http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/869-The-Conduit
Don’t forget that he has a column now too, so he can give more elaborated critiques without having to squish them between gay jokes. Extra Punctuation - The Conduit
Actually, I did not know that. Thanks for the heads up.
He also has released the special editions of the Trilby games for free instead of requiring a small fee.
Worth it if you never played them or want to play them again.
Eh. I can’t justify buying another game when there are so many good titles already out there.
Uh, they’re free.
Amusing tale: One of my buddies is on the production staff for The Conduit, and loves the ZP reviews. He kept saying, “I really would love it if Yatzee reviewed The Conduit, even if it was a bad review.”
I pointed him at the link last week, and he spent some time pounding his head on a table afterwords.
Even better. I can’t justify the time. Too many other games to play.
Umm, has Yahtzee ever given a good review to anything? Ever? (Aside from the last generation Prince of Persia games of course…)
I really do like Zero Punctuation but I’ve never managed to take any review of his seriously. He’s the epitome of reviewer as performance art. He generally makes legitimate observations about a game’s shortcomings, but I don’t think anyone really checks out his reviews for a logical, nuanced opinion. It’s all about what he’s going to say next. His good reviews generally amount to “It doesn’t suck quite as much as everything else out there.” That’s not exactly a rousing recommendation. 
Well, there was Psychonauts…but as he noted in a later review (Bioshock), “nobody likes me when I’m being nice to a game.”
He also thought Fallout 3 was okay.
He loves Portal and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time.
He loved Saints Row and he kinda liked Assassin’s Creed until the story got all wonky.
Yeah, Yahtzee has found his own personal niche in video game journalism and he occupies it quite magnificently. But I can’t shake this feeling that a lot of what he does and says is to garner attention. (That’s a “Duh” statement, I know…)
If I were to afford him the benefit of the doubt, (and I’m very willing to do so as he seems to be a very intelligent individual), I’d say he has some very particular issues with modern game design and he uses the various games he reviews to illustrate those issues. IE: The brevity of single player games these days, lack of color choice, and bad AI on both enemies and player allies. Not to mention the illogic in a lot of the plots in modern games, (ETA: Assassin’s Creed as Omniscient points out), and the temptation to fall into cliche on the part of developers in both story and gameplay.
I can’t say I disagree with much of this, but it’s apparent he exaggerates quite a bit to illustrate his point. I don’t think this is an invalid technique however.
If you filter out the opinion, which isn’t actually too hard, I find his facts and observations to be impeccably on-target. He rarely has anything good to say, but he doesn’t make stuff up about the game (well, I suppose he does, but what he does make up is very easy to spot). And when he does say something good about the game, however grudgingly, that probably means that aspect of the game is pretty good. You just have to compensate for the negativity to get information out.
Agreed, completely. I don’t want to come off as if I’m slamming Yahtzee at all. As I said I like ZP and I think he knows exactly what he’s doing. But I don’t think he concentrates his reviews, necessarily, on whatever game he’s talking about specifically. I think his issues are much more broad, and he uses those reviews to illustrate those points.
In some ways I think his reviews are more valuable than Gamespot’s, IGN’s, 1Up’s or whatever because regardless of how good the game is, Yahtzee’s basic tactic is, “this is what you did wrong.”
Yahtzee’s reviews are useful to me in that if he ever even grudgingly likes a game, it’s likely very good. His disliking a game is essentially meaningless, however, though you can read into what he says specifically to get a decent idea of how the game is. For example, his review for The World Ends With You is often spent griping about JRPGs and how shitty they are, but in between that, he does give a couple nods to the interestingly frantic battle system and the strange aesthetic, which are the game’s big selling points. For him to have even these grudging remarks about a JRPG (his most despised genre) means that TWEWY must be pretty damned good, and it is.
Here are some games that Yahtzee likes:
ENTHUSIASTICALLY
Portal
Psychonauts
Saint’s Row 2
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Silent Hill
**
WITH RESERVATIONS**
Half-Life 2
Fallout 3
Assassin’s Creed
Bioshock
Super Mario Galaxy
Grand Theft Auto 4
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Thief
He’s the only reviewer I trust. He gave a good review for Saints Row 2, saying it was a very fun game. I bought it on that word and yeah, it was a really fun game.
I remember on one review he said a game was lacking in A and B. My friend bought the game anyway and after he played it I asked him what he thought. He said he liked it, but it was lacking in A and B.
Oh, he also liked Call of Duty 4
He said nice things about City of Heroes once.
I find this, too. As a matter of fact, having dinner with my friend, I pointed out that 99% of what Yahtzee said was, in fact, things that my friend had said less than two weeks beforehand. (The only difference was no mention of the ‘not being able to look upwards’ problem).