YMMV / Zero Punctuation

• Aluminium Christmas Trees:
  • While he did later acknowledge that "warfighter" is an actual term used by the military which rather justifies its usage as a subtitle, he still notes that this didn't make the title of Medal of Honor: Warfighter any less ridiculous.
  • He thought that Flak Towers were completely fictional in his Medal of Honor: Airborne review, even if the one in the game was artistically embellished somewhat.
• Anvilicious:
  • Naturally, he has very strong opinions on the games industry as a whole. It's unlikely he'll go a video without a short rant about how broken the business model of AAA publishers is and how bankrupt creativity it is and how the industry is set to crash any day now. Of course, unlike the other examples, this is directly related to the medium he works in, so most would likely consider it justified.
  • Yahtzee refers to the nightmare world of INSIDE (2016) as Thatcher's Britain. In the same review Yahtzee refers to mindless drones controlled by the player as "Brexit Voters."
  • He has a long history of making pretty blatant jabs towards America and their politics. Ironically, he now lives in the country himself, and as one might expect, it's done little to lessen this behavior.
  • As of the Hogwarts Legacy video, he's taken an exceptionally blunt stance in favour of trans rights - or more concretely, against both J. K. Rowling's views on them and the writer herself.
• Archive Panic: Yahtzee has been releasing videos weekly since 2007. Even with them being only five minutes long, watching all of them would be a considerable time investment. The 'No Punctuation' compilation videos of his reviews—which edit together a single year's videos—are just over four hours long on average.
• Ass Pull: Did a last-minute review of Undertale so he could include it in his Top, Middle, and Bottom 5 of 2015. Not a negative example, though; he had explicitly praised it in an Extra Punctuation article and in his Let's Drown Out series, and said that the experience couldn't be explained in detail without dulling it for those who haven't played it yet.
• Awesome Music: Once Yahtzee stopped using different songs to open and close episodes, The Escapist's own Ian Dorsch provided a fist-pumping hard rock theme, complete with Big Rock Ending.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Boxer shorts with googly eyes in the LittleBigPlanet review. At the very end of the review it then came back as a Ringu-esque Screamer Trailer. Possibly connected to an earlier comment about "[sticking] googly eyes all over your mission hub".
  • The boxers come back in the hundredth Zero Punctuation for a split second.
  • The SimCity Societies review ends early and includes a Team Fortress 2 Heavy/Medic love tragedy told in pictures.
  • It's a bit of a meta one, but approximately 3 minutes and 22 seconds into his review of The Talos Principle there's a sudden crossfade transition between two shots that sticks out like a Great White shark in a pet shop aquarium, as it is literally the only such transition in the entire history of Zero Punctuation. It's generally believed to be a simple editing error.
• Broken Base: The theme song. Awesome or generic? For some, the issue is not that the song is bad, but that his older reviews began and ended with songs either fitting or ironic toward the game reviewed.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Very fond of racial/sexual jokes, stereotypes, and other forms of very politically incorrect humour.
  • In-Universe with Dead Space 2. Extremely early in the game, a friendly NPC is transformed into a shreiking, skinless, scythe-limbed zombie with tentacles growing out of its eye sockets right in your face, which Yahtzee found so over-the-top as to come back around to ridiculous.
  "AAAAAAA!!! Are you scared yet? AAAAAAA!!! This really hurts, actually. AAAAAAA!!!"
• Genius Bonus:
  • After the crossover with Graham Stark, the imps interview Pedigree Chum. As the Urban Dictionary notes, a "pedigree chum" is "someone whom you share a common sense of humour with, whether it's been months or even years can still be able to pick up where you left off and have that same banter."
  • A Stealth Insult in the Metroid: Other M review flies by so quickly because it's uncommonly subtle and he doesn't draw attention to it; he describes the gameworld as being "smaller and more linear than, say, Metroid Fusion". Fusion was criticised for having a very small and linear gameworld compared to other games in the series, and Yahtzee's comment was like criticising a car by saying its boot space is a little lacking compared to, say, a moped.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Has its own page.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Has its own page.
• Ho Yay:
  • His review of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon has some very steamy infatuation with Luigi.
  • He also calls Wander "a hot, young stud" and references Link's "sexy little elf boy gams".
• I Knew It!: In his video review of "El Paso, Elsewhere and ?", Yahtzee says that the embargo date was changed while he was trying to get ready for the second game, whose identity remained a mystery. Many fans commented that the mystery game was probably Hellboy Web of Wyrd, because of the clues the game had. A week after the review, the embargo was lifted, and Yahtzee confirmed in a livestream that the game was, indeed, Hellboy Web of Wyrd, which he later named Third Worst Game of 2023 in Fully Ramblomatic.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "The Glorious PC Gaming Master Race". It originally appeared in his review for the first Witcher game as part of a gag about its interface being unnecessarily clunky and thus presumably-impossible to port. It was meant as satire (Yahtzee believes PC and console gaming are equally shitty), but it quickly became an Appropriated Appellation. There's even a subreddit named after it (which, to be fair, is somewhat tongue-in-cheek). Around the time a concern piece from PC Gamer started making the rounds in 2015, Yahtzee wrote an Extra Punctuation article addressing concerns over its use, deciding that it's one of the most effective ways to say Take That! to the Third Reich - using a term they coined in such a spurious and (generally) joking manner completely deflates what the Nazis were hoping to achieve. Fast-forward to his review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance though, and he ended up taking back the appellation, giving them a less appealing sobriquet in "PC Gaming Dick-Slurp Allstars".
  • From his review of Dark, "TELL ME MORE ABOUT X", mocking the unnatural conversation flow resulting from poorly-written dialogue trees.
  • Press X to Not Die achieved memetic status so much so that it got a trope named after it (and another one too, by extension).
  • The "gaming industry never learns" jingle that pops up time and time again. Infinitely applicable, and really catchy, too!
• Misaimed Fandom:
  • A portion of his fans are notably outspoken, and tend to feel strongly about his opinions towards works, an attitude he regularly decries.
  • The appropriated use of the "PC master race" by PC users is another one. The phrase was meant as satire in the first place. Yahtzee himself would alternate on reviews between playing it straight when a console version fails to deliver what a PC version could, but then bashes on it when the issue comes to the player-base being obnoxious. However, as of his Kingdom Come review, Yahtzee finally hit his breaking point with the term when he believes that those same players didn't want the developers to fix the game's save system because "the plebs might be able to play the game". This caused Yahtzee to let out a massive cursing stream, wishing he named those types of players the "PC Gaming Dick-Slurp All-Stars" instead.
• Mis-blamed: Yahtzee caught a lot of flak in his Papers, Please/Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons review on the grounds that he was transphobic. Part of it was a clumsy joke that he apologized and later edited out (the "sucking off pre-op transsexuals" line), but the "no trannies" sign he drew up for the Papers Please half was actually Yahtzee referencing an actual part of the game's dystopic elements (border guards are ordered to detain trans people if their paperwork doesn't match their gender assigned at birth), not an endorsement of transphobia.
• Most Wonderful Sound: "Let's all laugh at an industry / that never learns anything, tee hee hee!" While the "Occasional Guide To Special Moments in Gaming History" subseries is highly infrequent, it's nonetheless greatly anticipated by fans in part thanks to this little ditty.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Yahtzee hits upon an idea in his Watch_Dogs review of a game built entirely around the CCTV-based character escort missions. This, however, is an idea that Operator's Side did in 2004.
  • He touts the Brutalities in Mortal Kombat X as a new mechanic, even though they've been around since Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, albeit in a slightly different form.
  • His Extra Punctuation column on making other types of gameplay turn-based suggests the idea for a turn-based racing game. This idea actually exists in board game form with Formula D, and in video game form (albeit without cars) in the form of Quadriga.
  • In his review of Diablo III he decried the use of procedurally-generated dungeons, comparing it to a book with randomly ordered chapters: "If a book randomly rearranged its chapters with every read, then every chapter would have its characters doing fuck all, because the plot wouldn't make sense otherwise. So the end result will always be a fucking boring book." Someone actually did write such a book in which the chapters are unbound and can be read in any order, and true enough, nothing much happens in any given chapter. It's open to debate whether the end result is boring, though.
  • In his review of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, he quips "obviously, it's going to be in the same New York sandbox; Spider-Man's not holidaying in Cardiff anytime soon" with an accompanying image of Spider-Man lying sprawled on the ground beside a row of small houses complaining "I ran out of building". There was a famously hilarious 1985 issue of Amazing Spider-Man (vol. 1 #267) called "The Commuter Cometh!" where Spider-Man chases a petty small-time criminal into the outer suburbs and finds himself hobbled by (among other problems) a lack of buildings to swing from (a joke which would later be reused in Spider-Man: Homecoming).
• Reviews Are the Gospel: Yahtzee despises both this sentiment among gamers and the fact that professional critics use scores. That being said, his more zealous fans follow this practice with his own reviews.
• Sacred Cow: Zig-Zagged. Yahtzee's choices for 'Greatest Games Ever' can often line up perfectly with the majority of other critics—or diverge drastically. He holds some games in the same high regard as most other critics, such as Resident Evil 4, Deus Ex, Undertale, and Metroid Prime; in other cases, he regards poorly or outright hates games most other critics adore, such as Resident Evil, Shenmue, Super Mario 64, and Final Fantasy VII.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: At the end of his The Lord of the Rings: Gollum review, Yahtzee states that, as bad as the game is, the sheer hatred directed at it is still a bit much; Daedalic Entertainment have only made point-and-click adventure games before this one, their attempts to make something bigger fell flat, and that they should be pitied instead of hated. While Yahtzee has something of a point in that there are some mitigating circumstances to the criticisms of the game, his assertion that they shouldn't be criticized at all fell flat to some viewers. This is because the game retailed at full triple-A price for its Obvious Beta state, the DLC monetization features that should have been in the game from the start were inexplicably paywalled for an extra 10 dollars (including emotes, which suggested to many viewers that it was a desperate cash-grab), and the developers couldn't even get the name of the game right in a statement apologizing for the game's poor quality. Nevertheless, he still listed it as his worst-reviewed game of 2023 on Fully Ramblomatic.
• Values Dissonance:
  • He suggests that this is why he dislikes games such as Call Of Duty. The games rely on the premise that the player possesses some degree of nationalism towards the United States, and for obvious reasons, he has no such feelings. That being said, his extremely negative portrayal of America isn't that flattering to those that are American or support the country either.
  • A gag (one of the signs on a border guard shack reading "no trannies") from the Papers, Please review got him in trouble. The USSR really was transphobic, a byproduct of trying to have a secular morality by copying Russian Orthodox dogma, and in-game it's one of the many rules you're supposed to enforce as part of Arztotska's oppressive regime.
  • In his review of The Sinking City, he muses that this is the reason why the usual tropes of the Cosmic Horror Story don't resonate with modern values anymore.
    "Cosmic horror was all about challenging humanity's self-importance. The horror of Cthulhu lay not in Cthulhu wanting to nibble off our knackers, but in the fact that Cthulhu doesn't really give a shit; he was around before humanity, will be around long after, and spares us no more thought than he would the dust mites in his bathroom carpet. But that horror doesn't work so well in the modern age, when we only need open a web browser to be reminded that humanity is pointless and deserve to die out and leave naught but cheap plastic Spider-Man Halloween costumes for the archaeologists of future races to puzzle over."

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