Zero Punctuation affected by Mass Effect's verbiage

by Alexander Sliwinski { Dec 19th 2007 at 7:00PM }

Yahtzee delves into the interstellar drama of Mass Effect this week and walks away with the same issues as many others, but explains it in a way that only the British expatriate can. We already know Yahtzee doesn't like America very much, so we'll take it as a back-handed compliment that he doesn't mind listening to all the North American accents in Mass Effect as compared to Wookies ~~grunt~~ ~~groan~~ bellowing (what do Wookies do?) through Knights of the Old Republic. As his issue with Mass Effect lies in its wealth of dialog and text, we'll just end this post now.

Find this week's NSFW dose of Zero Punctuation after the break.

Tags: escapist, masseffect, yahtzee, zero-punctuation, zeropunctuation

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

gonk @ Dec 19th 2007 7:07PM

if he doesn't like words maybe he shouldn't have played it in the first place?

kinshadow @ Dec 19th 2007 7:13PM

He probably played it just so he could use the phrase "mass erect" in the the review.

Edog Lost @ Dec 19th 2007 7:19PM

it worked, it's funny.

Oneiromancer @ Dec 19th 2007 7:22PM

Kinshadow, you're exactly right--read the small text at the end, Yahtzee declares it to be so.

Joop @ Dec 19th 2007 7:59PM

He spent several seconds, which is paragraphs in Yatzee-speak, explaining why your comment doesn't apply. Try watching it again. Just because you like words doesn't mean you'd be over joyed when some one hands you a full volume encyclopedia collection.

gonk @ Dec 19th 2007 8:06PM

anyone who knows bioware knew this game would be more towards the encyclopedia end of the scale...

also he should've used an ass effect joke too

Joop @ Dec 19th 2007 8:22PM

Gonk, as others mentioned, one of his favorite games is Planescape: Torrent, which is a mountain of text. It's not the quantity, it's the the lack of quality in such quantity.

T3H WICKERMAN (FDF) @ Dec 19th 2007 8:25PM

I was under the impression he reviews games. That and that fact that people have been hounding him to REVIEW it. Fun as usual, I liked mass effect but I enjoy the laugh I get from this fellows reviews much more.

Yuccadude @ Dec 19th 2007 7:08PM

Wookies, at least Chewbacca, often hrrn, so I guess you could add that to the list of noises they produce.

schatten529 @ Dec 19th 2007 7:12PM

Don't Wookies Growl?

ALH @ Dec 19th 2007 7:12PM

B^U

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 7:22PM

The good ol' CAD vacant stare...

Robotochan @ Dec 19th 2007 7:13PM

I'm shocked he missed the horrible autosave!

plyx @ Dec 19th 2007 7:29PM

For real. Worst aspect of the game by far.

gonk @ Dec 19th 2007 8:08PM

can't you turn it off in the options? i don't find the 2 second pause that annoying though, esp. since it gives me an 11th save slot as a backup

why not the LS2/LS7? @ Dec 19th 2007 8:50PM

How can I bitch about 2 seconds to autosave when the distance to places might as well be measured by "number of elevators between here and there", and each elevator takes 40 seconds minimum?

It's a goddamn joke how many times it reloads/goes to elevator as you move around your ship, the Citadel or other planets.

gonk @ Dec 19th 2007 9:19PM

once you do the initial sidequests in the citadel, you can zip around with the transit things a lot faster

i know, the loading stuff sucks, but oh well. the rest of the game makes up for it. i'm on my 4th playthru now, with 2 more planned

Ethan @ Dec 19th 2007 7:15PM

I wouldn't really call this stuff a review. I watch it for the shampoo metaphors.

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 7:24PM

I think - no, I know that he takes issue with that stance. I've been watching Yahtzee's review videos for a long time, and I'm convinced that they're every bit as fair and relevant as the arbitrary numbers pumped out by the rest of the review community. As a bonus, they happen to be hilarious. That doesn't prevent them from being serious reviews as well, though.

Ethan @ Dec 19th 2007 7:44PM

I'd call it a polemic. It's unfair and unbalanced, but I'd agree that it's no more so than most - it's merely less pretentious. Knowing the angle it's coming from does make it useful in the way a review is.

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 7:53PM

I wouldn't call it unfair. Unbalanced, perhaps, but I could argue that any review that claims to be balanced is a fraud. You don't see many film or book reviews that dispassionately list features. Game reviewing needs to change, and I think styles like Yahtzee's are the future.

But aside from simply ranting, he does provide reasons, and examples, in every one of his reviews.

I can understand why people tend to default to the "it's entertainment, not serious reviewing" explanation, either to diffuse an argument or to justify their love of ZP despite the fact that Yahtzee has shredded a game they enjoyed, but I think it's disrespectful to Yahtzee, and simply incorrect.

T3H WICKERMAN (FDF) @ Dec 19th 2007 8:27PM

here you go ill make it fair and give it a 6.5.

Vegeta (aka Ska Oreo) @ Dec 20th 2007 2:41AM

I actually kinda have to disagree with you on that. I don't see Yahtzee's segments as real reviews. They are more like him bitching about something that is popular and/or getting rave reviews and as we all know criticizing something that is popular means you're cool (which explains the legion of fans this guy has because honestly the quality of the vids have been declining). If this was a review it would have focused on both positive and negative aspects of the game, but Yahtzee mostly focuses on the negatives in order to be funny. Even when he says he likes something he spends about a second saying so and then proceeds to rip the game (even the game he likes) a new one.

His shit is only done for the lulz, but I don't think it should be regarded as an official review.

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 7:21PM

It's a shame his format doesn't allow for a bit more elaboration. I know he loves Planescape: Torment (as any thinking human being should), and that game is drowning in text. Superbly-written text, but still... He never claims that Mass Effect is poorly-written, so I wonder how good the writing in a game has to be in order for Yahtzee to forgive it its verbosity and have a grand ol' time. I hope ME goes to the PC in the near future so I can try it out for myself.

Anyway, hilarious ZP video, as usual. A bit late in the day for Joystiq to report it, since it's been up for hours, but hey, whatever.

Joop @ Dec 19th 2007 8:02PM

He doesn't flat out say it's poorly written, but he does heavily imply it and give reason with the whole life story thing.

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 8:12PM

Good call, Joop. He doesn't seem to be very vehement about it, though. If it was really terrible I think he'd have been a bit more upfront about it, but as it stands I guess it seems like he was simply underwhelmed by it. Not interested enough to make up for the length of it all.

Mr Khan @ Dec 19th 2007 7:41PM

BioWare's always been known for excessive detail, but the Action-RPG genre is easy to do well (many good ARPGs)

He's right about games making you feel guilty for skipping text, though, there's always some detail or other that you miss that's generally important

Jake @ Dec 19th 2007 7:42PM

I am pretty sure Yahtzee has ADD. The only game he's reviewed and really liked to my knowledge was Portal, which was only 2.5 hours long with at least 1.5 hours of it taken up by tutorials and very easy puzzling stuff. I mean, it was an hour of some of the greatest puzzles ever spread over 3 hours with about 20 lines of funny, for a game, humor. Then it was done and you heard a song that you played two more times on the internet.

I loved Portal, don't get me wrong. Really enjoyed my time with it. But seriously, he hates anything with depth or length it seems. It is like he has the mind of a casual gamer. How can he possibly get through a game a week when they seem to annoy him so much?

He hates the optional dialogue in Mass Effect? If he skips it, he feels like the game is getting mad at him!? Yahtzee is hilarious, but sometimes his propensity towards humor drags him well away from any real critique of a game.

In any case, I find his reviews humorous, quite accurate when he isn't just being silly, and his game knowledge in general seems quite deep.

He did correctly point out that the things he hates about Mass Erect are also the things that most people (read: rpg fans in general) like about it.

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 7:48PM

You must have missed his gushing review of Psychonauts, and by extension everything in the old LucasArts catalog, and everything Tim Schafer's touched.

Also, he enjoys Planescape: Torment, which is poison to the casual gamer.

The reason he seems to dislike most of the games he reviews is that it's his thing. He's sort of a hilarious curmudgeon. He intentionally focuses on the negatives.

Mr Khan @ Dec 19th 2007 7:48PM

No, he's just bitterly, cynically, humorously jaded, which is an instant pass for cool amongst this community. The gamer community is generally one that likes to bash whatever's popular

If he weren't so unfailingly hilarious (in a way rarely seen on the internet), i would probably be irritated by him

James @ Dec 19th 2007 7:51PM

The longer the game the better it is? What?

Joop @ Dec 19th 2007 8:14PM

"He hates the optional dialogue in Mass Effect? If he skips it, he feels like the game is getting mad at him!?"

I don't think its existence bothered him, just the fact that it was there and was bad. A wine lover isn't going to immediately love a ten gallon box of wine just because it's wine.

GaryM @ Dec 19th 2007 7:50PM

"I've been watching Yahtzee's review videos for a long time"

Six months seems like a lifetime, doesn't it?

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 7:56PM

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but it honestly does. I'm not sure how long it took for Yahtzee's reviews to reach the level they're currently at, where both Joystiq and Kotaku update every time a new one is posted at The Escapist, and it does seem like a long time... longer than 6 months, at least.

MasterInsan0 @ Jan 9th 2008 5:54PM

It didn't take much time at all for his reviews to reach this level, honestly. The Escapist made a pretty good call when they hired him.

Joop @ Dec 19th 2007 8:08PM

That was surprisingly tame, I was really expecting a thorough lashing.

I mean, I love Mass Effect, but I fully accept that it's a guilty pleasure I don't speak of without the anonymous safety blanket of the internets.

retromancer @ Dec 19th 2007 8:27PM

For someone who frequently blasts FPS gamers for wanting "twitch twitch bang bang" action, he certainly demands it a lot in his RPGs.

Joop @ Dec 19th 2007 9:44PM

The guy sets his bar pretty high. I think more people should, too.

wootman @ Jan 2nd 2008 11:38PM

personally i find him to be the perfect reviewer for someone on a budget, as he points out the flaws in new games and reccomends older cheaper ones.

LaughingTarget @ Dec 19th 2007 8:35PM

I personally liked the lengthy dialogue. Mass Effect is as much a Sci Fi game as it is a political narrative. Politicians are pompous pontificators afterall. Also, the lengthy dialogue fleshes out the world in ways no competing RPG companies have been able to match.

I'm surprised at his disdain. It makes me wonder if he prefers the Final Fantasy style story where the characters fall in love in 5 minutes, things happen without adequate explanation and we expect to get to care about characters with minimal exposition (or worse yet, dragging cutscenes that are mostly silent or action oriented).

Yes, it isnt Shakespear, but Mass Effect makes it a point to create a living world and characters with real growth motivation. Mass Effect's real game breaking issues are called inconsistent dialogue volume, graphical pop-in and the Mako.

fugori @ Dec 19th 2007 8:39PM

I think Yahtzee's stance on JRPG's was made quite clear in the video...

Is "inconsistent dialogue volume" really a "game breaking issue"?

Sidepocket @ Dec 19th 2007 10:44PM

I played Mass Effect at a friends house. For as much as they talk about the story, this makes the Star Wars Prequels look like Shakespeare.

Mass Effect is as cookie cutter as you can get with laughably stiff animations, no emotion and the most generic sci-fi plot on the planet.

I was skipping the cut scenes too to get at the game play, which is decent but felt like they made it more of a FPS just to cater to the Twitch FPS audience that 360 has. :(

why not the LS2/LS7? @ Dec 19th 2007 8:42PM

I spent 90 minutes (I'm not joking) selling and rearranging weapons about 20 hours in when the game told me my inventory was almost full.

This was necessary because when you're in your ship, you can't see what weapons other people have without going to their locker. And then you still can't compare it to what you have or others have. So have to check everyones inventory make a list, cross-reference it, then rearrange the right weapons to the right people, then go and sell/buy weapons/mods to make sense.

90 minutes on this is a joke. They should improve this. And all the ammo mods are kind of a mess on their own. It's tough to get rid of them fast enough, let alone organize them properly so you don't get rid of the wrong thing.

On another note, the dialog skip doesn't work right in Mass Effect. You press X to skip, but if it brought up the dialog wheel right as you pressed it (remember, it does so before the dialog ends), then X is taken to mean "accept whatever response I happened to be pointing at that I never even saw". I can't believe the testers didn't notice it. They must all hammer the X button constantly.

Still, I really like the game.

gonk @ Dec 19th 2007 9:24PM

i've learned to equip just my 2 main cohorts while i'm on a planet, and after a while i go to the citadel's shops to see what i can buy, and sell all my excess shit. i just keep 1 or 2 non-equipped mods of the highest level available

and hold the left stick straight up when you're skipping dialogue with x, since there's never an option at the top of the wheel

Obie @ Dec 19th 2007 8:48PM

Wow these get better everytime, love this guy.
Gotta keep an eye on those quick background pics he puts up, that dig at CAD comic was great.

Zsavior @ Dec 19th 2007 8:55PM

I like Jrpgs I like Western RPGs I find his view funny on both ends, and it took a swipe at Tim Buckley to boot, twas his finest review. Do I trust his word as law no, did it give me a chuckle about how some of the nuances of the game may be annoying to me, hells yes.

yojimb0 @ Dec 19th 2007 9:01PM

fyi the word callipygian means "having a nice ass."

Geist @ Dec 19th 2007 9:12PM

Hahahah thanks, I was kind of wondering that.

LordMinogue @ Dec 19th 2007 9:04PM

I'm surprised that he didn't tear the 360 a new one for Mass Effect's technical issues. I spent as much time looking at loading screens and elevator shafts as I spent in dialogs by the end of the game. Older 360s chug during the climactic cut scenes too...maybe he has a new hardware revision?

*disclaimer* I loved the game and thought it was $70 and 25 hours well spent

why not the LS2/LS7? @ Dec 19th 2007 9:17PM

It's two elevators (one is an airlock) just to get to your ship from the spaceport on the Citadel. And a pointless run down the neck of your ship (it's guitar-shaped in floorplan).

That's at least 3 minutes to get to the bridge once you start, if you're at the elevator in the spaceport! If you are somewhere else in the citadel add another loading screen (the mass transit, which shows a cityscape as it loads) and a ship undocking scene, for a time of about 5 minutes.

I mean come on.

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