Brotherofwill said:
Man I don't get Yatzhee sometimes. It's funny and he's a really great guy, but what's he exactly trying to get at?
He keeps on complaining about lazy sequels, cookie-cutter bland adventures and an overall lack of originality, but then he doesn't do anything about it. He keeps on reviewing shitty, mainstream titles instead of maybe branching out a bit to show us some better games. He said that 'noone likes it when I'm being nice', but that's just not true. His Psychonauts review owned, I bet thousands of people picked that up and tried it because of his recommendation. I did. He just doesn't do anything about it. He has a viewership of millions, he really could pitch some new concepts at us instead of whining and repeating the same tripe.
So the pacing is off? I strongly disagree. In order for these 'visceral' moments to work, the pacing has to be balanced with high to low moments. Like in great movies, starting slow is often extremely helpfull because it makes the more accelerated bits seem more extreme. It's supposed to be a murder mistery like 'Misery' or 'Don't Look Now', it's always good to set these up in the frameworks of common lifes to get the necessary shock value later on. U2 was great, but the shoot-bang-bang formula will only work so well, and no single moment is able to stand out. Excessive action is really a problem in modern entertainment.
I loved the beginning of this game. You really don't know what to expect. It starts incredibly slow. Ridiculously slow. I sure as hell made some jokes about it, while I was playing it (like shake contoller after the peeing animation), but it still worked because it was new and set the frame works. My mother was interested in the game from watching the first 10 minutes, that says it all (and she's very hard to get interested in games). The only thing she's been interested in in this medium is The Last Guardian, because it resembles the imaginative.
I don't mind that he doesn't like it. Hell there are loads of things that I didn't like about it. Voice acting was extremely unbalanced, it relied on a fair share of clichees and the timing that the game is on can be iritating at times. But it was a breath of fresh air in the current releases. Atleast he can highlight that it does some new things, instead of giving people the impression that this is a Sims game.
If you really thought he was going to like this game, you haven't really been paying attention.
For starters, Yahtzee's complaining and pretensions to some kind of greater standards have always been something of a joke. He's always contradicted himself on what he claims to want, and and he's always been more fanboyish about the few things he does like than than genuinely able to explain what they're great. Psychonauts is a perfect example- the game was fun, but it was hardly deserving of being placed above many of the games that he's reviewed. Or how about Painkiller, one of the dumbest, most simplistic shooters of the decade? It's fine if you like that sort of thing, but don't come to me afterward pretending that you're too good for Halo.
Until the day where Yahztee gives a good review to a game that it isn't cool to give a good review to, like, say, Halo, I'll never consider him a serious critic.
Second, Yahtzee has never liked games that put story over gameplay. He's complained about quick time events. He's never been patient with games. What, exactly, made you think he'd like Heavy Rain? Even if I did take him seriously, and even if I didn't personally find the idea behind Heavy Rain to be incredibly dull, I still wouldn't have expected him to like it.
funny stuff indeed...