Yahtzee masih bersikap kasar soal video game, dan bagus untuknya

When the HMS Escapist sank everyone worth a damn swam away to form a YouTube channel called Second Wind, where Yahtzee Croshaw's video series Zero Punctuation continued under the name Fully Ramblomatic. It's not exactly the same—the people have glasses now—but it's continuing the essential work of being rude about videogames on the internet.

Back in the Before Times, when someone brought a videogame magazine to school we'd all gather round to flick through it, and the only measure of whether it was a good videogame magazine was if the captions on the screenshots were funny. I didn't notice until years later, but that meant we only read the British ones.

That particularly British tone is something Yahtzee's videos share. It might come across as flippant to some, but to me it's always read as deep care. Putting in the effort to make a description witty instead of plain means you're working harder to keep your audience engaged, and doing that for videogames suggests you care enough about them to want your audience to actually pay attention.

Yahtzee does that. Like Blackadder finding the 100th way to tell Baldrick he's an idiot, he never runs out of ways to complain about videogames. You know how Palworld made a big deal about letting you give your Fauxkémon guns? As Yahtzee points out, to actually do that in the game you have to "jump through so many hoops you feel like a spider in a bowl of Cheerios." That's a throwaway description I bet took the better part of the afternoon, and every episode is full of them.

When he actually likes something about a game it stands out. Not just because each tiny liferaft of positivity floats on the storm-tossed ocean of his negativity, but because his praise is as well-observed as his critique. When he says the turn-based combat of South Park: The Stick of Truth gives it a pacing that leaves natural gaps for jokes to fit in, that observation deepens your understanding of the game.

The internet's full of cynicism now, and I understand why people wouldn't be interested in more of it. But the videogame industry deserves to be disrespected every now and then, and videos that don't even bother to show a screenshot because contempt can be communicated just as well via stock images and a recurring catalogue of weird little guys are the kind of disrespect I can get behind.

I mean, he's wrong about Knights of the Old Republic, but I'll forgive him that one.