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

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I know it's basically rubbing salt on a rotting wound of a week old horse, but if you take a closer look at those three thumbnails, you will notice they are like mutated, retarded triplets.
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2nd and 3rd are basically identical with swapped thumbnail soyjaks, but all three use the same background.
In a surprising turn of events, all the gamba slop mysteriously disappeared seemingly overnight.
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for reference, this is what it looked like 5 days ago.
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Change of heart? Bullying got to them? Maybe there's something bigger afoot? IDK, ask the 300 or so people who still watch them.
 
X-com has adaptive difficulty?
Yeah Terror from the Deep had intense difficulty scaling so if you did ok to well early on the game became impossible to beat very quickly. And the issue with that is that the game itself was a bit easier iirc than the original so the main method to win was to sabotage yourself early on which in a Xcom game is like playing Russian roulette when only one of the chambers is empty
 
I'm currently watching his old reviews, and as of 2011, he ain't that bad. If I recall, just like many along with him, he cracked during Gamergate and he "chose a side". I will see if his 2013/14 reviews take a nosedive in quality.
The 2016 election season seems to have been the tipping point if anything.

One interesting bit is if you look at the episode guide circa 2014-2015, they're almost all the typical games you might see for a time, AAA games, the latest Nintendo game, trending indie titles on Steam, and so forth (barring the occasional "classic" review). You can see it start to change, the indie titles become pretentious bullshit no one has heard of, more focus on Nintendo, and so on.
 
If I recall, just like many along with him, he cracked during Gamergate and he "chose a side". I will see if his 2013/14 reviews take a nosedive in quality.
He talked about gamergate a lot at the time on his youtube channel Let's Play/podcast series "Let's Drown Out', he was a big fence sitter about it. It was really the 2016 Trump election cycle that pushed him over the edge which you can start see at the end of the series in 2016, right before he moved to California.
Also him apologizing for the tranny joke in the Papers Please review was an early warning sign too.
 
Wasn't the point of his video the opposite - he's still playing Mewgenics and appreciating the ephemerality of the runs and cats divorced from the meta-context? No clue why this one, with its very heavy meta progression, is the one that clicked with him in a more Roguelike than Rogue-lite fashion, but that was what I took out of the video - going at Mewgenics runs was what gave him the peace of mind to break his crossword streak.

I'm not sure exactly how far he got into the game, but it seemed to me that he's at least mid-way through act II given all the references to Hell, so this definitely isn't the common situation of a journo (including Yahtzee in the past) making references entirely to the first area.
AW FUCK YOU RIGHT, I totally missed that. Goddammit I didn't think I was THAT sleep deprived when I posted that.

Yahtz says he was having trouble with the black shard quest, so that means he's beaten Zaratana at the very least. Sounds like he's taking his sweet time so I'd guess Yahtz has 40-50 hours in Mewgenics so far. Zaratana isn't the hardest boss fight but it does take a good amount of time just to encounter it.

How long to beat Mewgenics?

Isn't it the same? Issue is that he is a paid game reviewer so every game he plays IS an obligation. It's not some youtuber that can say he stopped playing midway, it's a grown adult not doing his job because he finds it boring.
Yahtze surprisingly entitled for Games Journalist turned E-begger. I remember Second Wind tried viewer requested reviews and quietly stopped doing them. A big fat reason that I can recall was when During the KOTOR review, Yahtzee outed himself as too dumb to understand the Jedi Council's plan, tried to pass it off as a writing oversight.
Mewgenics is interesting in being the essential "Anti Reviewer game". Its premise is so retarded that it falls on pure gameplay. No lore, no atmosphere, no plot. If Yahtzee really did play the bare minimum of it to shit out a review, it shows he only likes to talk about game design but hates gaming itself.
I must recant my previous post due to a lapse of retardation. Yahtz is still playing Mewgenics quite heavily. The violently ephemeral gameplay has made him a touch more aware of the importance of letting go and the catharsis that comes with it.
He is just scared of a backlash. If he doesn't have the time to play he should just say it rather than do disingenuous reviews based on YouTube videos. And if he is bad at games he should say it rather than argue that they'd be made for his skill level.
He does sometimes admit when he hasn't beaten a game, if only to reinforce how bad said game was to experience. I guess he doesn't show his hours on every game because it's a level of transparency he can't be arsed to do.
 
The 2016 election season seems to have been the tipping point if anything.

One interesting bit is if you look at the episode guide circa 2014-2015, they're almost all the typical games you might see for a time, AAA games, the latest Nintendo game, trending indie titles on Steam, and so forth (barring the occasional "classic" review). You can see it start to change, the indie titles become pretentious bullshit no one has heard of, more focus on Nintendo, and so on.
Totally agree with the 2016 timeline.

I discovered ZP by seeing his Army of Two review being featured all the way back on fucking X-Play, was instantly hooked, never missed a video. Always knew Yahtzee was liberal, but back then he seemed more like a 90s edgy anti-censorship center left European than anything seriously cringe. That perception changed when Trump took office.

To be honest, I really couldn’t give less of a shit about Yahtzee’s opinion of the Trump admin (whether it’s positive or negative), but I never thought he would actually go inserting full-on Orange Man Bad jokes in his videos because that’s fucking hack shit and he should know better. 2000s Yahtzee may have made a quip about Bush/GWOT or America at large if it was relevant (reviewing a COD game for example), but now he injects it randomly, and obviously does so out of pure seeth. Over the last decade, despite the fact that I really don’t think his core political stances have really changed that much, his whole vibe has shifted from “Snarky, Crass Australian” to “Pretentious Californian Artist Wannabe”.

There really needs to start being a bigger cultural pushback against injecting their politics into shit, especially people who are just doing reviews and commentary and aren’t actually creating anything worthwhile independent of other people’s work. I cannot overstate it: In my opinion, Yahtzee is one of the best to ever do it. He was hilarious, consistent, professional, and has been around for damn near twenty fucking years. But, I went from watching literally every single video he put out starting in ‘07 to barely giving a shit about him between Trump and COVID.

People need to start saying: “You are a grown-ass man who swears at toys for a living. Put the fries in the bag, and shut the fuck up.”
 
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Yahtze surprisingly entitled for Games Journalist turned E-begger. I remember Second Wind tried viewer requested reviews and quietly stopped doing them. A big fat reason that I can recall was when During the KOTOR review, Yahtzee outed himself as too dumb to understand the Jedi Council's plan, tried to pass it off as a writing oversight.
I've discussed multiple times in this thread that there's evidence that for a lot of games he's "played", even as far back as Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015) he's simply just watched it on YouTube.

Demanding that he stream a game as proof of actually playing it or finding a game relatively obscure enough that there's no footage of it on YouTube would probably be rejected outright.
 
I've discussed multiple times in this thread that there's evidence that for a lot of games he's "played", even as far back as Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number (2015) he's simply just watched it on YouTube.

Demanding that he stream a game as proof of actually playing it or finding a game relatively obscure enough that there's no footage of it on YouTube would probably be rejected outright.
That's honestly not surprising. There were other "reviewers" of videogames doing shit like that back then and earlier. Spoony buying game footage from other people to put in his reviews because for some reason he just couldn't be bothered to capture the footage himself or stream it and record it that way(there can be reasons to pay other people for footage, like alternate path stuff, optional sidequests, alternate unavailable versions of the game, etc. but that's not what he did). The scamming faggot Jirard for his "The Completionist" shit was paying people to beat games for him.

here really needs to start being a bigger cultural pushback against injecting their politics into shit, especially people who are just doing reviews and commentary and aren’t actually creating anything worthwhile independent of other people’s work.
And this is the meat of the matter. It's more than just videogame "reviews". It's movie reviews, lore channels for IPs, all kinds of shit. It becomes an issue with these people get their head so far up their own ass that they believe they're important but the reality is they haven't actually fucking done anything.
 
And this is the meat of the matter. It's more than just videogame "reviews". It's movie reviews, lore channels for IPs, all kinds of shit. It becomes an issue with these people get their head so far up their own ass that they believe they're important but the reality is they haven't actually fucking done anything.
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Its incredible how this image never aged, but only expanded itself to cover more retard reviewers.
 
Spoony buying game footage from other people to put in his reviews because for some reason he just couldn't be bothered to capture the footage himself or stream it and record it that way(there can be reasons to pay other people for footage, like alternate path stuff, optional sidequests, alternate unavailable versions of the game, etc. but that's not what he did).
Whom was he buying footage from? Like, the most I recall was the Pumpkin Head game and he openly admitted in a commentary that he got this footage from a fan and even asked permission to use it.
 
Whom was he buying footage from? Like, the most I recall was the Pumpkin Head game and he openly admitted in a commentary that he got this footage from a fan and even asked permission to use it.
Spoony?
Ultima 9
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Ultima 8
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Ultima 7
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FF13
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FFX
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FFX-2
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Also got footage for runes of virtue, ultima underworld 1 and 2 (but he claimed it's because he lost his footage due to some issue) Didn't do it for Big Trouble in Little China, Ultima 6 and earlier, FF8. I never said he hid it, he put it in the credits. But it's not like he was ever doing some in depth commentary comparing international versions of these games or something. If anything including the Pumpkinhead video, it would seem like there's a distinct period when he decided to just use other people's game footage to review games. Keep in mind this is a guy who could have also been streaming the games and recording footage, but basically double dipping on revenue... but he didn't.

Actually I went and double checked. He also did it for Ultima 2, 3(I think this was one where he had fans submit footage so I wouldn't count this one)4, 5,

By the time you add all of that up, that's most of his videogame rants/reviews. Like I said, it's another example of a person having their head up their ass about how important/famous they are while relying entirely on IP created by others, and eventually just using other people's footage and "reviewing" games.
 
I discovered ZP by seeing his Army of Two review being featured all the way back on fucking X-Play, was instantly hooked, never missed a video. Always knew Yahtzee was liberal, but back then he seemed more like a 90s edgy anti-censorship center left European than anything seriously cringe. That perception changed when Trump took office.
Accurate. The let's play channel he did with Gabe is a great time capsule for what his views were pre Trump. He was vocally anti PC, was not a fan of feminism and dropped slurs pretty liberally. They stopped uploading videos just a few months before Trump won. He was yet another free speech liberal guy who switched up and became a huge faggot after Trump was elected. What is interesting to me is unlike 90% of the "woke" guys who used to say slurs he to my knowledge never apologized for it.
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Spoony?
Ultima 9
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Ultima 8
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Ultima 7
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FF13
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FFX
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FFX-2
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Also got footage for runes of virtue, ultima underworld 1 and 2 (but he claimed it's because he lost his footage due to some issue) Didn't do it for Big Trouble in Little China, Ultima 6 and earlier, FF8. I never said he hid it, he put it in the credits. But it's not like he was ever doing some in depth commentary comparing international versions of these games or something. If anything including the Pumpkinhead video, it would seem like there's a distinct period when he decided to just use other people's game footage to review games. Keep in mind this is a guy who could have also been streaming the games and recording footage, but basically double dipping on revenue... but he didn't.

Actually I went and double checked. He also did it for Ultima 2, 3(I think this was one where he had fans submit footage so I wouldn't count this one)4, 5,

By the time you add all of that up, that's most of his videogame rants/reviews. Like I said, it's another example of a person having their head up their ass about how important/famous they are while relying entirely on IP created by others, and eventually just using other people's footage and "reviewing" games.
Tbf, back then recording software wasn't as ubiquitous and simple to use, plus streaming itself wasn't as common. And it was probably easier to use long plays for good footage rather than hope your recording came out well, especially for games that take dozens of hours to finish.

Not to mention, I really doubt it he had to lie about playing Ultima of all things.
 
Tbf, back then recording software wasn't as ubiquitous and simple to use, plus streaming itself wasn't as common. And it was probably easier to use long plays for good footage rather than hope your recording came out well, especially for games that take dozens of hours to finish.

Not to mention, I really doubt it he had to lie about playing Ultima of all things.
He was a professional content creator whose job involved doing screen capture of console games, PC games, VHS, and so on. Clearly he had the ability to do this with the various screen capture he was doing without needing to get footage from elsewhere. This is a lame excuse.

And sure, streaming wasn't as common, but for someone whose only job was to play videogames while recording them... why the hell not double dip on that? It's not like he needed to record his mic audio from the stream to use for the commentary videos. Twitch was a thing back in 2011, justin.tv before that. Even later on he actually was streaming on youtube in 2015 which would have been a source of recorded footage to make commentary videos about other games which of course he never did(but that's because he's a lazy shithead).

Obviously the movie/tv/comic/music/etc. review guys couldn't get away with that. It wouldn't make any sense, they'd get copyright problems, it just wouldn't work. If all you had to do with your existing job, was basically hit a button and vaguely ramble about what you were doing for additional income to a pre-existing audience due to already having everything necessary setup, you wouldn't do that?

Angry Joe does precisely this now. His recent streams? Resident Evil Requiem, Slay the Spire 2.. and then on his youtube channel he's got a review for Resident Evil Requiem and an impressions video for Slay the Spire 2 that came out a couple of days after he was streaming those games, and he's had clips from his streams in his review videos for years now. It just makes sense to do.
 
He was a professional content creator whose job involved doing screen capture of console games, PC games, VHS, and so on. Clearly he had the ability to do this with the various screen capture he was doing without needing to get footage from elsewhere. This is a lame excuse.

And sure, streaming wasn't as common, but for someone whose only job was to play videogames while recording them... why the hell not double dip on that? It's not like he needed to record his mic audio from the stream to use for the commentary videos. Twitch was a thing back in 2011, justin.tv before that. Even later on he actually was streaming on youtube in 2015 which would have been a source of recorded footage to make commentary videos about other games which of course he never did(but that's because he's a lazy shithead).
I don't know your age, but even just keeping all the data back then would have been a pain in the ass, not to mention that a lot of those old games really didn't play nice with screen capturing software. I recommend watching Accursed Farms videos (the Stop Killing Games guy) where plenty of games has him tackle bizarre glitches and crashes due to the recording software.


Obviously the movie/tv/comic/music/etc. review guys couldn't get away with that. It wouldn't make any sense, they'd get copyright problems, it just wouldn't work. If all you had to do with your existing job, was basically hit a button and vaguely ramble about what you were doing for additional income to a pre-existing audience due to already having everything necessary setup, you wouldn't do that?
He eventually did after he realized it was easier than making videos, but the tech was still not there. I do recommend some of his long plays, especially the SWAT 4 ones.
 
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