Zero Punctuation Reviews!

Recently, the series Zero Punctuation ended. It was always a short, snacky series of videos that started out in the edgy, too hot for tv days of the internet but ended a genuinely well written series of comedy game reviews. There are compilation videos online called “zero punctuation without any punctuation” that I’ve listened to as background noise for so long I can now recite full hour long sets of reviews by heart (for the record, start with the newest videos first and then work your way back until the joss whedon by way of Kevin smith tone and 2000’s era edgy jokes starts turning you off).

The weird thing is about being such a fan of a series that ran for 15 years is that I instantly recognize games that have been completely forgotten. I routinely go to retro video game stores, and I’m the only person in the store who gets excited about finding a copy of absolute crap like too human or brink because I’m genuinely the only person who remembers what those even are. I’ve slowly collected a ton of them, and with the Xbox 360 store going down and having a fire sale before it did, I managed to get a bunch more. Now, if you’ve been collecting games from back before eBay scalpers ruined everything, you also probably have stacks of games you’ve barely even touched because they were a dollar and the cover was funny or something. So I haven’t actually played a good portion of them. Until now!

I’ve decided to go through the zero punctuation library and check these games out. I’m both curious about how some of these games i’ve been hearing about for literally a decade play, but also i never owned an xbox 360 when it was current, so I missed a whole bunch of classics. I had a wii back in the day, but despite those machines being remembered fondly now, every single person aside from nintendo die hards back then played wii sports for a week and then let it collect dust the entire generation, and i mostly played ps2 and dreamcast games i got from garage sales.

• the darkness review.
• back to the main site.

Let's lay down a few ground rules

1. I am not going to beat all of them. There are some real classics in this list, but there’s also absolute dogshit. Yahtzee openly stops playing games a few hours in if they’re bad. And it took him 15 years to get through this list when he was doing it for a full time job. So I’ll play them a few hours and see what they’re about and report back. I’m also not going to replay games I’ve already played a ton of, especially if it was recent. I only beat gta V like six months ago, so I’ll more than likely just write up my thoughts about it.
2. No online only/ only mostly games. These games either don’t exist in any form once the servers shut down or have had so many changes that they’re nothing like they were when they were reviewed. This doesn’t mean I’ll never check out any of them, but even games as late as fallout 76 are apparently drastically different so I’m not going to spend too much time on them
3. The “no shit all over my house rule”. I live in a two bedroom apartment with 3 people and am absolutely swimming in random bullshit. I’m crazy enough to have a vhs tape collection and a crt television despite not having a door because I live in the living room. So if there’s something that requires random extra peripherals I don’t have I’m going to skip it. I’m not going to try and find a place for rock band drumsets or 17 different vr helmets.

There. That should lower expectations sufficiently. I’ll also try my best not to accidentally quote episodes but I have been watching this basically daily for years now so some of it’s going to come out. There is no set schedule for updates. It’s more of a hobby and passion project than anything I’m trying to build a fan base on or make official. Check back periodically to read the new reviews