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What I find iffy about the whole presentation is that I rarely get a s — Zero Punctuation

"What I find iffy about the whole presentation is that I rarely get a sense that my ragtag bunch of anime misfits are actually interacting with each other. The first part of the game, you tour all the home villages, randomly touching people until one goes, "Hello, random group of strangers! Im about to embark on a very personal quest that will define the rest of my life! Why not tag along?" And thats your new party member, smilingly joining up with a group of what might be cannibalistic serial tax-dodgers, for all they know, accepting that theyre going to have to mutely witness the personal bullshit of seven complete strangers before they come back around to sorting out whatever put a hair up their own arse. Its particularly jarring with characters like Primrose, doing the "I am dishonoured and alone and have nothing left in this world but my quest for violent, bloody revenge" bit, never acknowledging the seven colourful dudes in varying stages of adolescence with whom she shares a sleeping bag every night. Its only right at the end of the game that any connection between the eight stories is established; before that, its eight separate stories rather than a story about eight people. Every time you go through a new chapter of one party members story, everyone else just disappears up their butthole for the duration of the cutscene. Sometimes, after a cutscene, a little button prompt comes up, and you can teleport the relevant character and one other party member to the Interaction Dimension, where they discuss what just happened, but I dont see why they couldnt have worked that into the scene; made it look like some actual organic relationship-building was going on, not just a spot of post-match commentary like Statler and fucking Waldorf."
Zero Punctuation
Zero Punctuation
Zero Punctuation
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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

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"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."
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"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."
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