Reviews WebAnimation / Zero Punctuation

Read in a fast voice

It's TVTropes law that if you want to write reviews, sooner or later you have to come to the topic of Zero Punctuation, and I'm going to try and review it in the style of the show itself, so expect some colourful imagery, lots of swear words, and less substance than a Conservative Party Manifesto.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw pioneered a revolutionary new method of reviewing video games by not reviewing them at all in lieu of talking about them in exactly the same way whether they were irredeemable, terrible, bad, average, or decent; with the enthusiasm of a man viewing a documentary on prostate cancer. If he truly likes a game, he'll only imply a few times that it's worse than at least three murders, and the nicest thing he could find to say about Red Dead Redemption was that it was a bug-riddled time sink, which I imagine is why he later named it the third best game of the year.

Yahtzee can be found on The Escapist, a website you can be banned from for not treating the creator of the thread 'Did Anita Sarkeesian fake the moon landing?' with enough respect, and while he is kind enough to be literally the only thing keeping them afloat, putting him next to Jim Sterling was a mistake on the same level as donating to a Keiji Inafune Kickstarter project. Jim has the comedic chops to make sure you realise his giant ego is a joke, whereas Yahtzee sounds as if he genuinely despises every fibre of your fucking being for the crime of watching his videos.

And sorry to grab the lowest-hanging fruit but what the fuck was all that about Super Smash Bros.? A button-masher? A game in which the most advanced attack involves pushing a button and moving a joystick at the same time? Do you find telephones to be 'button-mashers' because you can't be bothered to take the five fucking seconds necessary to learn how to use them? But let's move on, lest he make another 'Mailbag Showdown' where he hunts down the only people on the internet who make less-cohesive arguments than he does and pretends that they represent everyone who disagrees with him so he can go back to being the smartest man in the Aphasia Clinic.

In conclusion, you may be surprised to hear that I actually quite recommend Zero Punctuation. Most of my criticisms apply to the entire ten year series, and somewhere over the course of a whole fucking decade, he managed to learn how to shed most of these flaws, and while nowadays you can't step outside without a singing telegram advertising the Patreon of 'I Hate Your Favourite Games', we do need someone to play this role in the industry; going after the bad, mediocre, bland, and the could-be-better with the same kind of vitriolic disgust normally reserved for paedophiles or Piers Morgan.

Besides, it wouldn't be fitting for a Zero Punctuation review if I didn't complain non-stop until admitting just before the end that it's actually pretty good.