Zero Punctuation: Everybody's Gone To The Rapture

[Nurb]

In the same way developers use "It's cinematic" while nothing about the game matches the standards of movies, "It's story driven" often doesn't hold up to literary standards. They are over-simplified or overly-vague without proper resolution.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I love the name changes this episode.

 

[bluefire5]

With the whole narrative craze lately I wonder what he would think of Life Is Strange
Well I can make a pretty good guess but I'd like to see him review it anyway

 

[Jake Martinez]

I love the name changes this episode.

I have to agree! By the time he got to "Everyone does the dinosaur" I think I peed myself a little bit.

Also, is anyone really surprised that this is an incomprehensible mess? There is absolutely no narrative structure, or as Yahtzee points out as is the case in Stanley Parable, player agency. You just wander around soaking up the "virtual atmosphere", which evidently is pretty crap and boring.

You can go spend 30 dollars on Steam right now for a visual novel like Grisaia no Kajitsu [http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/345610/] and be vastly more entertained by a "game" with no gameplay that only uses the bare minimum of what's possible with a computer program to relate a story (2d visuals, voice acting, music). Of course, it actually has a narrative plot structure and good characters, so maybe that's a hint that developers like the Chinese Room ought to take on board...

 

[Lunar Templar]

Anyone who isn't a creationist should've known it was bad by its title alone.

pretty sure even they would look at this and call it shit.

 

[vallorn]

Yahtzee, everyone with a brain who has visited /r/GamerGhazi hates Ghazelles. I guess The Chinese Room are no exceptions to this. Although, that does imply that they have the sum of a single brain between them which is not evidenced in most of their games so... Hmm... Quite the little conundrum we have now. Perhaps 'All their brains went to the rapture'?

 

[FPLOON]

I laughed harder than I thought I was going to with that The Archers/Quatermass And The Pits crossover reference... My glob, my grandmother showed me some "obscure shit" back in my Elementary School days...

Other than that, Everybody Can Go Fuck Themselves really doesn't sound like it needed a gaming-esque execution in the first place...

 

[Haru17]

I'm not very interested in the premise of this game, but I'd put even less stock in Yahtzee's opinion of any story ever. It's not like he's liked any of the interesting narrative games of the past few years, or basically any JRPG ever, mind, so in terms of game narrative criticism he's slighting everything against an invisible rule stick.

 

[gridsleep]

It sounds as if they stole the idea from watching the first ten minutes of The Quiet Earth and skipping the rest.

 

[Transdude1996]

It sounds as if they stole the idea from watching the first ten minutes of The Quiet Earth and skipping the rest.

Or they fast-forward through all the Twilight Zone episodes detailing someone being the last person alive.

 

[rgrekejin]

Jesus Christ, nothing's coming out anymore. At this rate, Yahtzee won't be able to make a Top 5 video.

Wonder if he'd be able to do a retro Top 5 of 2007...

I think so far he's only really liked Bloodborne, which is good for #1.

He also thought well of Witcher 3, and had generally positive reviews of Talos Principle and Elite: Dangerous, if memory serves. Those have been the only ones which were even vaguely positive that I can recall.

He loved Elite, but that game is from 2014, so I don't know if it qualifies. Same with Talos.

True. His reviews of them happened after his last "Year's End Roundup" video, so I assumed he would count them as being part of this year's crop, as they came out too late to be included in last year's video, even thought they were released last year. But I suppose there's really no reason to assume that. In that case, his "Best of" is shaping up to be... what? Bloodborne, Witcher 3, roughly 40% of Arkham Knight and... Freedom Planet? Maybe Fallout 4 if he doesn't hate it?

 

[Metalix Knightmare]

I'm not very interested in the premise of this game, but I'd put even less stock in Yahtzee's opinion of any story ever. It's not like he's liked any of the interesting narrative games of the past few years, or basically any JRPG ever, mind, so in terms of game narrative criticism he's slighting everything against an invisible rule stick.

You ARE aware that Earthbound is one of his favorite games right?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Jesus Christ, nothing's coming out anymore. At this rate, Yahtzee won't be able to make a Top 5 video.

Wonder if he'd be able to do a retro Top 5 of 2007...

I think so far he's only really liked Bloodborne, which is good for #1.

He also thought well of Witcher 3, and had generally positive reviews of Talos Principle and Elite: Dangerous, if memory serves. Those have been the only ones which were even vaguely positive that I can recall.

He loved Elite, but that game is from 2014, so I don't know if it qualifies. Same with Talos.

True. His reviews of them happened after his last "Year's End Roundup" video, so I assumed he would count them as being part of this year's crop, as they came out too late to be included in last year's video, even thought they were released last year. But I suppose there's really no reason to assume that. In that case, his "Best of" is shaping up to be... what? Bloodborne, Witcher 3, roughly 40% of Arkham Knight and... Freedom Planet? Maybe Fallout 4 if he doesn't hate it?

He liked Rocket League quite a bit, I can see that as an easy #5.

 

[maninahat]

When you compare this game to something like "Her story" you realise the main issue with these walking simulators, walking around adds absolutely nothing to the game.

"Her Story" is very low on the interactivity scale but it's still pretty engaging. It doesn't make you wonder about all the over the place in the vague hope that making a a world will to walk around will automatically bring immersion. There's also been a lot of thought put into the way the player experiences the story rather than just randomly distributing it around a game map.

I'm not sure I agree with people's idea of the term "interactive". In the likes of Her Story, you aren't doing much in the way of physical interaction, but your brain is doing a great deal of heavy lifting. I find it is like saying a person working on a crossword puzzle is hardly doing anything, because they don't move their pencil enough. That's why I tend to give the better written walking simulators a pass; if they are encouraging you to do a lot of thinking, I don't mind if my actual game play interaction is fairly minimal. That said, there must be some purpose to embodying the game protagonist, otherwise they might as well have just wrote a mystery novel or radio play.

 

[Dalisclock]

I'm not very interested in the premise of this game, but I'd put even less stock in Yahtzee's opinion of any story ever. It's not like he's liked any of the interesting narrative games of the past few years, or basically any JRPG ever, mind, so in terms of game narrative criticism he's slighting everything against an invisible rule stick.

He likes some of them, but IIRC, he doesn't like any of the "new" FF games, pretty much any of them after IX(has he ever said anything about X?). To be fair, there are plenty of FF fans who don't particularly like the new games either, either being MMO's, MMO but offline and the whole giant mess that is the XIII trilogy.

 

[thanatos388]

Jesus Christ, nothing's coming out anymore. At this rate, Yahtzee won't be able to make a Top 5 video.

Wonder if he'd be able to do a retro Top 5 of 2007...

Until Dawn came out a couple of days ago, and we have Phantom Pain, AC Syndicate, Fallout 4, the annual COD misery train...

I doubt Yahtzee will review MGS5 Part 2 unless as a last resort. After that, that's only 5 games total, and COD won't be coming till November.

You say "Part 2" as if the content in "Part 1" was enough to be considered part 1 and not simply a short bullshit prologue with some silly mods on top. On that note Yahtzee loves to shit on Kojimas writing too much to pass up the final Metal Gear I think. Also its gameplay is so different that it probably warrants a review from him just to see if the larger focus on gameplay was enough to entertain him.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

He likes some of them, but IIRC, he doesn't like any of the "new" FF games, pretty much any of them after IX(has he ever said anything about X?).

I'm not 100% sure but I think he criticized X's [ridiculously convoluted] story in one of his recent Let's Drown Out videos. I forget which. Also made a similar observation regarding the Kingdom Hearts chronology, in comparison.

 

[GrumbleGrump]

I'd like to see Yahtzee review Splinter Cell Blacklist or Mortal Kombat 9(and his thoughts on it getting banned and then unbanned in Australia).

He already did Mortal Kombat 9, dude.

He also sorta liked Arkham Knight.

Eh, he liked the gameplay, which is really the only thing to like about the game apart from the graphics. Besides, it's not really top 5 material as the story was terrible. Whats worse, it's the kind of terrible that isn't even funny.

You say "Part 2" as if the content in "Part 1" was enough to be considered part 1 and not simply a short bullshit prologue with some silly mods on top. On that note Yahtzee loves to shit on Kojimas writing too much to pass up the final Metal Gear I think. Also its gameplay is so different that it probably warrants a review from him just to see if the larger focus on gameplay was enough to entertain him.

He did admit to liking the gameplay, so far to say that if it was on a game longer that what he got for 40 smackaroos, he would love it. It's hard to debate him on that too, I played Ground Zeroes (bought it for like 5 bucks) and it's pretty good. Flows quite well actually.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

So, another typical Chinese Room "game" - an audiobook, where you hold the W-key for an hour to listen to it with a lot of pause.
I feel those guys should just do that, audiobooks, as they clearly don't have the slightest grasp of what a game is supposed to be. You know, interactive in SOME way.

You're right, they should have allowed you to punch and shoot things at random intervals. Because that's basically what 'interactivity' entails these days.

 

[Bindal]

So, another typical Chinese Room "game" - an audiobook, where you hold the W-key for an hour to listen to it with a lot of pause.
I feel those guys should just do that, audiobooks, as they clearly don't have the slightest grasp of what a game is supposed to be. You know, interactive in SOME way.

You're right, they should have allowed you to punch and shoot things at random intervals. Because that's basically what 'interactivity' entails these days.

No, but say, having to press a button to lower a bridge. Or offering two routes, leading maybe or maybe not a different storypath. Stanley Parable did that as basically its sole "game mechanic". It had no proper failure state (you could get an ending you already knew about from the five billion or so the game had and consider that as failure state), but it was still interactive and it reacted to what you did - either by adapting the story or questioning you straigh up.
Here, we got "walk to listen to audiologs" and nothing else. The order doesn't make a difference, either. And Dear Esther was even worse as you were stuck on rails.