Recent content by Marik Bentusi

Oh man, good thing I manually checked this site, looks like the site revamp disabled the Zero Punctuation RSS feed (and it looks like the new site doesn't have a ZP-specific RSS feed yet). Happy to see the site is still alive tho!

I actually think the time-locked doors in Dead Cells are a really smart design choice. They, along with shortcuts unlocked with abilities you gain in the later levels, are what make rushing levels viable. You can play the game very slowly and stock up on all the helpful goodies you can get...

I mean, depending on who/where you ask, "Mary Sue" can mean anything between "the literal original Mary Sue character", "a character exhibiting a trait also common among Special Snowflake-type characters" and "a badly written character". But from what I can tell the common definition among...

I feel like Super Hot may have been kind of a victim of its prototype's own success. The vague version of the full game's plot and the "shoot red dudes in a world with almost no textures" worked fine enough for the scope of the prototype, but both seemed to have been stretched thin for the full...

TF2? Last time I checked (which admittedly was a couple years ago) it was full of sidegrades, but no straight upgrades, with many vanilla loadouts being pretty damn viable, if a bit boring compared to some stuff that came out later.

He think he just cited them because they were Fallout's previous way of having players feel consequences about the morality of their actions. If the series had had a different way of doing that, he'd have cited that one instead. I don't think it's so much that he's missing the karma meter in...

Wasn't Yahtzee's final point that it handles "your choices matter" poorly?

Different guy here, but this doesn't seem to do much for difficulty since the Get Out Of Jail Free card still works: - mash Spacebar until you're at least at the edge of the orc horde - run away to the nearest herb to regain all your health - re-enter battle It's especially simple if...

Oh yeah the sound design was really messed up for some reason. I can only assume they tried to do something clever with it and then in the general chaos of Thief's development they shelved the feature and didn't tidy up the code properly, so it produced weird bugs. It's a shame, too, because one...

Aside from the things already listed, what bothered me personally the most was all the interruptive micro-cutscenes that turned an organic chase scene into "rub [spacebar] against this bunch of crates and pray that it's actually a climbable object". At least FarCry3 had the decency of putting...

Personally I think "Glorious PC Gaming Master Race" is a joke with a bit of truth. It's always annoying when someone goes full arrogant fanboy mode, but the PC does generally offer a lot more features variety, games and raw horsepower, at the cost of difficult optimization and debugging because...

Prototype's got exactly the kind of aggressive, fast, fluid, varied gameplay I need for letting off Steam. You can fling fridges at tanks one moment, claw your way through mutants the next, and roleplay as Blackwatch to round things out.

A directed experience with no way to alter the narrative doesn't have to be devoid of player agency or unfocus the player. Linear games do it all the time. In the go-to example of HL2 you have zero narrative choice/impact, but you're still very much in the spotlight. It's also possible without...

To me the biggest difference between TSP and B:TS was player agency. TSP is designed to be very reactive to your actions/decisions, limited as they may be. You may not be in control of it, but you're definitely the one steering the plot. The spotlight's on you. In B:TS it's more like the...

What he describes is pretty much the perspective I got as someone that never played GTA. Aside from a couple hours in GTA2 with a dozen silly cheats enabled 'cause the missions bored the snot out of me. I expected the whole sandbox thing to make for more organic "Fuck yeah" moments tho...