Headscratchers / Zero Punctuation

• Whose face is it that Yahtzee keeps using in his videos? It's not his face, is it?
  • One of Thomas Ruff's "Expressionless Faces"◊.
  • Here The full question and answers starts around 5:30.
• After recently re-watching his Tales of Monkey Island review, I noticed two things that don't make sense. One comes from Yahtzee, which I will voice normally, and the other is a mistake from Irish-Yahtzee, which I will voice in a stupid pirate accent.
  • He said that the second Monkey Island game deliberately set up its ending so as to eliminate any chance of sequels. That's not actually true. Now, I can understand him not having gone around the internet to find the truth of Gilbert's plans for the series, but that idea was proven to be not true by The Stinger in that very same game. Not to go into too much detail, suffice it to say that it's proven not to be All Just a Dream, forming a clear Sequel Hook. Actually, that misconception comes up a lot, which really bugs me.
    • Perhaps it was intended to end on a note like that? I'm not exactly authority on that or anything really, but remember that not every story has to have a happy ending, or even a "full" ending.
    • No, Ron Gilbert said several times he had plans for a third game.
  • Arr, ye dirt-caked potato enthusiast! Ye be sayin' that the controls in the game require ye ta move our Mighty Flooring Inspector by draggin' 'im about wit the mouse, and that it makes controllin' a 3D character too difficult! Now, while I agree that whichever lubber came up with the mouse controls for movement ought to be hung from their toes over the side of the hull, there be a perfectly suitable keyboard setup for controllin' movement that works far better than the blasted cursor, ye non-salty cur!
    • A loose quote from Yahtzee's Silent Hill 2 Extra Punctuation column answers that last question:
  "Yes, there are devices within The Conduit's options menus that let you adjust movement speed, how far up you can look and whether or not you continue turning when pointing off-screen. So I guess a couple of the issues I mentioned can be fixed. This does, however, raise the question of why you'd include options which are basically toggle switches for 'make controls work properly,' and more pertinently, why they'd be set to 'off' by default. Besides, I see no options for 'make game less ugly' or 'make story make sense' or 'lay off the fucking infinite enemy spawners,' so yah, boo sucks to you."
• In his Dead Space review, he makes a joke where the communication problem was easily fixed, but then reveals that he was just thinking of something else. This Shout-Out is too subtle. Does anyone know what he was referencing, if anything?
  • This sounds more like a general jab at this kind of plot, rather than a specific Shout-Out. Like the lists you find floating around the net "10 Things that Never Happen on Star Trek", which included stuff like "having to make a hard choice, which is made considerably easier by the Prime Directive" and such.
• Why in his Far Cry 2 review can a siren be heard in the background around 2:10?
  • Every now and again background noise can filter into his room - he's unlikely to do many re-recordings given the relative length of time he spends on each review, especially just to eliminate one or two sounds.
• Where the heck did those imp things originate from? They've been around since his Heavenly Sword review.
  • In his original video review for The Darkness, the imp was originally an altered version of the darkling minions, before carrying over into his Fable review, and then becoming a recurring character.
• In his Shadow of the Colossus review, he said that he's never seen a perfect game. Wasn't he the one who said that there was nothing wrong with Portal?
  • I believe his Portal 2 review has amended that: The main problem with Portal is its fanbase driving its memes into the ground.
• Could he really be arrested for owning an imported copy of Mortal Kombat 9? I thought it was just illegal to sell it in Australia.
  • Rule of Funny, most likely.
    • Coming from an Australian troper, Rule of Funny most definitely.
  • The Other Wiki says otherwise - "The Australian Customs and Border Protection Service lists the game as a prohibited item". OUCH.
  • Yup, you can be fined around the equivalent of ten thousand dollars for possessing it. Whether or not that gets enforced is something else though.
• Why does Yahtzee sound so different in some of his reviews than in others? For instance, listen to him in the Assassin's Creed II review and the Modern Warfare 2 review just a week earlier. In Assassin's Creed II his voice is much smoother and a higher pitch compared to the normal kind of gruff voice. And then there's episodes where his voice swings the other way and is much deeper than normal. I can understand deeper from colds or being tired. But higher and smoother? What gives?
  • He discusses this here. Be warned, though, he is considering banning users in future videos who spend too much time commenting on his voice. Of course, this could just be a joke.
• Does anyone know what's the deal with "dangling a penguin by a string on the end of a stick"? I noticed it in his Infamous 2 review, where it illustrated him disappointing his parents. Then I noticed it again when I rewatched the Super Mario Galaxy review, where he uses it to entertain himself while auto-running the minigame that earns money. Anyone know the story behind it?
  • It's a novelty version of a toy where you have a ping-pong ball attached to a bat with elastic and you just sort of... hit it. It's a version of that with a penguin instead.
• When people quote Zero Punctuation... They punctuate him.
  • It's just a name. It comes from how he talks so fast that there might as well be no punctuation. But there are.
    • Plus, it makes it easier to read after all a run-on sentence can be notoriously tough to make sense of even for native speakers of the language so putting in punctuation is just a matter of being considerate especially when jumping from topic to topic speaking of topic changes how about that weather?
• It's a silly question but what was the music in the background of Fallout: New Vegas when he numbered the days of his journey?
  • That would be 'In The Mood' by Glenn Miller.
• Why does he complain about games being samey- "like X but.." and then when asked to review something outside the genres he sticks to refuses on first principles?
  • There's a difference between a game being in a given genre, and a game being a copy of a previous game.
  • Agreed. At the risk of parroting Yahtzee, you should really play Lords of Shadow to understand what it means for a game to take a lot of elements from other games.
• So in his Darksiders 2 review he complains about the obnoxious button layout that has R2(or L2) as the "target" button and R1(or L1) as the "magic" button, basically stating it's impossible to do both at the same time. Did I miss anything? Is Yahtzee actually 3-fingered? I liked the caption joke where he mocks his own art style stating that "the average number of fingers in a hand" is "zero", but you actually have at least 2 fingers free to pull the trigger buttons, since the only one you actually use on the controller is your thumbs. What's so hard about it?
  • What's difficult about it is that R1 and R2 are both on the right side of the controller, one directly above the other. Meaning that, if you want to target something and then hit it quickly (which you will most of the time), you have to either constantly flick your index finger uncomfortably sideways in its socket or keep both your index finger and middle finger constantly extended so you can hit the target button with one and then quickly hit fire with the other (this has the added difficulty of having to support one side of the controller with only your ring and pinky finger, the two weakest ones and least used and so least capable of handling such sudden exertion). As Yahtzee is fond of saying "It' a great way to end up with a bad case of wanker's cramp."
    • Exactly. It's an uncomfortable and fairly awkward method for something you're going to be doing throughout the entire game. Him making it out like it was impossible to do was a very blatant example of hyperbole, not a literal statement.
    • Erm... you just described the exact way I hold my controller most of the time: with the pinky and ring finger of each hand, index and middle waiting on the R/L/1/2 triggers when needed. Now you're making me feel I'm super-powered or something.
    • Well, only if freakishly-large hands counts as a super-power. Not everyone has the hand-capacity for that style of holding a controller (likely the same people that derided the Xbox's original controller size).
    • I play like that since I had a PS1, and I was like 11. It can't be that hard, if a kid that used to have blisters from playing Mario 3 on the NES can do it!
  • In case you hadn't noticed, Yahtzee doesn't have any fingers, his hands are free-floating featureless circles.
• He keeps a vagrant chained up in his basement for co-op games. But... if he keeps the vagrant chained up there long term, isn't he both giving said vagrant a home and preventing said vagrant from traveling, making that person no longer actually a vagrant?
  • He's still a vagrant because he's being unlawfully held captive. If he were in a prison, he'd be a prisoner, if he'd rented an apartment, he wouldn't be a vagrant - but since he's being detained against his will by someone with no legal authority, he's still a vagrant... or a hostage.
• So in his AssCreed III review, he compares the game constantly shoving historical figures into your face to The Magic School Bus. This comparison....makes no sense at all. Magic School Bus focused pretty much solely on science IIRC, not history. A better example would probably have been something like Liberty's Kids.
  • Okay, here's an answer: How many of his viewers would get a Magic School Bus reference? Now, how many would get a Liberty's Kids reference? He deliberately chooses the reference that is incorrect in order to maintain the comedy-more people know what the Magic School Bus is and would chuckle at the reference. Or, to put it bluntly, it's Rule of Funny.
  • In The Magic School Bus, the crew constantly come across different natural things doing their jobs, whether it be animals, blood cells, or underwater volcanoes just like what he said happened with all of the famous people in Ass Creed III. The comparison makes perfect sense.
  • Yahtzee's British and The Magic School Bus was pretty much a British kid's Saturday morning diet.
    • But it still doesn't deal with History, so it's still confusing as heck.
    • And? It still had historical stuff in there and was a huge hit for British school children. Is it really that much of a shock that someone raised in England would have memories of a TV show that aired in England?
    • The "And?" is the part where there was no History in The Magic Schoolbus (AFAIK). I watched 3 seasons of it (back when Discovery Kids in Brazil had programming for kids older than 8) and I don't remember anything of history. There was Chemistry, Ecology, Anatomy, Zoology, Physics... but no History as far as I remember. Unless there's more than one Magic Schoolbus, that's quite the problem.
    • So you're just being incessantly pedantic then. Liberty Kids was not a huge hit in England, if at all. MSB was, which is why he used it as a point of reference.
    • Pedantic? The magic schoolbus doesn't have any history in it. That's not being pedantic, that's pointing out that the comparison makes no sense. He might as well compare it to SpongeBob SquarePants, since that was a popular show and thus is a fair comparison.
    • If I remember correctly, while it usually didn't focus solely on historical figures, it would sometimes bring up relevant figures to the subject it was talking about, like discussing planets and gravity and visiting Issac Newton.
    • Magic School Bus is just an example of educational "let's go and see/learn about this" shows. Not a perfect analogy but enough for most people. And they did go back in time to meet the dinosaurs in a game, though admittedly that's more natural history/zoology than human history.
• How can there be Extra Punctuation if there was Zero Punctuation to start with? It's not extra if it's the first time any punctuation has been added.
  • It is a pun, or play on words.
  • It's the punctuation removed from the video, thus being "extra".
• OK, the end of Murdered: Soul Suspect review had a gag about Yahtzee criticizing wearing a fedora and a vest while he used to wear a fedora and a vest (or at least that's how he appears in an old publicity photo). But... isn't that hat a trilby? Didn't he complain about people mistaking one for the other a few reviews earlier?
  • The point was more about wearing clothing that's largely considered dorky rather than the specific hat.
  • The trilby is a type of fedora, specifically one with a narrow brim. It's another case of Hypocritical Humor.
• Is Yahtzee’s nickname related to the dice game at all, or was it just a random selection?
  • It's derived from one of his earliest adventure game creations, the Arthur Yahtzee Trilogy. It's anyone's guess as to how or why the character was named, but "Yahtzee" became his online handle, the games being an embellishment on his own life; he preferred using "Yahtzee" as his go-to alias in real life when introduced to new people, after moving to Australia and wanting a fresh start.
• On many occasions he's bashed people who buy games used, on many other occasions he's bashed gaming companies for not keeping their old games available for purchase. Where does he expect gamers to get old games? Is there some arbitrary threshold that he hasn't told us (i.e. "don't buy used unless the game is at least two years old")?
  • There's a significant distinction to be drawn between "buying a game used because you're too cheap to pay full price, thereby depriving the game's creator of revenue from it in favour of the reseller getting it all", and "buying a game used because it's literally impossible to acquire a new copy".

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