Zero Punctuation / Hilarious In Hindsight

As it turns out, Yahtzee is really good at making ironic predictions, either because he turns out to be able to foreshadow almost exactly what's going to happen, or the exact opposite...
See also this page for when his predictions come to a less humorous outcome.

In his review of Lollipop Chainsaw, he had no idea who James Gunn was, and had to look him up on IMDB, reading off that he was one of the writers of the Scooby-Doo movies. His star has risen a little since then.
In his 2007 review of The Orange Box, he says regarding Valve's Episodic Game model "by having shorter games at lower prices released more frequently, and while they have aspects one and two down, they continue to struggle with three." This is well before Half-Life 2: Episode Three would fall into vaporware territory, which helped lead to the meme "Valve can't count to three" due to none of their games having a "3" in the title.
Yahtzee's various digs at John Romero, and his scathing review of Daikatana in particular, became this when Yahtzee was tasked with interviewing the real Romero about Empire of Sin. The interview ends with Yahtzee and Romero having a hilariously awkward laugh at this.
Yahtzee: I've written some... Uh, slightly critical things about you.
Romero: Oh, I know. I've seen 'em.
In the review of The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass Yahtzee proposed a hypothetical situation wherein Valve would release a game sequel containing, among other things, a citrus bazooka that fired lemons. Four years later, Portal 2 from Valve had a memorable sequence where Cave Johnson ranted about life giving you lemons and how he was going to have his engineers create combustible lemons.
- On that note, in his Portal 2 game review, he claimed at least there was nothing meme worthy in it, unlike Portal's "The Cake Is a Lie" and the Companion Cube. Little did he know that Cave would be the game's Memetic Mutation.
This exchange from his review of Alone in the Dark (2008) referring to two hypothetical developers as a metaphor for good ideas with poor execution, upon realizing that absolutely everything within this exchange is a core game mechanic of LIT (2009):
Terry: Hey again. How about [we put in] a dangerous gooey black floor that becomes neutralized by bright lights?"
Gonad: Okay again. Now let's make the flashlight incredibly ineffectual against it, and make the floor a one hit kill.
Pretty much the entirety of the BioShock 2 review (which largely consisted of him lambasting it as an entirely-unnecessary sequel to a game that tied itself up nicely) is this once his Top 5 of 2013 episode came out and labeled BioShock Infinite as the best game of 2013 (he would also label Infinite as the eighth-best game of the 2010s).
- 2 being Vindicated by History to the point a The Escapist retrospective called it the best of the series. (One must remember at the time 2 having a multi-player mode was cause for a massive backlash, and considering the state of games these days, that makes it hilarious in hindsight too.)
In his review of God of War III, he thinks about how Nathan Drake would fare in a fight against Kratos. Fast-forward to 2012 and the release of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale allowed for such a scenario.
Similarly, he praised how Kratos stood out from most video game protagonists, complaining about how the medium is saturated by "generic, dark-haired, clear-skinned, hypocritically violent, self-righteous white boys, assigned the role of 'hero' by virtue of being the handsomest guy in the plot, usually voiced by Nolan North". Then in 2012 Spec Ops: The Line came out and turned that entire sentiment on its head, and boy, was Yahtzee surprised.
Opening his The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct review, Yahtzee put money on there eventually being a reboot of the God of War series with Kratos being an angsty teenager. Fast forward to God of War (PS4) which goes the exact opposite path, with Kratos now being a middle-aged widower trying to raise his son.
His comments in his 3DS video about a head-based mount for the system seems rather amusing after not only the explosion of the Oculus Rift and similar devices, but also how the New Nintendo 3DS attempted to alleviate the problem he was talking about through head-tracking.
In his Diablo III review, he remarks how one could recreate a dungeon-crawler RPG using a humorously slapdash method involving Microsoft Excel. Turns out that it's possible in actual game form, though..
His Brütal Legend review says that he might have enjoyed the Total War series more if you could tear up the battlefield yourself in some kind of vehicle as the battle went on. This was pretty much the central concept behind Divinity: Dragon Commander.
In his Alan Wake review, he criticizes the game's episodic chapter structure, commenting "I've always felt that games that out-and-out instruct you to stop playing them would be difficult to explain to the marketing department". Fast-forward two years and he's awarding ravishing praise (and eventually his game of the year award) to a game which has the latter concept as its central premise.
During his Top Ten of 2011 list, Yahtzee hands out praise to Sucker Punch for tying up Infamous while giving it a spot on his Top 5, but mentions that if a sequel is made he'll give the reward over to Minecraft. inFAMOUS: Second Son would then be announced, although in his review, he clarified that he would only change over the recipient of the reward if the game was a direct sequel.
In his Torchlight review, Yahtzee jokes that Torchlight likely won't ever be ported to consoles—which it actually was two years later on Xbox Live Arcade—until a console has a controller the size of a "tea tray." A few years later he would use that exact term to describe the Wii U's Game Pad, to say nothing of the rise in popularity of lapboards.
One of his Extra Punctuation columns discussed the idea of easily creating a difficulty curve by starting the player off with a lot of powers, and then having them lose them as the game progresses. Seems like the developers behind Project Maiden and the Lifeline DLC for State of Decay were both thinking along those exact lines, as did SINNER: Sacrifice for Redemption in 2018.
During his Minecraft review, he talks about how it's better than games like Garry's Mod because it forces the player to gather the materials rather than just giving you them outright. His review was released on January 26, 2011, when the game was in Beta 1.2_02. Fast-forward to September 15 of that year: Minecraft updates with Beta 1.8 and the addition of "Creative Mode"... which does exactly that.
As many can agree on, the "Next Gen Buyer's Guide" video became hilariously outdated by the time E3 2013 rolled around.
In his Silent Hill: Homecoming he suggested that it is probably unwise to continue a franchise if the original developers are no longer interested in making new entries, as the quality of the subsequent titles will probably suffer. He later named Spec Ops: The Line his game of the year for 2012, a game that was part of an existing franchise but not created by the original developers.
- The same suggestion also became Harsher in Hindsight after Silent Hills, a game which had accumulated a great deal of hype and anticipation after the P.T. teaser game, was unceremoniously cancelled by Konami.
  - And then even harsher when, after Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was supposed to be the absolute final game in the MGS series (with Hideo Kojima leaving Konami under acrimonious circumstances), Konami announced they were making a new Metal Gear game anyway (a multiplayer-focused zombie survival shooter which has been received about as well by the fanbase as a flatulent hobo at a royal wedding). In 2019 they would put the boot in even harder by announcing they were working on Metal Gear Solid VI anyway, obviously completely without Kojima's input.
  - Way back in his 2008 awards show, he gave Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots the "Indiana Jones in a Fridge Award for Franchise Murder", claiming that the Metal Gear Solid series had been thoroughly "euthanized" and that all of the loose ends had been tied up. The Phantom Pain would come out 7 years later, and the MGS series would infamously be effectively murdered by Konami's meddling and forcing the game's final mission to be cut, leaving several plot threads left dangling with only incomplete cutscenes to tie them together. Even then, the series has become a literal Franchise Zombie with Survive, leaving Yahtzee's original 2008 claim wildly off the mark, for good or for ill. Indiana Jones, on the other hand…
In his Bayonetta review, he mentions at the beginning how Sega have "never been afraid to represent people with hideous birth defects", like the character with an extraneous tail (and presumably by extension an extraneous arsehole)". He mentions how Nintendo wouldn't do something like that. Eh, nope.
A minor Running Gag of his involves a placeholder for a media premise being illustrated by "cheeseburger spiders". It turns out this gag predates Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 by a few years.
- And furthermore, while Bugsnax doesn't have cheeseburger spiders, it does have a cheeseburger-based insectoid creature in the form of Bunger, along with the Fryder, a french-fry spider.
In the credits for his Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands review, he states that "They should show video games in cinemas and everyone in the audience chooses on what button to press next."
His review of Deus Ex Human Revolution has him noting that ideally, the boss fights would allow you to hack turrets to fight them. Guess what? That's exactly what's recommended you do in the Director's Cut version of Barrett's fight.
He mentions that the vigors in BioShock Infinite probably fell out of a rift to the "convenience dimension". Burial at Sea reveals the technology actually was taken straight from Rapture.
One of his complaints about Drake's Deception was its outdated portrayal of London, showing an English pub with a red phone box in front of it◊. Eventually, someone added a picture to the wiki of a real-life example of just that◊.
- In the same review, when he sees that all of the bad guys are non-Americans, just like in the previous two games, he begs the developers that in the next game the player be allowed to kill an American - “Just one!” - for a change. Then came Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, where in the entire game, you get to kill...one single American.
A complaint for Beyond: Two Souls involved the lead character Jodie Holmes spending part of her time "staring at hunky boys". Some time later, Holmes' voice and mocap performer Elliot Page initially came out of the closet as a lesbian woman, and then several years later as a trans man.
- Also in the review he made another two oddly prescient jokes: first when he described much of the gameplay in David Cage games as a character "bumbling around a house looking for objects and surfaces to momentarily rest their gonads on" with a follow-up where Jodie Holmes wanders over to a coffee table as a button prompt dictates her to "FLOP 'EM OUT"; and secondly a bit where Jodie is supposed to be a rogue CIA agent but Yahtzee thinks she looks more like a 15 year old boy.
In his review of Shovel Knight, Yahtzee says that "Hoh yes, they don't call him 'Shovel Knight' just for the lol random humour value like his contemporaries, Biscuit Samurai and Fridge Viking." Sounds like he was predicting the ones from For Honor.
Yahtzee once called the Instant Kill Grab Attack in God of War the "Fuck-You Button". During his Let's Drown Out of the Doom II Mod, Brutal Doom, it's revealed that pressing F on the keyboard makes the Doom Marine flip off whatever is in front of him, shouting "Fuck yoself!" That's right: Brutal Doom has a literal Fuck-You Button!
In whats either this or Harsher in Hindsight, his Dead Space review has this gem that varies with the sequels and viewer:
Yahtzee: Isaac Clarke is basically the character who does everything we keep yelling at people in horror films to do. He has a suit of armor that he never takes off, he uses convenient high-powered cutting tools to carve his initials into slime monsters, and he never speaks, because he knows his dialogue would have to come from the same God-awful script that all the other sods are using.
- Doubled down on when the remake came out and Isaac both removed his helmet repeatedly and was fully voiced. Even better is that Yahtzee defended the decision to make him voiced in an entire video essay, if only because it was a perfectly reasonable decision to make for the modern age.
In his Super Mario 3D World review, he mentions how stupid of a idea it would be for Captain Toad to get his own game. E3 2014 rolls around, and...
One of the credit comments in his video on Batman: Arkham Origins has him complain about how the Mad Hatter has had more appearances in the Arkham series than the Scarecrow. Guess who shows up in the next game? And then Mad Hatter shows up in the game's DLC anyway so he still has more appearances than Scarecrow.
His Hyrule Warriors review has him briefly snark about the lack of representation from the cast of Wind Waker. Around mid-2015, the 3DS version of Hyrule Warriors remedies that omission with the King of Hyrule and Tetra.
When he names Call of Duty: Ghosts the worst game of 2013 on account of what he feels is blatant racism, he sarcastically wonders if the next game of the franchise is going to feature a deadly bio-weapon that only targets anyone who is not American. Sure enough, the Big Bad of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare creates such a weapon. However, he actually plans on using it against Americans.
In his Extra Punctuation feature on the dilemma surrounding Hello, [Insert Name Here], he comes up with the idea of a protagonist's customizable name being read out by some robot companion. While granted, it doesn't use a Synthetic Voice Actor like he suggested, this is still similar to what Codsworth in Fallout 4 is able to do.
His mission statement in Minecraft about building a skull fortress that cries lava seems a lot funnier in hindsight when you know that Magnus in Minecraft: Story Mode does exactly that in Episode 2.
His Bayonetta 2 review (from late 2014) has a brief part hypothetically wondering whether the character would appear in Super Smash Bros.. In December of 2015, this was announced to be the case. He would then acknowledge this in his review of Devil's Third. He also noted in his Super Smash Bros. Ultimate review that Bayo was neutered and resembled someone's old maid aunt.
An Extra Punctuation feature on sanity mechanics that talks about Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, has him complain about the idea of the player character being Driven to Suicide if his sanity gets too low. This was of course long before Yahtzee himself used a very similar, albeit more randomized variant on the same idea when he made The Consuming Shadow (he actually defended this decision and explained the reasoning behind it in an Extra Punctuation column).
Yahtzee makes a remark in his Age of Conan review about how he looks back on the time spent with MMORPGs and says he could've spent it, amongst other things, writing a best-selling novel. This became so much funnier when he said that he got the idea for his first print novel, "after I stopped playing World of Warcraft".
The review of The Force Unleashed II describes Starkiller as "the most hideously overpowered thing in the Star Wars universe until they glue three Death Stars together". In comes The Force Awakens with Starkiller Base, which is essentially a souped-up Death Star several times the size of the original, capable of destroying multiple planets at once.
- In the review of its predecessor, Yahtzee imagines himself rewriting the Prequel Trilogy to include scenes of Darth Vader breakdancing. Cue the infamous Galactic Dance-Off from Kinect Star Wars.
The Deus Ex: Human Revolution review has a joke about Adam "being required to carry a heavy vehicle license to walk down the street". Come Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Adam DOES require permits and licenses to walk around as an aug.
Yahtzee opens his review of Resident Evil 6 with a remark about the core series doing away with the idea of subheadings. And then Resident Evil 7 came along with a "Biohazard" subheading attached.
In his initial review of Demon's Souls he dismissed the game with the comment "A challenge is one thing, but trying to break down a fucking cement wall with your forehead isn't a challenge, it's grounds for getting fucking sectioned!" Years later, after Dark Souls had gotten him thoroughly onboard with the series' trademark brand of "If at first you don't succeed, die, die again" difficulty, "breaking down a wall by bashing your head against it" was still the same metaphor he used to describe the gameplay, only now he was a big fan of it. He has mentioned that fans have asked him to revisit Demon's Souls, but has decided not to (because he didn't want to have to plug his PlayStation 3 back in). This also became hilarious in hindsight when the game was completely remade for the PS5, leading to him playing it again and reviewing it in 2021. Looks like the entire reason FromSoftware decided to remake Demon's Souls was so that Yahtzee would finally give it a proper review — and he did.
In his review of Darksiders he sarcastically pointed out that it was pretty obvious which horseman you'd play as because, among other reasons, "Death would make things too easy". Come Darksiders II and no, this time you play as Death, and he's not nearly as overpowered as Yahtzee had expected (something he lampshaded when it came time to review that game).
While not as complex as he envisioned, Yahtzee's Extra Punctuation column about a Papers, Please successor set in a bureaucracy-laden portrayal of the afterlife seems pretty close to Peace, Death!, and to a different extent, Death and Taxes.
In his Catherine review, a one-off joke depicts Vincent rejecting Catherine and Katherine and running off with Qatherine. Then Catherine: Full Body gets announced, and with it, a third "Catherine", nicknamed Rin, is introduced... and her name really is Qatherine.
- In the same review, Yahtzee brings up the Persona series by the same creator, describing it as "about spending half the time battling monsters in a dream and the other half trapped in a high school anime and being unable to say which was the most nightmarish." Fast forward to 2017 and he became a big fan of Persona 5, as well as other entries in the series later on. Notably, while he continued to complain about the combat sections and the high school life sim sections, he acknowledges that they are both needed to make the game work as well as it does.
One of the central design principles that Yahtzee had for the game formerly known as Fun Space Game: The Game was a space sim that played towards a stealthy approach. There's an indie game by the name of Objects In Space that takes exactly that approach.
Yahtzee starts his Saints Row 2 review by wishing for, "A sandbox crime game where you play as a Batman villain". Merely less than half a month shy of a whole decade later, LEGO DC Super-Villains did exactly that.
Yahtzee starts his review of Ride to Hell: Retribution with "Fans of The Last of Us, I feel a wedge has been driven between you and I", illustrated with a golf wedge embedded in the ground. In The Last of Us Part II, Ellie watches Joel get killed with a golf club.
In his review of Fortnite, he refers to the game as one of the "less successful alternatives that hipsters can say are way better actually" in comparison to Player Unknowns Battlegrounds. While PUBG was the more popular game when he originally published his review in January 2018, it was only a few months before Fortnite eclipsed it in terms of popularity and became a cultural phenomenon, while PUBG (though still immensely popular and remains one of the most played games on Steam to this day) began a sharp decline largely attributed to Fortnite's meteoric rise.
In his review of Fallout 76, Yahtzee mocks the game for its attempt to hop aboard the open-world survival crafting bandwagon after the trend had long since gotten stale, but jokes, "Never say die, you could always patch in a Battle Royale mode!" Come E3 2019, Bethesda announces that Fallout 76 would indeed be hopping aboard that long-departed bandwagon as well.
An Extra Punctuation column in the wake of his Pokémon Black and White review has Yahtzee question how single-mindedly obsessed the franchise's universe is with Pokémon battles, drawing a parallel with football in the UK. Pokémon Sword and Shield, an entry in the franchise set in a version of the UK, frames its Pokémon tournament in a manner similar to a football league, as given away by the stadium and uniforms.
One Extra Punctuation column has Yahtzee ruminating on Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm and the future of Star Wars as a franchise. In it, he made the argument that the reason Star Wars had lasted so long in culture was the massive contrast in quality that had come from it (the Original Trilogy versus the Prequel Trilogy specifically), saying that if the Prequels had been mediocre instead of just plain bad, people would have stopped caring. He reasoned that the only way Star Wars could continue to last was if whatever came next was, by comparison, extraordinarily good, unbelievably atrocious, or at least perceived as either extreme to the point that the internet could continue arguing about it. Lo and behold, in the era of the Sequel Trilogy, the debate over the quality of the movies and related TV shows continues to rage.
At the start of September 2010, the joke review of Duke Nukem Forever ended up being voted the best he'd ever done by members of The Escapist - mere days afterward, Gearbox announced that DNF was actually finished, and a demo was playable at PAX. Now that's timing.
- As pointed out in this article on Cracked, that joke review seems eerily prophetic of a large number of plot elements used in Wolfenstein: The New Order, particularly when it comes to adding humanity and depth to a previously bland character, being spurred into action by a woman from his past begging him to help, being set after the villains have taken over, and starting in the ghettos before finishing on the moon.
- The remark in the same joke review about walking by alternately pressing the triggers to move each leg is also funny considering that Octodad did exactly that five years later.
In his review for Fable II, Yahtzee opens up by reminding the viewers that Fable 1 was the second review he ever made, so all he has to do is review The Darkness again, then crash and burn into total obscurity and his life will be perfectly symmetrical. Much later, he reviews The Darkness 2 (albeit without fading into obscurity afterwards).
In his 2012 Extra Punctuation article on Black Mesa, he ended^note with the line "I look forward to seeing how you redo the final Xen levels to be less crap, 'cos I'm thinking that's another eight-year job in itself."^note Just over 8 years after this article, the final Xen levels of Black Mesa finally entered beta testing before final release (and yes, the developers did put in an enormous amount of work to make them less crap).
In the review of Disco Elysium, Yahtzee said "I won't call it my game of the year." He ended up doing exactly that barely a month later in The Best, Worst & Blandest of 2019. He even lampshaded this himself:
"Yeah, I said I wasn't going to make this my game of the year, but that was before the rest of the year's games plopped out like marbles from the nose of a remedial student."
Adding to the irony, he had panned Planescape: Torment for being "the best book you ever played", saying he didn't play books, he played videogames. He leveled the same complaint at Disco, but apparently it wasn't enough to dissuade the award.^note
During his review for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, he wonders why the franchise is even called The Witcher and not Monster Hunter. Geralt would later appear in DLC for Monster Hunter: World.
At the end of his review of XCOM 2, Yahtzee questioned the plausibility of the peaceful alien occupation, particularly the improbability of the citizens being willing to accept a snake person ("PC Hissy") as the local constable. Then XCOM: Chimera Squad was announced, where one playable member of the titular counterterrorism squad is, indeed, a Viper.
On a personal level, Yahtzee for the longest time was vocal about his intentions to never marry nor have kids, even making his Credits Gag in his review of Amy "Fortunately, he will never breed". As of 2020, both of those things have now happened.
ZP "Dreams" End Credits: Unfortunately he has bred.
In the Amnesia: The Dark Descent review, Yathzee screams, "OH, PISSING BLIMEY, THERE'S JAM COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!" One suspects this is where the inspiration for Jam came from.
In his Dead Island review Yahtzee suggested people hoping for a zombie apocalypse would be really bummed out if the entire world was instead covered by carnivorous jam. Given this review came out one year before his novel, he was likely teasing that plot element.
The NieR review had Yahtzee comment on Kainé's stripperific outfit and claim that if someone didn't call them out on this, their next game "would have its heroine going into battle in nothing but high heels and three bits of masking tape." Come the next game in question, NieR: Automata, this would be basically true of tritagonist A2, whose entire outfit aside from a cloth strip around the waist was actually a blackened underlayer where her artificial skin had been damaged, and the 'high heels' were directly built into her feet.
- He was also gratified to see that the main character in a Square Enix RPG wasn't a skinny emo child for once, something that was not only true in the Japanese version of NieR, Replicant (Yahtzee had played NieR Gestalt, which changed the protagonist from a brother to a father; the original Japanese version was later localized for the remake in 2021), but also held true for Automata's deuteragonist 9S.
Near the end of his review of Gears of War 3, Yahtzee commented "Of all the big names getting their trilogies tied this year, Gears of War I consider one of the least likely to get a last-minute death row reprieve. It's a relic of a previous age, too dull for a reboot.", showing the game tied to a stake beside Resistance 3 and Modern Warfare 3. In the years since, Gears of War has continued to plod along, with Yahtzee consequently having to review 4 and 5 (plus the remake of the original), and the series even getting the Gears Tactics turn-based strategy spin-off (which Yahtzee has so far not reviewed). Meanwhile, Resistance (the only one of the three games lined up at the end of the GoW3 review that he actually liked) is long since dead and gone, while the Call of Duty franchise has become an institution of gaming even after the Modern Warfare trilogy ended, and even that has since received a reboot in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019).
Yahtzee actually acknowledges the trope when he unwittingly predicted Paper Mario: The Origami King in his Paper Mario: Color Splash review when he said: "Last time it was adhesive, now it's paint. Next time it will probably be rescuing the 6 magic sheets of blank printer paper from the clutches of king Hole Punch."
Yahtzee: Well, guess what? In Origami King, there's a boss fight against a hole punch. No, really, there actually is. And if the games industry is taking ideas from my sarcastic, exaggerated examples of things that would be stupid, that would fucking explain a few things.
In the Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs review, Yahtzee comments on the originality of the game's title, describing it as something an executive would react to with "Couldn't we just call it Amnesia: Revelations or something?". 7 years later, Frictional Games would release the next installment in the Amnesia series: Amnesia: Rebirth. Naturally, Yahtzee was quick to comment on it:
Yahtzee: Between this and the Paper Mario hole punch boss, I really need to figure out a way to exploit my power to make exaggerated terrible ideas reality. Hey, wouldn't it be crazy if the post office stopped delivering letters and instead delivered free money to my house?!
In the Mad Max (2015) review, there’s a bit where the personification of the movie industry (represented by Best Picture winners The Godfather and Schindler's List) dismisses the Mad Max franchise based on its premise of “S&M perverts driving around a desert and blowing each other up”. Flash forward to the 2016 Academy Awards, where Mad Max: Fury Road, a movie that was already far more acclaimed than anyone was anticipating, was nominated for 10 awards - including Best Picture - and won six, the most of all the movies nominated.
Yahtzee makes a joke in the Doom (2016) review questioning why the UAC decided specifically to go with Hell as a new energy source, asking why humanity doesn't get a Heavenly power source instead. As it turns out, putting solar panels by God's radiant beard wouldn't have been quite as on the cards as Yahtzee thought, as the sequel introduces an angelic faction known as the Makyrs... who also get their power from Hell.
In his The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild review, he praised how the game handled exploration by forcing the player to climb the towers, notice landmarks for themselves and mark them on the map manually, "'cause you know at that point in a Ubisoft game, the map would just spooge a bunch of icons like a highly aroused clown with confetti up his dick." Three years later, Ubisoft released Immortals Fenyx Rising, which was openly inspired by Breath of the Wild, but if anything seemed to take the wrong lessons from it when it came to exploration:
Yahtzee: Instead, you have to systematically move your cursor over a load of seemingly empty landscape, waiting for the little sensor to go "widdly wee", at which point another icon gets added to the map like a cornflake in the beard of an ill-fated first date. And there are so many fucking icons to find from any given location that this process is incredibly tedious: standing there, slowly rotating like a car park security camera, checking off every random chest and collectible and adding it to your little notebook, until you're thinking, "This is a fucking day job! I am cataloguing! I am validating data! I am a trainspotter in the middle of a loading depot!"
At the start of his review of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, Yahtzee snarked that "after Mass Effect: Andromeda, more Mass Effect is about as hotly demanded as The Jeffrey Epstein Bumper Fun Activity Book for Kids". And then in 2020, EA announced Mass Effect 4...
In his double-bill review of Nom Nom Galaxy and Freedom Planet, this was Yahtzee's closing line: "I know people will tell me I'm just a misery-guts who expects too much of everything, but fuck you! You know where we end up if we all stop expecting much? Two words: President Trump!" This was in August of 2015. Trump had only declared his candidacy two months earlier and nobody was taking him seriously. Yahtzee ended up lampshading the unfortunate nature of the joke in his double-bill review of Gris and Ashen.
Yahtzee: Well it's early days yet, we might all be enslaved in the Epic mega-corporation bitcoin mines by next year; let's not tempt fate like I did with the "President Trump" joke.
In Yahtzee's review of Control, when he's remarking on the strange number of similarities between the Hiss and the Dark Presence from Alan Wake, he muses that the two entities are "probably on nodding terms because they do all the same shit." In the AWE DLC for Control, it's revealed that the Hiss and Dark Presence actually hate each other.
At the end of the review for Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Yahtzee claims that he can "use a syringe to remove the filling from a Cadbury's Creme Egg and replace it with Branston Pickle, but it wouldn't be a good idea" before putting the video on standby mode; after the credits roll, the scene returns to Yahtzee, now a complete mess, saying that the surgery wasn't a good idea. Seven years later, there was a YouTube video series called The Food Surgeon (2016-2018), in which the titular protagonist makes autopsies and surgeries on food, including candy bars.
While nominating his worst game of 2012, Amy, Yahtzee speculates that the developers released the game right at the start of the year in the hopes that it would be either forgotten or eclipsed by an even worse game. Come his retrospective of the 2010s, both sentiments came to fruition; his introduction includes the comment "Who the fuck remembers Amy, besides whatever poor twat-hinge invested in it and now presumably makes his Christmas dinner by peeling old lettuce leaves off the sides of compost bins?", and his ranking of the worst games of the decade has Amy ranked as the 2nd worst of the 2010s behind Hunt Down the Freeman.
Yahtzee describes the inconsequential character-naming feature from the start of Deus Ex by jokingly alluding to the game throwing it out and insisting the protagonist's name is JC Denton. While this was indeed his usual joking exaggeration (In actuality, the player decides on the protagonist's real name and JC Denton is a code name), this idea of the game suddenly throwing out character creation is exactly what the opening of Deltarune does.
Yahtzee builds his retro review of Silent Hill 4: The Room off of the idea that Konami supposedly considers it an Old Shame and would thus never rerelease it. Two years later, Konami did quite the opposite, releasing a patched PC version on GoG.
In his review for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Yahtzee rails against a misfired example of a "Not So Different" Remark in an exchange between Spider-Man and Carnage, saying that Spider-Man could have responded to the accusation of how Carnage is just like him with something along the lines of, "No I'm not". Such an exchange happens from Venom's perspective in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, in response to the same villain, no less.
One that grew ever more hilarious with time; in his review of Bloodborne he opened by commenting on how FromSoftware's business strategy seemed to based around doing one thing that nobody else did to force all the people who were into that thing (in this case, punishingly-hard, exploration-focused action RPG games with subtle storytelling) to come to them exclusively. Since then, Soulslike RPG has become an entire genre unto itself with countless other developers getting into it.
A remark Yahtzee made about Ghost of Tsushima had him convinced that nothing much would be meaningfully changed if the game was called Assassin's Creed: Samurai. Two years after the game's release, Assassin's Creed: Red was announced, which evoked comparisons to Ghost of Tsushima swiftly, including from Yahtzee himself in an Extra Punctuation feature.
The entire video on Google Stadia (and Yahtzee's speculation therein) ended up as either Hilarious or Harsher in Hindsight depending on perspective, when Google announced that the service would be shutting down just over two years later.
- What definitively is Hilarious in Hindsight is the remark about the developer of Gylt supposedly not wanting to air out their own dirty laundry in too public a space, which explained why the game was a Stadia exclusive. Shortly after the shutdown, Tequila Works announced that Gylt would be released for multiple formats in 2023.
The first video-based Extra Punctuation column on Chris Pratt being cast as Mario in The Super Mario Bros. Movie had Yahtzee speculate that his performance would be introduced with a gag involving switching from Mario's exaggerated Italian accent to an ordinary performance. Indeed, the movie did end up doing this, albeit in the context of an in-universe TV commercial rather than the Wreck-It Ralph-esque arrangement that Yahtzee had in mind.
One Extra Punctuation episode has Yahtzee muse on the idea of keeping detective games fresh by incorporating procedural generation into the proceedings. Only weeks later would he end up reviewing and giving high praise to Shadows of Doubt, a detective game which builds itself around exactly the kind of procedural generation he was thinking of.
Yahtzee concludes his review of Little Hope with frustration at how The Dark Pictures Anthology has repeated the twist of the supernatural elements being a hallucination, and speculates a silly way that the hypothetical third game would explain such a twist. Come the third game, and the supernatural elements aren't hallucinations at all, breaking this seemingly emerging tradition.

Hilarious In Hindsight / Zero Punctuation

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Hilarious In Hindsight / Zero Punctuation

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