Zero Punctuation: Super Smash Bros. Brawl

[twilight_dweller]

Although I don't agree with some of his points, I can definitely see where he is coming from, and he raised some good issues. Such as the wonky camera.

 

[ArchmageDale]

Oh good, holy lord in heaven.

It's called COMEDY for the love of God!!!!!

Humour, you know, like ha ha ha, that was rather funny and so on? Is that not what Yahtzee is about, making us laugh with his witty, cutting reviews, you know, HIS JOB?! THE REASON HE'S GOTTEN SUCH FAME IS BEACUSE IT'S FUNNY.

I LOVED SSBB, and I LOVED this review, because it made me laugh, and anyone, ANYONE who got "offended" is a fucking idiot.

IT'S A GAME. Jesus CHRIST.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm a longtime Yahtzee fan, and this is far from the first time he has given a negative review to a franchise I like. Case in point: Resident Evil. One of my favorite franchises ever, Yahtzee clearly isn't a fan. That's okay. RE isn't for everyone, and I totally see where he's coming from on some of the things he said about it. He has also made a great deal of reviews that I completely agree with him on.

This one is different because he isn't giving the game a fair shake and he isn't backing up his statements with fact.

Oh, and as far as people who "got offended by it being fucking idiots," well that was probably because he pretty much came right out and said "this game is stupid, and if you like it you are stupid." Actually, I think his exact wording was "jibbering fanboy twats," or something close to it. So, yes, I was mildly offended... because he was directly insulting me. That's kind of the textbook definition of being offended. Negative reviews are fine, but when you start directly stating that a person is stupid for their tastes in games (something that members of gaming culture are notoriously bad about) that's when you've crossed the line.

Heaven knows I'm not trying to start a flame war here, geez. I'm just trying to make sure the other side of the coin is seen.

 

[gigirizzi]

Incidentally, all of you praising Yahtzee for "sticking it to this game" are, in fact, as bad or worse than the people who were yelling for Yahtzee to review the thing in the first place. Why? Because you guys are exactly the same as those people, except you want him to heap vitrolic hatred on the game. You want someone who agrees with you and are praising him for knocking on the game, because you want to say "Ha ha someone said SSBB sucks", probably to win some argument with your friends. Grow up.

If that's the sort of person you are then you are that guy; not that guy who is better at games, but that guy who everyone realizes over time somehow became their friend but is a jerk and they really don't want to hang out with him because he is mean, obnoxious, and acts like a twelve year old. Seriously. Nice as it is to feel validated, if your opinions need external validation then they are pretty worthless. Don't be afraid to hold your own opinions, but if you must back them up with what some random online reviewer said then you really do need to get a life.

You should not particularly care that he "stuck it to the game"; as far as I and many other viewers are concerned, the purpose of Zero Punctuation is not so much to review games as to give us five minutes of pure unadulterated joy and laughter per week in the context of a game review. We all love to see Yahtzee insult games; he's quite good at it. But when he starts insulting people he just falls down because it just isn't quite as funny and there really isn't all that much new ground to cover - everyone has said pretty much everything insulting there is to say about gamers, and it really just isn't all that funny anymore because we've seen it done twenty thousand times already.

His review was spot on and funny IMHO. Maybe it wasn't for you this time, but I'm not sure who made you think that your opinion mattered, especially seeing as the part where he complain about having to review the game is a direct jab at people trying to tell him how to do his stuff.

If something requires you to agree with the person for it to be funny, then it isn't actually funny at all.

But more to the point, I'm not telling him what to do but rather stating my opinion - that this week's work was of inferior quality. If you don't ever get useful feedback, if you try something different (which this week seemed like) and don't really know whether or not people liked it, then what's the point of having feedback at all? A hall of mirrors is hardly helpful, and my goal was to let him know that at least one of his viewers felt let down.

As much as I'm sure everyone's favorite English-born Australian would like to hit it out of the park every time (and as much as we'd like for him to do so), I felt he didn't this week and thought this was the appropriate venue in which to put forward that opinion.

Yathzee is a little sparkle of light in a world full of darkness. That darkness is mainly the money and interests that are driving the videogame industry. He's the only one who has the integrity to not kneel before the power of the videogaming majors and mindlessly prasining their sub-par products only beacuse they MUST be considered masterpieces, regardless of their real value.
He's my hero.

 

[Ultrajoe]

You can tell the amount a game relies on the faith of its followers to plug up its shortcomings by how vehemently they defend it, at 728 posts, i think my point is made.

 

[Easykill]

You can tell the amount a game relies on the faith of its followers to plug up its shortcomings by how vehemently they defend it, at 728 posts, i think my point is made.

You're crazy.

 

[corronchilejano]

Actually, I think his exact wording was "jibbering fanboy twats," or something close to it. So, yes, I was mildly offended... because he was directly insulting me.

I read this and actually had to go back and watch the review. I enyojed it far more than before, and here's why: The TWAT fanboy commentary was directed at the guy that writes hatemail because he did a negative review for Smash Brothers. True, he actually wanted to play the game to play as Sonic, and what got him pissed the most was that you had to UNLOCK him.
He refered to fanboys ONCE: When he said "You'll like the game EVEN if you haven't played it if you defended the Wii name when it came out". Come on, he actually didn't insult anyone. I encourage you to go back, forgetting there's around 18 pages of people saying how much the game sucks, and I bet you'll enjoy it a lot more.

Screw you guys, Im going home.

 

[The Thief]

You can tell the amount a game relies on the faith of its followers to plug up its shortcomings by how vehemently they defend it, at 728 posts, i think my point is made.

But most of those posts are supporting Yahtzee...

From what I've read it looks like hater-trolls out number rabid-fanboys. But there are some pretty good posts that are quite true on either side of the argument.

 

[The Thief]

The "certain number of multiplayer matches" to unlock Sonic is 300.

No, that can't be. I remember fighting him quite early. Did you get that from gamefaqs? I think it's wrong because it said R.O.B. is only 160 but I never got him until I suffered through the singleplayer.

edit: it's probably a typo, cause I think it was 30 matches in that I fought him.

 

[Ultrajoe]

You can tell the amount a game relies on the faith of its followers to plug up its shortcomings by how vehemently they defend it, at 728 posts, i think my point is made.

But most of those posts are supporting Yahtzee...

From what I've read it looks like hater-trolls out number rabid-fanboys. But there are some pretty good posts that are quite true on either side of the argument.

true, but given Yahtzee as an online review, it a given that it does rely on the faith of its followers, thats the point of a fanbase for such a review, my point is that a game should not need to rely on spit and prayers

not that i think brawl is bad, i just think my comment is relevant, spit and prayers isnt bad if it works, for the 40K players out there: It works for the Orks, why not Brawl?

EDIT: man, you must have got in just before me BTW: we look to be coming up on longest thread ever, keep it coming

 

[miller483]

True, he actually wanted to play the game to play as Sonic, and what got him pissed the most was that you had to UNLOCK him.

If you're playing this game JUST for Sonic, then it really isn't for you.

With that being said, I don't know why all the fanboys are getting their panties in a bunch (besides the fact that they're fanboys).

It seems pretty clear to me why Yahtzee didn't like this game:

1. He doesn't like Multiplayer (if I'm not mistaken)
2. He isn't the world's biggest Nintendo fan
3. He isn't the world's biggest fighting game fan
3. He was basically forced to review a game that he didn't like/care about.

It's like getting a non-anime fan to enjoy an anime game. If you're not a fan, there's a 75% chance that you won't like it. (and yes, that statistic was made up)

PS: I love Brawl. I am also not a fanboy. (PSWii60 FTW!)

Edit: The trolls are also getting pretty annoying.

 

[SolArc]

I like Yahtzee's reviews because he doesn't rate everything perfect, like most of the reviewers out there. Brawl being a 9.5 out of 10 as reviewed by Gamefaqs doesn't feel right to me. I feel that Brawl is a step back from Melee. There wasn't anything new and innovative about Brawl. They just pretty much took Melee and stripped it of somethings and added some "slightly" different things. They changed the air dodge mechanic; that's cool. But then they made it like SSB in the fact that everyone is slow and floats again. And I believe you can button mash in this game because I've fought against people who were just randomly dodging and shooting arrows while I was trying to strategically position myself for a grab but what happened? He ended up dodging in the middle of my grab and my grab missed. You wouldn't be able to do that as easily in Melee. But the whole point behind Brawl was that it isn't supposed to be a "Tournament" type of game, unlike Melee, which had so much you could do with it to make it tournament viable.

 

[Xenoveritas]

Snake and Sonic taking over 10 hours of gameplay to unlock? I had Snake unlocked within half an hour of the game's power being on for the first time and I wasn't even consciously trying. If you really were you could probably have him in five minutes. And you unlock Sonic just for playing a certain number of multiplayer matches (along with most of the unlockable characters in the game, by the way.) You know, multiplayer? The thing he was complaining about not getting to play because you "had to unlock everything in single-player?" My friends and I had Sonic out within maybe two hours tops.

Knowing how to unlock them that fast makes you "that guy." The only way to find that out is to look it up online. Granted complete unlock instructions are on the Smash Bros. Dojo, but reading that site also makes you "that guy." It's common knowledge that you can unlock most of the characters through the single player campaign. It's not common knowledge how to unlock characters without playing on specific stages.

Not to mention that certain elements are only unlockable by playing through the single player mode, including elements that effect multiplayer mode. Not characters, but unlockables none the less.

And button mashing does not get you anywhere in Smash Bros. As a matter of fact it's what sets it apart from most fighting games, whose very nature force you to study command lists for 15 years before playing easy mode. Smash Bros was designed to be "minute to learn, lifetime to master."

It'd help if SSBB offered a tutorial to help new players to learn the controls. (Apparently if you allow the demo to play long enough it'll show you a tutorial video, but that hardly counts.) Learning the controls involves having played the previous games or being taught by someone who has.

And the item spawn and certain characters are designed to allow dumb luck to beat skill. Maybe not "button smashing" but it's still the same "random luck over skill" that button smashing is.

And once more, if this is wrong, please tell me why, but -

How is the play needed to unlock Sonic or Snake any different from having to play through the setlist on any Guitar Hero game to get to the much hyped final tier? One and Number Of The Beast were featured in the hype for Guitar Hero III just as strongly as Sonic and Snake. I may be missing something, but they look to be exactly the same situations. The oint is, if he took such offence to it in this review, and did not mention it at all in the Guitar Hero III review, then he is just exhibiting a double standard.

I have to disagree that there's any analogy between the two. Locked tracks are more like locked stages, something that's more acceptable than locked characters. There's really no analogy between locked Guitar Hero III elements and Smash Bros. elements.