Zero Punctuation

[Nappi]

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php

The scrolling ad for Painkiller.

Hilarious. Or so I have been told by Kotaku.

[Wrestlevania]

I'm still hoping Kotaku will drown in its own semen sometime shortly.

There is simply no justice in this world.

[Nappi]

Bit cranky, eh?

BTW. My previous post wasn't meant as a Kotaku bash (even considered leaving the last part out to avoid these kind of things). I have always considered the site as a collection of links and not as some kind of cradle of game journalism anyway. Works just fine for that purpose.

[Marek]

Sadly Brian Crecente does see his site as some kind of cradle of game journalism. Did you know he was once a crime reporter? A CRIME REPORTER. And that apparently gives him an infinite stack of Get Out of Jail Free cards for all the crap 'journalism' Kotaku does.

Just joining in on the crankyness. I'm quite a social person you see.

[Wrestlevania]

I've ranted and raved about Kotaku's fall into gutter reporting elsewhere on the web, but suffice to say: I used to really rate Crecente and Kotaku about 2 years ago. Then they noticed they got more traffic for posting pictures of anime figurines having a shit. And ad dollars is all that counts when it comes to online journalism.

Anyway, back on topic...

[DanJW]

Like Nappi I just use it as a sort of link suppository respository. Although Brian Ashcraft sometimes makes me chuckle and the quality of comments has slowly improved.

[Nachimir]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18761

What’s interesting is the recent rise in a different approach to reviews, one that isn’t dependent on their being published on the day of a game’s launch and that doesn’t doesn’t come with a score attached. The staggering popularity of Ben ‘Yathzee’ Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation videos (which, according to Alexa.com have booted host site The Escapist’s profile up several internet leagues), are almost always focused on games that the viewers have already experienced first hand post-release.

Of course, its popularity has been driven by excellent knob gags but behind the stickman puerile humor there is something more serious and profound going on. People might come for the cock jokes but they stay for the critical chutzpah that props them up. It mightn’t look like it in the classical sense, but Zero Punctuation is one of the first pieces of games criticism, as opposed to reviewing, to hit the mainstream.

[DanJW]

The World Ends With You

although in typical Yahtzee fashion it is more of a comment on JRPGs in general.

[thorn]

Oblivion.

[Roderick]

Funny episode, but rather useless so long after Oblivion's release. We all deciphered its flaws when it came out, then took a big gulp to get it down and proceeded to discover there was actually a pretty nice game in there.

[Wrestlevania]

It's still worth doing I think. Oblivion wasn't a slight game by any means, so I'm sure there are still lots of people out there who still haven't played it properly.

Like me.

(Tried a couple of times but just can't get into it.)

[ThunderPeel2001]

It's still one of my "to be played properly" games. It's just too dense to penetrate without spending hours and hours (and hours) in it, I imagine. The plot is immensely dull, too. I certainly don't want to have to go back through one of those boring portals again... Yikes.

But there's plenty of other things to do... if you can be bothered

[DanJW]

Yes, it took me a while to get fully sucked into Oblivion (heh) but I did eventually, mostly through the Thieves Guild quests and the Dark Brotherhood quests. The main story is indeed very dull (an excellent reason to be fast and/or invisible is so that you can run through the oblivion gate levels without stopping to fight anything).

[Roderick]

But there's plenty of other things to do... if you can be bothered

You're taking it the wrong way. You should approach Oblivion like Homer would. Omigosh there are some monsters over there OH LOOK A BUTTERFLY WHEEEE! /carts off to chase some random critter and jump on rocks

[SiN]

You're taking it the wrong way. You should approach Oblivion like Homer would. Omigosh there are some monsters over there OH LOOK A BUTTERFLY WHEEEE! /carts off to chase some random critter and jump on rocks

Crackdown was amazing like that. I kept going, "alright, it's getting late, I should go to slee ... WHAT, ANOTHER AGILITY ORB?!" *stomps away*

SiN

[ThunderPeel2001]

You're taking it the wrong way. You should approach Oblivion like Homer would. Omigosh there are some monsters over there OH LOOK A BUTTERFLY WHEEEE! /carts off to chase some random critter and jump on rocks

I'm not sure if that's really saying good about the game It's on my "give it a proper go" list, though. I have to say that the stats put me off a bit, too. (They seem so old fashioned these days, it's amazing they're still around.) Isn't it really easy to accidentally "gimp" your character by picking the wrong skills at the beginning?

[DanJW]

The stats system works quite well, in that you will get better at whatever you do most (although melee for instance will be really hard at the start if you don't begin with a boost). Yahtzee was mistaken in that hybrid characters don't work - in oblivion they work fine. Plus there is a large assortment of premade charcter classes to choose from.

In fact people that play the game a lot often choose to invert their stats - choosing their core stats to be not the ones they plan to use most. Although this seems weird it allows you to become much more powerful by the end of the game, because you can improve stats more before hitting the level cap.

[Scrobbs]

I'm in the same mind as Thunderpeel. It just looked too time intensive to get anything out of it. So I didn't bother.

[elmuerte]

wth!?

worst episode ever

[Nappi]

Ah, reruns. Summer has finally reached the internet it seems.

[Wrestlevania]

Honestly, it doesn't seem like more than a handful of weeks since we watched this the first time around. Why not pick some of his really early, non-Escapist stuff to show more recent viewers where it all began?

Definitely an odd choice to show again if you ask me.

[Scrobbs]

I don't get it - are they not all available all the time anyway?

[elmuerte]

it was first show end of august 2007 (has it been that long already!?)

All episodes:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

[thorn]

Why not pick some of his really early, non-Escapist stuff to show more recent viewers where it all began?

There only were about two of them. He's probably just on holiday. God knows I wish I could escape the southern hemispherical cold right now.

[twmac]

That is madness, I'm in Melbourne right now and it is not cold in the slightest.

Mind you I just spent 2 years in Montreal. Now that is what real cold feels like.

It probably doesn't dip below 12 degrees centigrade in Melbourne, even at night.