Hmmm, well I think the problem is that "curses" are subjective. A curse that say maims you with an uncontrollable killing arm would really suck for 99% of the world, but if your say a Ninja who from that paticular moment on has very little going on except to kill several hundred dudes, it doesn't much matter. This is why curses like lycanthropy, or a demonic mage of uncontrollable bloodshed (Splatterhouse) don't work too well in video games.
To put it into perspective, Elric's sword "Stormbringer" has a nasty habit of killing everyone around him whenever he doesn't toe the line and do exactly what "The Lords Of The Higher Worlds" want him to do (and sometimes even then). Sure, it's awesome when he's hacking his way through small armies of semi-divine monsters, but less cool when it decides to say munch the soul of his true love, or kill almost everyone who ever tries to help him and watch his back (the exception being the incarnation of the Eternal Companion: Moonglum, who is pretty much favored by the same force empowering the sword).
The point being that I don't disagree with it being a curse, just that it's not much of a curse in this context. I agree that you'd think this is the kind of curse you'd put on a relatively normal sort, as opposed to a loner Ninja who has already decided to make it a personal crusade to kill you, and pretty much everyone else you've ever been remotely aquainted with.
-
That said I think people getting on games for not being politically correct is going overboard. Complaining about the game being racist for say portraying Muslims as the bad guys (which they are from a certain point of view held by a lot of people for good reason) is EXACTLY why we see so many bloody zombies in games, because as soon as people show up we start having critics scream "OMG, your not treating the brits even handedly" or "OMG, you can't show the Muslims as the bad guys". It's even greater hypocricy when you look at people making arguements about parts of the western world being far more concerned over sexuality than violence, and then having people scream "OMG, female characters in kinky and/or revealing outfits, we need to stop those", which undermines the whole arguement people make about the lulzworthy nature of a society that gets concerned over say bear breasts but doesn't mind the sadistic disembowelment of opponents.
The point here I'm making is that critics need to be careful about what they say, in this review alone a lot of Yahtzee's own snark has pretty much discredited a lot of the criticisms he's made in his other columns. You can't have it both ways, and if you wonder where a lot of this garbage comes from, well look at the criticisms made in this week's Zero punctuation, and conider this is supposed to be the irreverant game review. It's been going on for a while but Yahtzee seems to be slowly but surely turning into my grandmother.