I find Yahtzee's reviews refreshingly brutal and honest, saying what many other reviewers might be thinking, but would be too scared to actually say.
There is one point, though, that seemed, to me, to be rather unnecessary. Judging from the comments, many other people agreed with Yahtzee, but since I only skimmed through the comments I don't know if anyone else pointed this fact out yet.
I'm talking about "That Guy" syndrome. It's when one person happens to be better at the particular game than the friends he's playing with, and ends up trashing and humiliating them and getting *****-slapped in return.
What's wrong about it? It's a perfectly valid situation, and ends up potentially ruining the game for everyone.
The problem is that many games I've seen have a counter: handicap settings.
Maybe there's a simple reason many gamers overlook it. Maybe there's a taboo on handicap, because if you insist on using the settings it's almost like admitting that you're mentally handicapped. It likens you or your friend to a drooling, retarded boy slouching in a wheelchair while his nurse quietly takes the controller out of his hands.
Of course, handicap settings can actually make the game fun again. My family and I have been using them for over a decade. It's practically a requirement when you have three brothers and a dad sitting down at a four-player game, especially when you need both hands to count the collective age difference between the brothers.
The Super Smash Bros. series goes one step further and has an automatic handicap setting. If you win round, your lose a handicap level. If you lose rounds, you gain handicap levels. That's exactly what we did manually with Goldeneye 64, and having the feature to do it automatically (and in Brawl's case, behind the scenes) was really nice.
At handicap's most extreme settings, you can set up a mentally retarded hamster versus a Jedi, and the hamster will have a good chance of winning. The advantage of handicap options are simply thus: All players can play to the best of their ability, and everyone gets their turn kicking ass and getting their ass kicked. Unless, of course, that smells too much like socialism to you.
If your "That Guy" is a real jerk-hole, too, he can feel smug and secure in the knowledge that you needed the odds stacked in your favour to win. You, on the other hand, still got the pleasure of properly dragging his ass all over the stage and delivering sweet vengeance.
I'm a weirdo in that I'll usually explore all the menu options of a game before actually playing the game proper, so I usually discover if there are handicaps or not. At the least, I've discovered that console games without that setting don't tend to be played in multiplayer all that often.
Next time you're playing with a group of friends, and you just want to sock "That Guy" in the eye, maybe you should see if there are handicap options in the game. Of course, if there aren't, go ahead and sock him one.
