"Zero Punctuation" and "Dev Diary" by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw - The only thing worth watching on The Escapist

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I believe I said something along the lines of Yahtzee having bite in his early days. Well, if I did, I take it back, he's been whining about racism all the way back from at least 2007, back in his Crysis review.Apparently not just that game but also Far Cry 1 are racist, and here I thought that Hawaiian shirt the protagonist wore was universally thought to be the most offensive part of the game. But really, I'm just thinking what the hell he meant by this, if this would be a punchline for a joke that would be one thing but we know he is genuinely soft enough to cry about racism in every single review of Call of Duty and pretty much any other military shooter so this is a gripe he really has. If that was supposed to be a joke in itself, it's not a funny one and a bad or confusing joke leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you never want that as a comedian. Either way, the more I think about it this dude could easily be a proper lolcow if his little comedy show never took off, if he didn't spend his time on that and his other content or projects, what else would he have? Whining on twitter or resetera/neogaf, probably. He's too soft for /v/, even if he is just as much of a contrarian. Can't wait until Second Wind collapses, maybe then he will finally retire FR/ZP for good once he has nobody else to wipe his ass for him and he realizes he doesn't want to manage the show by himself. He seems just arrogant enough to think his personality is what carried him all that time, imagine if he started a podcast of some kind in hopes that this will keep him afloat from now on.
 
In Yahtzee's case, I'm assuming it's because his silver-spooned wife Kess is American and most of his former Escapist buddies are too
True, but he was outspoken about it even before then. If I recall an episode of LDO (it was either "Rise of the Triad" or "Proteus"), he and Gabe had smugged about the silly Americans and their silly gun rights.

Some 2A-ers sperged out a bit and demanded to get on a Skype call to "convince him within five minutes" that guns are good and gun control is bad.

Obviously that went nowhere but he and Gabe continued playing the usual "we had a massacre, then we banned guns, and we haven't had massacres since" card, which only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than three seconds.
 
silly Americans and their silly gun rights.
The middle and upper classes in Commonwealth nations love to look down their noses at Americans and call them all violent hillbillies. This impulse/cope is one half of the engine that powers TDS in the non-US Anglosphere (and the other half is US leftwing media exports).

In Yahtzee's case, I'm assuming it's because his silver-spooned wife Kess is American and most of his former Escapist buddies are too
It's entirely Kess. He moved to Australia for an online girlfriend as well.
 
Obviously that went nowhere but he and Gabe continued playing the usual "we had a massacre, then we banned guns, and we haven't had massacres since" card, which only makes sense if you don't think about it for more than three seconds.
That argument is just sooo popular in Commonwealth nations. I still haven't found a YouTube podcast as good as LDO, although I think if I re watched some of them they definitely wouldn't hold up.
 
That argument is just sooo popular in Commonwealth nations. I still haven't found a YouTube podcast as good as LDO, although I think if I re watched some of them they definitely wouldn't hold up.
They will always hold a very special place in my heart, despite both Yahtz and Gabe being horrid politispergs, even back then. Especially the latter, who really has sunk into absolute depths of non-achievement. But I'm a sucker for dynamics that have one cohost abusing the other so I doubt the warm fuzzy glow will ever fade for me. YMMV.
 
The more I watch of this guy, the more I wonder why I ever found anything he said funny to begin with. I got 3 more videos that I found pathetic each in their own way and there is a lot I want to say about them so get ready for a long post. Feel free to give me puzzle pieces if you want, I don't care:

*Hogwarts Legacy is an obvious one, altho it is different than how I remember it. The JKR rant is now shorter and it is very much censored, I remember he went all out when it came out. I am guessing the uncensored release was on the Escapist website and Youtube got the short end of the stick, which just makes his little tizzy fit even more pathetic when he has to say "the c-word" when he's crying about the transphobic wizard lady. What a joke! Rest of the video is just about as unremarkable as the game, which is par for the course, what else is he going to say about possibly the most generic Ubisoft styled sandbox game ever made? You could reskin it and easily call it "The Division 3", there, where is my comedic review contract? This isn't hard to do.

*Spider Man 2 was his last review on Escapist and his last Zero Punctuation episode before he and Nick started up Second Wind and rebranded the show under Fully Ramblomatic. First of all, the comments are still disabled on that last ever ZP video, gee I wonder why! Second, he doesn't go out with a bang but on a whine. The censorship issue is even worse than in his Hogwarts review, whatever bite his video might have had was taken out, which is frankly sadder than him becoming this husk that he is now, or was back 2 years ago. Third, his humor is just as outdated as his format, at the end he makes a butthurt rant about the Marvel fanboys, and aside from his obligatory "not my niggerinos!" strawman where he says people only dislike the game because there is a black person in it, he makes a cheetoh dust joke when talking about the comic fan nerds who have a problem with the game's story. Well, "joke" is a strong word, his crying maybe, point is that this would have been relevant about 15-20 years ago, if he wanted to make a more relevant joke it would have to be about that same nerd fandom all trooning out or making it "hospitable" for the LGBT community and then make a MJ chin joke to accompany it. Of course, he is an "ally" so he can't do that, but the truth is that the stereotypical cheetoh dust nerd who would fight you over minutia of his favorite capeshit comic or whatever to the last breath is a dying breed, as it has been pointed out many times HRT hit the nerd population stronger than crack hit the ghettos. This right here ends his ZP career, the same old jokes he's been making for well over a decade at that point, the absolute lowest hanging fruit and ones that make less sense than ever. Oh and of course the same tired old pearl clutching about inclusivity, from the same guy who literally used to make blackface jokes in his videos. Nothing has changed since, just that his friend from the office is now both his gimp and his sugardaddy now that he works at SW. Fitting fate, I say!

*That last one is I think the cringiest, and that would be his Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 review. Of course he wouldn't be positive about the game, being a contrarian and all, but I should point out that BO2 is usually seen as the best game in the franchise even by non-COD fans, if not then at the very least in the top 5, not to mention being one of the biggest shooters of the 7th gen consoles. What I am saying is that this game used to be a big deal and people like it for a reason. So, what is Yahtzee going to rant about, then? Well, for the first 3 fucking minutes of this 5 minute and 40 second review he just cries about how white, right wingers are bad and evil and crazy and pretty much just sounding like your typical BlueSky or ResetEra user for more than half of the review, while barely talking about the game while glazing the villain because he is a poor brown(never mind his actual story arc in the game, which I doubt he even finished). This was in 2012 btw, yet this is just him politisperging without a single bit of humor or self awareness here, this is even more scathing than his tired, boring Hogwarts review 10 years later. Anyways, for all of 1 minute and 10 seconds afterwords he actually talks about the game, but at around 4 minute and 10 second mark for the rest of the video(further minute and a half) he starts whining again about muh white privilege, muh poor, underrepresented niggerinos, boo hoo so what if our protagonist is a terrorist, he is BROWN! and all that. He keeps calling everyone who plays these games a paranoid, crazy right winger but I should add that vast majority of the COD fanbase were and still are little kids and casual gamers, very few "right wing paranoid gun owners" play these games as they would rather play actual mil sims. Not that Yahtzee even knows what these are, most of his reviews are mainstream releases or some indie-artsy shit nobody cares about. Another case of his jokes not even making sense as he reaches for the lowest hanging fruit possible and tries to have his nicely crafted strawman hold it for him. This is humor equivalent of kryptonite, I would be deeply ashamed if I made something like this and put it under my name.


So, why did I make this post? Because last time, I said that bad or confusing jokes leave a bad taste in your mouth, this is the worst thing you can ever do as a comedian. Well, the first two of the three videos I talked about at least try to be informative and funny despite some sperging, the BO2 video was just him going on a political rant for nearly 6 minutes with almost zero humor or him being critical of the game. These kinds of "reviews" are partly responsible for why Gamergate happened, nobody wants to be lectured by some far-left fart huffer when they just want to know if the bing bing wahoo is any good and if it's worth the money. When Second Wind finally kicks the bucket, this video, I am struggling to call it a "review", will be exactly what I think of, since he has not changed in the slightest since. Funny, because his last COD review as of writing this(Black Ops 6) was actually pretty accurate, so why he had a stick up his ass for this one is beyond me. One thing that is clear is that he is 100% genuine about everything he said and it wasn't done for the humor, cause there is none. That same kind of venom that landed Godhand a 3/10 on IGN among many more examples is found here, just pure grade A game journo seething captured on film, no different than any other lolcow spergout.

I don't think any of this is a revelation to anyone that has been following this guy for years, but boy have I forgotten just how pathetic he really is when you get right down to it. Even more pathetic is the Escapist, since this guy was their golden goose. Site more or less shriveled up and died right after he left, so if someone who can do the equivalent of writing a really angry social media comment and adding an animation to it is their top dog, where does that put the other people who done content for The Escapist then? Ironic, since their last non-gambling video is a 6 minute about COD Black Ops too.

Anyways, I don't think there is a deep point here, Yahtzee is a hack that can't review games for shit, is out of shape and I would not have sex with him. Surprised anyone would, really, but he should be glad that there is crazy, rich fangirls out there that will because he really doesn't have any useful skills whatsoever to make a living. As I already established, working for the Escapist isn't really a "skill", or wasn't a skill since I doubt they are going to last much longer. All I will say is that like many lolcows, he made a hell of his own creation thanks to his laziness and now that I see just how horrific his videos actually are post-mortem, I hope he does them for years to come. I want Fully Ramblomatic or Zero Punctuation styled videos 20 years from now, just like James Rolfe is forced to do increasingly more cringe and awful AVGN videos even as he is literally balding. This is a fitting punishment for clogging up Youtube with his shitty pseudo-reviews.
 
Anyways, I don't think there is a deep point here, Yahtzee is a hack that can't review games for shit, is out of shape and I would not have sex with him. Surprised anyone would, really, but he should be glad that there is crazy, rich fangirls out there that will because he really doesn't have any useful skills whatsoever to make a living. As I already established, working for the Escapist isn't really a "skill", or wasn't a skill since I doubt they are going to last much longer. All I will say is that like many lolcows, he made a hell of his own creation thanks to his laziness and now that I see just how horrific his videos actually are post-mortem, I hope he does them for years to come. I want Fully Ramblomatic or Zero Punctuation styled videos 20 years from now, just like James Rolfe is forced to do increasingly more cringe and awful AVGN videos even as he is literally balding. This is a fitting punishment for clogging up Youtube with his shitty pseudo-reviews.

If you're going to go for the "YAHTZEE WAS NEVER GOOD" angle, at least try to pick pre-2016 examples for everything. I know the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 review dates back to 2016, but both Hogwarts Legacy and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is cheating since those were late, late era ZP at which point the decline was extremely obvious to anyone paying attention.
 
If you're going to go for the "YAHTZEE WAS NEVER GOOD" angle, at least try to pick pre-2016 examples for everything. I know the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 review dates back to 2016, but both Hogwarts Legacy and Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is cheating since those were late, late era ZP at which point the decline was extremely obvious to anyone paying attention.
I'm not making a deep analysis here, I am just pointing out what personally grinds my gears. BO2 review is very telling since it's a 2012 video, as I pointed out he was already sperging about racism as early as 2007(didn't he start out working for the Escapist that same year?) but only 5 years later he made a full length political blog video instead of a review. Only thing that changed since is that his passion is gone, he came close with JKR Hogwarts video 11 years later but he bitched out and was forced to censor himself. Nothing sadder to watch than a toothless old dog trying to get a bite out of you, barking is all it has.

BO2 video is an anomaly since for most other COD reviews, he generally finds something amusing to talk about instead of just raging, even if it is obvious he hates the game. That goes for many of his videos, so to see what is arguably the best "sparkgaggleweewee" game out there finally breaking his faggot fragile mind into tiny pieces is both hilarious and confusing at the same time as he should find plenty to talk about other than just muh brown people. Or maybe he would if he didn't personally get triggered by the game.

I was thinking of archiving those videos(in case nobody else has) just in case Escapist pulls the plug on the channel, but so far I have very little to archive as there is so little value in these videos. If they disappeared forever tomorrow, not much of value would be lost. You only really see how tired out and samey they are if you binge-watch them, at least the video essay crowd has to talk about SOMETHING interesting or informative to fill in that hour long gap but a 6 minute video is just long enough for a couple of bad gags and maybe a political rant. Youtube shorts/tik toks before that format became a thing, basically, with just about as much value.
 
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If you're going to go for the "YAHTZEE WAS NEVER GOOD" angle,
I don't think history will be kind to him.
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The repetitive jokes and format would have been charming if he didn't fuck up his entire career and swerve into left wing politics. Even some of the most recent stuff have certain similarities to original reviews but that spark is barely there and buried under political shit and moaning/begging.
 
I'm a month late to this, but has Ben ever thought that it may have less to do with the nebulous idea of the "Algorithm!" and some other damning factors?
Like the fact that he has been doing this for nearly twenty years and the ZP shtick was getting stale maybe half of that?
Or that the site and group he was closely associated with imploded?
And the new one is literally diet-Escapist judging by content and creator alike?
Just off the top of my head, three better and more sensible explanations than Youtube fucking him and his borderline if not completely irrelevant buddies on Second Wind, but God knows those suggestions are going in the garbage bin. I'm not defending Youtube, having started in early 2006, to see the rape and desecration of a once great site has been painful, but not everything can be answered with one simple thing.
 
he was already sperging about racism as early as 2007
He was, but admittedly I think the political landscape wasn't as polarised back then, so there wasn't quite as much White solidarity. Yahtzee was in pretty mainstream company, echoing your smug Bill Maher types. I think he's stayed the same but the zeitgeist has changed to where his politsperging feels a lot more onerous than it did (at least for me) at the time.

You're right though - he did rush to the defence of muh poor spearchuckers in RE5 and flat-out stated you couldn't be racist to Europeans/Spaniards like you could nigs (to the people who pointed out how those were represented in RE4).

He concluded that "Capcom aren't bad people. They're just idiots." I think these days anyone can agree with the latter sentence.
 
He was, but admittedly I think the political landscape wasn't as polarised back then, so there wasn't quite as much White solidarity. Yahtzee was in pretty mainstream company, echoing your smug Bill Maher types. I think he's stayed the same but the zeitgeist has changed to where his politsperging feels a lot more onerous than it did (at least for me) at the time.

You're right though - he did rush to the defence of muh poor spearchuckers in RE5 and flat-out stated you couldn't be racist to Europeans/Spaniards like you could nigs (to the people who pointed out how those were represented in RE4).

He concluded that "Capcom aren't bad people. They're just idiots." I think these days anyone can agree with the latter sentence.
2007 was peak year for leftism to be considered cool, coming out of the Bush era. A massive chunk of internet famous people from that time (if not all of them) will never accept the fact that the left now is fake and gay, so they will forever hold the party line even when it goes against everything they claimed to stand for.

Yhatzee going more vocal about his politics is either him aging to be unfunny political busybody or a way to make up for bland content.
 
James was born in the summer of 1980. the Millenial generation starts at '81, so he's basically at the tail-end of Gen X
The Gen X cohort born around 1980, 1978-1982 I'd say? Fits neatly in neither category, much like how the cohort around 1994-1997 fits neatly in neither the Millennial nor Zoomer generation

Yhatzee going more vocal about his politics is either him aging to be unfunny political busybody or a way to make up for bland content.
tbh the vocal politics have always been there, it's just that it's always felt... fake and gay, as it does now

But I'm probably in the minority in the thread that still enjoys him. His stuff has always been interesting in proportion to how interesting to talk about the game he's playing is
 
I believe I said something along the lines of Yahtzee having bite in his early days. Well, if I did, I take it back, he's been whining about racism all the way back from at least 2007, back in his Crysis review.Apparently not just that game but also Far Cry 1 are racist, and here I thought that Hawaiian shirt the protagonist wore was universally thought to be the most offensive part of the game. But really, I'm just thinking what the hell he meant by this, if this would be a punchline for a joke that would be one thing but we know he is genuinely soft enough to cry about racism in every single review of Call of Duty and pretty much any other military shooter so this is a gripe he really has. If that was supposed to be a joke in itself, it's not a funny one and a bad or confusing joke leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you never want that as a comedian. Either way, the more I think about it this dude could easily be a proper lolcow if his little comedy show never took off, if he didn't spend his time on that and his other content or projects, what else would he have? Whining on twitter or resetera/neogaf, probably. He's too soft for /v/, even if he is just as much of a contrarian. Can't wait until Second Wind collapses, maybe then he will finally retire FR/ZP for good once he has nobody else to wipe his ass for him and he realizes he doesn't want to manage the show by himself. He seems just arrogant enough to think his personality is what carried him all that time, imagine if he started a podcast of some kind in hopes that this will keep him afloat from now on.
Go figure that a weeping brit gets his capital city colonized by his beloved browns and flees to California.
 
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