Zero Punctuation: No More Heroes

[Dobbinatrix]

Branston pickle is awesome!

my guess for next week, condemed 2

 

[nekrosangelo]

Have to say that's the first Zero Punctuation in a while to actually make me laugh for a while after the video was finished for some time.

Gotta love branston pickle.

 

[RTR]

There should be a Zero Punctuation podcast

 

[evilsandwich]

Good lord. Pretty good.
My theory of a Smash review this week is hopelessly dashed to pieces.

Is Smash Bros even out in Australia yet?

 

[Uszi]

My theory of a Smash review this week is hopelessly dashed to pieces.

And will probably remain that way until June at the earliest. Gawd bless Nintendo and their EU/Aus/NZ release dates.

EXHIBIT A:
http://www.australiangamer.com/feature/385/party_games.html
Dated March 30, 2008

... Though, that should pretty much sum it up for you, and make said ZP review unnecessary.

EXHIBIT BUNTIL IT IS MADE ILLEGAL)
http://www.gpstore.com.au/Games/1556150.html
http://us.codejunkies.com/Products/Wii-FreeLoader--US-Version__EF000593.aspx

w00t?

 

[Psykoo]

I actually thought that was amazing!, right up there with some of the best done, good reviewing yahtzee!

 

[Thisusernameisjustanotherwasteofspace]

So, the Jurassic Park theme song for the Turok review wasn't obvious? XD

Nice review, but that's about it. And why does Yahtzee's voice keep changing with every new review?

 

[evilsandwich]

So, the Jurassic Park theme song for the Turok review wasn't obvious? XD

Nice review, but that's about it. And why does Yahtzee's voice keep changing with every new review?

I think its just to make us scratch our heads.

 

[Flaming-Gerbil]

Nicely done, if it wasn't for the fact that I feel Wii's are a gimmicky pile of rubbish which wears thin after a week or two I'd buy it in an instant.

Also bonus points for having Muse as the closing track.

 

[medibot]

I know it's a bit much to ask you to play through the game a second time, but I found that kicking it up to hard (I'm sorry, "Bitter") mode actually made the combat reasonably challenging, especially in the timed missions. Speaking of combat difficulty, if you managed to button-mash your way through the Bus segment without getting your torso cut into five pieces several times, please put some of your essence in a bottle and mail it to me so I may drink it and become, like you, a god of video gaming.

 

[Bodo_Fraggins]

Ok Yahtzee is give up, im trying to vote for the webby awards but cant navigate my way through the darn website, i dont know if its me being Retard McSpacky Pants or the site, where oh where do i go to vote for you?!?

ive tried the film section, the use of animation section, public service and activism, someone tell me please!

Film // ??? // ???

fill in the blanks someone

 

[evilsandwich]

I thought you said you hated JRPGs.

So why do you like EarthBound?

Make up your mind.

There's an exception to every rule. Besides we can all agree that mixing the Cthulhu Mythos with Charlie Brown cartoons makes for a fairly non typical JRPG game.

 

[Poptart Fairy]

I thought you said you hated JRPGs.

So why do you like EarthBound?


Make up your mind.

In the same sentence he mentioned hating JRPGs, he listed Earthbound as one of the few exceptions.

Context, people!

 

[illegalusername]

"amusing cartoon whale in an ocean of second hand bong water" had me floored.

If you liked NMH for the sheer "what" factor, you should try God Hand.
It doesn't even try to make sense, you just punch the fuck out of gorillas and midget power rangers.

 

[shinjiLike]

Aloha,
does anyone know which version of No More Heroes they have in Australia ?
The version here in Europe (and Japan, I think) is without the whole blood and splatter thing. I´m not really a fan of this stuff, but I like my games, movies etc. the way they were meant to be.
I´m just wondering which one Yahtzee reviewed.

Great review as allways btw. ^^

 

[sammyfreak]

Once again awesome!

 

[Crooked Knight]

The Yahtzee avatar flying through the end of the universe on a Branston jar while wearing sunglasses is one of the best things you've ever done.

 

[Melaisis]

"No... that's too obvious."

I approve of Yahtzee's choice of music quite often, actually. Especially when he began with 'Crash Into Me' on Burnout: Paradise. Well done kidda!

 

[myopiczeal]

And a transcript in a Technicolor Dreamcoat:

No, no, that's a bit too obvious.

No More Heroes is a Japanese game based around Jedi lightsaber fighting, and starring as the main character a hopeless pop-culture-obsessed social reject who spends most of his time whining, getting strung along by women, and being a generally unlikeable fuckbend. So at least you can't fault it for understanding its audience (predictable joke). The game is brought to us by Suda 51, the 51st result of an illegal Japanese cloning experiment to create the world's most auteur game designer, Sudas 1 through 50 having perished after their minds failed to absorb the necessary level of pretentiousness.

His last game was Killer 7, and let's get one thing straight: I fucking loved Killer 7. There we were, living our grey, predictable lives, playing our grey, predictable games, when along came Killer 7 in a Technicolor Dreamcoat, leaving slightly perplexed joy in the wake of its huge motorbike, showing exactly what could be done when you flout all established convention, and just start exploring what can really be done with gaming as an art form. I still don't know how to classify it; puzzle, action-adventure, rail shooter? Well, whatever it was, it was a preciously unique amusing cartoon whale in an ocean of secondhand bong water.

Now we have No More Heroes, a Grand Theft Auto clone. "Shine on, you crazy diamond," said Yahtzee, his voice thick like sarcastic Marmite. Well, that's a bit uncalled for; the experience is still as off-the-beaten-track as I've come to expect. You play Travis Touchdown, the aforementioned specky narcissistic weirdo (characterized just a little bit uncomfortably close to home), who buys a lightsaber and vows to become the greatest assassin in the world. You know how it is when you buy a barbecue; you throw a lot of parties for a while to fool yourself into thinking it wasn't a waste of money. To achieve his aim, he has to slice his way through 10 colourful boss characters in a trippy, ultraviolent, Yellow-Submarinesque odyssey through social satire, in between riding his bike, playing with his kitten, and buying trendy clothes in an optional side quest to look as much like an absolute bell-end as possible.

The open world aspect is illusion; the game is essentially linear, not that there's anything wrong with that. There is, however, something wrong with repetition. After you kill a ranked assassin, you go into the city to grind yourself retarded. To proceed, you have to cough up a sum roughly equivalent to the street value of three human lungs, so first you take a low-paying part-time job, which unlocks some higher-paying assassination sub-missions, there being lots of overlap in the industries of litter-picking and professional murder. Next, you're dropped into a room with 50 of the same mouthy big girl's blouses you fight absolutely bloody everywhere, and get handed a big bag of money once they're all raining down upon the landscape in a million overconfident bits.

Funnily enough, my favourite part of the between-mission rigmarole is the menial part-time job at the start. Each time, there's a different clever little mini-game that tries to make the most of the weak controls. If they were higher-paying, I'd probably have chucked in the assassination gigs altogether, which can be summed up as: mash A until bored, then mash B for a bit instead. Actually, the sword fighting is pretty fun (as it had fucking better be, considering the amount of it we have to do), but there's one aspect of it that makes me want to slap Suda 51 until his eyeballs switch places, and that's the fact that after killing an enemy, Travis has a random chance of screaming out the name of one of his favourite puddings, and gaining superpowers for a bit. And when you put random chance into combat mechanics, all strategy has been thrown out of the window, then scraped off the ground and used to pick up the broken glass. And then Sod's Law ensures that the enemy who finally gives you a superpower will inevitably be the last one in the room, leaving Travis running around with glowing Dragonball Z hair for 10 seconds, seriously menacing the walls.

The actual gameplay of the ranking boss fights usually boils down to: wait for them to attack, block or dodge it, then ***** slap them a few times while they scratch their heads like silly chimps. But the awkward thing about No More Heroes, or at least about reviewing it, is that like Killer 7, it's intended to be satirical, and when there are problems with the gameplay, I'm worried that it was intended to be that way (as a satire of, I don't know, pretentious video games), and if I were to call it out on that, then I'd lose my credibility with the cool alternative crowd. But then I remember that any game designer who sacrifices fun to make an artistic statement is obviously stuck so far up his own arse that he's in danger of choking on his own head.

Enough ragging, because in spite of the last 8 paragraphs of petulant, bird-like warbling, I enjoyed No More Heroes a lot. The unpredictable story and quirky aesthetic kept me fascinated enough to keep plowing through it just to see what happened next. So I'll say the same thing about No More Heroes that I say about Killer 7, and EarthBound, and Branston Pickle. As flawed as it is, get it anyway, because you will never experience anything else like it. God knows what would happen if you spread Branston Pickle onto No More Heroes; possibly the universe would end. And it would be AWESOME.