"I tried out Babylons Fall, Platinums new live service hack-n-slashathon on PS5, or had a crack at it if you will, not that it made it easy. First it wouldnt even start without a PS Plus subscription, even though I only wanted to play single player because yknow, humanity. Its like a highway bypass: I understand why it needs to exist but Id rather not have one in my house. Got past that and Babylons Fall still wouldnt unbutton its top until I also signed into a Square Enix account. What the fuck possible benefit do you imagine Id extract from signing up for another fucking account, Square Enix, other than one more excuse to never check my email?! Christ, this is like trying to get through airport security with an inflatable novelty suitcase nuke. But eventually I got through it all and when I was on the other side of the metal detector putting my shoes back on and admiring the new tag theyd punched through my ear, I cast a look around and thought to myself: "Oooh. This looks like shit!" As in, it literally resembles faecal matter, decked out mostly in glistening browns except for a streak of vibrant blue from an accidentally swallowed whiteboard marker. It looks like a PS3 game, all brown and flatly lit with characters textured and animated like a papier-mâché diorama about kitchen utensils. It even has a classic case of cheaping out on the cutscenes by just panning over still images with increasingly agonizing slowness. I thought the download size was suspiciously small."
Zero Punctuation is a series of video game reviews created by English comedy writer and video game journalist Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. From its inception in 2007, episodes were published weekly by internet magazine The Escapist. Episodes typically range from five to six minutes in length. Videos provide caustic humour, rapid-fire delivery, visual gags and critical insight into recently released vide
"For the uninitiated, Sam Stone is a nineties action-hero graduate from the Duke Nukem correspondence course with some kind of unclear role in the military, and who started showing up to work one day in a customized t-shirt and jeans. And no one wanted to complain in case he blew cigar smoke in their face, or shagged their mums."
Zero Punctuation"I can only assume that using jump-scares to provoke funny reactions from streamers started getting old, and now theyre seeing if similar results can be achieved from just annoying the shit out of them. And if that is the case, look at me falling right into the trap. I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of MY DIIIIIICK!"
Zero Punctuation"I cant help feeling that Valve have missed the point of episodic gaming somewhat. The whole idea is to mix up the usual rigamarole of game publishing by having shorter games at lower prices released more frequently, and while they have aspects one and two down, they continue to struggle with three."
Zero Punctuation"The environments do a good job of building atmosphere with eldritch light illuminating the mist that coils around the trees, flickering shadows making an innocent mulberry bush momentarily look like a round-shouldered murderer with an axe and a massive erection. Its just that the game is fully aware that it does dark spooky forests best but little else, so every half hour it has to contrive a new reason for Alan to be lost in a spooky forest at night. Its like a crime drama about a detective who can only concentrate when hes around pastry, so every week the crime has to conveniently take place in a bakery or within walking distance of a pie shop."
Zero Punctuation"Find me one case in which random user comments enrich an online experience. Scroll down now and read the first five comments under this video! You should start feeling a cold metallic sensation because youre now holding a gun to your head!"
Zero Punctuation"See, the rub is that Cuphead is retro-style, but not in the usual sense, i.e., pixels the size of Plymouth; its deliberately fashioning itself after retro animation, in the style of Max Fleischer or very early Disney, and pulls that off with quite remarkable success! The film grain, the scratchy audio, the big brass band soundtrack, the fluid, exaggerated animation where characters all move like warmed-up gummy worms caught in the spokes of a bike; it all feels so bloody authentic! And most importantly, what a lot of people forget about early cartoons — here, we very unsubtly waggle our eyebrows at Epic Mickeys forgotten grave-site — is that they could be really fucking dark. See, back then, it wasnt generally understood that kids needed to have their delicate sensibilities protected, as odds were pretty good they were all going to die in a European trench war before they turned eighteen, anyway. So thematically, cartoons were lighter on wholesome lessons about friendship and heavier on skeletons and racism. So theres something overtly sinister about Cuphead, which might be from subtly wrong things like the drinking straw in our characters head — I mean, the teacup-head thing Id buy, but who the fuck drinks from a teacup with a straw? Thats just pushing it. But I think its the overall scratchy look and feel that makes me think the little girl from The Ring could push out of the screen at any moment and start making comical trombone noises."
Zero Punctuation"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"