Awesome / Zero Punctuation

• One of the few times Yahtzee Croshaw spoke out against another creator, Tim Buckley, on the infamous strip "Loss", with one of his most savage attacks before or since:
  So, now your comic is squatting on the Internet like a sewage plant on the river Thames, but you're still not popular, because you're competing with every other hack with a PlayStation and a messiah complex, so how do you stand out against the crowd? Well, you're forgetting the most important ingredient: drama. I'm not talking about dramatic storylines, although that can certainly be part of it. Let's say, for sake of example, that you're sick of making Companion Cube jokes, and suddenly do a serious storyline about your female character having a miscarriage. Obviously, you'd need to have several blood clots in your brain to think this is a good idea; you're established as a wacky humour comic, so this is going to be an awkward tonal shift at best and hugely disrespectful of the subject matter at worst. Your most hardcore supporters will feebly attempt to go along with you on this, smiling nervously at each other as they would around a mentally unstable friend with a shillelagh, but mean-spirited, embittered cocks are gonna call you out on it. At this point, there are many ways you can respond. "I don't see you doing anything better," "I can do whatever I want with MY comic," "You're just jealous because I get more readers," and other equally flawed arguments. But above all else, never admit defeat, because the bigger a douche you are, the more traffic you get, as spectators line up to see you jump around the monkey cage, screaming and flinging your poo.
• His review of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, where he gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to 50 Cent, and most mainstream rappers in general - not because he's racist, mind you, but because the message most rappers give is basically "Damn, It Feels Good to Be a Gangster!", and that the ideal life is being one of the Nouveau Riche living off of Hookers and Blow.
  Maybe this is the sort of thing you need to wear baggy trousers to understand, but is this really a life to aspire to? Writing a million songs about mistreating women, so you can one day live out the wealth fantasies of a shallow, materialistic thirteen year old? Taking a lot of pictures of yourself holding large wads of money really close to the camera with an angry look on your face like the camera man just broke wind? Destined to one day fall victim to the Glock of Damocles or live long enough to be chewed up and spat out by the exploitative music industry?
  • 50 Cent apparently heeded his advice, and went to television production and was behind two acclaimed series, Power and For Life.
• His Wolfenstein (2009) review, done entirely in limerick form.
  • And later, in his review of Wolfenstein: The New Order, he genuinely appreciated how much the game was a Surprisingly Improved Sequel to the last game, especially with how he praises all the characters - compared to the 2009 Wolfenstein, where he openly said he didn't care what'll happen to the characters, he pretty much says ALL of the characters in The New Order were complex characters with all sorts of development, from how the Nazis were absolute monsters that the player is WELL motivated to take down, to even how B.J. Blazkowicz was a Tragic Hero constantly on a hairpin's edge from plummeting down a Despair Event Horizon... And then, even though he did the limerick for the last game because it was just too boring to review the standard way, he concludes this review with one last little ditty:
    With the Wolfenstein series updated,
    It's straightforward enough, I can't hate it,
    For the goodies I root
    And the baddies I shoot
    And their corpses I leave desecrated!
• The fact that the developers of [PROTOTYPE] and inFAMOUS both responded to his call to render the other game's lead character in lingerie, which Yahtzee took as proof that he was the secret ruler of the internet.
  • The best part was that they both included unicorns and rainbows in their images. That's right - the teams behind Dueling Products that came out so close together that they couldn't possibly be ripping each other off did it twice.
    • The contest was also referenced in the GamePro article for Prototype 2.
• Duke Nukem Forever. The actual review and the joke.
• His Extra Punctuation on Roger Ebert's claims of the validity of video games as artwork, in which he gives a respectful, rational and highly intelligent breakdown of the argument that proves to be one of the most sober and thoughtful takes of the issue found anywhere on the internet. Doubles as a Pet the Dog moment.
  Art is any created work that provokes strong emotions in you, personally. And trying to impose your feelings on someone else is as pointless and time-consuming as trying to impregnate a dishwasher.'
• His Ocarina of Time 3DS review had the usual generic Nintendo-bashing, but in a refreshing twist he never explicitly condemned the game but made the point that the game is thirteen years old and has a dozen sequels which have expanded upon it, and Nostalgia Filter won't turn those who didn't play it when it was new.
• Beating Gears of War fans to the punch by telling them that if he said the plot of Gears of War was actually good, they'd trumpet that from the rooftops, but if he said the plot was crap, they'd be howling at him "what did you expect in a Gears of War game?"
• Be honest- none of us expected Yahtzee to be honestly excited about Watch_Dogs? Or at least impressed with it, saying that it's a perfect example of how to announce a game- no fucking around with fancy HD trailers, just 10 minutes of straight up gameplay.
  • He then tore it (and its sequel) to shreds in his actual reviews, proving that hype (something he's railed against repeatedly) truly has no hold over Yahtzee Croshaw.
• His defense of Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw as "comparatively progressive", complete with a Take That! against the Tomb Raider reboot:
  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.
  • Speaking of Tomb Raider, Yahtzee's review has him calling out how the 'Character Development through a Dark and Troubled Past reboot' doesn't work if there's no character development outside of a Freak Out after the first kill, Dull Surprise from kill 2 to game conclusion, and the feeling that the character is a constantly Railroaded Cosmic Plaything that doesn't give players the feeling of choice in 'developing' the character.
    "Captain Walker decides to shoot the white phosphorous! Jason Brody decides to stay on the island! That's what makes their characters develop! Lara just alternates between breathy whimpers and bland resignation. 'So you can kill a man and take a machete like a champ', a concrete block can do that! But you can't kick one out the back of a speeding truck and call that a 'character arc'!"
• In DayZ, managing to fight an entire horde of zombies with nothing but a fire axe and a bolt action rifle (which him firing attracted the horde in the first place) and managing to come out of it alive (albeit barely) certainly counts.
• In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, using a heavy to blow a hole in a UFO and then using a sniper to double tap a high level threat alien in the head with no other turns left when they were out of range to help. Described by him as one of his high points of the game.
  "A masterstroke of unconventional strategizing of which I was so embarrassingly proud that I boasted furiously about it for the entire last thirty seconds of an internet video." Credits Roll
• In his dual review of Doom³ BFG Edition and Medal of Honor Warfighter (ha ha ha ha), Yahtzee calls out the people who protested at him giving Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 the joint worst-game award by saying he "doesn't like shooters," getting genuinely angry at them, which makes it even more awesome.
  Yahtzee: I suppose Warfighter, ahahaha, exasperates because after I declared Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare as the twin bollock lords of shit mountain there were dissenting voices dismissing my opinion on the basis that I "just don't like shooters". Oh you ignorant little bastards, stick your balls up your ass and clench yourself castrated. I was into shooters when you were sucking on Wiimotes, you cover-loving, health-regenerating, murderer-come-latelies. You don't even know what a shooter is! A shooter is fast-paced circle-strafing wits-about-you rocket-jumping last-scrap-of-health toodly-fuckpies organic excitement in a fancy hat! It is not riding a conveyor belt to the next chest-high wall and resting your head on it until you get lulled into a lovely little sleep by other people's gunfire!
• The bit at the end of the E3 2013 review, where he admits that the Xbox One DRM issue had been resolved, and that he has to fall back on "less popular" arguments, such as...
  Yahtzee: ...their blind insistence to empty spectacle above all else, to make Triple-A development all the more elitist and prohibitively expensive, the systematic erasure of console gaming history one generation at a time, the flagrantly anti-consumer culture of artificial exclusivity, that this has created a world in which games are expected to support consoles, in which artwork exists to serve a medium on which artwork is presented, as if the words of a great novel exist to serve paper, or a great film exists to serve a piece of wall on which it has been projected, and so on and so on and so on...
• You've got to admit that it took serious courage for Yahtzee to give The Last of Us a negative review instead of praising it like every other reviewer despite knowing the backlash he would receive afterwards.
  • Also worth noting that while he admits the game's intro sequence and story are done well, the latter being something people often praise, he also comments that game's plot is very predictable.
  • The fact that he was one of the only reviewers to call the game out. Even Gamespot's infamous review only went so far as to call the violence too extreme. Yahtzee actively called out all the morally heinous and downright horrifying shit Joel and Ellie do throughout the game. Although many people who enjoy the game also understand that, and recognize it as being one of the major themes of the plot.
  • Another one is for how he responded to the viewers "stimulating E-Mails" in comparison to SSBB: Instead of dedicating another video to shame them, he decides to empathize with those viewers, and review a really shitty game to help them both vent frustration.
    • Onto that note, Yahtzee's reviews for both Ride to Hell: Retribution and ET The Extraterrestrial has him being calm. Compare him to Angry Joe, who broke down in rage and The Angry Video Game Nerd who took a movie for him to finally review it respectively.
• A pretty bang-on response to a common rebuttal in "Broken Age":
  'That's the joke,' I hear you argue. 'Then why aren't I laughing,' I retort.
• His What Is The Matter With You People? article, besides calling out some rather disturbing people in the Call of Duty fanbase, he also brings up how the death scene from the nuclear bomb in the original Modern Warfare managed to be both shocking and horrifying due how the player character in it is struggle to survive before finally succumbing, and how the attempts to shock the player in the series have gotten less shocking by becoming MORE shocking:
  By Modern Warfare 2, though, the series had rather drastically devalued killing off the player character, and virtually every temporary protagonist who isn't palling around with Captain Price's unit gets knocked off by the end of their moment in the spotlight. Instead, the game finds a different way to play with our expectations of a player character by having us participate in a massacre of innocent civilians. It gives us the usual nose-leading mission directive but simultaneously, within the context of the world, condemns us for following it. It brings to mind that one science experiment where members of the public continued electrocuting a prisoner because an authority figure told them to. How much would it take to persuade an average person to commit an atrocity? When we come to Modern Warfare 3, the "shocking moment" has become just another item on the checklist, and is a hollow, incidental event. There's no toying with the perceptions of a player character and their role; you just get to see a small child get blown to bits in London. Presumably just one of many children who were killed in the slightly ridiculous simultaneous chemical attacks on every European city, but apparently the one worth focusing on was the American tourist. Perhaps they felt all the native London children would be less relatable because they'd all be picking pockets and covered in dirt from sweeping chimneys. But that's not why I'm complaining about it (for once). I'm complaining because it failed in its purpose. It wasn't shocking because I saw it coming a mile off. And it bothers me because it wasn't included for its importance to the plot or for any kind of gratification (at least I hope not), but because there had to be a shocking moment. It seems almost bureaucratic, like it was requested by the accounting rather than the story department. And there's something very disturbing about a large faceless game publisher coldly and emotionlessly tearing apart a simulated child purely because it was on the schedule for that day.
• The A Link Between Worlds review. A minute into the video, after building up to bash the game, Yahtzee, convinced that the only one who would actually keep watching after that point would be Nintendo themselves, proceeds to have a chat with Nintendo concerning their recent failure syndrome.
  Now, if you're looking for a balanced and thoughtful critique of the game, then what the fuck are you doing here? I'm basically just going to rail it with the same points as always until it cries. Strap in while I strap on, dear viewer. Now, what's this game all about then; you play as Link and you have to rescue the princess Zelda? Wow, across the meadows of fresh ideas you stride like a Colossus, don't you? Oh, but it's very innovatively invoking "Link to the Past" on the SNES; the very same way I very innovatively crawled up my mum's vagina and stuck my thumb in my mouth. I'm going to continue like this for five minutes of your life that you will never get back! ... Have they gone? Right; sorry about the subterfuge. By my calculations, the only person still watching will be Nintendo itself, ego surfing. And you and me need to have a little talk, man to monstrously large corporation.
• Yahtzee's summation of his Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 review, where he complains about how much of a wuss the game makes Dracula:
  "It is a nice idea to be able to play as Dracula; I look forward to the game that allows us to do so! Rather than the shirtless mopey pantywaist presented for us here."
  ...
  "Dracula does not tussle with the groundlings like a terrier at the bear-baiting! Dracula does not do mandatory stealth sections! Dracula does not fetch quest! Dracula is the guy on the far end of an army of minions, slouched on a throne, tossing expensive wine glasses aside 'cause he couldn't give two licks of a used tampon for whoever has to shampoo the carpet!"
• His review of BioShock 2; he goes into details on what a good sequel should do, mainly take advantage of plot ideas that could be expanded on, but he feels that the original Bioshock did such a good job wrapping up all its plot threads that it has no room for a sequel, and the idea of playing as a Big Daddy also ignored what they were supposed to represent in the original, along with creating a completely a Super Prototype that made him wonder why it wasn't seen in the original. Even allowing the story to make any sense given the state Rapture was in required a number of Retcons that he felt made no sense.
• In a shocking turn of events, instead of Accentuating the Negative in his review of Dark Souls, he praised it and went on for most of the video going on about how much he liked it. He even mentioned how good it is in later reviews.
  • The lasting effect of this cannot be overstated, because after one of his more infamous reviews was of Monster Hunter Tri, it was assumed he would never touch the series again. He ended up returning to the series with Monster Hunter: World and was significantly nicer to it, even admitting that he could see why people would like it. Dark Souls really did a number on this Brit.
• In his review of Half-Life, despite how he frequently complains about the state of the FPS genre, he's able to see through his Nostalgia Filter and admit that the game represents aspects of older FPS games that he never liked, mainly platforming and having to walk on narrow ledges, things that he feels don't work well when done from a first person perspective. None the less, he still finds the game's story is very well told and praises it as an example of how a story can be told without relying heavily on cutscenes.
• While he has fun taking jabs at Nintendo, during the review of Luigi's Mansion, in the midst of jab at how convoluted recent Nintendo controllers have been, he detours into a Take That! directed towards "dedicated social media interfaces that run on money", saying that Nintendo at least still makes "games machines."
• In The Sims 4 review he argues that EA's deep cuts into the content shows that they have missed at least part of the point of what makes the series so compelling.
  So presumably, you know what The Sims is by this point - it's the best possible argument against the existence of a benevolent interventionist god, in which you direct small groups of dollhouse residents until they cease to amuse, then burn their lives to the ground and laugh at their betrayed tears. But before you start assembling your psychotic single-white-female-esque campaign of torment, do bare in mind that there isn't any swimming in Sims 4. So you can no longer lure them into the pool and delete the ladder, which was so iconic to the series, they might as well have removed the green diamond thing.
  
  I wonder if, in their snip-happy way, EA truly realizes how devastating to the core principle removing swimming pools really is. What The Sims is is a consumerist middle class fantasy about walling yourself off from the real world and reducing all measurement of human development and personal success to one's possessions, your dragon's hoard of crass, suburban decadence. And in that game of Top Trumps, the swimming pool is a kingly crown. It's always the first thing on my progress list when I play The Sims, after the second toilet and a TV bigger than my left bum cheek.
• His Extra Punctuation column on the "PC Master Race", which was written as a response to fans urging him to make a comeback to an article on PC Gamer. Instead of biting the bait and turning this into a snark combat, Yahtzee calmly explains how ridiculous the notion of the term being equated to Nazism is, and how that the fact people using this term aren't aware of it being a reference would mean this crushes the original Nazi meaning it had:
  Because the Nazis were dicks, and they don't deserve to have power over our language anymore. If some millennial can honestly use the term 'PC Master Race' for years without even knowing that it's a Nazi reference, then I'd chalk that up as a win. That's how badly you lost, Mr. Hitler - your armies were destroyed, your nasty ideals have been condemned, and now we've taken all your favorite words away. Suck it, Dolfy.
• His absolutely, brutally epic rip into Konami's poor business practices at the beginning of his review of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
  I think it's safe to say that all bets were right the fuck off when it came to The Phantom Pain. Even more than they usually are with Hideo Kojima [...] Because of course Konami recently decided that they're going to take everything they've built over the years as a game developer, arrange it nicely in front of them, and then pick up a big hammer and smash and smash and smash and smash and smash! "Sorry we had to cancel Silent Hills, but we kind of lost our interest in it around the same time we lost our FUCKING MINDS!!! Here, have a pachinko machine instead! We like pachinko machines, because it's nice to have something around with some fucking balls! Also, fuck off, Hideo Kojima, you're too reliably bankable for our liking! We'd much rather stick our feet up our arse and bounce down the stairs making burbling noises with our lips! Blblblblblblbl!"
• Yahtzee calling out Nintendo for not including a gay relationship option in Tomodachi Life:
  Tomodachi Life encourages you to populate it with the Miis of real life friends and family, and to disallow same sex relationships it tacitly denies that they exist in reality, or at least assume that no gay person or friend of a gay person could possibly be playing it, because they're all off playing their special gay games for gay people that come in pink boxes adorned with chest hair.
• The veritable conga-line of political Take Thats from the Enemy Front & Valiant Hearts opening sequence (though some didn't like that Yahtzee was continuing to spout the tired stereotype of "everyone who likes military shooters is a right-wing nutjob”, but then others might explain that he wasn’t actually implying that at all, and is instead suggesting that right-wing nutjobs would enjoy it and not that all who enjoy it fit that description):
  * The days of straight-faced, ripped-from-the-headlines, right-wing wish-fulfillment giving Johnny Terrorist what-for in the dusty ruins of Suicide Bomber University are waning, maybe because the house of cards that is stability in the Middle East just refuses to stay up no matter how many times we set fire to it.
  * Or perhaps there's a growing sense that our personal safety is less at risk from jabbering extremists inspired by 72 virgins and more from frustrated white loners inspired by one virgin, namely himself.
  * I think conservatives in America have been Hoist by Their Own Petard. They just kept knocking down any chance of gun legislation and effectively forced America to accept that a massacre is something it's just gonna have to put up with now and again. And then they wonder why no one seems to care about taking revenge for 9/11 anymore!
• He quickly reviews Undertale to include it in his Top 5 Best Games of 2015 as #1 in the same video.^note Taking advantage of some Loophole Abuse that says he has to review a game in a ZP video to put it in these countdowns. He never said it had to be a proper video.
• Arguably, his review of Metroid: Other M is this to its detractors. Though many critics have gone on about how bad the games is (one lesser-known reviewer made a four-part review spanning about eighty minutes), Yatzee basically and crassly summed up all of their complaints in little over five minutes. This feat had a fan pledging in the comments section that, when the time comes that Yatzee will insult a game they like, they will forgive him. Someone on the internet forgiving a critic for criticizing something they like.
• His review of Metroid Prime: Federation Force, by far his angriest sounding review to date, where he absolutely thrashes the game for being nothing more then a weak cash-in on a popular franchise and takes Nintendo to task for its continued mistreatment of the franchise.
• Yahtzee goes off on political discussions, especially on the Internet, during his review of Hatred, and it is GLORIOUS.
  We live in an age where mass communication has counter-intuitively turned all attempts at verbal debate into a basketball game where the teams are on different courts, and stand around a basket racking up meaningless points and throwing shit over the dividing wall. The only way an individual can safely express their politics these days is to anonymously spend money. Hence why homophobic pizza joints can mysteriously accrue a million dollars in donations. Hatred exists merely as a maypole for those wishing to defy the cultural nannies who want to tell them that they can't have it until they learn to wipe their bottoms properly. So two groups of affluent middle class people annoy each other, Hatred makes lots of money, and the world at large gives less of a toss than a quadriplegic shot-putter. Good night!
• His review on Until Dawn, where he attacks it for completely missing the point of the slasher films it references.
  Until Dawn is an interactive story of the David Cage school pushed through the filter of slasher movie with the promise being that if we make all the right decisions, perhaps we could keep all the out-of-work twenty-something actors alive. I don't think you were paying attention, Until Dawn. I will have made the right decisions if every single one of these gurgleberks ends up upholstering the soft furnishings in Leatherface's man cave.
• In the "Hot Coffee" controversy video, Yahtzee pointing out the reason that Moral Guardians stopped attacking Rockstar and Take Two over their games? There was no money to be made from it from the class action settlement.
• In March 2018, Yahtzee posted a withering review of Half-Life fan-game "Hunt Down the Freeman", but didn't stop at criticizing the story or development quality; he saved his worst criticisms for Valve (the creators of Half-Life) for letting this infringement of their property be published and sold on Steam for actual money with no complaints, rubbing more salt in the wound of fans who have waited years for Half-Life 3 but most likely are not going to get it. He then goes on a rant about how Triple-A games seem intent on no longer providing meaningful experiences, and the ones that do get buried in the Steam store while Valve (once a pioneer in meaningful gameplay experiences) can't be bothered. By the end, Yahtzee sounds genuinely upset and hurt.
  "What happened to you?! WHAT HAPPENED TO US?!!"
  • All of his anger directed at the game was enough to give it the rank of #1 on both the list of the Top 5 Worst Games of 2018 and that of the Top 10 Worst Games of the 2010s.
• Yahtzee blasting people who have taken his PC Master Race joke far too seriously and literally in his review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
• In his positive review of Cuphead, Yahtzee took a shot at Disney for wimping out and sanitizing Epic Mickey instead of doing something daring.
• His E3 2018 rundown was everything you've come to expect from his annual anti-hype video, but his takedown of Ubisoft for their false claims about Assassin's Creed: Odyssey is amazing, in part because he is legitimately angry and not his usual exasperated self, and also because he rightly points out that Ubisoft are actually undermining the progress they made in the past for inclusivity for the sake of PR points:
  But what made me choke on my sherbet was when the bloke narrating the gameplay video said, "For the first time, you will be able to choose between a male and female hero!"
  YOU WHAT?! Am I on crazy pills?! Assassin's Creed Syndicate did that! What is the fucking point of doing progressive and innovative things if you're just going to pretend they didn't happen two games later and try to score innovation points a second time?! IT'S NOT "PROGRESSIVE" IF YOU'RE PROGRESSING TO THE PLACE WHERE WE ALREADY FUCKING ARE, GENIUS!^note On the one hand, people countered by pointing out that Syndicate had both a male and female deuteragonist in the twins Jacob and Evie Frye, both of who you play as at different points in the game, while what Odyssey was actually offering was a choice at the start between a permanent male (Alexios) or female (Kassandra) protagonist to play as for the entire game, but on the other hand the introduction of Evie Frye had been a blatantly calculated response to the backlash against Ubisoft's previous stupid statement in Assassin's Creed: Unity that there couldn't be any playable female characters because it would be too expensive, so regardless of the differences between Syndicate and Odyssey, attempting to score inclusiveness points again for a playable female character still felt really lazy.
  • He ended the video with a major takedown of the entire state of the industry, going on to issue a Dare to Be Badass (or at least "Dare to Not Be Mindless Sheep") challenge to his audience:
    <sigh> You know why I still do these rundowns every year; it's because gamers as consumers have conceded too much fucking ground, and what counts as acceptable standard business practice inches more and more toward Fort Bullshit, Tennessee, every year. Twenty years ago, the relationship was, "Play one-third of our game for free as much as you like, and then consider paying this unworthy mortal twenty insignificant dollars for the rest, Your Grace." And somehow, that's turned into, "Pay in full now, stinking plebs, 'cos we showed you a logo. You can't have it for six months, and then you have to pay another ten bucks for the special helmet with a bell-end on the front so everyone knows what a cockhead you are." The pushback against loot boxes was a good start, but how about this? Let's all stop preordering stuff! Just for a year, six months maybe, trial period. If you're tempted, ask yourself: "Can I envision a scenario in which my decision to purchase this game might ultimately hinge on whether or not I can play it while wearing a special preorder cock helmet?" At least consider it, so the next year, I'm not saying, "Hey guys, how about we all stop ticking the box that says, 'Sony have the exclusive ownership rights to our blood'?"
  • And just to finish off, he revealed that, despite the iconic fast pace of his videos, he still had a lot of insightful things to point out about E3 this year, which he would at least attempt to present in the longest and most epic stinger ever:
    Please don't fill the comments with the usual "why didn't he mention X, Y, and Z" shit because the point of this exercise has never been to list off every title and give a token snark to each one, but to encourage critical thinking as a counter to E3's deliberately mind-numbing hype. It's too easy to get swept along with the bright lights and the constant coverage and forget that a lot if not most of these games are created as obligatory products rather than as something with artistic integrity, often designed for broad appeal and the numbing of emotions rather than their stimulation. But at the same time
    it's a mistake to dismiss everything out of hand, as any genuine passion a developer had for their own contribution can shine through even the densest corporate machinery. Assume I said the same thing about every game: "Could be good or bad, but there's no way of knowing until it's been played through by someone who isn't being paid to shill for it." As a basic starting point, try considering what you aren't being shown as much as what you are. If you noticed, as I did, a couple of conspicuous edits in the Anthem and Rage 2 gameplay videos that didn't appear to signal a change of scene, ask yourself what was cut out that the publishers didn't want you to see, and why they didn't feel like the game could sell itself by its unembellished appearance alone. Also, consider the way the player in a gameplay video acts wholly unlike one in real life, usually moving slowly and rotating the camera languidly to drink in the expensive scenery, when a real player would probably want to move and look around a lot faster, and such a fundamental change of pacing would almost certainly impact any story elements that the gameplay video showcased^note he cut off here without being able to finish, due to only having two stingers
• In his review of Sea of Solitude, he calls out that game, along with GRIS, for their extremely on-the-nose symbolism, giving a very insightful remark on the role of symbolism within a story.
  "If you look at, say, Moby-Dick, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for a lot of things - man vs. nature, order vs. chaos, the struggle to clean semen out of the bathroom rug before your mum gets home - but on the surface level, it's an adventure story about a white whale and a dude with a narc-on, and if you prefer it that way, then that's all it need be. GRIS and Sea of Solitude have no surface level; it's all symbolism all the time."
• Yahtzee's review of Fallout 76 concluded on a surprisingly and heartwarmingly optimistic note concerning the future of the video game industry:
  "People ask me if I worry about the future of the interactive arts in this era of triple-A being a constant stream of soulless exploitative knock-offs, but I'm not worried! Because we've been here before. At the end of the 90s, games like Quake III and Unreal Tournament tried to convince us that we didn't really want artistic single-player PC games when we could just pay to run on hamster wheels all day, and look what the 2000s brought us. Deus Ex! Thief II! BioShock! Portal! It's always a phase. In the long run, the only eternal guarantor of success is a quality product well-made, ideally with tits on the front. The money to be made from knocking off what's popular and exploiting the stupid always dries up eventually, if only because the stupids die out from daring each other to headbutt the ceiling fan."
• In a rather mature move, Yahtzee fully admits that his review for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will not go over well with the series' fanbase, since "it's not [his] thing". Granted, he still doesn't hold back, but the preemptive warning was a smart move, considering the last time he reviewed a Smash game.
• This line from his review of Ghost Recon Breakpoint, regarding the game's infamously intrusive microtransactions:
  When you charge money for something you can produce infinitely at zero cost, like in-game currency, that's not a service, that is the fucking death of economics as a concept.
• From his review of The Last of Us Part II, Yahtzee sums up his grievances with the game by making some excellent points on what not to do when you want to keep your audience interested in your story and characters despite a dark setting.
  The following things do not make a character deep or compelling:
  1. Getting hurt a lot. (Looking at you, Tomb Raider reboot.)
  2. Being sad.
  3. Doing morally questionable things.
  And we might as well tack on 4. Being a member of a minority, just ‘cause I’ve already given up hope for this video’s comment section.
  What does matter is that characters at least be interesting to watch, and these aren’t.
  • A brief moment in the same review is Yahtzee sounding genuinely angry when speculating that the developers were likely overworked for no good reason:
    And corporate game dev being what it is, when I think of the developers almost certainly being exploited and overworked to make this miserable game so unnecessarily long, I wince, viewer. I wince at the pointless suffering. 'Cos you could strip four or five hours of gameplay out of Last of Us 2 and lose nothing.
  • Yahtzee also takes his time to explain why the bleak atmosphere and unlikeable protagonist worked for Spec Ops: The Line and why not for The Last of Us Part II.
    Walker in Spec Ops: The Line slowly becomes a monster as he's twisted by the constant backfiring of his good intentions and that's why it's compelling; Ellie has no character development, villain lady does a little bit for stupid reasons along the lines of suddenly realising that the enemy faction she's been genociding unquestioned for months are also human beings with families and would rather not be genocided thanks. But Ellie sets out to do something shitty and remains a shitty person.
  • He would later name it the worst game of 2020, boldly calling out the games media industry that had showered it with undeserved praise as if afraid of looking unrefined if they criticised it:
    I'm not trying to be contrarian; I genuinely cannot think of a game that gave me a more miserable experience than The Last of Us II. And here we fucking go. "Ooh, look at Mr. Controversial Opinions! You think The Game Awards' Game of the Year was actually the worst game ever, do you? And you think all the people who think it's good are wrong, do you? And you think The Game Awards have their noses shoved so far up AAA buttholes that they wouldn't notice a good game if it was speed bagging their testicles, do you? And you're going to put all these views into the mouth of a notional third party in a weak attempt at creating deniability, are you? You going to interrupt at some point?" I wasn't, no.
• Yahtzee attacking Disney's influence in his review of Marvel's Avengers.
  In summary, Marvel’s Avengers is exactly what it always seemed to be: a game designed not to engage or electrify but to take up space, inside your head, on your hard drive, in human culture in general — but the plot takes on a deeper meaning if you look at the Avengers as an analogy for the Disney Corporation. Assembling a team of franchise and media companies in order to fight against an oppressive government-backed regime bent on corporate regulation, taxation, and the dreaded monopolies commission. So in this metaphor Kamala Khan as the protagonist represents an approved citizen of the corporatocracy who buys all the merch and dutifully wets her Stan Lee autographed knickers over the right brands. And then each Avenger represents one of Disney's acquisitions. Thor represents Pixar, old school fantasy hero popular with the kids. The Hulk represents Fox, a veneer of respectability over an instrument of total societal destruction. And Iron Man represents Star Wars. Used to be good when better actors were involved, now deserves to choke to death on its own cum.
• And now, Yahtzee taking the rare opportunity of calling out Sony for refusing to send him a review code of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart because of his negative tone:
  So that's Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, generally inoffensive but hardly pushing the envelope, more prodding the post-it note, really. I apologise for the abject blandness of this take and also for the lateness of this review. It would have come out sooner if we'd gotten a review code before the release date but Sony wouldn't give us one when they found out what it was for. They said that, quote, "Given the tone of that coverage, we'd prefer you secure your own code." From where, Sony?! The fucking dumpster outside your office?! I don't normally give you these cheeky little glances behind the beef curtains, but, I mean, really? I guess we all knew publishers want to dictate the content of reviews, hence those review guides they keep sending us that read like a timid schoolchild asking to please not be kicked in these specific sensitive areas, but I didn't expect them to just come out and admit it! What's your problem with my "tone", Sony? You didn't know I'd make the "Snatchet" joke!
• If you thought Yahtzee was a bit too gentle, his review of Gotham Knights (2022) opens with him unleashing the most blistering takedown of the AAA industry he's ever used on anything in over 15 years of game reviewing:
  I think we’re overdue for some of my trademark coining of terminology. "Spectacle Fighter" recently got the official Steam endorsement so "Spunkgargleweewee" can’t be far behind, and we really need a better name for shit like Gotham Knights than “Live Service.” It sounds too much like a good thing. Being alive is good, and so is being serviced. Can’t let the publishers control the narrative on this sort of thing, they’d call a kick in the bollocks a “key entertainment sector reinvigoration scheme.” So what else should we call games where you repeatedly grind up infinite amounts of copy pasted random combats in order to acquire nineteen different currencies with which to construct new equipment colour coded for alleged rarity, that are basically identical to every other but have higher numbers to compensate for ever-increasing enemy damage sponginess? Hm, let me think. How about: cunts. Games made by cunts. Evil money-grubbing cunts who make overpriced emotion-deadening culturally bankrupt Skinner boxes deliberately designed to foster addictive behaviour. Who don’t even feed their dog until they’ve run long enough on a treadmill generator to offset the cost of a bag of Eukanuba. That kind of cunt. Demonetise me, Youtube, I don’t care. And neither does my editor. Probably. <Yahtzee's editor bursts into tears behind him>
• "The Live Service Model is Dying" episode of Extra Punctuation has Yahtzee being smug as ever, calling out big AAA game publishers for trying to generate infinite money and infinite growth. Yahtzee tears into this line of thinking, saying that "any passing six-year-old or vaguely sentient dog could have explained to these publishers that when you have a game whose entire business model hinges around rewiring people’s brains so they want to play eight hours a day, the market can’t sustain more than a few of those". Yahtzee also uses Hi-Fi RUSH as the counter to the idea that the "live service" is what people want, since Hi-Fi RUSH was shadow-dropped with no hype, but was reasonably priced and with unique mechanics, and it was an instant smash hit. Essentially, the whole video is Yahtzee showing smugness not just for being right, but also optimism that the current anti-consumer trend of "live-service games" is either on its way out or already gone. He concludes by telling publishers that they can't brute-force their audience into liking something, no matter how much money they throw at a trend.
  Yahtzee: The current state of triple-A, as well as the MMO wave and the 90’s multiplayer shooter-sploitation, were all part of the same pattern: the money men eternally searching for a guaranteed formula for success. And they will never find one. Or rather, never realise that the formula already exists. You know how you guarantee success? You produce an original product that’s well made and reasonably priced. It’s as simple as that. But they’ll never take that to heart, because coming up with good ideas requires creativity, and investing in them requires a willingness to take a risk. And the money machine is capable of neither.
• The "For Everyone That Says I Hate Video Games" Extra Punctuation is one big "fuck you" to the people that say Yahtzee hates video games just because of his reviewing style of being a Caustic Critic that likes to Accentuate the Negative. The opening bit is a Long List which provides an immediate counter to these claims by listing out all the games that Yahtzee does like. He also calls out people for changing the definition of what counts as a "real" critic to not include him if he gives a negative review of a game they liked, with Yahtzee noting that he never gets these criticisms from people who like a game. Yahtzee closes the video by asking an Armor-Piercing Question of "if [he] were a 'real' critic, by your mysterious definition, how would that change anything" about such an opinion? In the end, Yahtzee concludes that people who make these criticisms of him and his review style simply don't want to address the cognitive dissonance of wasting their time playing video games when they could be doing something more productive.
  Yahtzee: People always say about me, [imitating detractors] "Oh, that Yahtzee, he's that guy who hates games. Christ, why does he even play games if he’s just going to hate on them all the time? He hasn't liked a single game besides Portal and Silent Hill 2. And Dark Souls. And Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. And Psychonauts. But that's it. Just those and Thief 2, BioShock, Painkiller, inFAMOUS, [PROTOTYPE], Batman: Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed II, Assassin's Creed 4, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Minecraft, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Deus Ex, Driver: San Francisco, Spec Ops: The Line, Saints Row IV, XCOM, Paper Mario, Papers, Please, Zelda Wind Waker, Titanfall 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, EarthBound, Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation, Grim Fandango, Bloodborne, Subnautica, Cave Story, Stardew Valley, Doom (2016), Metroid Prime, Persona 4, Persona 5, Resident Evil 4, The Secret of Monkey Island, Resident Evil 7, Killer7, Far Cry 3, Return of the Obra Dinn, Spiritfarer, BPM: Bullets Per Minute, It Takes Two, The Artful Escape, Neon White, Metal: Hellsinger, Tunic, Hi-Fi RUSH, and all the other ones. Oh, and he's probably artificially speeding his voice up as well."

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