No, Yahtzee does pretty much always speak the truth and call things as they are, but does draw out and exaggerate the negatives and spend less time on the positives. He does that for everything. Like the Mario Galaxy review? He makes it clear that he's only drawing out the few negatives there actually are with the game.
Then of course he did diss Brawl, so he's obviously not a reviewer.
See here's the thing. No-one seems to even consider the idea that he might not be being entirely serious. The content of his reviews might not even reflect his opinion of the game as a whole. He might even...like some of the games that he seems to trash so vehemently. Like you say, he just picks up on a few minor negative points, or he dares to call the games out on conventions that may have become a bit tired or contrived. Hell, i'd consider him more of a critic than a reviewer - I mean in the sense of an academic critic. Buried under all the comedy are some pretty astute observations about game design.
And since proclaiming that you love a game he 'trashed' seems to be the accepted way of maintaining credibility when talking about ZP , I shall say that I loved his MGS4 review and I just finished my 4th playthrough, for god's sake (Big Boss emblem, aww yeah).
That wasn't directed at you!
It was for the others saying he's not a real reviewer and he just spins lies about their favourite games.
I'm a huge Halo nerd, and I thought his review of Halo 3 was spot on. Some people just need to learn that it's okay to disagree.
This is why some people think he spins lies, and you think he points out truths.
But if he's stating a fact, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree, if it's true it's true. Now you can look past it and not worry, or it can be a really big pain. That's the thing.
His Halo review, I can't remember everything he said, but generally summed it up as average and bland, with a confusing story. I can absolutely see how he thinks that, and that a lot of other people agree with that. Myself, well I've played and loved the first two and loved the hell out of Halo 3. Doesn't mean I can't see where he's coming from.
Far too many people see that he's saying mean things about their favourite game and call it 'lies', when it's just that they don't want to admit that their precious favourite has some problems.
OR, it's an opinion and they disagree.
I'm still waiting for one of those "facts".
"Halo 3 is average and bland with a confusing story."
"(Returning to the main temple in Phantom Hourglass) can fuck right off."
"The entire second half of (Devil May Cry 4) is basically going through the same stages, only backwards."
"(Mass Effect) has too many motherfucking words."
"Haze sucks."
"Painkiller is fucking awesome."
PeregrineFalcon on
Looking for a DX:HR OnLive code for my kid brother.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
I've yet to see any evidence of these alleged "lies" from Yahtzee. He has given negative reviews to games I love, but I still watch them and go "yep, that's true, so is that, so is that". I just don't care about those problems. They don't ruin the experience for me. That doesn't mean that I can't chuckle when Yahtzee makes a joke about them. The most damning thing you can really say about yahtzee is "he makes the game sound worse than it is!"
I don't really spend too much time looking at reviews, I see them more as entertainment than a valuable font of purchasing information. That being said, I'm kind of liking what Giant Bomb is doing. It's Jeff Gerstmann's new gig after the whole Kane and Lynch shitstorm. There isn't a whole bunch of content yet, but it seems like they're putting out some pretty solid reviews and previews. They also have a podcast that isn't exactly riveting, but comes in handy when you're at work all day and have nothing better to do.
I love Zero Punctuation, even when he does a game I like. I think people need to figure out that when someone says something bad about something you like (although pretty much everything he points out as flaws are spot on) you shouldn't take it as a personal attack.
For me, it's not really a matter of where I get my reviews, but more how I look at them. For example, if all major reviewing sites give a game I was interested in 3s and 4s, I'll assume it's garbage, but if it's anything above, I'll check out the scores (for example, on IGN) very quickly and will focus more on the text. If they give a SHMUP a 5 out of 10 saying: The controls are tight, but there's not much replay value and the story is retarded, well, that's not a 5/10 for me. I don't need a story for SHMUP and replay value? The point is to beat it and get the highest score. They said they loved the controls, so it plays well. I'm satisfied with this game.
Yeah, I look to the content of the review to see what the positives and negatives are. If they're highlighting issues that wouldn't bother me, then mark the game down as a result, then I'll still give it a look because it's not something that will affect me like it does them. Then you get something like Alone In The Dark which sounds like it has a good story and atmosphere, but is horribly let down by being a broken, buggy mess with poor controls. Those negatives there would be more than enough to put me off, because I know I'd just get frustrated with it before getting anywhere.
I've yet to see any evidence of these alleged "lies" from Yahtzee. He has given negative reviews to games I love, but I still watch them and go "yep, that's true, so is that, so is that". I just don't care about those problems. They don't ruin the experience for me. That doesn't mean that I can't chuckle when Yahtzee makes a joke about them. The most damning thing you can really say about yahtzee is "he makes the game sound worse than it is!"
boo hoo
Exactly, he's really more of a critic than a reviewer. There is a difference.
Of course, like most critics, you're free to just ignore the wordy sonofabitch. Brawl fans were pathologically (and hilariously) unable to do this.
Up until recently I've reviewed games on and off for about five years. That doesn't make me an expert or anything but I have seen the other side of all this to some degree.
I think the entire game review industry is a joke, a farce. I think artistic critique in general is a necessary but easily-corrupted element of modern society, and game review is even more so because of how entrenched it is into the advertisement economy. That Newsweek (?) article of about a year ago (or less, my time-sense is bad) was illuminating and probably completely accurate on every level.
So I don't read reviews anymore.
I like Yahtzee because he's an asshole. I quite often disagree with his interpretation but he's just playing a role, one I find amusing. He's like Maddox, who I also found amusing. And even if he really believes every extreme word he says, he's still amusing. He exaggerates things and he has his own biases (as does every reviewer) and exaggeration is, fundamentally, a tool of comedy
Anyway, that's the thing - the only way game reviews communicate anything useful to a consumer is if the consumer mentally compiles multiple perspectives. And I'm not talking about multiple scores - I mean reading the text from multiple perspectives and reconciling both their differences and similarities.
It's also a rather unfair review market for the reviewer himself. I mean, anyone can sit in a chair, watch a two-hour movie, and rattle off some pretentious bullshit about it. And anyone can sit down for a ninety-minute meal and talk about their experience with the meal. And anyone can spend a night in a hotel and give their impression of the accomodations and service. And these are industries that more or less have some kind of common review standard. Games review doesn't, really, and you have volunteers expected to power through games which are 10-15 hours on average and sometimes beyond 40 hours. Is it dishonest to write a review before completing a 45-hour game? I've done it because that's kind of silly, especially when you have seven games to get through in half as many days.
I think it really falls apart because games are expected to do many things. Meals are expected to sate you and taste good. Hotels are expected to give you a good place to rest and good service. Movies are a little more complicated but not by much. Games are huge glommed objects that people seem to think should excel on any number of possibly-conflicting levels. Should it be fun? Should it be artistic? Both? One or the other? Graphically excellent? Does that even matter? And so on. Ultimately I think that if a game is "fun" it should be reviewed highly. But what is fun to one person is not necessarily fun to another person. That's just how interactive media is. So then reviewers start tacking everything else on - "how good's the sound?" "how good's the graphics?" - and the commentary on how good a game it actually is gets lost in the things that hardly matter.
NOTE: I'm not saying the ENTIRE INDUSTRY is completely worthless on an individual level. I've worked with some great people, notably Etoychest and Snowcone. I've met some really cool, down-to-earth, honest PR folk, game execs, and developers. But overall I think "game review" is an industry as sick as the general media is, completely biased, completely commercial, and generally useless for a consumer. It's also potentially harmful for the industry: Look at Microsoft's thing about disabling XBLA games with a low Metacritic average, or whatever that is. Ugh. I mean, I am sure they have ulterior motives and other reasons for limiting the number of games they offer but citing low scores as a reason isn't indicative of anything good.
I've yet to see any evidence of these alleged "lies" from Yahtzee. He has given negative reviews to games I love, but I still watch them and go "yep, that's true, so is that, so is that". I just don't care about those problems. They don't ruin the experience for me. That doesn't mean that I can't chuckle when Yahtzee makes a joke about them. The most damning thing you can really say about yahtzee is "he makes the game sound worse than it is!"
boo hoo
Exactly, he's really more of a critic than a reviewer. There is a difference.
Of course, like most critics, you're free to just ignore the wordy sonofabitch. Brawl fans were pathologically (and hilariously) unable to do this.
Um, what's the difference between a critic and a reviewer? Reviewers are critiquers. This is exactly what I'm talking about: Nobody seems to really understand what video game reviewers are meant to do, including video game reviewers.
Up until recently I've reviewed games on and off for about five years. That doesn't make me an expert or anything but I have seen the other side of all this to some degree.
I think the entire game review industry is a joke, a farce. I think artistic critique in general is a necessary but easily-corrupted element of modern society, and game review is even more so because of how entrenched it is into the advertisement economy. That Newsweek (?) article of about a year ago (or less, my time-sense is bad) was illuminating and probably completely accurate on every level.
So I don't read reviews anymore.
I like Yahtzee because he's an asshole. I quite often disagree with his interpretation but he's just playing a role, one I find amusing. He's like Maddox, who I also found amusing. And even if he really believes every extreme word he says, he's still amusing. He exaggerates things and he has his own biases (as does every reviewer) and exaggeration is, fundamentally, a tool of comedy
Anyway, that's the thing - the only way game reviews communicate anything useful to a consumer is if the consumer mentally compiles multiple perspectives. And I'm not talking about multiple scores - I mean reading the text from multiple perspectives and reconciling both their differences and similarities.
It's also a rather unfair review market for the reviewer himself. I mean, anyone can sit in a chair, watch a two-hour movie, and rattle off some pretentious bullshit about it. And anyone can sit down for a ninety-minute meal and talk about their experience with the meal. And anyone can spend a night in a hotel and give their impression of the accomodations and service. And these are industries that more or less have some kind of common review standard. Games review doesn't, really, and you have volunteers expected to power through games which are 10-15 hours on average and sometimes beyond 40 hours. Is it dishonest to write a review before completing a 45-hour game? I've done it because that's kind of silly, especially when you have seven games to get through in half as many days.
I think it really falls apart because games are expected to do many things. Meals are expected to sate you and taste good. Hotels are expected to give you a good place to rest and good service. Movies are a little more complicated but not by much. Games are huge glommed objects that people seem to think should excel on any number of possibly-conflicting levels. Should it be fun? Should it be artistic? Both? One or the other? Graphically excellent? Does that even matter? And so on. Ultimately I think that if a game is "fun" it should be reviewed highly. But what is fun to one person is not necessarily fun to another person. That's just how interactive media is. So then reviewers start tacking everything else on - "how good's the sound?" "how good's the graphics?" - and the commentary on how good a game it actually is gets lost in the things that hardly matter.
NOTE: I'm not saying the ENTIRE INDUSTRY is completely worthless on an individual level. I've worked with some great people, notably Etoychest and Snowcone. I've met some really cool, down-to-earth, honest PR folk, game execs, and developers. But overall I think "game review" is an industry as sick as the general media is, completely biased, completely commercial, and generally useless for a consumer. It's also potentially harmful for the industry: Look at Microsoft's thing about disabling XBLA games with a low Metacritic average, or whatever that is. Ugh. I mean, I am sure they have ulterior motives and other reasons for limiting the number of games they offer but citing low scores as a reason isn't indicative of anything good.
I like listening to GFW radio (Or whatever they're calling themselves now) when they go off on how fucked up games journalism is. They pretty much just say what you said, that you can't really give a fair review because of advertising pressure, time constraints and the fact that most reviewers have this kind of holy template they are unable to deviate from in the slightest when reviewing a game.
I've yet to see any evidence of these alleged "lies" from Yahtzee. He has given negative reviews to games I love, but I still watch them and go "yep, that's true, so is that, so is that". I just don't care about those problems. They don't ruin the experience for me. That doesn't mean that I can't chuckle when Yahtzee makes a joke about them. The most damning thing you can really say about yahtzee is "he makes the game sound worse than it is!"
boo hoo
Exactly, he's really more of a critic than a reviewer. There is a difference.
Of course, like most critics, you're free to just ignore the wordy sonofabitch. Brawl fans were pathologically (and hilariously) unable to do this.
Um, what's the difference between a critic and a reviewer? Reviewers are critiquers. This is exactly what I'm talking about: Nobody seems to really understand what video game reviewers are meant to do, including video game reviewers.
Yeah, I should have specified. I mean critic in the sense of an academic critic, like a literary critic. Someone who makes more of a formal analysis.
Just to get this straight, I'm not suggest Yahtzee is some kind of games professor or something. It's just that nearly all (if not all) the ZP reviews pick up on very specific design issues. It's very different to writing a buyer's guide, which is essentially what 'professional' games reviewers (for better or worse) are being paid to do.
Up until recently I've reviewed games on and off for about five years. That doesn't make me an expert or anything but I have seen the other side of all this to some degree.
I think the entire game review industry is a joke, a farce. I think artistic critique in general is a necessary but easily-corrupted element of modern society, and game review is even more so because of how entrenched it is into the advertisement economy. That Newsweek (?) article of about a year ago (or less, my time-sense is bad) was illuminating and probably completely accurate on every level.
So I don't read reviews anymore.
I like Yahtzee because he's an asshole. I quite often disagree with his interpretation but he's just playing a role, one I find amusing. He's like Maddox, who I also found amusing. And even if he really believes every extreme word he says, he's still amusing. He exaggerates things and he has his own biases (as does every reviewer) and exaggeration is, fundamentally, a tool of comedy
Anyway, that's the thing - the only way game reviews communicate anything useful to a consumer is if the consumer mentally compiles multiple perspectives. And I'm not talking about multiple scores - I mean reading the text from multiple perspectives and reconciling both their differences and similarities.
It's also a rather unfair review market for the reviewer himself. I mean, anyone can sit in a chair, watch a two-hour movie, and rattle off some pretentious bullshit about it. And anyone can sit down for a ninety-minute meal and talk about their experience with the meal. And anyone can spend a night in a hotel and give their impression of the accomodations and service. And these are industries that more or less have some kind of common review standard. Games review doesn't, really, and you have volunteers expected to power through games which are 10-15 hours on average and sometimes beyond 40 hours. Is it dishonest to write a review before completing a 45-hour game? I've done it because that's kind of silly, especially when you have seven games to get through in half as many days.
I think it really falls apart because games are expected to do many things. Meals are expected to sate you and taste good. Hotels are expected to give you a good place to rest and good service. Movies are a little more complicated but not by much. Games are huge glommed objects that people seem to think should excel on any number of possibly-conflicting levels. Should it be fun? Should it be artistic? Both? One or the other? Graphically excellent? Does that even matter? And so on. Ultimately I think that if a game is "fun" it should be reviewed highly. But what is fun to one person is not necessarily fun to another person. That's just how interactive media is. So then reviewers start tacking everything else on - "how good's the sound?" "how good's the graphics?" - and the commentary on how good a game it actually is gets lost in the things that hardly matter.
NOTE: I'm not saying the ENTIRE INDUSTRY is completely worthless on an individual level. I've worked with some great people, notably Etoychest and Snowcone. I've met some really cool, down-to-earth, honest PR folk, game execs, and developers. But overall I think "game review" is an industry as sick as the general media is, completely biased, completely commercial, and generally useless for a consumer. It's also potentially harmful for the industry: Look at Microsoft's thing about disabling XBLA games with a low Metacritic average, or whatever that is. Ugh. I mean, I am sure they have ulterior motives and other reasons for limiting the number of games they offer but citing low scores as a reason isn't indicative of anything good.
I like listening to GFW radio (Or whatever they're calling themselves now) when they go off on how fucked up games journalism is. They pretty much just say what you said, that you can't really give a fair review because of advertising pressure, time constraints and the fact that most reviewers have this kind of holy template they are unable to deviate from in the slightest when reviewing a game.
Oh I forgot something.
PR people don't give a rat's ass about the text of your review. Unless you gave it an obscenely good score and your publication has clout - then they might actually read it and look for soundbytes.
This is something of an exaggeration - PR people have to submit reports that collate data from various reviews they receive and I'm sure they read some of them and maybe some PR folk read all of the reviews they get but I'm sure a good majority do not. But overall my point is that it's a very tense industry for everyone involved, from the reviewer to the PR individual that supplied the review code to the advertisers in both companies and the publishers for both companies. And at the very bottom of all this is a lone critic. And the only thing most of the people above him care about is the number he spits out.
So you have a guy devoting a potential 20+ hours to some random game, spending a few hours writing up some text on it that hardly anyone reads or cares about, and it's hard not to get disgruntled especially with the lack of respect most game reviewers get coupled with all the pressure applied to them.
PR people don't give a rat's ass about the text of your review. Unless you gave it an obscenely good score and your publication has clout - then they might actually read it and look for soundbytes.
This is something of an exaggeration - PR people have to submit reports that collate data from various reviews they receive and I'm sure they read some of them and maybe some PR folk read all of the reviews they get but I'm sure a good majority do not. But overall my point is that it's a very tense industry for everyone involved, from the reviewer to the PR individual that supplied the review code to the advertisers in both companies and the publishers for both companies. And at the very bottom of all this is a lone critic. And the only thing most of the people above him care about is the number he spits out.
So you have a guy devoting a potential 20+ hours to some random game, spending a few hours writing up some text on it that hardly anyone reads or cares about, and it's hard not to get disgruntled especially with the lack of respect most game reviewers get coupled with all the pressure applied to them.
I think part of why most of the PR guys don't care what the meat and bones of the reviews put out about their product is because this is an era of a quick solution/tl;dr mentality. They don't give a rat's ass about what you actually have to say about their game because they, just like the gamers they hope to lure, are more concerned about some number or grade you give it. That might be more of a criticism of the society we live in now though.
PR people don't give a rat's ass about the text of your review. Unless you gave it an obscenely good score and your publication has clout - then they might actually read it and look for soundbytes.
This is something of an exaggeration - PR people have to submit reports that collate data from various reviews they receive and I'm sure they read some of them and maybe some PR folk read all of the reviews they get but I'm sure a good majority do not. But overall my point is that it's a very tense industry for everyone involved, from the reviewer to the PR individual that supplied the review code to the advertisers in both companies and the publishers for both companies. And at the very bottom of all this is a lone critic. And the only thing most of the people above him care about is the number he spits out.
So you have a guy devoting a potential 20+ hours to some random game, spending a few hours writing up some text on it that hardly anyone reads or cares about, and it's hard not to get disgruntled especially with the lack of respect most game reviewers get coupled with all the pressure applied to them.
I think part of why most of the PR guys don't care what the meat and bones of the reviews put out about their product is because this is an era of a quick solution/tl;dr mentality. They don't give a rat's ass about what you actually have to say about their game because they, just like the gamers they hope to lure, are more concerned about some number or grade you give it. That might be more of a criticism of the society we live in now though.
Yes but I believe the media is largely to blame for many ills in modern society, and I include this whole frakked up review/critique system as a subsystem of the media.
I've yet to see any evidence of these alleged "lies" from Yahtzee. He has given negative reviews to games I love, but I still watch them and go "yep, that's true, so is that, so is that". I just don't care about those problems. They don't ruin the experience for me. That doesn't mean that I can't chuckle when Yahtzee makes a joke about them. The most damning thing you can really say about yahtzee is "he makes the game sound worse than it is!"
boo hoo
Yeah, he can definitely pick out the flaws with any given game. But any retard can do that - what makes a good reviewer is being able to express whether those flaws ruin the game or not. He basically hates every game.
But that's still just secondary to the fact that he's not funny or entertaining at all. While I do sit there and go, 'yeah, that's true', I don't laugh, and neither do I smile while watching it. It's like watching a two year old throwing a tantrum in a supermarket. Well ok, that's not true, I smile watching two year olds throwing tantrums.
Hell, i'd consider him more of a critic than a reviewer - I mean in the sense of an academic critic. Buried under all the comedy are some pretty astute observations about game design.
I agree with this. There is a difference between a critic and a reviewer, and I think Y is on the critic side of things. Taken as a sum total, his reviews are like an extended essay on his philosophies re: game design and gameplay, with special attention paid to common (and overused) elements in gaming.
Yeah, he can definitely pick out the flaws with any given game. But any retard can do that - what makes a good reviewer is being able to express whether those flaws ruin the game or not. He basically hates every game.
But that's still just secondary to the fact that he's not funny or entertaining at all. While I do sit there and go, 'yeah, that's true', I don't laugh, and neither do I smile while watching it. It's like watching a two year old throwing a tantrum in a supermarket. Well ok, that's not true, I smile watching two year olds throwing tantrums.
Yes, Call of Duty 4 and Orange Box were utter shit. I'm glad he hated them.
oh wait
PeregrineFalcon on
Looking for a DX:HR OnLive code for my kid brother.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Yahtzee isn't particularly "angry", doesn't hate every game and doesn't particularly exagerate flaws. So when people say that I wonder if they've just watched one review of a game they're invested in and decided that he's a meanie based on that.
Yahtzee isn't particularly "angry", doesn't hate every game and doesn't particularly exagerate flaws. So when people say that I wonder if they've just watched one review of a game they're invested in and decided that he's a meanie based on that.
*cough* Brawl *cough*
PeregrineFalcon on
Looking for a DX:HR OnLive code for my kid brother.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
My problem with Yahtzee isn't that he's mean or whatever, it's just that I don't find him very funny. Fuck I have to almost slow down what he says to understand half the bullshit that comes out of my speakers.
The issue is that this forum honestly put the man on an altar of the heavens and thinks he's the greatest ever. Which makes my expectations a LOT higher than normal. I found AVGN just by bullshitting on youtube.
I mean, he just praised the hell out of Painkiller recently (a review I agreed with nearly 100%) but he does tend to exaggerate. Or he at least has some very extreme opinions. And a lot of it comes from his tone. He may not necessarily be exaggerating when he goes on for 25 seconds about how god-awful the story is (maybe he really thinks it is that worthless) but the hyperbole and tone he uses to express this is exaggerated to drive the point home. I also personally think he exaggerated the "issue" he has with MGS4's controls. You don't need to hold L1, triangle, and R1 to shoot a weapon. Yes, some are more complex than others, but for most you just need to hold L1 and R1. And the triangle stuff is a toggle. Just a few specifics that come to mind.
And he basically called Portal a perfect game. So this "he basically hates every game" thing is just factually incorrect. He tends to like a great many games.
Overall I think he's pretty much on the money most of the time and he's very entertaining to listen to. He tends to cut through a lot of the shit other people get lulled into accepting.
And despite finding flaws with Mario Galaxy, noted that they were minor criticisms and he did like the game. Also had positive things to say about Assassin's Creed when so many others were keen to trash it.
My problem with Yahtzee isn't that he's mean or whatever, it's just that I don't find him very funny. Fuck I have to almost slow down what he says to understand half the bullshit that comes out of my speakers.
The issue is that this forum honestly put the man on an altar of the heavens and thinks he's the greatest ever. Which makes my expectations a LOT higher than normal. I found AVGN just by bullshitting on youtube.
Absolutely everyone here that doesn't like him, even after explaining his reasons (and they vary from people to people) is greeted with a: No, he's right, you just don't get it / are butthurt by one of his opinions.
No reason to continue to argue about the points. Some people think Dane Cook is a comic God, and others like George Carlin (RIP). You're not going to please everybody.
I'm not saying that if you like Yahtzee you're a terrible person, because you're not, it's just hard to see why everyone likes him.
I am not familiar with Angry Video Game Nerd. I guess I have some YouTubing to do when I get home.
Watch the Top Gun one, then watch the Power Glove episode right after it. It's good stuff... Also the Bible game one is hilarious.
Oh man, the Bible game one is by far the best of all. That squirrel+lion+acorns part is just grandiose.
I swear I was in tears. That's the funniest thing ever. Seeing a squirrel take out a lion with an acorn, then take out itself in a suicide attempt... Gold.
Posts
See here's the thing. No-one seems to even consider the idea that he might not be being entirely serious. The content of his reviews might not even reflect his opinion of the game as a whole. He might even...like some of the games that he seems to trash so vehemently. Like you say, he just picks up on a few minor negative points, or he dares to call the games out on conventions that may have become a bit tired or contrived. Hell, i'd consider him more of a critic than a reviewer - I mean in the sense of an academic critic. Buried under all the comedy are some pretty astute observations about game design.
And since proclaiming that you love a game he 'trashed' seems to be the accepted way of maintaining credibility when talking about ZP , I shall say that I loved his MGS4 review and I just finished my 4th playthrough, for god's sake (Big Boss emblem, aww yeah).
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
But if he's stating a fact, it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree, if it's true it's true. Now you can look past it and not worry, or it can be a really big pain. That's the thing.
His Halo review, I can't remember everything he said, but generally summed it up as average and bland, with a confusing story. I can absolutely see how he thinks that, and that a lot of other people agree with that. Myself, well I've played and loved the first two and loved the hell out of Halo 3. Doesn't mean I can't see where he's coming from.
Far too many people see that he's saying mean things about their favourite game and call it 'lies', when it's just that they don't want to admit that their precious favourite has some problems.
I'm still waiting for one of those "facts".
"Halo 3 is average and bland with a confusing story."
"(Returning to the main temple in Phantom Hourglass) can fuck right off."
"The entire second half of (Devil May Cry 4) is basically going through the same stages, only backwards."
"(Mass Effect) has too many motherfucking words."
"Haze sucks."
"Painkiller is fucking awesome."
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
boo hoo
This is an opinion (that I actually agree with).
Exactly, he's really more of a critic than a reviewer. There is a difference.
Of course, like most critics, you're free to just ignore the wordy sonofabitch. Brawl fans were pathologically (and hilariously) unable to do this.
I think the entire game review industry is a joke, a farce. I think artistic critique in general is a necessary but easily-corrupted element of modern society, and game review is even more so because of how entrenched it is into the advertisement economy. That Newsweek (?) article of about a year ago (or less, my time-sense is bad) was illuminating and probably completely accurate on every level.
So I don't read reviews anymore.
I like Yahtzee because he's an asshole. I quite often disagree with his interpretation but he's just playing a role, one I find amusing. He's like Maddox, who I also found amusing. And even if he really believes every extreme word he says, he's still amusing. He exaggerates things and he has his own biases (as does every reviewer) and exaggeration is, fundamentally, a tool of comedy
Anyway, that's the thing - the only way game reviews communicate anything useful to a consumer is if the consumer mentally compiles multiple perspectives. And I'm not talking about multiple scores - I mean reading the text from multiple perspectives and reconciling both their differences and similarities.
It's also a rather unfair review market for the reviewer himself. I mean, anyone can sit in a chair, watch a two-hour movie, and rattle off some pretentious bullshit about it. And anyone can sit down for a ninety-minute meal and talk about their experience with the meal. And anyone can spend a night in a hotel and give their impression of the accomodations and service. And these are industries that more or less have some kind of common review standard. Games review doesn't, really, and you have volunteers expected to power through games which are 10-15 hours on average and sometimes beyond 40 hours. Is it dishonest to write a review before completing a 45-hour game? I've done it because that's kind of silly, especially when you have seven games to get through in half as many days.
I think it really falls apart because games are expected to do many things. Meals are expected to sate you and taste good. Hotels are expected to give you a good place to rest and good service. Movies are a little more complicated but not by much. Games are huge glommed objects that people seem to think should excel on any number of possibly-conflicting levels. Should it be fun? Should it be artistic? Both? One or the other? Graphically excellent? Does that even matter? And so on. Ultimately I think that if a game is "fun" it should be reviewed highly. But what is fun to one person is not necessarily fun to another person. That's just how interactive media is. So then reviewers start tacking everything else on - "how good's the sound?" "how good's the graphics?" - and the commentary on how good a game it actually is gets lost in the things that hardly matter.
NOTE: I'm not saying the ENTIRE INDUSTRY is completely worthless on an individual level. I've worked with some great people, notably Etoychest and Snowcone. I've met some really cool, down-to-earth, honest PR folk, game execs, and developers. But overall I think "game review" is an industry as sick as the general media is, completely biased, completely commercial, and generally useless for a consumer. It's also potentially harmful for the industry: Look at Microsoft's thing about disabling XBLA games with a low Metacritic average, or whatever that is. Ugh. I mean, I am sure they have ulterior motives and other reasons for limiting the number of games they offer but citing low scores as a reason isn't indicative of anything good.
Um, what's the difference between a critic and a reviewer? Reviewers are critiquers. This is exactly what I'm talking about: Nobody seems to really understand what video game reviewers are meant to do, including video game reviewers.
I like listening to GFW radio (Or whatever they're calling themselves now) when they go off on how fucked up games journalism is. They pretty much just say what you said, that you can't really give a fair review because of advertising pressure, time constraints and the fact that most reviewers have this kind of holy template they are unable to deviate from in the slightest when reviewing a game.
Sometimes I Stream Games: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/italax-plays-video-games
Yeah, I should have specified. I mean critic in the sense of an academic critic, like a literary critic. Someone who makes more of a formal analysis.
Just to get this straight, I'm not suggest Yahtzee is some kind of games professor or something. It's just that nearly all (if not all) the ZP reviews pick up on very specific design issues. It's very different to writing a buyer's guide, which is essentially what 'professional' games reviewers (for better or worse) are being paid to do.
Oh I forgot something.
PR people don't give a rat's ass about the text of your review. Unless you gave it an obscenely good score and your publication has clout - then they might actually read it and look for soundbytes.
This is something of an exaggeration - PR people have to submit reports that collate data from various reviews they receive and I'm sure they read some of them and maybe some PR folk read all of the reviews they get but I'm sure a good majority do not. But overall my point is that it's a very tense industry for everyone involved, from the reviewer to the PR individual that supplied the review code to the advertisers in both companies and the publishers for both companies. And at the very bottom of all this is a lone critic. And the only thing most of the people above him care about is the number he spits out.
So you have a guy devoting a potential 20+ hours to some random game, spending a few hours writing up some text on it that hardly anyone reads or cares about, and it's hard not to get disgruntled especially with the lack of respect most game reviewers get coupled with all the pressure applied to them.
I think part of why most of the PR guys don't care what the meat and bones of the reviews put out about their product is because this is an era of a quick solution/tl;dr mentality. They don't give a rat's ass about what you actually have to say about their game because they, just like the gamers they hope to lure, are more concerned about some number or grade you give it. That might be more of a criticism of the society we live in now though.
Yes but I believe the media is largely to blame for many ills in modern society, and I include this whole frakked up review/critique system as a subsystem of the media.
Yeah, he can definitely pick out the flaws with any given game. But any retard can do that - what makes a good reviewer is being able to express whether those flaws ruin the game or not. He basically hates every game.
But that's still just secondary to the fact that he's not funny or entertaining at all. While I do sit there and go, 'yeah, that's true', I don't laugh, and neither do I smile while watching it. It's like watching a two year old throwing a tantrum in a supermarket. Well ok, that's not true, I smile watching two year olds throwing tantrums.
Yes, Call of Duty 4 and Orange Box were utter shit. I'm glad he hated them.
oh wait
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
*cough* Brawl *cough*
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
The issue is that this forum honestly put the man on an altar of the heavens and thinks he's the greatest ever. Which makes my expectations a LOT higher than normal. I found AVGN just by bullshitting on youtube.
And he basically called Portal a perfect game. So this "he basically hates every game" thing is just factually incorrect. He tends to like a great many games.
Overall I think he's pretty much on the money most of the time and he's very entertaining to listen to. He tends to cut through a lot of the shit other people get lulled into accepting.
Absolutely everyone here that doesn't like him, even after explaining his reasons (and they vary from people to people) is greeted with a: No, he's right, you just don't get it / are butthurt by one of his opinions.
I'm not saying that if you like Yahtzee you're a terrible person, because you're not, it's just hard to see why everyone likes him.
Watch the Top Gun one, then watch the Power Glove episode right after it. It's good stuff... Also the Bible game one is hilarious.
Oh man, the Bible game one is by far the best of all. That squirrel+lion+acorns part is just grandiose.
I swear I was in tears. That's the funniest thing ever. Seeing a squirrel take out a lion with an acorn, then take out itself in a suicide attempt... Gold.