pocket of your armor!" Queue a picture of Chris screaming "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" while he falls through infinite recurring armors.
- "But let's close this review with a revisit of that lovely matter of racism that's been hanging around like a bad smell. RE5 actually does a lot to defer that accusation. Your partner is black (a bit), quite a few whiteys are scattered throughout the early hordes, and real effort has been put into a somewhat realistic and sympathetic depiction of modern Africa. And then...! Halfway through the game, we suddenly find ourselves in a succession of mud hut villages fighting crowds of jabbering black people in loincloths and war paint, chucking spears. Oh, dears! Talk about sidestepping a pothole only to fall off a bridge. But one needn't be worried unless there's genuine hatred behind it, and I don't get that impression. Capcom aren't bad people, they're just idiots!"
Halo Wars
- The Stinger of the review. The imps discuss how tasty Pedigree Dog Food is. Yahtzee is not amused.
- Or alternatively he just wanted his Nice Hat back.
- "Yes, it's real-time strategy; a genre which, as the whinier of my correspondence have repeatedly made me very much aware, I have neglected up to now."
- The rant
[About his hostage units on Escort Mission disappearing after the timer runs out] "We lost contact!" went the character... BULL. FUCKING. SHIT. (the words "WHAT. ARBITRARY. SILLINESS." appear in synchrony with his swearing). All possible threats were dead! We didn't lose contact - I was looking at them - They were RIGHT. FUCKING. THERE! They were so close we could communicate by waggling our eyebrows at each other! What the fuck happened when the stupid arbitrary time limit ran out!? Did their Battle Royale collars explode!? Did they lose honor and disembowel themselves? WHAT?!
And just to put the cherry on it, you know who they were? Absolutely bloody no one! Generic faceless pricks of the sort I'd vat-grown about fifty of that day alone! But we didn't make it in time, so they were going to make me do the whole fucking mission again!
As the exasperated Chinese zookeeper said to the last male panda in the world, FUCK! THAT!
- It becomes about a million times more funny when you realise that this is the first — and likely only — time that Yahtzee has sounded seriously legitimately angry. Not jokey-acting anger, serious, honest to god "WHAT THE FUCK" anger. And it's beautiful.
- Let's not forget the awesome hypocritically humorous line that explains why he doesn't enjoy the RTS genre:
I'm a man's man, a courageous man who's not afraid to be out in the field... looking my enemy square in the eye through the scope of a high-powered sniper rifle from the next town over.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.
- During the review he illustrates the enemy PMC attacking Washington. Then the giant, bug-eyed Uncle Sam pops up behind them with a giant "OI!" beside him.
- Also "I know that drama demands that the enemy actually be a plausible threat, but I still think it'd have been more credible if the enemy had been an army of disgruntled insect people from the Earth's core (five second pause)... WEARING SILLY HATS."
Siren: Blood Curse
- His praise of "Sightjacking" as an interesting concept, portrayed as an eyeball on A Date with Rosie Palms.
- Another one of his odd metaphors crops up - "As the leper said to his mistress, 'Where's the bloody point?'"
Valkyria Chronicles
- His summarized feelings for JRPGs:
"If you're new to this series, let me briefly summarize my feelings towards JRPGs: UUUUUUUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEHHH RRRRAEEEEEEEUUUUUHHHH and every single one of them is about androgynous twelve-year-olds killing Satan."
Duke Nukem Forever
- Oh Lord, it's difficult to pick just one part of this review as being funnier than the rest. It really must be seen to be believed. Some backstory: The game won Viewer's Choice on Yahtzee's Facebook page. Thing is, the game wasn't actually out yet. The whole review is a big sarcastic joke about the game's ''long'' development cycle and has to be one of his best videos. Highlights include:
- The major changes the game goes through as it progresses:
Yahtzee: I started the game first-person shooting at terrorists in a military complex, then four or five hours later I was in a restaurant on the Moon making ravioli for an incoming alien wedding party. And I honestly couldnt tell you where any significant changes occurred in the intervening time!
- Even better, in the accompanying visuals, you can see a sign that reads "CONGRATULATIONS VL'HURG AND STEVE". In fact, it provides the page image for Aerith and Bob.
- The "fake" screenshots and trailers for the game:
Yahtzee: But what really boggles my mind is the sheer amount of effort that went into the fake screenshots and trailers that were released throughout development to give the false impression that the game was an utterly generic brown FPS that any competent studio could have farted out in a year or two, and that the entire team were time-wasting cock sections with the work ethic of an overweight house cat with no legs.
- Every single part of Yahtzee praising the game's control scheme:
Yahtzee: Every single mode of gameplay in this extravaganza is controlled through an intuitive full body interface. You move Dukes arms with the analog sticks and his legs with the shoulder buttons. So to walk forward you alternate pressing L1 and R1 and youd be amazed how immersive that gets after a while. The buttons are used for facial expressions, so you press X to move your mouth, Triangle to pick your nose, and Square and Circle to wiggle your ears. These are all mostly used to endear yourself to the many rascally children you have to befriend, but theyre also used for problem solving, such as at the point where Duke is strapped to an operating table and needs to activate a crossbow someone left next to his head. Also for the first ten minutes or so you can also use the SIXAXIS to rotate Dukes neck, but then theres a hilarious fourth wall breaking sequence where Duke bursts into the lead designers office and punches him in the stomach for being so fucking stupid.
- The game's dolphin races, which are portrayed on screen through an image of Duke racing a bazooka-wielding Adolf Hitler through the seas on dolphins. And Hitler's dolphin even has a Swastika!
- The game's amazing achievements, especially as Yahtzee descends into an insanely fast Leaning on the Fourth Wall fuelled rant about the final achievement, which appears to hit a hit too Close To Home:
Yahtzee: Its difficult to pin down my favourite aspect of Duke Nukem Forever between the dolphin races and the gun that shoots dogs and the liberal use of full frontal nudity. But I think the achievements deserve particular mention. Its not just the usual token achievement every time you beat a chapter and a big one at the end, No sir! Duke Nukem Forever makes you fucking work for your gamer score. Theres the achievement for beating the final boss using only your ears; Theres the achievement for playing the whole game with the controller immersed in icy water; The achievement for placing a Wii Fit board in front of the TV and obliterating it with a croquet mallet; But the hardest one of all is the achievement for turning off the console, leaving the house, meeting a nice girl, taking a sailing boat around the world, having three beautiful blonde children, and finally dying content with the knowledge that you didnt spend twelve years waiting for an utterly pedestrian sequel to a game that everyone stopped caring about around 1997'' '''''to be released by a developer that makes John Romero look on the ball!'''. Which is a huge challenge because if just one of those kids turns out brunette then you have to start all over again!
- It becomes even more apparent in the next section:
Yahtzee: My one criticism for Duke Nukem Forever is that it comes on 14 DVDs. But Id expect nothing less from a game with such a long development time! And every second is on display! And a good thing too, I mean hypothetically if 3D Realms hadnt used the time to put together a titanic super game and had been merely jerking off for twelve years then it raises unfortunate implications. It means that not only can a studio be staffed entirely by howler monkeys but there are also investors, who probably consider themselves to be quite serious people, who will pay them to jump about and wee on things for over a decade, while talented people with great ideas for games are snubbed because theyve never had dinner with John Carmack or whatever. And then when the monkeys present nothing more entertaining then a fistful of poo on a tray and they get sued for all their bananas, a bunch of extremely thick people, who still genuinely believe that something half decent could come out of this rigmarole, would say Thats tragic! NO IT IS NOT TRAGIC! If you get sued because you were paid to do a job you didnt do, that's not tragic, that's how the world should be! And you are a magnificent retard who should have their brain taken away by social services!
- The best part is that when he mentions getting paid to do a job you didn't do, the visuals show The Escapist's logo walking up to Yahtzee, showing him a piece of paper that reads "CONTRACT: REVIEW ACTUAL GAMES THAT EXIST'' and then taking away Yahtzee's desk.
- The ending of the review, and subsequent credits:
Yahtzee: But anyway, the point was Im just glad I dont live in a world where such scenarios exist. Now I better stop here because I promised Jimi Hendrix that wed go pony trekking under the sea.
- And then the credits show him and Jimi Hendix riding seahorses under the sea, Kimi Hendrix putting on an underwater performance and then getting blown up from a missile launched from a Yellow Submarine.
The Second Annual E 3 Hype Massacre
- While conducting his second annual overview of games previewed at E3: "Final Fantasy XIV! I feel that anything I could say would be repeating myself, so I'm just going to express my feelings with a strangled noise from the back of my throat: Aughhghhghghhghghhghghggh."
- What's even better is that he continues doing that over the end credits music, even attempting to keep with the tune.
- Made better still when he realizes the "epic guitar solo" ending is coming up. You can hear him very quickly say "Fuck" before inhaling and bracing for impact.
- What's even better is that he continues doing that over the end credits music, even attempting to keep with the tune.
- "Bayonetta! As in 'Hey, yo' betta not play this game-' OH, FUCK YOU!"
- When comparing the two protagonists: "I had to laugh at a moment when I was on a mission, plowing a tank through a crowded street, and over the agonized screams, Alex said: "Gawrsh, I sure hope this is the right thing to do!" It's like if Mr. Bean were a mass murderer."
- "A sandbox is only as good as the method by which you get around it, and Cole has a tendency to get bogged down with climbing, while Alex can shoot blood out of his wrists at jet engine velocity and fly, like emo Peter Pan." ("THINK WHINY THOUGHTS")
The Sims 3
- "This may sound a bit hysterical, but The Sims 3 is probably the most evil game in the world."
- At the beginning he says he's reviewing this game because Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which he'd rather be reviewing, hasn't been released in Australia yet.
"My future self will probably be playing it by the time this video goes out, but fuck my future self, he's got something against me ever since he started putting on weight."
[Present!Yahtzee starts eating a doughnut roughly a quarter the size of his body, causing the gut of Future!Yahtzee to jut out, much to the latter's dismay.]
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
- Every time the party blower comes out in the Call of HWAREZ review.
- "...and no, for some reason, I cannot pronounce Hwarez any differently..."
- "This may surprise you, but—" *party whistle*
- The bit during the Silent Hill 2 review with the party blower coming out of Yahtzee's hat. And the look of shock coming from Yahtzee as a result.
2. 5 D Hoedown
- The distraught level designer in the 2.5D Hoedown who follows him around crying with "WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" taking up the entire top third of the screen.
- The subversion of X Meets Y at the end.
Tales of Monkey Island
- Yahtzee's terrible-Irish-accent half of the review of Tales of Monkey Island was painfully hilarious.
- "It's so obnoxiously safe and committee designed that any attempt to critique it in my normal manner would be equally as dull. ...so that why I've decided to review it in Limerick form".
Batman: Arkham Asylum
- While describing the game's combat: "Press X to
not dieKICK ASS."
- Also from the Arkham Asylum video, at 1:58 of the review, he shows Batman pouncing on and killing a mother cat - complete with mourning kittens.
- "Another tool in Batman's arse...enal is the Detective Vision; I guess you can't call it 'Bat-Vision', then it'd be a black screen."
- "...But as I tapped the block to break it, it shifted slightly, and I clicked the background and fuck, it was like my character had been waiting all day for me to do do that. He flung his pick into the air and started jumping up and down like he wanted to be a cloud when he grew up."
- "Scribblenauts comes to us from 5th Cell Media, a bunch of work-shy cheaters whose most notable previous title is Drawn to Life, a game so unfinished that the player had to do half the art design themselves [...] After Drawn to Life they wanted to prove they're not above drawing stuff themselves, so they drew every single object on Earth. Talk about overcompensating!"
- There is one particular hilarious line.
"The main character is Rubi, a tomboyish assassin who is about as likeable and sympathetic as a deep-sea angler fish in an SS uniform."
- "She's arrogant, rude, surly, psychotic, selfish, greedy, joyless, and really rather dim."
- "She also thinks swearing is wit. That's my thing!"
- "She's arrogant, rude, surly, psychotic, selfish, greedy, joyless, and really rather dim."
- The utter lampooning of terrible gaming ideas scattered throughout Wet's design through use of the game programmer "Pillock," who does everything to please the octopus in his brain, and causes his boss to be Driven to Suicide.
- "global wobal wobbity bits"
- His Take That of Rule of Cool gunplay: "The gunplay is based around Rubi's ability to automatically shoot one enemy while manually aiming with the other gun, which is an effective gameplay mechanic, but it only works when she's leaping through the air or wallrunning or sliding along the ground like she's being carried along by an army of beetles. And at all other times she forgets that she's holding more than one gun, so apparently she's got an air-cooled brain. It's most reminiscent of Stranglehold, and has the same problem that game had. Yes, it's kind of thrilling when Inspector Tequila dives sideways in slow motion shooting dual pistols while doves fly out of his ass, but when he does it 50 times in a row you start to wonder if he has some kind of inner ear-disabling, dove-shitting medical disorder.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
- A dog randomly gets rocketed out of his DS.
- Not entirely random—just the scene prior his avatar had been saying "Out, out!" to a horrible mental image as Yahtzee-as-narrator described 'another bizarre bit,' and apparently between those two something in the handheld obliged him in the most hilarious way possible.
- "...unless you're some kind of recently unfrozen neanderthal and this is your first experience with electronic media, in which case: RARRGH! Submit your soul to the one-eyed demon!"
Dragon Age: Origins
- "I'd like to see a Tolkienesque fantasy where the humans aren't the biggest pricks in the room. I mean, a lot of my friends are humans, and some of them are all right."
Assassins Creed II
- The episode starts with Yahtzee's mangling of a saying familiar to Europeans (and Hetalia fans):
"[...] In heaven the food is Italian, the police are British, the platformers are French, the shooters are Croatian, and it's all run by two international software giants and an electronics corporation. In hell the food is British, the shooters are Canadian, and I forget the rest, but basically the gist of the saying is that Italians are all tossers."
- Yahtzee's recap of the events of the first Assassin's Creed:
"It recounted the adventures of Desmond the future-y man and favorite candidate for the blandest sentient lifeform in the universe competition as he uncovered a global conspiracy by diving into the racial memories of Altair, the Medieval pasty man, an Assassin with the ability to turn completely invisible when sitting on benches looking serious, hampered since birth with a unique genetic deformity that makes him water-soluble."
- The game's fast-travel system, here depicted as Ezio being shot out of a cannon.
Demon's Souls
- Describing a boss fight with what he describes as a giant cow pat: "Anyway, I eventually managed to return the monster to cow pat hell..." (showing him Golf Clubbing the cow pat followed by it landing next to a sign saying "Welcome to Sussex".)
Holiday 2009
- "Oh, what the fuck are you doing here? It's Christmas, haven't you got families to resent? This is my one week off, I'm going on holiday."
- "... That's summer holiday, by the way. Hope that northern hemisphere's weather's working out for you."
Awards for 2009
- "The Everything-Proof Shield Award for Most Obstinate Refusal to Die";
"[After explaining why he does not give the award to Mario] -so instead I'm giving it to Michael Atkinson; a south-Australian Attorney-General who continues to ensure that half the games get banned or censored, and whose ancient, black, dried-up little heart still manfully strives to keep him alive in the face of the searing waves of hatred that are broadcast to him from all over the nation AND the world, every second of every day. Well done, you miserable old fuck"
- When complaining about Wangsty, testosterone-poisoned protagonists:
If I were War and I just hoisted a seven-foot demon into the air and chopped it in half with a single swing, I wouldn't stand there scowling. I'd go, "Fucking hell! Did anyone just see that!? I am squirting machismo out of my nipples over here! I am a monster truck that walks like a man!"
- The whole beginning of the review as well:
Well bugger my bumblebee's breadbin! First weeks of Twenty-Ten are going to be fun, aren't they? Darksiders, Bayonetta, Dantes Inferno, and God of War III... God of War ripoff, God of War ripoff, God of War ripoff, and... Well, God of War.
- And while we're at it, the part we're he reveals Darksiders shameless rip-off of The Legend of Zelda:
I don't think [borrowing from Legend of Zelda]'s the case, thought. To say Darksiders "borrows heavily" implies they did some work of their own. A better phrase would be "Completely Rips-Off with about much shame and emotion as the fucking Borg collective"! I appreciate that taking elements from a good game that work well and play around with menu scenarios isn't a bad way to design games, but when you have a boomerang that can hit multiple targets, a grappling hook that pulls you to climbable walls, and puzzle dungeon about deflecting beams of light with movable mirrors, we've moved from simple "homage" to the territory of "spraying a stolen car and re-selling it to the owner"! Thankfully the last dungeon introduces a gadget that has never been in a Zelda game: A gun that opens blue and orange portals! ... Outstanding.
- "...The main character looks like someone sat down, started drawing him, and then never fucking stopped. [...] What War looks like is a fucking coral reef on legs."
- "Here are the combos you will need to know to master Darksiders: the Chump Chop ('Square'), the Double Chump Chop ('Square'+'Square'), and the Whipped Cream Genocide Brouhaha ('Square'+'Square'+'Square')."
- His mental breakdowns over the utterly complex plots of the game in question and, get this, Pac-Man.
Eat pills, avoid ghosts... only sometimes you can eat the ghosts as well if you-AUGH!
- Speaking of Bayonetta, his British 'immunity' to her.
"Fortunately, being English, and therefore utterly repulsed by the slightest sexual urge of myself and everyone around me, I am immune from any callous attempt to touch my heart via my wrinkly undercarriage, and Bayonetta looks about as sexy to me as a pencil stuck through a couple of grapes."
- The series of Freudian slips the make a lie of that last comment.
Dark Void
- The 'Inspiration-o-meter'.
- Dark Void is "a game that ran out of something. Maybe it was money, or time, or willnote , or employees, or maybe a giant monster frog demolished their studio while battling Godzilla."
- "Dark Void started off pretty rocky, but between the rocks I caught a glimpse of something beautiful with cleavage that could hold up a fucking Christmas tree. But once I'd caught up with it and we'd started making out, all its teeth fell into my mouth and gave me scurvy."
- Describing Borderlands as an "FPS RPG (OMG)".
- Yahtzee's depiction of a USB glove controller for MMORPG fans, where you get one experience point every time you punch yourself in the face.
- Referring to the game's setting as "Pandora-no-not-that-one".
- "Interface 101: the less clicks, the better." (Shoots a dolphin)
Mass Effect 2
- The resource harvesting: "Which is as interesting as it sounds, and it sounds like this: BWUUUUUUUUAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH..."
- The description of "the BioWare face" problem has to be seen:
"Hello Commander Shepard (wave-hand), I heard you might show up today (nod-head), how 'bout those freaky aliens, eh? (shake-fist, grr-grr, slightly racist undercurrent)"Shepard's response: (Paragon) You should learn to respect other cultures. (Renegade) RAAR! SHEPARD SMASH!!!
- The description of "the BioWare face" problem has to be seen:
- Preceded by BioWare no longer scoring points for writing.
- Birds fly, fish swim, Michael Atkinson molests dogs, and BioWare games have good writing.
Dante's Inferno
- On the games Viral Marketing:
"[...]I'd rather go to the hell for the wrathful than the hell for people who work in the EA marketing department, which I'm pretty sure is the EA marketing department."
- Yahtzee refers to the Karma Meter system in terms of renegading or paragoning lost souls for either meter, and later on comments on the pointlessness of it all:
"'So what's the point of having two different experience levels?' you ask. 'Well, it's like my right hand on a Sunday night,' I say. 'Why's that?' you ask. 'IT BEATS THE FUCK OUT OF ME!'"
Bioshock 2
- "Grr, your selfless compassion fills me with murder frenzy!" and his comments about how playing as a Big Daddy is a bit like "making a sequel to Half-Life where you get to play as a gun turret." Complete with a diagram of the controls.
- Could be more Hilarious in Hindsight, seeing as one of the characters in Portal 2's co-operative mode is a robot adapted from a turret.
- "Instead of playing Pipe Dream for half-an-hour at every turn, you do a pseudo-quicktime event for a few seconds instead, and apparently the universe is about to explode, because the quicktime events have actually improved the game."
Aliens vs. Predator
- The opening of the review:
"Aliens vs. Predator is one of those concepts you're probably not supposed to think too much about, especially not the title. Surely they're both aliens, and come to think of it they're both predators, too. Perhaps a more explanatory title is necessary, like Big Dribbly Black Thing That Likes Eating Lance Henriksen and Has a Head That Makes You Wonder About What Sort of Relationship H. R. Giger Had With His Father vs. Big Clicky Invisible Thing with a Crab for a Face That Always Seems to End Up Getting Beaten Up By Big Stupid Lads Wearing Dirty Pants."
- Also, his description of the Alien formula:
"Aliens take over facility, Marines get sent in to take care of it the same way that bits of bread get sent into ponds to take care of the ducks. And there's inevitably some stupid, evil business/military guy who wants to harness the Aliens, and the more times this happens the more evil and stupid they get: 'Okay, so the last 60 evil, stupid guys who tried to control the Aliens all got their brains spread on cream crackers and served as canapes at the Alien hoedown, but I think their problem was just not being evil and stupid enough'"
- Concerning combat against Aliens while controlling a Predator:
It plays like a hack'n'slasher that was designed by a pilchard. (Picture shows a exasperated pilchard at a computer saying FUCK YES).
- Yahtzee's frustration at the humans' seeming ignorance of what a Predator is despite numerous previous encounters has him wondering why none of the other survivors didn't at least mention it on their LiveJournal. This is illustrated with a man with Predator claws stuck in his skull, sitting at a computer and typing, "Dear Diary: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA".
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
- He actually mentions Haggard's Truck-o-saurus Rex from the first game in it.
- His description of the game also warrants a mention: "Modern Warfare Modern Warfare click click jabber jabber hello bang dead"
Final Fantasy XIII
- "As a highly respected and successful game criticSHUT UP, I AM!"
- "So far, I've established that the two lead-ish characters are named Lightning and Snow, which are both things that could ruin a picnic. There's also another guy called Hope, as in, 'I Hope we can get these sandwiches back in the car before any Snow or Lightning happens.'"
- "This Hope guy has been established from the start as a whiny, weak, inept, cowardly, socially retarded mummy's boy, so presumably, he's the character most of the audience are meant to project onto."
- "I know what you're gonna say: 'Yahtzee, please take your dick out of my eye socket!"
- "If this were Modern Warfare, I'd have curb-checked every terrorist in the free world by now."
- "I checked and yep, theres already erotic fanart of the FF13 characters"
Just Cause 2
- "Some might say that's enough. Some might say I'm too hard to please. But some can shut their fucking mouths." Accompanied by the heckling Imps being chased by a tiger.
- In the same (surprisingly positive) review, he portrays main character Rico as a fearsome wizard with almighty control of physics. He might not be too far off the mark.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
- "Shuttered Mammaries is technically a remake of Silent Hill 1, in the same way a dog biting off your dick is technically foreplay." With animation of a dog tugging on a long black bar protruding from Yahtzee's crotch with the word "YUM" written on it while Yahtzee stands there doing nothing except for widening his eyes, the dog finally separating it from his body and walking away with it leaving a trail of blood, and Yahtzee staring after the dog with a big heart floating over his head.
- Shuttered Mammaries gives you a psychological analysis based on your playing choices [caption: YOU'RE A PRICK] and told Yatzee he was "fastidiously clean and tidy" (besides trying hard to ignore the rubbish piling up in the kitchen), "family-oriented" (living on the other side of the world from them and never writing) and "possibly crap in bed". "[Beat] ...moving on..."
- "And some of the characters wear different clothes. I don't find that red dress particularly intimidating, but - oh fuck, a pink dress, shit's gettin' real!"
- His description of the blue-tinted Dark World resembling "the night God drank his Slurpee too fast" accompanied by an image of God clutching his head in agony and screaming "FUCK" had this troper in stitches.
Splinter Cell: Conviction
- The critique of the Idiot Plot and how the villains are Too Dumb to Live.
"Note that Sam only finds out about the conspiracy after it sends thugs to kill him, so the baddies said to themselves, 'Hey, the one guy who could threaten our operation is in a different country and isn't the slightest bit interested in our stupid conspiracy. Fuck that, let's go shoot at him!'"
- "Before the game tells you his name it asks you if you can come up with a better one, and thus began the adventures of Twattycake, defender of the innocent."
Dead to Rights: Retribution
- "In case you never played the first game here's a Dead To Rights Recap: BANG PUNCH BANG PUNCH BANG PUNCH WOOF!"
- "Let's just hope it doesn't end up Dead To Rights: Retarded. That would be Dead To Rights: Regrettable."
- About the Protagonist:
" I feel Jack is following the letter rather than the spirit of the law. A law completely unique to Jack Slate, given to him by some kind of mad ocelot god only he can see."
- About the takedowns:
"You slap around the enemy enough and he'll get disoriented. Press a button and both he and Jack you'll get transported to a little pocket dimension where pain is God, and Jack Slate is pope!"
- And the conclusion:
"I even have a good name for a sequel. Dead to Rights: Really. Really, really, really... really, really, really... Dumb."
Monster Hunter Tri
- Yahtzee doesn't get most JRPGs. Not the sex games though. Those he understands. Even the visual novels.
- The proper title for Monster Hunter Tri:
"But I guess calling it "Hunter/Gatherer of Innocent Young Dinosaurs Pathetically Mewling Their Last as the Memory of Their Mother's Warmth Drifts Away to Be Replaced by the Unforgiving Coldness of"... oh fuck it, let's just call it: "You Bastard"."
- "You can play the game with the Wii-mote and nunchuk in the same way you can technically compete in a fencing competition using only your erect penis." (complete with the image of a guy's "DADDY" cut off by said fencing opponent.)
Alan Wake
- Alan Wake has a side-quest where you collect pages of manuscript about the story you're currently playing. Alan picks up one which reads "Then Alan was savaged by the biggest and most sexually frustrated bear that has ever lived." The bear then appears behind him with a big censor bar on its crotch reading "GENTLE BEN!"
Red Dead Redemption
- " Sometimes NPCs will get caught in weird quantum singularities, and flicker in and out of a parallel universe where men have merged with horses. Sometimes John's walk animation fails, and he glides merrily around like he's on rocket skates. At one point his love of his country got the better of him, and I had to reboot, to stop him humping a mountain."
Alpha Protocol
- Thornton being "The Ponciest little Ponce that ever ponced past the Poncing Parlor".
- The visuals depicting Alpha Protocol's "incomprehensible miasma" of a plot.
- The prediction about what Microsoft's Kinect might turn out like:
"So everything will be fine until a wasp gets in the room, and then your character will promptly throw all their grenades away and pummel a chair! "
Super Mario Galaxy 2
- About the standard Mario Excuse Plot setup:
[...] the plot of many Mario games can be enlivened somewhat by assuming that "cake" is the Mushroom Kingdom word for "sex"; The Princess invites Mario over for some... cake, but Bowser kidnaps her so she can make some... cake for him instead, only now he's five hundred feet tall and emperor of the universe, so she'd better make sure her "cake" is spread quite wide.
- The text adventure bit.
You are a greasy Italian spaz standing on a platform unsupported in the yawning void of space.
What now?
You can't do that (somehow).
What now?
You jump, emitting a hearty vocalization like a flamboyant homosexual being goosed while breathing helium.
- "Naturally, the plot ends up with more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire. If all the history up 'til 1955 gets changed, than why am I still in the present? How do all the other characters know that history was changed? Actually, they do explain that — someone left a note... Now, I don't know about you, but I'd like to think of myself as credulous enough to not form international secret societies at the behest of time-travel conspiracy theories on random pieces of paper. It'd be like seeing some bathroom graffiti and forming a religion around "Big Hank"."
Crackdown 2
- The bit about the online multiplayer: "Joining random online games is like walking into an aviary full of nitrous oxide and trying to play scrabble with the kookaburras while they stand around having sex with your mum."
Split/Second: Velocity
- "Split Stroke Second Colon Velocity"
- About driving games in general: "I like them, but I'm terrible at them. It's the exact opposite of the problem I have with fellatio."
- Driving in real life: "I doubt things would be easier to get around if I was six feet wide and constantly farting carbon monoxide. I don't know how your mum does it."
- The early proto-man, working on the wheel and threatened by woolly mammoths; "Yes, life was tough in Thatcher's Britain."
- "And I think if you're that rich, you're beyond needing video-games for entertainment. You probably get your jollies by buying two poverty-stricken pregnant women, and telling them that neither of them are getting out of the arena alive until one has eaten the other's fetus.
Transformers: War For Cybertron
- At the end:
"There, you may now e-mail me to explain in close detail how the death of Optimus Prime was your generation's Othello."
Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
- On the game's cameraman: "And when you try sprinting, Christ! It's like his kneecaps have been replaced with slinkies!"
- The accompanying illustrations depicting an In-Universe Camera man named "Brian" who eagerly runs around behind the titular duo, and Kane telling Lynch to "Just pretend that he's not here."
- His remark at the very end of the review was also incredibly funny, especially when you start to hear his voice develop a rather serious growl to it, like Yahtzee was slipping out of his ZP persona and delivering a criticism of the game out-of-character while at the same time sounding like he was shouting the line.
"Kane and Lynch 2 sucks so many dicks that it now breathes spunk instead of air!!"
Mafia II
- "We all agree Prohibition was a stupid law, right? So why is it socially acceptable to crave a nice cup of tea in the morning or a cigarette after a knobbing, but the moment I try to pound half a kilo of smack into my eyeballs everyone thinks there's something wrong with me?!" Accompanied by a female imp in bed next to Yahtzee visibly freaking out when he produces a syringe as big as his entire body and jabs it into his eye.
- "They were going to call it Quest for the Sausage Fountain, but you know how people are, you have to spell everything out."
- Every mention of "fast whores" is accompanied by a female imp flying about at high speed.
- The various comparisons of the gameplay to a boring office jobs, such as "filing bullets under faces".
Metroid: Other M
- While talking about the development team, Team Ninja: "...Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball, or, as it's sometimes known, BOING!"
- Also from that review, his hilariously accurate impersonation of Samus' monotone voice and overly flowerly way of speaking.
(in a monotone voice) "From Adam's stern expression, constant swearing, and repeated kicks to my face and stomach, I realized he must have been a bit upset about something."Adam: WILL YOU FUCKING EMOTE
- And his suggestion that they get BrianBlessed to voice Samus... and how that still wouldn't work because the writing in general is agonizingly awful.
- "So do you want to know who the traitor turned out to be? So the fuck would I! 'Cause the game kinda forgets about this whole sub-plot and hopes you do too."
- On a more meta note: "On a educated guess, though, the evil guy was probably the one with the evil mustache" becomes much funnier when said character actually is the most likely one to be The Mole.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
- The 3 types of horror games:
Yahtzee: You see, there are three kinds of horror games: First, there's the kind where you're in a dark room and a guy in a spooky mask jumps out of a cupboard going "abloogy woogy woo" - that would be your Doom 3. Then there's the kind where the guy in the spooky mask isn't in a cupboard but standing right behind you and you just know he's going to go "abloogy woogy woo" at some point but he doesn't and you're getting more and more tense but you don't want to turn around because he might stick his cock in your eye - that would be your Silent Hill 2. And then there are horror games where the guy in the spooky mask goes "abloogy woogy woo" while standing on the far side of a brightly lit room before walking slowly over to you plucking a violin and then slapping you in the face with a t-bone steak - that would be your Dead Space.
- The enemies from Dead Space:
Yahtzee: [The Dark Descent] has actually got pacing, unlike Dead Space, where all the monsters are so fucking thrilled to be working, they fight each other for screen time.
- His description of his thought process during his first scary moment:
Yahtzee: Dum-de-dum. Well, this isn't very scary. Oh look, physics! I can throw chairs about like a removal man who's completely stopped giving a shit. Doors suddenly blowing open in the wind? Yawn-o-rama! I guess I'll just look around upstairs and then might as well play Halo: Reach for a bit. Nope, nothing much up here either, I'll just go back and— whoa, what was that thing I just glimpsed running down a hallway? I don't know, but it looked cross about something, so I think I'll go down this other hallway instead— Oh, it's blocked. Guess I'll turn around an— WHERE DID YOU COME FROM!? Augh runrunrunrunrun I'm sorry I didn't mean to mess up your chairs— OH PISSING BLIMEY THERE'S JAM COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!
- Also, this gem:
Yahtzee: The entire backstory is neatly encapsulated in the title - you have amnesia, that old video game storytelling chestnut. [Yahtzee's avatar is lying in a hospital bed with a doctor consulting a chart.] If adventure games were a medical condition, the first symptom would be amnesia, and the second would be kleptomania. [Yahtzee makes off with the bed.]
- Regarding the sanity meter:
Yahtzee: [Amnesia: The Dark Decent] implements a sanity meter, as if sanity is like diesel oil or something and you can get a reading on it by sticking a dipstick in your ear. And as so often the case, the main effect of losing your sanity is that the screen goes all blurry and weird, as if the first thing anyone does when they go insane is lose their contact lenses. Hanging around in the scary darkness depletes sanity because apparently we're five years old, but staying in the light makes it easier for monsters to see you, creating a toss-up between not getting a headache from wibbly-wobbly camera filters and not being murdered.
- He closes it out by calling the game a good constipation aid.
Halo: Reach
- "The very first image in the game is a brief flash-forward depicting your helmet lying discarded in the dust of battle-scarred terrain. What the fuck do you think happens in the end? Your character gets thrillingly and climactically gets a little bit hot?"
- Yahtzee's opening rant about Halo's lack of seat belts.
- "This might sound a bit weird, but 'hoerdy goerdy bobbley boo.'"
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow
- "...wondering if one could improve every Castlevania game by replacing Dracula with the Count from Sesame Street, though probably not Symphony of the Night because you'd have to rename Alucard "Teerts Emases Morf Tnuoc Eht"
"ONE miserable little secret! TWO miserable little secrets! A PILE of miserable little secrets! Ah-ha-ha-ha!"
- The joke comes back again in the credits, reading:
- "Who the fuck rips off Shadow of the Colossus? That's like cock-slapping the Mona Lisa!"
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
- "So while Journey to the West was about an arrogant monkey king who is forced to learn discipline by escorting a Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage, Enslaved is about a bloke slapping robots in the dick. But his name is Monkey, so that's alright then."
Fallout: New Vegas
- "This is a roleplaying game, so let's motherfucking roleplay!".
"Woke up in a doctor's office with some guy telling me I've been shot in the head and may have suffered brain damage, but I've learned not to trust the opinion of giant, mustachioed spider-people; so I made my excuses and left."
- His descriptions of his misadventures in the Mojave.
"So after loading myself down with other people's packed lunches, I set off on the North road with a song in my heart, and was immediately eaten by giant killer flies."
Call of Duty: Black Ops
- His impression of the game's frenzied pacing, akin to a nagging housewife.
"Go there! Keep running! Take cover! Not there, you're getting shot! There, shoot that guy! Not him, he's on your side! Can't you tell? He's wearing a slightly different hat! Quick, pick up that grenade and throw it back! I don't know, over there somewhere! Oh, there, see? If you'd thrown it sooner that wouldn't have happened, you stupid cunt! (smacks Yahtzee with a rolling pin)"
- "Why is my character putting broken glass into the mouth of that helpless prisoner? I don't think he'd find that very tasty—OH BUGGER MY BREECHES that was uncalled for!"
- "Another opportunity for the Call of Duty franchise to wave military hardware in our faces and go PHWOAR!"
- The beginning and end of the review feature several countries personified as people, including America, Russia, China, the UK and Switzerland. Axis Powers Hetalia references in the comments section were unavoidable.
- Likewise, Yahtzee's analogy that all the "Modern Warfare"-esque shooters is a sign the United States craves a world war is on par with all the erotic fanfiction by a virgin nerd is a sign that they're trying to say "I Need To Get Laid".
- Pointing out how the term "Black Ops" carries a term of stealth, mystery, and deniability, whereas the game has so many explosions and shoot-em-ups that any stealth (let alone deniability) goes sailing out the window. Special points for explaining the Grand Finale mission:
"What's that, Vladimir? No, no, our fleets of aircraft carriers were just in that particular bit of ocean for a volleyball tournament, and to take some photos for a navy recruitment booklet! No, I can't imagine how one of your battleships in the exact same area could've gotten riddled with bullets (although now I come to think about it, I do remember hearing what could have been minigun fire, but at the time I thought it was just somebody playing squash very, very enthusiastically)!"
iPhone Games
- On the game Fruit Ninja: "You're a ninja, fruit is flying in front of you and fuck fruit. Sitting around all smug, on trees and in pies."
- Early in his review, he laments that "so much of triple-A gaming these days is endless sequels, ripoffs and wank". The accompanying visuals give an example of a sequel (Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days), a ripoff (Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days) and some wank (Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days).
- Telling us what making a game for the iPhone involves versus what making a game for the Wii involves in terms of exactly how badly the developer gets violated, the accompanying visuals, and the first picture of Yahtzee back at his desk afterwards.
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
- "I don't want play the same game over and over, I get enough dull repetition in my sex life." Caption: "It's always the bloody nipple clamps with you, isn't it".
- "Assassin's Creed: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"
- Yahtzee actually admits that the story with Ezio is starting to get a little stale (especially since the content feels like it was just cut off from the end of Assassin's Creed II), and is actually looking forward to an all-Desmond centric sequel in the future. Not for Desmond himself, but for the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits he's saddled up with, particularly sarcastic British guy Shaun. "Can't think why!"
- His entire rant on adulthood in the Splatterhouse review.
"Isn't being an adult great? You can go on all the fairground rides, drink yourself to death, and stick your dick in all kinds of magical things! Sometimes I like going to hospitals for terminally ill children and just rubbing it in."
Epic Mickey
- At the beginning he goes into this Heroic BSOD about park mascots trying to sexually abuse him.
No, Goofy! I don't want to taste Herman's special milk!
- Feeling the game tries too hard and yet not hard enough to be edgy, Yahtzee goes for broke and slaps Hitler's face onto Mickey's edgy magic paint brush.
- "And why do you think every other console controller has two analog sticks, Mr. Wii? Do you think it's just for symmetry? Or because they look a little bit like nipples? No! It's because in third-person games, the camera is like the working class: If you can't control it, it will plot to destroy you!" All combined with a picture of a camera stabbing Yahtzee in the eye shouting, "Death to the Aristos!"
- Interestingly, yes, originally the Dual Shock did have two sticks just for symmetry, though he's referring to the current generation's controllers so the joke still stands.
Top 5 of 2010
- The top/bottom of 2010 had such counters as "Jumping off a rainbow onto someone you hate" (second best) "Weedkiller Martini" (third worst) and "Mistaking a deep fat fryer for an eyewash station" (second worst).
- After awarding his Worst Game of the Year award to Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days:
"Step onto your first-place podium, then put a rope around your neck so we can kick it away."
Fable III
- The Flat "What." of the Fable III review. Funniest Flat "What." EVER!
- "Oh, goody! Now I can go back inside and keep playing Minecraft!"
- The Brisbane floods, where "the sandbag fairy had visited all the good little shops", and the visual puns that follow.
- "With Fisher-Price Shoggoths scratching at the walls, I decided the sensible, level-headed thing to do was to tunnel down into the centre of the Earth".
- "Ohh, shit. When did I become my dad?"
- "Why did it get so dark all of a sudden? What's that rustling sound? Why are my intestines over there now?"
- "Christ, it's like Zelda meets There Will Be Blood!" (with picture of Link being chased by Daniel Plainview wielding a bowling pin)
- "One: Do not rely on fire to clear away your forests unless you want your gameworld to look like the Vietnam War."
- "But as I was trying to think of something to do with all these rocks, I noticed a nearby mountain, and thought 'You know what that's crying out for? A Skull Fortress! With flaming towers and eyes that weep lava (because he's depressed by all the kamikaze shrubs).'"
- Creepers: "It's like their only reason to live is to ruin other people's artwork. There but for the grace of God go I, suicide hedge!" Illustration: Yahtzee running at Fable III with explosives strapped to his body.
- His entire rant about the appeal of building anything with his example being a golden giant cock and balls.
- The absolutely best line of that segment has to be when he compares Minecraft to Garry's Mod:
"If you can just clap your hands and summon fifty explosive barrels to pile ragdolls around, the spectacle is about as fulfilling as eating your own snot."
A Shadow's Tale
- "...this is the permanent mental state of most adult male nerds in any situation more sociable than jerking off with a hand-puppet. The Ur Example of this subgenre, as in 'Er, what are you doing with that hand-puppet?' would be Ico, also known as I. C. O. if you're WRONG!"
Dead Space 2
- Dead Space 2 ramps up the poignancy of the slaughter by initially setting it in children's classrooms full of "blood-stained crayon drawings reading 'I love Mummy and being alive'."
DC Universe Online
- His overly long anal ogy about how reading comics are like bowel movements. Just go look at it.
- After commenting on how some viewers didn't know whether Yahtzee was recommending a game or not.
"So in the name of keeping things nice and clear for you touchy sods, let me as unambiguous as possible in this critique. MindJack is Fucking. Fucking. Fucking. Fucking. Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. Don't. Don't. Don't. Don't. Play it."
- Made more hilarious by the Visual Pun: each repetition of "Fucking" adds the word to the hammer he's about to use to bludgeon the game, each repetition of "Bad" and "Don't" shows him bludgeoning the game, and the "Play it" line has him kicking the game off a cliff.
Killzone 3
- "So, fuck modern technology right in its cutting edge! Oww!"
Kirby's Epic Yarn
- About the game's localisation delays: "You'd almost think Nintendo were concerned that a game about a fat, pink retard, voraciously overconsuming, wouldn't go down well in the West."
- "One of the many things I have in common with Captain Picard is..."
Dragon Age II
- Summing up the game as "not so much 'a hero's journey' as 'a hero piddles around for a while gobbing off his handsome friend.'"
Nintendo 3 DS
- "I did check, and it is extremely possible to make a Mii who has what looks like a cock for a face. It's equally possible to name him 'Senor Koquonfaes' (pronounced "Cock-on-face") and make him your street pass ambassador who greets every 3DS owner in the vicinity with the phrase 'I'M WATCHING YOU' in block capitals. Then all you have to do is walk past the primary school and listen for the losses of innocence."
- Discussing the console's version of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and its "slapdash 3Difying":
"I refuse to believe that no one at Ubisoft QA put their hand up at any point and said: 'Hey, isn't the sky supposed to be behind the sea?'"
- The 3DSes of Yahtzee and his friend's don't recognize each other, making him assume that the other 3DS "just didn't want to associate with riffraff" because it had more Streetpass hits than his. Complete with the friend's 3DS turning its nose at Yahtzee's while wearing a top hat and holding a cane.
- Yahtzee's "What the hell is wrong with me?" moment when he reacts with joy at seeing a gathering of children in a park so that he could leave little deposits in their pockets and butt bags.
- "COME ON IN! TAKE OFF YOUR COATS! HAVE A SEAT! Not in the big chair. I'm going to sit in that and gloat at you. (How about them Nintendogs, eh?)"
Portal 2
- The Credits Gag at the end of the review, set up at the start with "Early on in the series of increasing lucky breaks I'd hesitate to call a career..."
Well, that was a good career I almost had there.
- Yahtzee's history with the original Portal makes him a little hesitant to release a definitive statement on the sequel's quality. The result is almost two minutes of increasingly convoluted metaphors, until:
"Portal 1 was a big delicious jam doughnut with cream on top, and Portal 2 is a big Cornish pasty with chocolate in one half and shepard's pie in the other, and- LOOK AT ME DANCING AROUND THE ISSUE. DANCEY, DANCEY, LA-DI-DAH"
- The icing on the- ...French Fancy!
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
- His description of the enemy variety: "Utterly nutterly butterly."
- "And if you're playing the XBLA version, on a widescreen TV, there'll be massive big pictures of Alucard and Dracula either side of the screen glaring at each other for the whole game like both are waiting for the other to own up to eating all of Mrs. Dracula's pies." (Mrs. Dracula is dead, by the way.)
Mortal Kombat
- Commenting that the X-ray attacks indicate your character had a skeleton for a stepfather and they have some issues to work out. Said skeleton wears a hat, smokes a pipe, and asks "When is your useless son going to get a job".
Alice: The Madness Returns
- "And then Alice promised never to tell her parents."
- The second mid-credit stinger.
Once I tried to seduce a girl by putting a Drink Me label around my knob, but she did something horrible with a cocktail umbrella...
- "What I'm saying is that I don't see Alice: The Madness Returns making mad returns, neh heh nyehh..."
Shadows of the Damned
- While talking about the development team, Yahtzee has a brief dialogue with the audience, whose words are accompanied by a slide whistle:
"The music's done by Akira Yamaoka-WHO?"The guy who did the music for Silent Hill."WHAT'S THAT?(frustrated) "A series with really good music."OH.
- Also, "Suda, bless his heart, has always had what you might call a long-distance relationship with normalcy." Accompanied by a representation of Suda running around in the background, holding a giant rubber duck over his head and screaming.
- "Oh there you are, Suda, you randy old bastard!"
- This line comes at the culmination of the saga of "Big Boner". To say anything more is to spoil it.
- "Attention, hardcore gamers. Stop chewing on that piece of wood and listen."
- "[God Hand] was another game that sailed out of Port Sensible on the HMS Quirky."
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3 D
- He names Link "Fuck me", leading to a moment where Navi says "Fuck me it's cold in here."
- From the same review, when he says that the N64 "showed you more affection as a child than your parents ever did", and the graphic is a dad whipping a spider at a little kid hugging his N64.
- "Even the final boss fight gave me no trouble at all, except when that fairy dipshit started thinking about her favorite fairy boners or something."
Call of Juarez: The Cartel
- "There is no middle finger big enough!", in reference to the NPC's insistence on helping out in combat despite their utter uselessness.
- Also, "But before Guatemala can start getting worried, the US government sets up a special task force to take down the cartel, a coalition of FBI, DEA, LAPD... uh... BBC, TCP/IP, LOL..."
- His description of the three main characters as getting along "like three Borgias in a hessian sack".
- "...Catherine, a Japanese game centrally about the difficulties of relationships, such as unexpected pregnancy, the impetus of commitment, and being chased up an infinite staircase by a giant, monstrous girlfriend trying to eat you with her butt. Did I mention it's Japanese?"
- (Increasingly amused)"... there's a moral choice aspect where you answer questions based on your own substantial experience with relationships *stifled laughter* "
- The part in the video where the main character chooses Qatherine (an imp with a bow) over Catherine or Katherine (the two choices in the game).
- Having asked if the two similar names will be confusing in dialogue, there's a scene that assigns the wrong personality to each K/Catherine. "I knew this would get confusing!"
- "...like men are all direction-less tidal waves and women are all dykes built in the way of their raging flood. Blimey, what a badly worded metaphor."
- "WOMEN ARE ALL DYKES" - Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
- "Wait, what was I supposed to be fixing again? OOH LOOK A PUPPY!"
- "I watched an anime once. Dude pulled a gun at the start of the episode, fired it at the end, and everything in between was angst! I wouldn't mind, but he missed!"
Deus Ex
- His sarcastic jab at people who put all their skill points into swimming and poison resistance is funny enough, calling their brains "a permanent consolation prize," but his reasoning for why someone would do that is that they have to visit Queensland. This is shown by splicing in a picture of a lovely beach, offset by a sign reading "BOX JELLYFISH / WATCH THE FUCK OUT."
- About the tranquilizer gun:
"It's supposed to be for stealthy no kill runs, but it just makes enemies run around screaming for five minutes before falling over, and that's not very tranquil. That's like inventing an antidepressant that makes people believe there's free money inside their wrists."
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
- His description of the final boss as "the kind of nightmare Philip K Dick might have while being spooned by H. R. Giger", and the Running Gag of whipping vending machines at NPCs.
Driver: San Francisco
- The beginning of the review:
"Wanna hear something crazy? Titty fuck Labrador swimming up the nile. Wanna hear something crazy but also coherent? Julia Roberts was once hospitalized for swallowing an entire vole. Wanna hear something crazy but also coherent and true? Driver: San Francisco may well end up in my top five of the year!
- "He's in pursuit of a crimelord who's out to steal Christmas from the orphans, or something. It's not important."
- "Yes, it kind of is so fucking goofy that Disney would file a restraining order, but..."
- The sarcastic, white-bread hero saying "I guess I'm well-bread" and the well-written NPC saying "Looks like I'm bread for success."
Dead Island
- "So, here's a sneak peak to the soundtrack to a lot of Dead Island: 'GRR!' 'KICK!' 'GRR!' 'KICK!' 'GRR!' 'KICK!' 'SPLAT!'"
- The Yahtzee sprite finding out he's on "Bread Island" in the stinger.
- "Honestly, at this point you people just won't be able to cope if civilization ends any other way, will you? If the fucking Daleks invade or the entire world gets covered in carnivorous jam, you'll have to make papier-mâché zombie facsimiles just to get through the day."
- Yahtzee wrote a book about jam causing the apocalypse.
- And his image for the Daleks is toilet plungers strapped to two trash cans.
- "You'll spend a lot of time standing over a pile of dead bodies frantically doing the can-can until they stop moving."
- "So, to conclude my arguments..."
Resistance 3
- His surprise that the game isn't a cover-based FPS, lets you carry more than two weapons and doesn't have regenerating health. He sounds genuinely taken aback.
"Um... Sony, are you alright?"
So here we go, another bloody brown shooter for the current age with two weapon slots, cover mechanics, and regenerating health...wait, what are these glowing green things lying around everywhere? Medkits, you call them? What an intriguing novelty! Yes, Resistance 3 does not have regenerating health! Holy bum nuggets, I'm having to desperately seek aid under fire while hopping around on my last remaining limb and things are actually tense and exciting! Oh, but it's small comfort if I can't carry ten weapons at onc - I can carry ten weapons at once. Huh. And there's a Freeze Ray and a lightning rod and something I like to call the Jimi Hendrix Experience because it makes people puke themselves to death.
- The part leading up to it was no slouch either:
"Waaaait a minute... the scientist has a BEARD! What did you do with the rest of the body, Insomniac?"
- His over-the-top analysis which causes him to believe they ripped off Half Life 2, in a parodic tone, obviously.
"And look: Insomniac Games, if you rearrange the letters, lose some of them and add a few more, you get WE WANT TO BE VALVE"
- Another one from that review:
- Yahtzee explains why he bought a Kinect:
"Pope Urban VIII probably thought he was very clever when he condemned Galileo, but who got the last laugh there? Well he did, when Galileo died in poverty and dishonour so what I'm basically saying is that I'm basically like the Pope."
Batman: Arkham City
- Bruce Wayne is depicted with the words "Not Batman" written on his chest.
- "[Catwoman's] also a lot less fun to explore the city with, because instead of glidy wings and hookshots her method of getting around is to whip onto the tops of buildings and then smash straight into a wall. Then she has to hop her way up the wall in a sort of 'No, really, I meant to do that' kind of way, leaving another bloody imprint of her increasingly two-dimensional face to congeal on the brickwork. She also has her own Riddler trophies to gather, so I guess the Riddler feels he has to prove that he's smarter than her, too. But if the Riddler is sitting with his feet up watching the security cameras with a question mark-themed mug of milky tea while Catwoman is out headbutting masonry and picking up his litter, I think it's pretty self-evident who's smarter."
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
- Yahtzee begging for Drake to kill an American in a possible Uncharted 4, so he can be assured that Drake [[Eagleland isn't the embodiment of America]] declaring a one-man war on the entire world - or at least an Australian, so he can finally find out if the game is deliberately trying to Troll him.
Yahtzee: But as much as I've joked that Nathan Drake is a one-man declaration of war by the United States upon the entire rest of humanity, I'd like to finally move past that. (beat) I'd like to, but I fucking can't, because now he's after me!
- And the bit before this:
- Drake is shown walking along a cobble street into an English pub (entitled "The Cock and Balls"), and, as Yahtzee describes it, "with a motherfucking red phone box out front!" (cue red phone box and an arrow with the words The Fuck Is This pointing to it)
- Yahtzee thinks that Drake would be more admirable if he just admitted he was in it for the gold.
Yahtzee!Drake: I want enough money to buy a concubine for every square inch of my cock.Yahtzee: A whole three concubines, Drake?
- The assumption that Drake and Elena keep splitting up in games because they have little in common. Drake apparently enjoys watching Time Team and going to blackface minstrel shows.
- Noting how the enemies in the game have terrible survival instincts since they all choose to fight Drake in extremely dangerous situations where they really should be more concerned with their own safety:
"...enacting gun battles in collapsing buildings, sinking ships, dangling out the back of a plane, and on the surface of a flaming meteorite that's speeding towards a lion."
- Also noting the use of Lampshade Hanging, asking the idiocy of some points in the game, becoming especially glaring if they're never explained afterwards.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
- His reaction to the plot of the game when Russia somehow invades all of Europe at once:
"Now, I've never invaded Europe, except for that one time, but I would think that's a project you might want to stagger out a bit if you haven't forged an alliance with any galactic empires lately."
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- "Well fuck you, Ulfric Stormcloak, I don't have to help you wash your hairy bagpipes, I can breathe radioactive lasers!"
- "Like this one undead lad who hit like a runaway ice cream van but who seemed to forget all about me whenever I left the room, so I ended up taking potshots from the door like the world's worst Jehovah's Witness."
- "Oh yes, and take my advice: get a horse. The horses in Skyrim just do not give a fuck. If there's anything in a half-mile radius that means you harm your horse will not rest until it has been powdered."
- "Oooh, look at Sir Alan Sugar over there, he's too rich and important to adventure properly. Would you like to skip to the ending cutscene because you have to go and buy a new aeroplane before the shop's shut?"
- "But having spent so many weeks getting forced down corridors of every size and shape like the last bit of toothpaste in a tube being manipulated by the flabby, uncoordinated hands of a fat prick, getting yelled at because one of the many specks I haven't fired bullets at yet is holding another speck that can fire rockets, I was exactly in the right mood to get out in the open, feel the wind in my hair and the rolling epic landscape beneath my feet. So to that end, I stopped playing video games and left the house. Ha, not fucking likely!"
Saints Row: The Third
- Yahtzee laments the lack of a socks option for customizable clothing. "So I can no longer wear fishnets under a sensible business suit and role-play as a Conservative MP."
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
- When he's describing the annoying fairy sidekick: "You suck a man's cock Bing! 'Link, I have calculated that you are sucking a man's cock! There is a 70% chance that you should now cradle his balls!'" Which is made even funnier by how the censor bar says "Hey! Listen" on it.
- "I found a plot hole! NUUUUUUURSE!!"
- On the padding:
"First you prove yourself for the Master Sword, then you prove your worth for the three sacred flames, and then prove your worth a few more times for the song of the hero. If I were Link, I would throw the sword down and yell: 'Do you want this motherfucker dead or what?!' I feel like I'm trying to arrest the person burgling your house, and you keep telling me to fuck off until I've put on some nicer shoes!"
Top 5 of 2011
- The intro descriptions of the rankings accompanied by appropriate sound effects are funny enough, but the crowners are the third worst: "Shitting the bed while your girlfriend is over" followed immediately by the second best: "Shitting the bed while your girlfriend is over and discovering she's into that".
- Comparing the worst games of the year to "being cockslapped by your own herniated bowel."
- "Oh, happy new year, by the way."
Super Mario 3 D Land & Rayman Origins
- He liked Rayman Origins, but didn't like Super Mario 3D Land, causing Yahtzee's criticism to eventually devolve into "Aaah..." and "Grrr!", respectively (ending in a series of them: "Aaah... Grrr! Aaah... Grrr!").
- The Stinger where Yahtzee's ball arm is pulled away like in Rayman and the space between himself and the extended arm is cut with a pair of scissors. Cue blood and screaming.
Sonic Generations
- "Any celebration of Sonic at this point is like breast-feeding a 17-year old: extremely too late. And it would probably get you thrown out of a restaurant."
- "But lest you accuse the game of putting them in for fanservice - although I'd hate to think what kind of fan was baying for a return appearance of fucking Charmy the Bee."
Star Wars: The Old Republic
- "Basically, what I'm saying is it isn't very good. Did that come across? IT ISN'T VERY GOOD!"
- Amy in general is one of his better recent reviews. Like Halo Wars which was mentioned before, he really dislikes this one, and truly shitty games seem to bring out the best in him.
"Aww, I'm sorry the monster-infested post-apocalyptic death city wasn't providing quite enough stimulation for you, sweetheart. I know where there's never a dull moment: my fucking S-bend!"
- "I mean, Alex from Silent Hill: Homecoming rolling around the city streets like Sonic the fucking Hedgehog was just dumb!"
- "I find that 'I will die of an indistinct infection if I don't remain physically close to preteen girls' rarely goes down well in court."
Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning
- "Mass Effect brought us a race of all-female bisexuals who are culturally obliged to bang anything that moves, and you wonder why I prefer sci-fi these days."
- Yahtzee's complaint about how fantasy games "seem to require that you learn a second language".
"The Tuatha are engaged in a conflict with the Seeli-Fae and the Jutton in the land of Knick-Knack-Knocky and Bingly-Bongly-Boo!
- The sack analogies. And then the third developer pops out of a pillow fort.
"You know what I hate? YOU NOT BEING IN THIS FUCKING SACK RIGHT NOW!"
Yakuza: Dead Souls
- In his review he comments that it is effectively an Expansion Pack of Yakuza 4 and that "even putting BRIAN BLESSED in there as an optional boss fight" can't make him overlook that fact. The image is of one of Yahtzee's stick-people looking at a stick-Brian with this face, who proceeds to manifest Red Glowing Eyes of Doom and fire a laser from his mouth while the hapless anonymous stick person desperately ducks under it. Hilarious as a visual, even funnier to consider what a boss fight against BRIAN BLESSED must be like. Besides loud and full of ham, naturally.
- "Fuck yes, it's Akiyama again. I love his horrible mauve blazer, and now he's dual-wielding custom pistols like a boss. I just want to take him home and mount him to my kitchen wall so my kids will have an appropriate role model to look at over their Honey Nut Cheerios every morning."
Ninja Gaiden 3
- The first few lines of his review:
"You know, being the leader of an evil ninja clan... oops. Shit! Um, forget I said that, I'll start again. *ahem* If I were the head of an evil ninja clan..."
Fez and I Am Alive
- "If indie games were a country, Fez would be the ki—well, Cave Story would be the king, but it would be unwise to appoint Fez as the grand vizier, I'll tell you that."
Prototype 2
- Five words: FUCK AROUNDY MAKEY SUPER MURDER
- Yahtzee wonders where all the Always Chaotic Evil humans are all being recruited from en mass. "Possibly Liverpool?"
Risen 2: Dark Waters
- The entire epilogue video, as a DJ to Black Mesa.
"You're listening to Black Mesa Research Facility Internal Broadcasting Friday Morning Drive Time Fun Slot, playing the hits while you play God!"
- "To Security Officer Calhoun outside Sector 7-G: Stop banging on the door, we know you're out there, we just don't like you."
- From the review proper: "If you're making Dark Waters, you should probably go see a doctor about that."
- "Suddenly, that wasn't the only thing that had risen. Dick joke swing, and a miss!"
Sniper Elite V2
- "It would be nice if you could tag enemies while looking at through the sniper scope, instead of hurriedly switching between scope and binoculars like a badger-watcher with anger-management issues..."
Yahtzee's Avatar: YOU STRIPEY FUCK!!! [gets dragged away by an imp]
- He realizes that he has nobody's word on the chain of events but the protagonist... and proceeds to go wild.
- At the start, Yahtzee notes how ironic it is that a game about fighting Those Wacky Nazis was actually a welcome relief from all the modern, War on Terror era "realistic" shooters plaguing the game industry, especially ones fighting Russians, as if wishing the Cold War had boiled over into World War III. Then he starts to explain the plot...
Yahtzee: "...your task is to assassinate a bunch of German V2 rocket scientists before they can be enlisted by the dirty Russians- OH FOR FUCKS SAKE!!! Could we at least leave off the fucking Cold War until we're finished with the hot one?"
- He admits that he's simultaneously satisfied and ashamed of the X-Ray Vision mechanic, just like how he feels after jerking off to a Disney princess, with his Author Avatar looking at Ariel while sniffing a fish.
Dragon's Dogma
- The entire mulitplayer part of the review, drawing a link between it and being a pimp!
But Dragon's Dogma does have one major unique mechanic that deserves a close examination. It's, um...well, do you remember Neopets? It's kind of like that but with slavery. As part of the introductory missions, you have to generate a primary NPC sidekick in the same way you made yourself: class, race, appearance, favorite Spice Girl, etc. But for adventuring purposes, you can also enlist two additional sidekicks who are the main sidekicks of other players elsewhere in the world. You go into a little connecting universe where a sampling of available hired hands swan about trying to catch your eye, you go over to the ones you like, look at their equipment, check their teeth, bob their scrotums, and if you're happy take them adventuring with you. When you're finished with them, you give them a little present and send them back to their owner with a fond slap on the bum. You even have to rate them like you're filling in the timesheet for the temp agency. It creates motivation to make sure that your sidekick has the best equipment and skills and looks good in tights so they'll be more likely to get hired by other players, acquire experience, bring you back presents, and... wait a minute! Am I pimping?!
- Then followed up by:
"No, it's all right," says the game. "They're not actually intelligent, free willed human beings. They're pawns, a sort of magical slave race who look a lot like humans but actually don't have minds of their own." Oh, even better. Now we're pimping the mentally sub-normal!
- Then followed up by:
- But by far the high point is his reaction to the "pawn" handwave.
- Also his critique of the pawns' relative intelligence level:
Pawn: We could get a good view from the top of that tower!Yahtzee: I know we could, asshole! You know how I know? Because I was just on the top of that tower, and so were you!
- Yahtzee gives up on referring to New Super Mario Bros. U by its name and just starts calling the game "Steve", placing a mug of Steve Buscemi on top of the box.
- "Right, what's next? Oh, what a delightful trailer for some kind of Lost Planet sequel, what are they calling this one? ... Dead Space 3? Fuck off!"
- Towards the end he jokes about being a hype ruiner for hire (complete with creepy white van), which has "B. Y. S. G. Croshaw" on the side, a series of initials which makes very little sense at first...until you're smacked into the giggles by a Brick Joke from his Haze review, where he called himself Benjamin Yahtzee Sebastian Godzilla Croshaw.
Lollipop Chainsaw
- "Juliet is always in control of the situation, has a healthy, devoted family life, and the developers would never suggest that the player should feel motivated to protect her from rapists - seriously, that's pretty fucked." *pic of Yahtzee slapping Tomb Raider (2013)*
- The "psychological damage" line. Keepsmilingyoufatbitchkeepsmilingyoufatbitch...
Quantum Conundrum
- The review begins with a brief mini-review of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, which Yahtzee derides as unplayable. An imp dressed as a fairy chides him for this and tells him "If you have any self-respect, you'll stick with it!" (Beat) "So anyway, Quantum Conundrum..."
Yahtzee: ...which I interpreted as a challenge.
- "I picked it up because the back of the box said 'The Kinect has finally found its hardcore game...'"
Caption: ...SO SUCK IT, CROSHAW!
- Using various forms of alcohol to describe the four dimensions.
Yahtzee: There's the pina colada dimension where everything is light and fruity, the black russian dimension where things sit much more heavily and you start clutching your head complaining about your ex-wife, the absinthe dimension where everything floats off into the sky to come crashing apocalyptically down the following morning, and the slow-motion dimension where this analogy kind of breaks down.
- "I hope you've played a lot of feces Tetris, because it's time to stack shit."
- The captions given during Yahtzee's discussion on graphical settings.
- While browsing the Steam forums for technical assistance, Yahtzee recounts one forum poster who said anyone who didn't know how to edit using Unreal or didn't have a top-end PC didn't deserve to play PC games. His response is simply beautiful.
This review is dedicated to you, anonymous forum poster, because you're a cunt. What are you, you're a cunt, yes you are! You live in a cunty cottage and you drive a cunty car!
- What's even better is that the fairy-imp from earlier had been holding up a sign advising Yahtzee to "say 'cunt' a lot".
- One last jab at the Kinect.
Spec Ops: The Line
- The game actually managed to get Yahtzee quite depressed, which led him to forcibly contrive some levity into his review:
(Waffle about the self-contradictory nature of FPS gaming) Oh, I'm sorry, is this getting too contemplative too early on? Here are some farting noises! *farting noises*
- "Spec Ops: The Line is one of those pleasant surprises that comes along every now and again; a videogame story that really got to menote , giving me genuine feelings of weariness, guilt and actual physical sickness. Fun, fun, fun!"
- The ending.
Do you remember when shooters were about killing demons from hell? Those were good days. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of gaming growing up, as our childish fantasies are torn from us and we are forced to confront consequences in an unfair, unforgiving, and unavoidable world of hatred, misery, and death.
- And the credits end with "It's just been downhill ever since IDDQD stopped working".
- He complains that while this game is rife with Player punches they come across as rather anvilicious with a bit of But Thou Must.
"While the game does show the horror of war, it just shoves it in your face. (Spec-Ops pushes Yahtzee's face into his monitor) It's similar to a woman sneaking into your house, getting naked and putting her butt near your face when you're asleep, so when you wake up and see her ass she calls you a pervert for looking at it. I didn't want to see your ass Spec-Ops! You brought it up, you asshole! (Yahtzee avatar DopeSlaps Spec-Ops standing behind him).
- Yahtzee pondering why the game was titled such, summarizing the story as all about how, the main character's life got flipped, turned upside-down.
- "At this point there's only one thing I can do, MASTURBA- I mean RETRO-REVIEW!" Apparently he uses a squeaky giraffe to do so.
Sleeping Dogs
- After an introductory paragraph describing the nature of Grand Theft Auto clones, he attempts to re-name the genre as "Petty-crim-footstool-vehicle-related-inner-thighs-'em-up".
- On the games title: "There's a racist joke about East Asian cuisine in there somewhere that you'll be pleased to hear I'm not going to acknowledge."
- The main character Wei Shen joins the Triads upon arrival in Hong Kong "because who the fuck else are you going to sign up for in Hong Kong, the Real IRA?"
- "Now, Timmy, we can only give you an Xbox and five games for Christmas this year because you did blowtorch your initials into your sister!"
- The combat mechanics described as what is technically known as "flipping out the buttered fuck crumpets".
- "Eight years ago, GTA San Andreas had a jetpack. Does Sleeping Dogs have a jetpack? Well then, better luck next time!"
- The review starts with Yahtzee angrily refusing to review New Super Mario Bros. 2.
I'm not falling for it this time, Nintendo, so even if you did massively shake up the formula and recast Mario as a brash intergalactic smuggler piloting the Yosh-1 through the imperial controlled Mushroom Nebula I will never know!" *followed by the image of Yahtzee covering his ears and going "LA LA LA"*
- I saaawww you (New Super Mario Bros. 2).
- His playthrough is off to a good start.
"So I started my first game spawned on the shores of a mysterious land, made for the nearest visible building, and was immediately beaten to death by six squawking, working-class zombies in flat caps. Then I paused to have a little drinky..."
- What really caps this joke is how utterly defeated Yahtzee sounds
- "After having fallen and broken my leg, I saw one player run over my head as I pathetically called for help. Later playthroughs would teach me that, in terms of DayZ regular human interaction, THAT was a passionate kiss on the mouth."
- "Yeah! Ambiguously melee attack your way out of that, you straggly cunt! Haaaaa... what's that rumbling noise? And then every door in the street flung open and fucking hell, it was like the Pied Piper set his flute to the murderer setting. Oh right, loud noises! The classic zombie apocalypse social faux pas!"
- Yahtzee comments how when a new player (to DayZ) came by that unless the guy actually talked to him and asked what was wrong, he would have shot and looted him.
- Also, when said player gave Yahtzee a blood transfusion with (Yahtzee swears this is true) his ample supply of blood packs and nothing else, he comments on how he could have learned about The Power of Friendship and "sticking together in the face of adversity". Until a zombie came by, broke his leg, and either chased the other guy off or killed him.
Guild Wars 2
- (On mundane grinding quests) "The fact that I was a necromancer made it pretty funny, though; I pictured the farmer's wife standing at the kitchen window, watching me chase moles out of the vegetable garden by summoning shadow-demons from the stygian pit to curse their very souls and then turning to her husband and going: "He does know we've got a spade he can use, right?""
- "...and Guild Wars 2 also improves on that by giving you limited slots and a range of swapoutable abilities what the hell kind of word was that?"
- On stating that the game world is a huge mess (or perhaps an accurate representation of what happens when 90% of a world's population IS made of wandering adventurers) he eventually concludes that Guild Wars 2 is essentially a fantasy-themed kiddie playground, where the kids take turns whacking on the animatronic monsters while a bored attendant keeps watch.
Borderlands 2
- "Borderlands? more like BORED *pause* -Erlands! *long pause*
- Later in the review "Borderlands? more like SNORE-derlands *pause* two *long pause*"
- The review in its entirety. It's one long hilarious panoply of your usual Caustic Critic going into Bait and Switch meets Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! as he completely forgets to review FIFA 13 and instead reviews three other games with more plot substance.
- His opinion of Mists of Panderia:
Yahtzee: I blame publishers not wanting to put out anything that might have to compete with Mists of Pandaria, which incidentally I wouldn't touch with a twelve-foot sterilized barge pole being held by someone else.
- Him not actually playing the game beforehand:
Yahtzee: Some might say not having played the game and only glancing briefly at the cover art might preclude reviewing it as a rule, but I didn't get to where I am today by following rules all over the place! Let's give it a crack.
- His experiences playing Anna:
Yahtzee: In Anna, you are a faceless, nameless protagonist, who I choose to believe resembles Mr. Bean, who has come to an abandoned sawmill in search of his lost love or something, and considering the sawmill only has like five rooms, what follows is a pretty fucking breakneck descent into the depths of the human heart.
- His opinion on the "logic" puzzles in Anna:
Yahtzee: Anna is closer to adventure game than survival horror though, spiritually akin to those microscopic escape-the-room flash games where you solve a sequence of logic puzzles in a small environment. But the operative word there is "logic" and Anna's relationship with that concept evokes the relationship a cheese grater has with a water balloon full of sperm. Before you can even get into the sawmill, you have to find two parts of a mirror, arrange them on a wall, stick a pinecone to the front and then light it on fire because this in some way unlocks the front door. That's not a logic puzzle, that's something Hunter S. Thompson might attempt after he lost his front door key at a mushroom-enfueled wilderness retreat! I'm glad I don't live in this neighbourhood; you probably can't even run yourself a bath until you've arranged twelve Snickers bars under the S-bend and pissed in the sink.
- His outrage that Tokyo Jungle insists on submitting his score to the leaderboards:
Yahtzee: And I can't stand how every time I die, it insists on submitting my score to the global ranking, not only forcing me to wait a literal minute when I just want to fucking restart but then usually informing me that I'm in a hundred-billionth place in the ranks of roleplaying as a small yappy dog and I would like to inform all my peers just to round out the emasculation.
Tokyo Jungle: YOU DEAD.Tokyo Jungle: You know who'd love this?Tokyo Jungle: FUCKING EVERYONE
- The images make it even better:
- The ending is priceless:
Yahtzee: Shit, hang on, I got confused again. How long have I got left? 8 SECONDS?! FUCK!! Uh, FIFA 13 is a game in which you and your burly friends help a small leather sphere realize its dream of being in a net, and I think we can all agree that that's basically a positive thing, nighty-night.
- The Credits Gag regarding Tokyo Jungle: "Maybe being told that I wasn't good enough to mate with the prime females struck a bit close to home."
- The thumbnail for the review is actually highly amusing. Almost invariably, the thumbnail for a review will be a contextual screencap from the review itself. For FIFA 13, it was... a tiger-headed Yahtzee being attacked by a velociraptor with a loose pile of assorted animals in the background. Don't bother trying to figure out what the hell this has to do with soccer. Because it's from the Tokyo Jungle part of the "review".
Resident Evil 6
- "What is the point of multiplayer? Correct, to socialize with other human beings, which is why I hate it." (shows Yahtzee hissing at socializers from the sewers).
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
- "Did you like playing X-COM, Yahtzee?" "What was that? Sorry, I couldn't hear you, I was playing X-COM."
- Him pretending that the commander is "somebody's fussy mom" and the accompanying images that follow.
- "But at least the randomness makes the game very replayable, so take comfort in that as you contemplate restarting from scratch because you didn't research laser guns fast enough and all your men have to be evacuated from the field with a fucking spatula!"
- "You can survive getting one of your top guys raygunned into sandwich spread. Two, it's a pinch, but you might as well reload if your entire supersquad gets wiped up, because the aliens aren't going to hold back to let you train up a new selection of rookies who aim like fucking Octodad and go into panic mode if a wasp starts buzzing too close to their peanutbutter sandwiches."
Medal of Honour: Warfighter & Doom 3: BFG Edition
- Yahtzee's speculation that the game came about as a result of one developer testing whether his cubicle-mate was actually listening to him. "YEAH, SOUNDS GREAT!"
- Needing a name to differentiate the particular brand of first-person shooters which rely on such pet peeves as reliance on cover, regenerating health, limited inventories and excessive handholding, he dubs them "Spunkgargleweewee," a term he continues to use on a semi-consistent basis.
- His rage against people who claim he just doesn't like shooters.
"Oh, you ignorant little bastards. Stick your balls up your arse and clench yourself castrated! I was into shooters when you were sucking on Wiimotes, you cover-loving, health-regenerating murderer-come-latelies!"
Assassin's Creed III
- The credits:
"Hey, strange hooded knife-covered man on a bench, did you happen to see a strange hooded knife-covered man run through here?"
- The theoretical conversation between Yahtzee and the game itself:
Yahtzee: [W]hen can we get to stabbing people?Assassin's Creed III: ...What is it with you and stabbing peopl-Yahtzee(snaps): What is it with you and NOT stabbing people?!
- Yahtzee initially being worried that The American Revolution period would lead to the British being Flanderized into a Evil Brits, while the Americans would be the Designated Heroes. Then he points out how the Grey and Grey Morality balanced out both sides from their stereotypical portrayals in this time period:
Yahtzee: "Doesn't make the game any less boring, but there you go."
Call of Duty: Black Ops II
- His suggestion for a better game that Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 could have been if it had played to its strengths: "The Adventures Of Hooky Wingsuit: The Amazing Flying Racist."
- "He a TURRIST!"
- Imagining a question from the target demographic about the game's quality:
Yahtzee: "Well, I'm white, paranoid, and stupid so this game sounds ideal so far," says a nearby cunt. "I'm just worried the gameplay won't also cater to my many neurological difficulties whoops my brain fell out again!"
Hitman Absolution
- The "fish skeleton" remark.
- "Oh, don't you start telling me I have problems, I get enough of that from the voices, thank you very much!"note
FarCry 3
- He opens the review with the phrase "I am a banana." and it only gets funnier every time he uses it.
- "I kept sliding off the roads because the cars are always a few feet wider than you think they are. Its a lot like online dating."
- A clever one from the credit sequence: one of the subtitles says "You know what the first sign of madness is? Rubbing animal giblets on your reproductive organs." The next slide has him poledancing, wearing a severed tiger head as a codpiece.
- Subtitling said slide: "It's not a real holiday until you've napalmed a cassowary."
- Another metaphor that gets a little weird:
A typical combat mission involves scouting the area from a vantage point, marking targets, picking the optimal angle of approach, and taking down the baddies one by one. Its quite relaxing really, like pruning a rosebush where the roses can get freaked out and call another rosebush to come and back it up.
Top 5 of 2012
- Yahtzee explains why he has has a soft spot for Never Dead despite its broken design.
"It's only when you try to do something interesting that you crash and burn in the most spectacular way. You may laugh at the bloke who thought he'd invented the parachute coat and threw himself off the Eiffel tower, but what's history gonna remember you for, funny man? That time you found a copy of Razzle in a hedge?"
Paper Mario: Sticker Star
- "The game opens with Mario and the princess holding some kind of open-air festival for stickers, which just goes to show how exciting life gets during Mushroom Kingdom peace-time. Stick around guys, 'cause next week is Hole Punch Mardi Gras!"
- "...for no particular reason the game fucking showers you with coins at the end of every level, like Mario's a registered charity and it's the last week of the financial year."
- Yahtzee admitting he needed to use the 3D for certain sections of the game:
" I suppose the 3DS can feel free to stand on my desk and rub its buttocks on my face, making really satisfied noises like this: "Mmmmmm, mmmmmmmmmm."
- "So if it's not a platformer and not an RPG, then what the hell is it? A walk-around-'em-up? A walk-around-sticking-things-to-other-things-'em-up? That's not a game, that's how I kill time at a pet shop!" (shows Yahtzee super-gluing a gerbil to a dog with the store manager saying "Excuse me, sir.")
- "I just want to play in the fucking cupboard, Nintendo. I know you're keeping WarioWare in there, too."
- "They were keeping Conker in that cupboard as well but I think somebody killed him for food"
Black Knight Sword & Hotline Miami
- The repeated renaming of games based on the way Black Knight Sword did it, i.e. "Orange Nerd Crowbar", "Brown Sweaty Racism", and "Red Dead Revolv— oh wait".
- On Hotline Miami:
"...due to a rather oddly placed stealth mission, you might actually stop to think that this game is actually really frustrating and the techno music is getting on your tits. Well... not really on your tits just on the tips of them (shows Yahtzee's avatar on a couch with a keyboard on its chest) like a kitten, but you don't wanna wake it up but there's something important you have to do (avatar looks on as couch catches on fire).
Anarchy Reigns
- "There's flying under the radar, but with zero hype and sneaking onto shelves in early January, Anarchy Reigns isn't so much flying under the radar as riding the fucking subway!"
- Snarking on the oxymoronic title. "It's like calling your name Dog Meows or Margaret Thatcher Cares."
- "There's such a fucking shortage of macho grizzled bad-asses voiced by Steve Blum in gaming that we've had to start recycling them now." Meanwhile, Bulletstorm peeks in sheepishly and says "Erm..."
- "I think I just beat up someone very thin, with a really clingy outfit and a stance like their hips have become dislocated. Oh well, that'll narrow it down to every single fucking female character in the game."
DMC: Devil May Cry
- "Ramble gramble-oh, never mind."
- The similes used to describe how anvilicious the story is.
- The callback to his Shadows Of The Damned review.
- An unfortunate idiom lurches rapidly into Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?
- "When the big boss expands like the asshole in the prison showers and takes on his city-destroying form, my first reaction should NOT be 'Phew, that's a relief.' I thought my rowboat was about to be made seaworthy."
The Cave
- Saying how The Cave is "an adventure game by Double Fine, not to be confused with the Double Fine Adventure Game that Kickstarter has already allowed to make more money than the rehab clinic next to Lindsay Lohan's house."
- "I guess they can't be hipsters after all, 'cause in that case the Cave would have granted them all a swift punch in the throat!"
- "Since this game has come out for Steam, XBLA, PSN, Wii U, graphing calculators, and handfuls of Scrabble tiles on metal trays, you can use whatever control method you like, but I needed to only use the mouse so I could use my other hand to keep a tally of every time the game repeated itself."
Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch
- The Studio Ghibli Bingo board.
- Accidentally referring to the game's subtitle as "Wrath of the White Guilt" and "Wrath of the White Privilege".
- The Stinger at the end involves the game's child protagonist extracting some enthusiasm from a man, seeing another rather skeptical-looking individual full to the brim with restraint, and silently giving his needle full of enthusiasm a knowing look. Hilarity Ensues, if you consider Stuff Blowing Up hilarious.
Aliens: Colonial Marines
- Part of the beginning of the review where he compares people wanting him to review the game to lighting a firework and running away, shoving someone into the girl's toilets or putting an unwanted child into a pen with a scary dog:
"Oh I see! No one wants me around when the new Call of Duty is training you to ignore another quality recognition instinct, but the moment something comes along that offends what few atrophied taste buds you have left then suddenly I'm your personal attack gopher. Well how do you know I don't actually really like Colonial Marines? (*beat*) I don't, it's fucking atrocious! But you'd have looked pretty silly if I had wouldn't you?"
- And then he mentions that maybe he's just bitter because the developers are doing his job by acting like a bunch of school children trying to blame each other on who dropped the really eggy fart.
- There's also him mentioning that many doorways during multiplayer saw reenactments of The Three Stooges routines and how there's only so many times the words "Who farted?" can break the tension regarding waiting for an elevator to come down at the end of a level
- The talk of his favorite glitch towards the end of the review. What really sells it is the representative graphic of the boss alien pulling out a giant wooden mallet to smack the marine back to death while letting out a Big "NO!".
Dead Space 3
- Simply put, all the bemoaning about how Dead Space 3 has given up all pretensions of being a Survival Horror, and has simply gone the Action Adventure route like every other game from EA with a thin layer of Survival Horror flavoring put on top. Special points include how he figures the guy who originally pitched it as a Survival Horror has given up on the franchise as much as Yahtzee has, how the story has gotten exaggerated to the point it's like a Wacky College Romantic Comedy, and how patently idiotic it is for EA to use "Weapon Customization" as a cheap excuse to milk the micro-transactions popularized by FarmVille:
EA Spokesperson: "Did you enjoy blowing real money on flooding your friends Facebook pages with news on you imaginary cows? Well you'll love blowing real money on being able to win a non-continuous game with less effort, thus cheapening any sense of achievement!"Yahtzee: "I might be more indignant if I thought this might actually work. The scheme seems to be to walk in a bank with a gun and a ski mask on, put a bucket on the floor, and say 'I'm going now, but if anyone wants to put money in there then, y'know, the option's open.', and if anyone DOES put money in the bucket, then that person probably shouldn't have HAD financial independence in the first place!"
- In the beginning:
Yahtzee: Electronic Arts. Arts. Arrrts... If there was ever a name that illustrated a need for some kind of verbal equivalent of social services that comes and forcibly takes words away if they're being misused.
- The EA slimy-tentacle-puppet offers an explanation of the sewage-management "poo map" as a new feature that may be of interest to Yahtzee.
- In anticipation of a meteor strike, God's hand comes down from the sky and says:
- Yahtzee's first choice for a city name.
Yahtzee: So on a desolate plot of land I placed the foundations for the emerging city of Dogbollock, U.S.A. 'Oh no no no!' went the little finger puppet, leaning over and typing a row of asterisks. 'You can't call your city that, that would be ever so beastly!' Why not? It is a fun name. I would be having more fun as the mayor of a city called 'Dogbollock'. I'm hoping to set up a department of Dogbollock beautification.
- "I think there might be something wrong with the AI. This might also explain why my city was briefly terrorized by a rampaging criminal whose house turned out to be directly opposite the police station."
- His criticism of Origin's Start My Own mentality.
Yahtzee: And putting that on my computer felt like leaving a child of my own in the Jonestown Daycare center.
The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct
- Likening Sony to a pushy mother and Kratos its little ballerina daughter, "whoring him out to every PlayStation game that will take him" when explaining why he isn't reviewing God of War: Ascension.
- The image of BioShock Infinite sitting on the game store shelf holding a very large sign with the words "NEXT WEEK, ALRIGHT?" on it.
- When commenting on how the game being too easy for what's ostensibly a "survival" title: "I think you need to punish me some more, Survival Instinct." (Temptingly sticks his rear in the air while Survival Instinct breaks out something that looks like a whip, paddle and branding iron thrown in a blender) "I've been a VERY bad boy."
- "...So [the zombies] start smashing [a wooden fence] down to get at me and you'd better cast me in 'The Cask of Amontillado' because I'm about to fucking brick it."
- Followed by stating that this unscripted event in a bad game is still better than a completely scripted event in a Triple-A Game such as, say, Dead Space 3, where, in his words "-I looked down a corridor with fifteen vents along the wall and thought to myself 'Yep, should've gone for the shampoo especially formulated for bodily fluids', and the music guy would trip and somehow fall on every button on his mixing desk.".
BioShock Infinite
- When Yahtzee says that Infinite is a worthy sequel to the original BioShock
"Don't you mean second sequel, Yahtzee?" [beat] "GET OUT."
- The repeated statements about the game disappearing up its own butt, leading to a particularly hilarious end joke.
- "Andrew Ryan had some weird ideas about sweat ownership, but he was articulate, dangerously intelligent, and wouldn't let someone like Comstock run the fucking hot tap!"
- Shitty Final Level Syndrome, A.K.A. "The Shinfles".
- His description of Booker getting outed at the Raffle as the "False Shepherd":
Columbia starts off perfectly fine, resembling a idyllic, cartoonish racist Disneyland until Father Comstock, city leader and alleged prophet, marks out DeWitt as the guy who's destined to fuck everyone's shit up, so he's forced to fuck everyone up after they all turn on him for being the guy who's going to fuck everyone up.
- The "Santa Claus: Our Prophet" posters.
LEGO City Undercover
- Describing the "pre-BioShock Infinite mass":
"Where the mayor of SimCity is a cyborg ninja wearing two very skimpy vests and is diverting civic funds into bringing their dead mum back to life."
- Attempting to shake off the "post-BioShock melancholy":
"Ooh, LEGO City! Cheerful, colourful, charming, plastic objects lodged in the sole of the foot. NO! Positive now!"
- On whether the game is really what the Wii U needs right now:
"I wouldn't say so; I mean, it doesn't even resemble a pneumatic drill!"
- Studs all have the face of a stud.
- And near the end, one of them holds a knife to a player's throat while telling him to "Keep smiling".
Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon
- So. Many. Innuendos! Hell, quite a few of the comments reference just how "homoerotic" the review is.
Injustice: Gods Among Us
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
- "A story campaign that you could miss entirely if a large dog happens to run past the screen at the wrong moment," illustrated with Yahtzee glaring at the dog for doing so.
- The image for "Eighties sci-fi action" is Adam Ant with a cyborg laser eye.
- "At the end of the cyber-day...", which is illustrated by a setting sun with a cyborg laser eye.
- Two about the clearing out of garrisons: looking back to the ordinary FarCry 3, where you could leave it to "Mr. Whiskers and the forest friends", and pointing out that if there are no more enemies in the line of sight of the blood dragons, they may decide to "snack of some of Kyle Reese's Pieces instead; perhaps a plate of fish and Hicks!"
- Calling out the anticlimactic ending of the game, saying that there should have been a "disco arena space battle with another guard and armoured laser-dinosaur" where both combatants wield "American Gladiator-style paddles with hedge trimmers strapped to the ends".
- "Who could've predicted that a man dressed as a giant light-up purple cock would turn a few heads at the Paint-Drying Appreciation Society?"
Metro: Last Light
- "...apparently disregarding all the other cities in the world with underground transit systems, but maybe they've all been lost to rampaging hordes of cannibalistic buskers."
- "So theres a quite hefty percentage of this game where I feel were lacking a sense of agency, but when I point that out the game gets kind of pissy."
Metro: Last Light: Oh, you want to feel like youre the master of your destiny, do you? Fine! Go run around the surface for a bit."So I do that, but then Im all like,"Yahtzee: This big-winged monster keeps trying to get me to play fetch with my entire body as the stick. Am I supposed to be killing it or just getting the fuck away?.Metro: Last Light: Sorry! Cant make it any clearer because Mr. Free Will thinks Ive been railroading him too much!
- The Stinger: "When Artyom eats food does he go om yom yom oh for fuck's sake."
Next Gen Buyer's Guide
- "So far, it has been like watching the most retarded game of Texas Hold 'Em ever played, where everyone just sat and eye-balled each other for six months before someone finally called in the most wheezily, non-committed way possible, in the hopes it would make some else show their hand. Whereupon the flop cards were revealed to be: A joker, a get-out-of-jail-free, and a Magus of the Vineyard from Magic: The Gathering."
- Yahtzee's reaction to the PS4's social interaction functions: "Any chance of getting a dedicated 'Fuck Off' button on the controller, Sony?"
- Yahtzee's bridge analogy regarding making games for the Wii U.
"...recently a critical blow was dealt when someone at EA unguardedly mentioned that they weren't making any games for [the Wii U]...EA did backtrack on that remark though, perhaps realizing that before you burn a bridge, it might be smarter to wait and make sure the other two bridges aren't going to spontaneously combust."
- Yahtzee's hilarious prediction of the dire consequences of the X Box One's Kinect system always being on:
"Oh, but the Kinect needs to be on all the time so you know when you're barking orders at it, but I want to feel comfortable talking about the Xbox in front of it. I might unguardedly say 'I hope Xbox doesn't nuke the Chinese' and then who knows what might happen."*Graphic shows the Kinect hearing the quoted part as "Xbox: Nuke the Chinese," followed by a nuclear missile launching from the top of the Kinect*
- Getting taken down and reposted to serve as Yahtzee's traditional "Shut up and let me enjoy my holiday break" video on Christmas Day is pretty chuckleworthy.
- "Yaaaaaaaaawn... Sorry, Fuse. You're not boring me, I was just up late last night." Cue image of a trash can containing a picture of a dolphin and several discarded tissues.
- The punchline of the shallow characterisation: "And then there's the black guy, who's just happy to be here."
- "UGH! You just made me think of Clive Barker's Jericho! Thanks a lot, Fuse!"
Remember Me
- Yahtzee pointing out the pitfalls of how to name a game: the many analogies (all of which are funny in their own way) are capped off with him saying the title SHOULD NOT be something gaming journalists can twist into snarky headlines: "'Remember Me?' Kinda forgettable. (Puts on Cool Shades and smokes a cigar) Arf-arf!"
- Yahtzee complimenting how Nilin's butt is framed on the cover, claiming he likes to pretend it's saying the title out loud (complete with a Speech Bubble framing the title coming out of Nilin's ass).
Nilan's Butt: Remember Me!Yahtzee: Certainly will!
- The constant jabs at how blatantly obvious the story is trying to set up the Plot Twist to the point it's The Untwist, to the point Yahtzee claims the game was yodeling "TWIST! TWIST! TWIST!" like a mountain-top pretzel shack.
Yahtzee: "Finally, without wishing to spoil, the twists I came up with were WAY better than the ones the plot actually had. Not that I'm spoiling that there's a twist. Maybe the twist is that there is no twist, you just don't know. Maybe the twist is that this review won't end two words from now." [Beat] "DOUBLE TWIST!" *holds up two pretzels*
- The revelation of one the characters being named "Edge" ("revolutionary leader and former U2 guitarist"), eventually leading to several hilarious jabs at Bono.
- Depicting the PR outcomes of both the XBox One and PS4 with with an image of a paddling pool, where Sony proclaims itself "KING O' DA POOL", followed by Microsoft drowning itself.
- On Mirror's Edge 2: "What's that? You were hoping to see some of the free-running gameplay in the free-running game? Well, hope into one hand, shit into the other, and see which one fills up first, motherfucker."
- The idea that Yahtzee has been sending Valve love cards complete with little pasta shells.
- Microsoft at the International Don't Fuck Up Championship. "It's for your own good. It's for your own good!" paving the way for Sony to win the Sickest Burn in the History of the Universe trophy.
- His take on Ryse: Son of Rome being too much like current military shooters: "Now all we need is a derisive pun. Medal of Roma: Aegian Warfighter? Call-igula of Duty? Return To Castle Vulcan-stein? I'll work on it."
- "You don't see a lot of straight comedy in AAA games these days, do you, like your Monkey Islands or your Conker's Bad Fur Day or your Kane & Lynch 2."
- Yahtzee's attempts at random humour.
"A bunny with a pancake?" Yeah that was pretty random, well done. I can be random too, listen: "Fuck off, you perenial shitstain!" Oh sorry, I did that wrong.[...]Twatty bastardy pancakes, this is random humour, hope everyone's enjoying it.
- "I'm pretty sure the new Microsoft Word will create the design document for this if you press Shift-Control-F5."
- Where's Deadpool's giant robot spider fight and shirtless wrestling match with Senator Super Saiyan Seven?
- "Oh, don't be like that, baby! Superman 64 was years ago!"
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
- "Radiohead put it best: You do it to yourself, ba-dow-dow, and that's what really hurts."
- "A life free of debt!? You naïve fool, debt is your life!"
- "All the fossils will grow back tomorrow, you can replace your broke-ass fishing rod tomorrow, we'll know if your eyeball cancer's responding to treatment tomorrow."
- "Look at you, Yahtzee Croshaw; the virile mountain lion of game criticism, excited by a flower shop."
- "Ach! You vill reveal your secrets, British svine! At vhat time did you catch ze Vhale Shark?"
Ride to Hell: Retribution
- After his episode for The Last of Us got Yahtzee a lot of controversy from the fans of the game, he suggests a "bonding exercise" is in order, which he uses as an analogy for the review:
Yahtzee: Load up your shotguns, join me around this barrel, and lets take it out on some motherfucking FISH!!!
- Yahtzee then goes into elaborate detail about just how SCREAMINGLY BAD Ride to Hell is... then says that's the reason everybody should run out and buy it.
Yahtzee: "I'm just gonna spoil because fuck you: in a climactic showdown, the evil gang leader grandly reveals that it was all because he didn't like Jake's dad much. (Beat) ''That's the mystery!? I assumed that much when he sent eleven-thousand murderers dressed like Guns N' Roses backup drummers!"
- Special mention goes for the Excuse Plot, which has the main character try to find out the truth about his Disappeared Dad, and why the Big Bad is murdering all of his relatives.
- Yahtzee equating the game to a retarded child:
Yahtzee: It's a little retarded child with its head stuck in a cereal box and a massive great dump in its big boy pants going "I'm a real game now!" Of course you are, Ride To Hell.
- His sheer exasperation at the game's failings summarized in one line:
Yahtzee: It's hard to think of even one thing Ride to Hell doesn't fuck up!!
- And despite that sheer exasperation, the best part of the video is how freaking elated he sounds to review something so atrocious.
Yahtzee: Ride to Hell is the kind of bad that leaves me with a smile on my face.
- The metaphor for Microsoft lowing their standards due to the approaching end of the console generation.
Alright, son; we had fun on this boat over the years, but now it's time to sink it to the ocean floor and let all the bottom-feeders live in it.
But, daddy! Couldn't we just put a better engine on the boat, and not have to destroy all our cherished memories?
I think someone needs to go back in the naughty-box!
- "Considering Ride To Hell, what is this, Absolute Garbage Awareness Month?"
- Suggesting that just straight out calling your game Dark is reaching the zenith/nadir of Darker and Edgier, or as Yahtzee puts it "Perhaps this represents a final culmination of the entertainment industry's long-held notion that the epitome of cool is sitting around being miserable with the lights turned off."
- "Eric is informed that he is a vampire, because a vampire drank all his blood, but either they immediately forget about that particular rule [accompanied by a illustration of a story writer saying: "Fuck it that'll do!"], or Eric creates about fifty more vampires during the course of every single combat section. Hey, I've got an idea: How about we play one of them? I wanna reroll my character into one that didn't get snake-eyes for charisma!"
- Yahtzee applying a badly written Dialogue Tree to a real conversation.
- Ending with:
- Ending with:
- Yahtzee's comments on the game's desperate attempt to hide their similarities to Vampire: The Masquerade:
Yahtzee: During one conversation, Eric goes:
"TELL ME MORE ABOUT VAMPIRE SOCIETY,"and the dude goes "there isn't one, really (see, we're not ripping off Vampire: The Masquerade!)", but in his very next line, he says "I wouldn't expect a half-blood to understand". Oh, okay, no society but there is classism. Do you wanna go back and maybe write a second draft◊?
- "In conclusion, suck my Dark dick! ...I mean, suck my dick, Dark!"
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
- "The gameplay of Dream Team Bros is basically the same as Bowser's Inside Story. It switches between an isometric real world and 2D platforming inner world. Bowser's duodenum in the first case ("In yer go") and Luigi's brain in the second ("Chop Chop"). Both equally fucked up in their own special ways." (Mario, despite looking horrified from both options, opts for Luigi's brain, and you can see Luigi's head bulge from his entry).
- "It's like if Hugh Grant had stumbled into a parallel world where awkward British charm could be used to generate electricity."
Rise of the Triad
- The game bringing back the original's most beloved features:
Yahtzee: So we can speed around shooting the baddies like a Starlight Express cast member going postal?Rise of the Triad: Yep!Yahtzee: And we can fire cartoonishly powerful rocket launcher in mid-air?Rise of the Triad: Yep!Rise of the Triad: Yep! And we still have the power-up that turns you into a dog!Yahtzee: *Gasps* With the little doggy nose at the bottom of the screen?Rise of the Triad: Yep!Yahtzee: And the little adorable paw coming up when you press buttons??Rise of the Triad: Err... no, we forgot about that.
- This:
Yahtzee: So to evoke the same spirit, they just made the graphics really fucking murky so that distant enemies blend into the background and locating the assholes turns into some kind of hardcore bullet-themed game of Marco Polo.
- The second act of the game:
Yahtzee: Rise of the Triad does a very naughty thing around the second act:Rise of the Triad: Bet you're enjoying all this fast paced violence, aren't you? But this isn't a perfect recreation of 90's retro shooters yet! We haven't had enough shitty first-person platforming challenges!! Hope you like trying to accurately jump onto tiny platforms when your feet only exist hypothetically, because if you don't do it perfect we're going to kill you! And then laugh! And then display your corpse at the museum of failure wearing a silly hat!
- Quicksaves > Autosaves:
Yahtzee: But on the other hand it's not entirely the fault of retro-gaming. Because you know what the original Rise of the Triad had? Quicksave! Not autosave, presided-over by a sloth reading a really interesting magazine. First person jumping challenges are a bit of a pisser, but an entire sequence of the things that you have to start all over again at the slightest failure is a 12-Storey flying pisser circling the neighbourhood, contaminating all the swimming pools!
- Yahtzee's reaction to the game mocking him for failure and the accompanying visual
Yahtzee: I'd fantasize about impaling the voice actor with an ocean liner piston, butthole-first.
- When Yahtzee compares casual games...:
Yahtzee: Now when you're ready I want you to press this button. [Imp misses the button] Okay, that was slightly to the left of the button, but keep trying, you're doing ever so well.
Yahtzee: Oh, look at this wee-man, thinks he can roll with us. Maybe if you ate this entire live crab right now. While I'm hitting you. With the crab.
- ...to hardcore games...:
Yahtzee: Are you the kind of hurly-burly power-armour marine that can save the planet from the giant death crabs from space? Well, prove it, by pressing this button. Now, when you feel up to it, shoot that monster that we tied to a stake and put a giant glowing arrow over. You know what, never mind, I'll do it.
- ...and then says that both methods are good, except when games try to have it both ways:
- The ending:
Yahtzee: Maybe they'll put more levels out. Maybe they'll remember to put some fuckin' Triads in them this time.
Papers, Please and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
- "If they spell their name with a different vowel just once, then it's off to talk to the nice men with guns in the building that people go into a lot, but don't seem to come out of so much."
- "Hey, you know who'd like to see your hairy balls? These nice men with guns!"
- His analogy that the limited number of upgrades you can give to your booth are about "As useful as free WiFi connections in Auschwitz's prison showers" Crosses the Line Twice by itself, but considering the game is a Black and Grey Morality tale that takes place in a tyrannical Ruritania, it really complements the game in a Black Comedy manner.
- While talking about Brothers, Yahtzee wonders why the kids are pulling a Saving Private Ryan for their father. The visual shows the kids with army hats firing rapidly and screaming.
Pikmin 3
- Right off the bat, Yahtzee pulls a brilliantly tortured metaphor:
"It's like the fucking trenches of the Somme in there! Except the Allied soldiers are physically thrown at the German war machine by their commanders and every German casualty gets dragged into the Allied trenches just to have their flesh minced up and converted into rations. That'll teach me to pre-judge! Thanks, Pikmin 3, you fucking monster!"
- Shigeru Miyamoto, complete with his trademark smile, tossing helpless cats into a canal.
- Everything involving the dodos.
- From the end credits: "The last time I threw a bunch of vegetables around, I got fired from my job at the coma ward."
Killer Is Dead
- "You get subweapons by seducing women in what are termed the Gigolo Missions, to which I am grateful for teaching me the never-fail method of picking up women. Sit staring at them without saying a bloody word with a constant look on your face like you just caught a whiff of their panty stank and it did very little to impress, and whenever she looks away stare right down her tits like you're planning a spelunking expedition. Then having brought the mood in the room to a simmering erotic tension, SHOVE an expensive present in her face with such violence that if she'd been an inch closer, she'd need a sink plunger to pull her nose back out. Repeat until sex. At which point she will give you a drill. See, where I was going wrong was assuming that women aren't power tool vending machines with one slot for flowers and another for cock."
- "Anyway today's sword-wielding assassin protagonist is 'Mondo Zappa', whose interesting qualities kind of begin and end with his name, frankly. He looks like a nine-year-old boy who got stretched on The Rack for three days and then someone gave him a robot arm and a school uniform."
- "(Mondo's) from that school of characterization that thinks there's nothing cooler than being incapable of showing emotion, 'cause of course my granddad's been getting pussy like you wouldn't believe ever since he had the stroke."
Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
- The opening:
Yahtzee: If you're gonna call a horror adventure game "Amnesia", you might as well call a first-person shooter "Bullets".
- "...and while being chased down a darkened factory of death by a pigman squealing like his pork-scratchings are caught in a door-hinge is not something I would enter into without first making room in the household-budget for reupholstering the computer chair, said chair then shown with a hole in the seat and some rather dubious stains on the wall behind it.
- Confused low-brow company executive: "Couldn't we just call it Amnesia: Revelations or something?"
- Summing up the first game:
Yahtzee: If you need some kind of primer on the first Amnesia game, put on a blindfold and shit yourself. That'll about bring you up to speed.
- Comparing the plots of the two games:
Yahtzee: Don't worry about the plot [of The Dark Descent], because the new one's largely unconnected, besides the fact that its basically the same plot: You are a very British man, who wakes up alone in a spooky mansion with the eponymous headfart, and must make his way down to an increasingly scary environment, gradually piecing together why its gone all scary and how involved you were in the process, and I'll put down a spoiler warning here unless you work in the paint-tasting factory, but the answer is... A lot.
- Briefly calling the game 'A Sausage For Breakfast.'
- Feeling in the dark:
Yahtzee: Like the previous Amnesia, if you don't find all the text documents and shit, you might feel a bit in the dark on what the fuck's going on, as well as in the dark generally.
- His final words regarding why The Dark Descent was more effective than A Machine For Pigs:
Yahtzee: Being hunted through a tunnel by something that's going to pull my twat out through my nose if it finds me, now that is horror I can get a sense of. The sense is smell, and the smell is piss.
Grand Theft Auto V
- He gives his final statement as to what the game could have done better, then, after a brilliantly tortured simile involving a soldier getting his leg blown off in WWII, caps the video off with the soldier writing a letter home:
"Dear Mum, Remember when my dance instructor said I had two left feet? Well I managed to redress the balance somewhat...P.S.: FUCKING HELL! UAAAARRGGHH!"
Lost Planet 3
- His protests that the characters are just a collection of National Stereotypes, and how this proves necessary because, outside of their Funetik Aksents, there's no way to tell each other apart.
- His explanation about how this game and Dead Space 3 switch their signature styles with a visual of the two games running to each other and making out.
Beyond: Two Souls
JodiEllen Page's reasons for being depressed:Yahtzee: Anyway, Ellen Page is very sad her whole life because there's an invisible ghost following her around who kills everyone she doesn't like. Fucking suck it up, Ellen Page! Some of us had to make do with Rat Poison growing up!
- Yahtzee marks the start of another Berserk Button trend (namely the idea that every game needs to have two separate phrases marked by a colon (especially since it indicates Sequelitis before the first sequel even gets released). He is especially peeved at how, if you only say one part of Beyond: Two Souls, everybody would confuse it for something else.
Yahtzee: I've been playing Beyond!Bystander: "Beyond" what, "Beyond" the limits of social acceptability? (Cuts to Yahtzee bleary-eyed and desperately playing a game, surrounded by several jars of urine he apparently filled himself.)Yahtzee: No, I mean, I've been playing Two Souls!Bystander: Oh right, isn't that that really hard game from BY Software - I mean, by FROM Software?Yahtzee: No, that's Dark Souls!Yahtzee: NO, that's Arse Holes!
- Eventually, Yahtzee gives up on saying Beyond: Two Souls, and instead gives an increasingly hectic list of alternate titles, all revolving around having Ellen Page somewhere in them.
- When complaining that Ellen Page spends half the game sounding like she's about to cry, and the other half actually crying, Yahtzee realizes that most of the other characters spend their time crying, and thinks that their collected tears could irrigate the entire Sahara Desert.
- Although he admits it would be Hypocritical Humor to mock the Uncanny Valley of the facial expressions (seeing as how, as little as a decade ago, people were lucky if the characters even moved their mouths when they said their lines), he still can't ignore the Narm of "-whenever someone's supposed to be at the limits of screaming emotion in this game, they look more like they're concentrating really hard... on trying to do a horse impression." (shows a character going "Neeeeigh!", causing Yahtzee to do a Double Take.)
- Initially getting excited of some gameplay in a David Cage game that isn't a string of Quick Time Events "cracking off like farts from a row of nervous pigs", Yahtzee is disappointed to see that the only part these mechanics come into play (outside of the Justified Tutorial) is one stinking level (which, coincidentally, is the only one showcased in the gameplay trailers).
- Criticizing the schizophrenic Mood Whiplash of the story (from a game company and director allegedly about pushing means of story-telling), claiming how one point the story is about how Ellen Page is forced to see the grim realities of homelessness in the modern world one moment, and in the next is using spirit magic to fight Native American demons.
- With a pair of hunky boys.
- Yahtzee believes that the Quantic Dream games are better suited for providing psychological information on David Cage, believing that Beyond: Two Souls shows he believes Wisdom from the Gutter, and that the enemies of mankind are Corrupt Corporate Executives - that, or he's sucking up to the Hobos he'll have to live with, after Quantic Dream eventually fires him or goes out of business.
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD
- Yahtzee stating that the reason Link wears a green tunic in the game is because his nan wanted him to take part in Ocarina of Time cosplay.
- "The point is, Wind Waker-Link doesn't march about with self-righteousness jammed up his arse like a frozen tent-pole 'cause he's naturally destined to be oh-so-bloody great at everything. He's a character, with flaws and goals: rescue sister, drink soup, take photos of everything for some reason."
- "That's about the final word! Except for this one: Mingegurgle."
Batman: Arkham Origins
- The numerous Appeals To Obscurity regarding the game's villains:
- "Your enemies shall define you," went the marketing tagline, in which case, Batman, you are one dull fucking son of a bitch".
- "You know, this video will pass quicker if you stop pausing it every ten seconds to look up who the fuck these characters are."
- "As soon as you graduate, it's straight down to Goon Recruitment to pick up your fingerless gloves and baseball bat; unless you're a girl, in which case here are some pamphlets on ninja-ing."
- The Running Gag of people who couldnt be arsed, for example:
"What shall we do for the box art, Warner Bros.?""Just make it a black closeup of Batman looking sad. But don't let me catch you getting arsed about it, or you'll be in trouble! When I can be arsed."
- Believing that some of Bane's new characterization in Origins is based off Bane's characterization in The Dark Knight Rises, which leads to Yahtzee vomiting when he first brings the possibility up, and making several jokes about Bane's "jockstrap oxygen mask".
"Wearing Tom Hardy's jockstrap on your face just gives the game away. I learned that at the Academy Awards."
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
- "Instead of Future Desmond, we are now Future Silent Protagonist..."
Future Desmond's tombstone: FUTURE DESMOND/NONE BLANDERFuture Silent Protagonist: (Missing a face) I'll take *that* challenge
- "...an employee for a French-Canadian video game developer being pressured to produce results by their evil corporate owners. Write What You Know, ey, lads?!"
- The cameos by Connor and Wind Waker!Link (getting their ships blown out of the water by Edward Kenway).
- At one point, Yahtzee mentions the game's unlockable sea shanties. What song does he use to illustrate this subject? "Poker Face".
- The episode's entry on the Zero Punctuation Wiki heaps another layer of funny onto that scene by adding the caption, "Hope you're not expecting any applause-plause for that one, lads".
- The following theoretical conversation, referring to Yahtzees aversion of side-quests in the previous game:
"Hmm, yes, well-tutorialised. Tell me, do I ever need to do this again?"
"Well, not really, but it can help you make money to develop your homestead"
- "...Assassin's Creed isn't a series of games anymore, Assassin's Creed is a fucking line graph! The line went down a bit for Ass-Creed 3, but now it's gone up again, and maybe it'll keep going up in the next one, or maybe it'll take another plunge. What I do know is that this line graph is being drawn on what appears to be a depressingly long sheet of paper, - at the end of which is Ubisoft and I do not like the look of that stapler it's holding!"
Call of Duty Ghosts
- CoD: Ghosts is not "a game about the vengeful spirits hanging around an English chip shop". (Ethereal fish: "Yooouu killed meeee.")
- "...because not only is the U.S. outsourcing their weapons development to fucking Megatron..."
- Yahtzee lampshades that the titular Ghosts, despite being billed as a 'stealth unit' have zero sense of subtlety.
"The Ghosts, as the name might imply, are ostensibly a legendary stealth unit that specializes in taking down larger forces through sneaky guerrilla tactics. So obviously, one of the first things you do in the game is ram-raid an enemy base in a burning truck and start gunning down every living thing from the dandelions on upwards. Yeah, that's some good ghostin' there, lads! Truly, thou art akin to the flicker of a candlelight shadow as you waddle around an open field being shot at from nineteen different directions."
- Yahtzee highlighting the absurdity of the game's Excuse Plot:
"[South America] attack America by hijacking America's orbital missile weapon. OK, gonna stop you there again, Ghosts! Firstly, so much for the enemy being "superior" if they can't make their own superweapons and gotta pinch 'em like safari park baboons nicking the windscreen wipers. And secondly, orbital fucking missile weapon!? This invasion is sounding more justifiable by the second!"
"Oh, no, America has been attacked and is weakened and there's no defenses except an inexhaustible supply of tank battalions and an army of killer robots. And we would've had a doomsday satellite if the rest of the world hadn't gotten all weird about it!"
- "Just for fun I kept a running tally of all the characters in the story campaign who aren't burly white dudes and you are under no obligation to shoot. The final total was three: a female astronaut right at the start who immediately dies, a helicopter that spoke with a woman's voice, and a black member of the Ghosts unit who immediately dies. And, frankly, when that happens, the main characters displayed less emotion than when their dog got shot. "Dammit, the black guy died!", they seemed to say, "Now we can't claim to have tons of black friends while arguing on the internet!"
- "...But somehow it's only getting worse! Black Ops II actually came across as at least slightly self-aware, and Modern Warfare One went so far as being profound, such as in that bit where you die slowly and horribly in a nuclear blast. If that happened in CoD: Ghosts, you'd probably just fart all the radiation out in one big heroic guff, pull the broken glass out of your eyeballs, and then use it to shiv the Ayatollah."
Exclusives Showdown
- When going down the list of exclusives for the X Box One and the PlayStation 4, he comes down to Killzone: Shadow Fall vs. Titanfall, and was commenting on the latter when he's informed of a bit of new information, consequently winding up giving no points to either console:
Yahtzee: But maybe- what's that? Titanfall is getting a PC release? Well that undermines the whole cocking premise, doesn't it?!
- Yahtzee's closing remark:
So at the end of that, the PS4 has the most points in this pointless-conjecture-of-games-I-haven't-played competition, and therefore has a slight edge in the upcoming grimy basement knifefight. But viewer, there lies a world outside this grimy basement: the world of PC gaming! All you have to do is come up the stairs and into the light, feel the rays of the sun and the cool breeze upon your skin then go down some more stairs into the other grimy basement next door.
- Each round is introduced with a Self-Backing Vocalist rendition of the round's title. Round Four, "Driving Aboot" has him singing "Driving about, driving about, driving about, driv-ing about" as a poor rendition of the Doctor Who theme. which cuts out just as he goes into the ooo-eee-ooo theremin part.
Ryse: Son of Rome
- Describing the main protagonist Marius "As in, 'Thank you Marius! But our emperor is in another castle. '"
- Him describing the loading screens of the Xbox One.
Yahtzee: I put in the disc, and up comes an exciting next-gen percentage that takes five sodding minutes to get to 1%.Xbox One: Don't worry, you don't have to wait 'til it gets to 100% before you can start playing!Yahtzee: OK, so what percentage do I have to wait for?Xbox One: I'm not telling you!
- Him blasting the plot of the game: first from the Anachronism Stew (such as Boudicca besieging Rome with war elephants), then of how it's ripping off elements of other stories on the Roman Empire.
Yahtzee: "...the plot seems to have been written in five minutes by someone who watched half of The Eagle and half of Gladiator, while someone playing God of War in the same room occasionally fired a gun into the air."
- "Although the more realistic graphics get, the stupider it looks when enemies glitch around the battlefield in order to be in the right position for your pre-animated finishing move, like Nightcrawler has acquired a death wish."
- "But Yahtzee, the environments are pretty!" "Oh shit I forgot, 10/10!"
- Calling it the Modern Warfare shooter decked out in sandals and fashionable miniskirts, detailing all the ways in which it is and then saying "all it needs is a central cast consisting exclusively of burly white d...oh."
- Transitioning that to a final summary of the system.
Yahtzee: Well, let's just say the XBone starts as it means to go on. With a brick on the accelerator and a hose on the exhaust pipe.
Dead Rising 3
- Summary of Capcom's writing process:
Step 1: Someone turns evil for a stupid reason.
Super Mario 3D World
- Yahtzee commenting how the box art looks like it forgot its background and instead left a Photoshop transparency layer.
Yahtzee: That was one for my Photoshop-using homies, peace.
- Yahtzee speculating that the fairies captured by Bowser might actually be criminals "wanted on multiple counts of robbery, wand assault, and being maliciously twee."
- "I've been burned before by hairy, middle-aged men indulging in what they called 'harmless fun'."
- Yahtzee makes a comment about how the powerups are based off of the first thing that developers glanced at in the room, as illustrated by a generic character staring from his desk and then noticing a cat. The following illustration then shows Desk Mario.
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 staked your bollocks out 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."
4th Best: Shaking hands with Kofi Annan
- The descriptors for tiers four and three:
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
- Yahtzee being outright hesitant to name-drop Ride To Hell before giving it the Lifetime Achievement Award for Total Abhorrence.
- 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"
- Speaking on console launches:
Yahtzee: People tell me most consoles aim for being loss leaders these days. Well I don't know about that but they certainly are ''Dr''oss Leaders! ...Leaders in the field of Dross!*Beat*Yahtzee: You know, I got paid money to write that!
- Yahtzee's epic use of assonance in the summary:
Yahtzee: 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."
Broken Age
- Yahtzee gives his feelings on crowdfunding and how much of a budget the game got due to it:
Yahtzee: 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.
- He very humorously summarizes his beliefs regarding what merits the game should be judged on, and why:
Yahtzee: 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!
Dark Souls
- His comparison of Dark Souls to entering a rake-filled shed.
Yahtzee: 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.
Yahtzee: 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.
Yahtzee: 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
- Even better, 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
Yahtzee: 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."
Dark Souls 2
- One of his favorite bosses from the first game was the Gaping Maw 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.
- 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 a Back to the Future ride that 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.
- 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:
Yahtzee: "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:
Yahtzee: 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.
- Capping off with:
- 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!
- "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.
Yahtzee: But since World of Warcraft 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):
Yahtzee: 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!
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
- "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."
- At one point, Yahtzee admits that being sarcastic about the game leaning on Toilet Humor is Hypocritical Humor of the highest order, since he himself basically kicked off the review with an analogy where he gets his head shoved up Queen Elizabeth's ass.
- Yahtzee's complaint about how easy it is to overpower your character is illustrated by the player character firing a huge energy beam composed entirely of tigers.
- "But on the whole, it was like lifting up a piece of funiture I hadn't moved in a while and finding a Malteaser I'd forgotten about; nice Malteaser while it lasted although there was something in the middle that might have been a dead wasp."
Child of Day-Light
- Yahtzee's thoughts on one of Daylight's twists:
Yahtzee: 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:
Yahtzee: 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.
Yahtzee: "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
- "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!"
- 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]
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, want 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."
- "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 updatedIt's straight-foward, and I can't hate itFor the goodies I rootAnd the baddies I shootAnd their corpses I leave desecrated
- "All I wanna know is whether or not MechaHitler is still canon."
- 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."
- "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?"
- Yahtzee starts the video coming up with 3 E words note 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 this 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 dont mind, I think Im 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.
Tomodachi Life
- Senor Koquonfaes makes his glorious return, becoming the most popular Mii in Yahtzee's created world. He even winds up marrying the secret agent from his novel Jam.
I guess only she can be trusted to keep the terrible secret of what he has instead of a cock!
- 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.
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."
- "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."
- Depicting Ness with Kamina shades when describing how the game lets you automatically defeat enemies if your level is high enough.
Why dont 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."
- "Didn't this game come out a while ago, Yahtzee?" "What the fuck are you doing in my house, viewer!?! ...Also; yes."
E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial
- 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 Moments in Gaming History".
- Describing the Atari 2600 as "a wood-paneled console with more joystick ports than on-screen pixel capacity and sounded like a vuvuzela attached to an elephant dying of flatulence."
- "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."
- "So under that kind of pressure those mewling little shits on Christmas morning should have been grateful that the result didnt melt the console into hot slag and set fire to the tree. But mewl those shits did."
- "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 is a games console! Whereas Microsoft threw the cover off and went Fooled you, its 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
- "I dread to think how bad the game adaptation of Mac & Me would have been (Googles hastily)"
- "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.
- 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.
- The Running Gag of mocking the infamous "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" ad.
- "In what circumstance could someone need a shotgun that fires six times with every use? (Cut to a slide reading "Topical Humour") Other than being an American police officer."
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!
- Then he goes on to question the need for such a title, when the under-title works perfectly on its own:
- 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 will 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.
Sims 4: *pushes Yahtzee* Player first!
- 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):
Yahtzee: 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
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:
Yahtzee: "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) [ ]"
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! Du-wa-diddy-diddy-dum-diddy-do.
- And there's also one at the end:
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 The Lord of the Rings franchise.
It's like trying to put on an all-black Nativity play for a Fundamentalist Christian and a militant Atheist, both holding megaphones.
- "Anyway, after all that, Middle-earth, *hurk!* Shadow of Mordor is quite good. Fucking anticlimactic, really."
- 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 points out 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
- "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.
- "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
- "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."
- Really all of the interactions between the game designer and man 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!"
Designer:"No, I mean what happens in it, what's the context, what are the major themes you want to work with?"
Boss: "Horror, horror and horror. Jesus Christ, just do it, why are you so difficult to work with?"
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?"
- And also
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".
- 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!Lara: EEEEEEEEWWWWWW!!!
- "...which is why it feels so lurchingly out of place whenever characters swear. Bayonettas 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 its 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.
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."
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."
- 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 satisfaction with riding an elephant to 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
- "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 hastily crossed-off before Yahtzee remembers the world of the Dragon Age games is 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."
- The ending exchange.
Yahtzee: WHAT makes you think I'm THIS stupid, Sonic Boom?Sonic Boom: You bought me!Yahtzee: Touche.
- "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! Its 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.)"
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 Im pretty sure I didnt get and wasnt 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."
- And his comments on his third best game of the year (Alien: Isolation):
"You know me; I dont think its a good year unless Ive 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 the 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 it; but I won't put more effort in than the developers did."
- "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.
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-cliche "time travel" 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 Cro Team'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 explody death ball and repurpose it as a dessert trolley!"
- 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,
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.
- 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.
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 Genre 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 CD-ROM game", can accomplish what the likes of The Evil Within with all its next-gen capabilities and first-class budget couldn't:
Yahtzee: It freaks my fucking balls off.
- Yahtzee eventually admits that he didn't like the game because it was too effective at scaring him.
Yahtzee: 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.
- 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?
- 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:
Yahtzee: Now I'm not tense anymore, 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"
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!"
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."
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 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."
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.
- Yahtzee's filling in of the blanks:
- 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?
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:
- Then there's Yahtzee impossibly short-lived adventures with the chat system. He heard someone say "Nigger" then immediately turned the chat off.
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."
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 him and a theoretical kangaroo pet thing, a la Lassie. 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 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
- 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 "The 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?"
- The ridiculously exaggerated caricature that shows up when Yahtzee is talking about the NPCs' effective facial and body animations.
And I'd like to personally shout-out to whoever had the thankless title of Eyebrow Wrangler.
- His complaint that the exaggerated British accents in the game "turn even the most dramatic scene into Monty Python Does Westeros".
- 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.
- 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 compour blue ink - get your fucking story straight!"
- "Nevertheless, it was fun. Obviously. Nintendo powderizes fun and snorts it off Kid Icarus's buttocks."
- 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, 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 still think should be giving anyone trouble in the field of game design. I thought we had that down with 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 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."
- 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!"
- His increasing shock regarding the Oculus Rift.
"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!
- 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
Extra Punctuation
- From this Extra Punctuation: "Brink, besides being what a racist caricature of an Oriental person would say is their favourite Doctor Who episode, is also a disappointing game."
- "I can't speak for everyone, at least not until the device is completed, but..."
- The implications of Mortal Kombat Vs Mr. Men.
- From "Why No Couples In Games":
"Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2 was implied to be banging Fortune, but only because Vamp was implied to be banging absolutely fucking everyone, including you as you read this. Try to hold still."
- The conclusion to thinking about why Animal Crossing: New Leaf appeals to players:
So, from a design perspective, these are the important lessons to take from Animal Crossing: New Leaf, besides of course "Don't play this fucking game, I'm serious, get away before it gets a hold on you, RUN MAN RUN FOR YOUR LIFE"
- Yahtzee's history with adventure games:
As anyone who views my Wikipedia page will know, adventure games and I have a history. I was practically raised by them, like Tarzan by the apes, and was only brought to civilization in my late teens to be taught how to stop stealing random useless objects and communicating only with the phrase "That doesn't work."
- The episode descriptions can be this at times.
"This week on Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee compares Sim City to Nazi Germany."
- Arguably, Yahtzee's at his best when he can come up with a hypothetical scenario that literalizes a sarcastic remark, as in the above "My right hand on a Sunday night" and "last male panda."
"As the disbelieving friend said to the inventor of the feces-powered helicopter, "THIS SHIT WON'T FLY!".
"As the operator of a coin-operated artillery cannon might sarcastically yell to a retreating army, you should never be afraid of change."
- Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon's aesthetic: "The vibrant neon colours on a dark background are kind of like undergoing reconstructive dentistry, in that it can make things hard to make out (slightly tortured simile)."
- From an advert for the Mogworld audiobooks: "Now you can listen to me talk for thirteen hours without the expense of getting me coked up!"
- The advert for the Jam audiobooks, originally used in the CoD: Ghosts review.
- Yahtzee's contribution to Escapist's campaign to get the site a Webby in 2014:
I think you know what you have to do now: Annex the Sudetenland! Oh, sorry, I got that wrong. I meant: Vote for us! Then annex the Sudetenland!
- If you lower the speed, it makes Yahtzee sound drunk.