Zero Punctuation hates on Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

Are we supposed to be surprised?

Its kind of sad that being at work on Wednesday's is bearable because I know I'll get a dose of Yahtzee talking shit about some game.

My favorite part about Yahtzee's reviews is that his final judgment ranges from "not entirely a pit stain" to "Jesus bloody Christ, scoop my eyes out with rusty golf cleats".

i love the ZP reviews

The fact I'm going through Okami right now only heightens this experience.

His analysis about sailing was totally wrong.

Sailing takes a lot less time now, the shooting is fun and there are warp points to make travel even faster, although sometimes the touch screen has trouble registering certain warp symbols.

But he was totally right about that stupid temple. Stealth sucks.

Fernando's head exploding in 3....2....1....

I almost want to be mad about some of his points (like the idea that Nintendo gets away with releasing countless sequels when others wouldn't-Square, anyone?), but I don't see a point. You could hand him Super Mario 3 and he'd find ways to insult it, because no one watches these for the compliments. They want to hear him rip some game apart.

Still, entertaining.

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I'm normally a Zelda fan, they're the very essence of adventure games blahblah. But I couldn't get into PH. Not because of the controls, but the layout design with the hexagonal raised land just put me off. I'm playing through the Oracle games for the first time now and I'm having a lot more fun with these.

It's so true!!! (As always)

Okami > New Zeldas

He hated on Halo and a lot of people said "oh he's so right, Halo is teh suxor". Now that he's hating on Zelda the same people will say "oh no he didn't! Yahtzee knows nothing 'bout gamin'!!".

I beat this recently amidst the flood of other games I've been playing...

Didn't read this guy's review, but I had beef with it just in terms of moving around - it took some time to get used to moving w/ just the stylus. I thought the rest of the game was awesome though.

Didn't play Okami to compare it against.. plan to get it when it hits the Wii.

I agree with him about the Temple of the Ocean King, not because of the stealth (i liked that) but because you had to go through all the rooms every time (until you got to the sixth floor and set that warp point). My disagreement was that i liked the sailing, in both this and WindWaker

Still hilarious as always, especially the part about his organs jumping ship to escape humiliation

Some day I'm actually going to do more than just load the video on one of these. SOMEDAY...I'M GONNA WATCH IT, TOO!


That said, I love 'em both, but there's no way Okami is better than Zelda.

The complaints about Zelda's story telling are very fair. The Zelda games have always been awful in this regard, Twilight Princess being the worst of the lot (wtf was going on in that game?). It would be nice to see Nintendo address this at some point.

He doesn't give the gameplay a fair shake though, as the stylus control in Phantom Hourglass is (surprisingly) satisfying.

I also think the sailing is overly maligned. I didn't really find riding a horse around the giant maps of the other Zelda games that much more stimulating.

I actually thought the blowing etc. was nice, and the time you had to close your DS to stamp your map on the bottom screen took me a while to figure out, lol, not very used to thinking outside the box in videogames.

oh snap, i didnt notice he was talking about okami the first time i watched,i just thought he was rattling on. I guess 'dog' instead of 'wolf' threw me off... i feel ashamed as a gamer ;_;

Zero Punctuation is well on its way to being an internet sensation. This guy is awesome in so many ways.

This is awesome. He states the complaints I've had with Nintendo and the way they keep popping out the same basic games over and over. You can't really blame Nintendo because, like people who play Madden, they just keep buying them.

I said the same thing about nintendo, almost verbatim, in a post about Metroid Prime 3, to which the fanboys promptly told me to be a good xbot and go play halo. So thats exactly what i'll go do now.
Later

As an official ambassador of the Nintendo Defense Force, I would like to say that I agree with everything he has said EVER except for finally one small point.

He says that Nintendo is the only company that we let get away with this nonsense. I beg to differ. We (not including me) let every single developer in the world get away with it. Find me a sequel and I'll show you a (game name) 1.5 with upgraded graphics, one new weapon, and nothing new. I'd even say this is what Valve did with Half-Life 1 and 2, and that's one of my favorite games of all time! It's been going on forever, including the lack of changes from Pac-Man to Ms. Pac-Man to the Halo 1, 1.3, and now Halo 1.7 that was just released with zillions of sales. And on the other hand, we have Square-Enix, who doesn't even make new games, but remakes a couple per year.

The people who make games, the people who play games, and the people who review games... do not want change. They want the same crap over and over. It's what makes developers money, because gamers will keep paying for the same shit over and over, and reviewers will keep praising the same shit over and over. The problem is industry-wide.

Thank you for mentioning it Yahtzee, but Nintendo is definitely not alone. They're just the only developer to be this successful for this long, so they have a longer history of this problem. The most hyped games right now are Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3, FF13, MGS4, CoD4, Smash Bros. Brawl, Guitar Hero 3, and GTA4. Games without numbers don't stand a chance.

And whenever developers can't think of ways to keep milking their franchises, they bring old ones back from the dead. We're finally getting a new Rygar, a Contra 4, and a new Bionic Commando? These developers are raping our childhoods for truckloads of money, and we're happy to fork it over.

And my hands aren't clean either. When Contra 4 comes out, I'll be first in line!