I like a lot of what he said except for the bit about Battlefield 3, no matter what that game is amazing for the multiplayer sandbox it offers up. Not sure about his game of the year either, actually I was shocked to hear my game of the year not mentioned at all: Deus Ex. Oh well, whatever, I guess Driver must be something mind-blowing that I missed...
Zero Punctuation: Top 5 of 2011
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
I'm honestly surprised to see a game such as Driver SA so high on the list. Not that I have played it. Then again I guess it just shows how fair Yahtzee can be, awarding such a high place to a game genre he wouldn't normally play.
Putting Skyrim as number 5 must be his way of staying within the parameters of the pretentious game journalist club and still pleasing the slavering Skyrim fans (me included.)
A refreshing list including some genuine shockers, for that you have my respect. Bravo my man, bravo.
Putting Skyrim as number 5 must be his way of staying within the parameters of the pretentious game journalist club and still pleasing the slavering Skyrim fans (me included.)
A refreshing list including some genuine shockers, for that you have my respect. Bravo my man, bravo.
He outright says he put them there because of what they stand for. Which I think is fair enough. and it isn't like a movie critic complaining about 3d, it would be more like if everyone still used VHS and they were complaining about the big budget titles holding us back by releasing the same film every year in a shitty format even though DVD and blu-ray is readily available to do amazing things with.Gorilla Gunk said:
For the record, I think CoD multiplayer is amazing fun, and although I haven't played battlefield for some time, I still really enjoyed the ones I have played.
P.S. Why should we not take his opinion seriously? It's an opinion, the stuff reviews are made of. No different to any other reviewers.
What they represent is samey multiplayer-only churned-out year after year money grabs which completely stagnate the FPS genre by completely dominating it and making every other company try to emulate them. I think that is more than reason enough to make them worst game of the year.Gorilla Gunk said:
You seem to think I spent only ten minutes in game. I have sunk 200+ hours into it, hoping it would get better. It didn't.FaceFaceFace said:
Magic is the exact same at the start and end game, except that you have a different spell that you continually cast until you're out of mana, then drink a mana potion or run round like a retard until your mana fills up.
Archery is very similar at the start and end game too. What do the perks do? Allow you to zoom in? Slow time whilst you're zoomed in, that's the big one. Its still the same motions as it was early on, with nothing much changed.
Exploring would be interesting if they focused more on making each area look different to the other areas. Get me a screenshot and I'll get one of an extremely similar looking area. There are a few uniquish areas, but most of them are the same thing in a slightly different order. Hardly exiting.
The same deal goes for quests. Outside of the questline ones (Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, Companions, College of Winterhold, Main Quest About three Daedric quests (Sanguine, Molag Bal and one other I can't quite remember), they were all the exact same quest, just with a different location.
Now, for your 'You couldn't have experienced it in ten minutes'. My first ten minutes of Skyrim went something like this:
-Finish intro
-Ignore everything, head to that cool looking dungeon over there
-Complete first of many samey dungeons, this one feeling unique because it was the first one.
-Use all main styles of combat, to get a feel for which one I liked best (Single Handed Warrior, Single Handed Assassin, Single Handed shield warrior, Stealth archer, Warrior Archer, Destruction magic [Admittedly the other magics were not available at that time. After that time, I found out for the most part that conjuration is the most boring way to play the game, illusionist and alterationist can be interesting, but turns into a repetitive grind once you get a good style])
-Go to riverwood and get dumped with misc quests and a storyline quest.
Now, did I fight a dragon? No.
Does it matter? No. Dragons are some of the least interesting fights in Skyrim. A bear can kill one. Solo. No joke. I saw it happen. Dragon fights consist of waiting for it to land/stay still so I can stab/shoot it with my sword/bow/magic repeatedly until it dies.
The main problem with dragons, like everything in Skyrim, is that they are far too easy to kill. Short of a Chuck Norris topless hand to hand style battle, there is no challenge to them. Even with that, just chug 1 potion of resist fire and punch away. You'll eventually kill it.
The problem here isn't so much that they are too easy in and of itself - in Morrowind after a short while everything was piss easy and you could accidentally a god. The problem is that the fun things like hovering, scroll of Icarian flight or W/E, custom spell making, ect. were taken out to give the game some challenge and a form of balance, whilst the game itself presents no challenge and I'll be damned if its balanced.
The most redeeming feature of Skyrim is its mods - yet they are not the game itself, and Bethesda actively tried to stop you from using too many with their removal of Large Address Awareness from the PC version.
Skyrim contained a brief breath of fresh air from most titles of the day, but it was hardly remarkable or amazing in its own right. I had much the same experience all my friends had.
First day "Skyrim is so intense I play BF3 when I need to calm down"
End of week: No-one playing Skyrim, all on BF3. Except me, the ever hopeful it-might-get-better that played DN:F almost through to the end because the first 20 minutes were refreshing and I had hoped it would get back to that sort of thing.
Other than the surface of the world being mostly open and without loading screens, what was so amazing about Skyrim that makes it better than any other game this year? One feature doesn't redeem an entire game, especially when the only thing different about that feature is 'mostly no loading screens'.
Now, all that said, I'm off to play Skyrim. Not for the game, but to see just how many NPCs my PC can handle at once. I'll see if I can get a good 300 v 300 battle going somewhere...
Either my tastes differ from everybody else on the planet, or I was really, REALLY high when I played Dead Island.
The story was almost-non-existent, the characters were as deep as a sheet of paper, but the gameplay at least was fun as Hell. So why all the hate, damn it?
The story was almost-non-existent, the characters were as deep as a sheet of paper, but the gameplay at least was fun as Hell. So why all the hate, damn it?
I'm not sure what you were expecting, maybe flossing teeth with the bow before firing?. The perks can be useful, personally I've concentrated mostly on archery, so now I can take down pretty much anything, I always play these games as a hunter. Anyway, theres a perk to speed up draw speed, drawn movement speed, increases critical, stun etc etc.Joccaren said:
That can be said of real life mate, take a castle, or even just a tower, and compare it to another tower, you'll find they look pretty similar. There is only so much they can do, they really have no choice but to re-use furniture and meshes, otherwise we'd have longer loading times, and that usual degredation in media quality as the game progresses. I mean, what game out there is as big as Skyrim, yet has more detail?Joccaren said:
I mentioned something in another thread relating to Skyrim, and got shot down, so here is my underbelly...but...
PC gamers tend to ruin games for themselves sometimes. It's too easy to say, ''Sod it, I'm off to spawn this or that, or mess with this, or I'm too impatient to wait on that levelling up.'' Then the cheats set in. Everyone I know with the PC version of Skyrim has made the game pointless for themselves. I don't need anyone saying 'not me!', because I don't know any of you personally, I'm only going by my experience. I am playing it on XBox, I haven't cheated... except maybe looking up a youtube video of a treasure map location. Anyway, I trully think that I play Skyrim very differently than my PC-gaming friends. I can't cheat, so it doesn't bother me, I know that levelling up takes time and effort, and that's the whole point. The minute that you don't necesserily have to spend an hour crafting and enchanting to boost skills, you can just cheat, and a lot of you do, don't you?
Play Skyrim once more, play by the rules, ban yourself from cheating, and I guarantee you'll enjoy the game a lot more. I struggled with some quests early on, had to backtrack out of dungeons a couple of times (mostly due to powerful mages), but now I'm bad ass, I can snipe any human enemy with 1 shot - but I earned that, I spent the time levelling up so that I would be fairly bow-epic. Console gamers don't have the option of cheating or modding, and in the case of Skyrim I'd say that makes it a better game. I've put in over 200 hours too, and for me Skyrim is hands down GOTY.
I've got no problem with Yahtzee's pick for the worst pair of games, but I'm a bit suprised that he stressed at the start it is purely based on how much fun he had with it. I didn't play MW3, did play BF3, and the singleplayer isn't anything spectacular, but it is at least a functional game. That's more than we can say from games like Mindjack. If he'd put BF3 and MW3 at the top for what their lack of innovation, or their message, or what it means for the game industry to have those be the most heavily marketed and hot selling games of the year, I can get behind that. But is Yahtzee so sick of 'realistic' shooters that he hates just playing a functional game more than a broken piece of buggy shovelware? Well, apparently...
Reviews should be subjective anyway, as it is one persons opinion. Yahtzee is very good at what he does. I think that people do sometimes find it difficult to take someone disliking something they love. Also I think that sometimes people find it difficult to know whether Yahtzee likes something due to to the fact there isn't an 8/10 or a 4/10 at the end of every review.totally heterosexual said:
He also places more emphasis on originality and pure fun than many other critics, as well as story. So if games flounder there they suffer in his eyes. See MW and MW3 reviews for reference.
And he has stated that anything he doesn't mention in his reviews is basically fine. But I find it useful for someone to mention a games faults, even if it is something that has been rated highly, and that I may end up buying and liking. Just becauase a good game has faukts doesn't mean it's not a good game.
Is that even possible. If you were to somehow install more memory on your ps3, would the machine even recognize it?icaritos said:
I think I know what I'm going to do the next time I have one of my Frankenstein moments.
It's missing the music from the last one. It wouldn't even bother me if the last one didn't have music but now it does.
I watch Yahtzee every week because he never fails to make me laugh. My biggest laugh this week was putting CoD and Battlefield as the worse games of the year.
Any critic that wasn't going for laughs and put them as their worse games of the year, I'd have to think they were huffing glue in between taking mushrooms and LSD.
Any critic that wasn't going for laughs and put them as their worse games of the year, I'd have to think they were huffing glue in between taking mushrooms and LSD.
It's not a recent development because he has nothing against FPS'. There's just a LOT of FPS these days, and a lot of them are the same bland style of military shooter, so you're going to see them criticized a lot because that's what's available for review.Aeonknight said:
But the reason he hates BF3 and MW3 doesn't actually have to do with that. Like he said, what he hates about MW3/BF3 is the xenophobia, and missions where all you're doing is raining death down on helpless people from an airplane. It's disturbing to him that the biggest, blockbuster, recordbreaking games are ones where all you do is kill foreigners. It isn't a bias against FPS at all.
That description only completely fits Modern Warfare 3, which is just the same game as before but with a new coat of paint. Yes, there was a Battlefield game released in 2010 (Battlefield: Bad Company 2), but Battlefield 3 is still a pretty different game from that one.Naeras said:
Yes, Battlefield 3's singleplayer was indeed tacked-on (not to mention bad and extremely disappointing), but that's not why I love the game. I love it because of the - you guessed it - multiplayer. It truly is amazing. Not perfect, but amazing nonetheless. It really is epic. (I know that is an extremely overused word, but it really is.) If you ask me, Battlefield 3 shouldn't even have had a singleplayer. Battlefield 2 didn't have one, and neither did most of the games in the series.
I don't agree with Yahtzee that developers should stop making realistic military shooters (because that would mean no more Battlefield games). I think that they should keep doing it until they get really great, including the singleplayer.
It's actually kind of stupid that Yahtzee doesn't want a subgenre of games to be made anymore because it doesn't cater to his taste. If he doesn't like them, he doesn't have to play them (except for review purposes, of course). Can't he just let people enjoy them?