Zero Punctuation: Top 5 of 2011

[Sylveria]

Yahtzee, you cavernous hole! Good list. You are wrong about a game needing to stand on it's single-player element. I, like you, play games to have fun. I lurrrrv the multiplayer of "Realistic" shooters, (for the most part.) I rarely bother with the single-player. I just can't be buggered to care about single-player elements in "Realistic" shooters when there's a world of twelve-year-olds out there ready to test the limits of their imaginations in fictional, sexual conquest of my mother.

That begs the question, why even have a single player component? Even among the people who lurv MWCOD3^2 so much that they cut a hole in the box cover so they could have sex with it, the people who contribute any of that love to the single player campaign are almost non-existent. If the whole crux of the fun and fanbase of a game is the multiplayer, just release a multiplayer only game. Take that money that was essentially wasted on the single-player component and invest it somewhere else.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

I was hoping for something more surprising as the top game of 2011.
Portal 2 is well made sure, but I found it far too easy and lacking in replay value for it to be "game of the year." Instead it just made me more angry at Valve (not that Valve is a bad studio, I just don't prefer some of their design choices).

I understand he gave the two big selling shooters the worst-crown out of principle, but I think it lets his anger show too much and may have been misplaced. I haven't played either, so I have no idea about how well they are designed (or not).

 

[Chris646]

What really got me laughing in this one was the nice juxtaposition of the imagery of a bunch of people lining up, depressed, all about to kill each other whilst wearing party hats. That part was brilliant, Yahtzee. Anyways, Portal 2 was pretty good, and my opinion of it has probably lessened because I haven't played it since it came out, but it was pretty good. I heard that Bastion was really damn good, and I'll give it a try sometime.

 

[triggrhappy94]

It's kind of funny, just this morning a read a letter to the editor in the newest Game Informer about how they gave MW3 a good score, because they like and they weren't about compromising journalistic integrity just to make a point. What everyone else who wrote a letter to the editor didn't realize is that: everyone has their own opinion.

 

[Aprilgold]

Also, Bastion better than Skyrim? =o

Yeah because Bastion wasn't a boring copy - pasted cave to cave to get a mcguffin that also glitched like a thousand hookers on crack. Bastion was both pretty, had a great artstyle, never glitched and was innovative for many games now in days. Skyrim was basically Oblivion with a new coat of paint.

I shouldn't quote anybody else since apparently no one can get over Skyrim getting on 5th place. But Yahtzee has gave good games that were heavily unpolished bad standings in his reviews. Skyrim is a great example of this, only the PC version is barely playable with the least amount of glitches since modders will fix the game for bethesda, while the console ones were crash-tastic and glitched like 100 crackers on adrenaline.

I do think that the list did a good job of actually giving a top 5 games to buy and never to buy list, and was enjoyable.

I do agree that Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 got what they deserved, mainly because they wave around 'realism' while not being realistic in the slightest.

Every year there's that one game that I DON'T regret buying. In 2011, that game was portal 2. Good choice.

Skyrim FREEZES? I thought Bethesda was over "New Vegas" levels of glitchiness! I thought that Skyrim's worst bugs were along the lines of "hovering ground ladies" or spinning horsemen (as seen in a Youtube video).

Has anyone else had serious glitches with Skyrim? I'm starting to doubt whether I should get it if it's going to crash on me.

If you're on the PC, wait for the modders to fix it.

If you have a 360, play it for 10 mins at a time so it doesn't melt.

If you have a ps3, avoid it like the plague.

They say patch 1.4 will "address" it which means that they can't "fix" it.

I'm guessing they didn't send Yhatzee the ps3 copy...
Oh yea, he's a reviewer.

but...my ps3 copy is just fine... its a very touchy game..works for some..not for others.

Thats the problem, it should work for everyone, not just for a few. If we compare it to other games on the good list then you will see that all of them didn't have as many glitches as Skyrim does, because its a un-polished game because they didn't test everything like a Developer should before releasing the game to the public.

 

[daxterx2005]

Third movie curse huh, never heard of it before.

Alien 3 was great

 

[Beryl77]

I'm finally able to connect to the Escapist again. It can't only have been becuase of Yahtzee's video?

Anyway, very good list.
I can't agree more with Dead Island, I've rarely spent money for something so bad. My brother talked me into buying it and at first it was rather good but at some point I just stopped playing it.
I've yet to play Bastion, I've heard a lot of positive opinions about it, so maybe I'll give it a try.
I'm happy that Portal 2 got the first place, great story, funny and well written characters, good gameplay and of course excellent albeit a bit too easy puzzles. Just throughouly an enjoyable game and even the more the co-op if you've got a good partner.
I don't fully agree on bf3, I haven't played mw3 so I can't comment on that. While the singleplayer is just meh, the multiplayer is really fun. I don't know why everyone uses the word "realistic" when talking about bf3. The only thing it really tries to do realistic are the guns and to some degree the locations but anything else isn't realistic. If it was, it wouldn't be fun.

Just my two cents.

Edit:

Actually, I agree with Yahtzee's multiplayer hating. I myself am a HUGE fan of singleplayer games because I quite simply hate how gaming is abandoning it's singleplayer roots in favour of charging about $99.99 for content that if the game had been made in the last decade would have been included on the disk for the initial $20 game purchase!

In this case, I don't think you should be hating multiplayer but rather the fans who always buy those games and the developers who are just after money and abandon good singleplayer games. Of course, Multiplayer games just aren't your cup of tea but they can be a lot of fun.

 

[OneOfTheMichael's]

Well that was pretty much what I expected knowing yahtzee like the critic he is. And somehow I just knew it was going to be MW3/BF3 being the worst game/s of 2011. I didn't find them too enjoyable myself.

 

[DJShire]

That was some of best imagery he's ever done in spoken form. I'd say this is the best ZP of the year! Wait.....

 

[Mugen]

Yahtzee you prick, review DARK SOULS ALREADY! kidding, but seriously every week you dont review it, i will pirate a copy of Silent Hill 2, or any other game you claim to like

 

[144_v1legacy]

Being a Nintendo fanboy, I feel a certain relief that Zelda wasn't in this video (Iknew he wouldn't put it in the top 5). What that implies, to me at least, is that the worst Zelda game Yahtzee believes he has ever played is still better than at least 7.1% of the games he has reviewed this year.

 

[redisforever]

Meh, honestly, I enjoyed Battlefield 3. Not the single player, despite my usual hate against multiplayer, but it felt like a return to 1942's insane fun. Damn good online.

The rest, I agree with.

 

[jawakiller]

And of course, another list that means absolutely nothing... And is shitty as hell. I think Yahtzee should just get off his high horse and stop reviewing shooters.

He's not only really bad at it but he always misses the "fun" in them.
Having grown up in a pre-multiplayer world, he was one of those who never "got it." So what do we get? A grumpy old fuck who can't take anything involving a gun seriously. He seems to think that a shooter should be judged the same way one would critique another game, usually a sandbox or a puzzle game. All he does is play single player and expect rainbows. When he doesn't get said rainbows, he cries. Every single fucking game is the same.

He's terrible at multiplayer so he writes off any game that has a strong online portion. I mean, I get it. He doesn't like getting his ass handed to him by an eight year old. Still doesn't mean he should trash them. And it's not about being funny. He legit hates shooters. Besides, I find he's getting less and less funny as time goes on.

Okay, I is all done with muy rant.

 

[Nimzar]

I loved how MW3 was one of his number one most shitty games and being advertised all around the video was something claiming to give the "ultimate MW3 experience". Lawls.

 

[UltraXan]

That last bit made my day. Thanks again, Yahtzee, for always being an bringing home the bacon. Oh, and good luck on that new book I heard you we writing!

 

[Metalrocks]

pretty good list.
duke nukem is the worst game for me in 2011. dead island i also agree that it sucks. i got it during holiday sale and this game is actually frustrating to play. its boring and has no potential to keep playing.
had a feeling he will name battlefield and cod but we all know he talks about the SP and not the MP. so yes, the SP part sucks, at least in cod, havent played BF since i dont like to have a spyware called origin on my pc.

portal 2 as the best game is a good choice. personally for me, its serious sam 3. just because i enjoyed a typical old school shooter.

 

[Joccaren]

I absolutely loathed inFamous 2 to no end, it got dragged on so much to the point where I was testing myself to see how far I was willing to go before one of us gave up. I lost.

Woooow, was NOT expecting Portal 2 to be where it is.

Also, Bastion better than Skyrim? =o

Skyrim isn't great by any stretch. Its large world is somewhat refreshing in todays game scene, but it failed at any sense of need to do anything. The main thing I hear people praising it for is that you can talk to people and they'll all have had a completely different experience. I get the opposite. In one playthrough I have tried everything the game has to offer. Hell, in ten minutes I could have done that. Other than a 'I'll go to this dungeon first instead of that other one', there isn't really any reason to replay Skyrim. Hell, even doing the dungeons in a different order changes nothing except the fact that it may fix a glitch that occured because you went into a dungeon before the game wanted you to. Skyrim is good, but not brilliant. I agree with Yahtzee that it was peer pressure that got it to 5th. Bastion, on the other hand, is not only good, but has an interesting thing with the narrator, and had drive and motivation. It was pleasantly surprising whilst Skyrim was rather a let down, and it would seem Yahtzee felt the same way.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

I probably shouldn't be surprised that Yahtzee thought Portal 2 was amazing and that Battlefield 3 ended up one of the worst. Personally, I think Battlefield 3 is one of the more amazing titles of 2011 and shows a faint glimmer of hope that they might, MIGHT try invigorating and innovating the FPS genre. Granted, it still has many of the cliched problems of FPSs, but it's some of the most fun I've had with online gaming for quite a while.

But yeah, MW3 was horrible, and on that note, so was every other damn game Yahtzee put in that list. DNF was probably the biggest disappointment of the year (since I thought Gearbox could make something amazing after it), with Dead Island being a close second.

However, I must ask... HOW DID SKYRIM GET ON #5? I'm pretty sure every single reviewer on the Escapist that isn't Yahtzee probably stared at this video for a couple of minutes and kept rewinding the video to make sure they kept hearing correctly. I know that everyone's familiar with Yahtzee's rigorous standards, but I'm surprised that Yahtzee thought that it was the 'least best' of the best.

---

Edit:

OK, since I've been quoted about this numerous times before the day even ended, allow me to reclarify.

I do not think that Skyrim is the #1 game OF ALL TIME, nor do I believe that Yahtzee is wrong. I'm just making a bit of a playful quip about how everyone thought Skyrim was deserving of such an honor, and Yahtzee almost makes it a footnote in his own review. I humbly respect his opinion, and I do realize that some of the games he listed are, in fact, as much fun, if not even moreso, than Skyrim itself.

So please... STOP BUGGING ME ABOUT THIS ALREADY.

 

[skywolfblue]

I was rather surprised to see portal 2 up there, given his previous review of it. Glad to see he secretly liked it after all!

 

[Joccaren]

And of course, another list that means absolutely nothing... And is shitty as hell. I think Yahtzee should just get off his high horse and stop reviewing shooters.

He's not only really bad at it but he always misses the "fun" in them.
Having grown up in a pre-multiplayer world, he was one of those who never "got it." So what do we get? A grumpy old fuck who can't take anything involving a gun seriously. He seems to think that a shooter should be judged the same way one would critique another game, usually a sandbox or a puzzle game. All he does is play single player and expect rainbows. When he doesn't get said rainbows, he cries. Every single fucking game is the same.

He's terrible at multiplayer so he writes off any game that has a strong online portion. I mean, I get it. He doesn't like getting his ass handed to him by an eight year old. Still doesn't mean he should trash them. And it's not about being funny. He legit hates shooters. Besides, I find he's getting less and less funny as time goes on.

Okay, I is all done with muy rant.

Actually, he loves shooters. Look at his review of Painkiller. Its a shooter. Bulletstorm, while he hated some things about it, he didn't hate because it was a shooter. What he hates is the modern style shooter where there is more emphasis on competitive online play rather than on the game being FUN.
Games like BF3 and CoD likely aren't fun to him not because he sucks at multiplayer, but because all you do in them is point a samey gun at a samey enemy and pull the samey trigger for the samey death animation. A shooter I'd wager he would like would have a large set of different looking enemies that had different weaknesses, and different guns that were well suited to each of those weaknesses so that there was some challenge in the game other than 'Point that way and quickly press trigger'. That sort of thing is, in Yahtzee's words, 'Pure unadulterated fun'.
Which sounds like more fun, pointing a military looking weapon at a Middle Eastern/Russian enemy and hearing a muffled 'bang' before watching them just fall over, or pointing a flaming crossbow that shoots exploding cows at a rampaging purple Stegosaurus and hearing a massive explosion and watching the stegosaurus blow itself into a million pieces.

Also, he does have a point that games should be able to stand on their single player experience. Not everyone enjoys multiplayer, the inherent cost of multiplayer from Internet Providers and things like Xbox live, the screaming of little kids in your ear and the constant grind for no real purpose. If a game includes a single player, that single player should be good, and worthy of the game to stand on. If its got a crap single player - don't include it and drop the price some.

And I'll agree he had been getting less funny as of late, I put it down to not enough tits, cock or other genitalia references. Lines like 'Saluting to the queen with one hand whilst groping her tits with the other' made me laugh, as did this video's "#3 Bad: Shitting the bed while your girlfriend is over.
#2 Good: Shitting the bed while your girlfriend is over and discovering she's into that kinda thing"