The day I ever find myself sharing even half the same mind as Yahtzee is the day I stop playing video games... as what on earth would be the point of even playing games if it would make me feel that bitter and angry.
I'm not bitter and angry about Killzone 2 having a WWII with space marines story. I just find it funny that something I saw, no one else even commented on, nor has any other site I have seen mentioned, is something that he noticed right away. The difference between my thoughts on it and Yahtzee's, as you can see in my full post I quoted, is that I recognize societal PC pressures often leave game designers little room to work with in terms of enemies. I believe the RE5 press has proven that.
I think his refusal to review KZ2 fully has more to do with the fact that every fanboy war title that comes out he will purposely avoid for as long as his bosses will allow him too. Now he can even say he has mentioned it. In the past he has had comments in his credits about how he will not review X game, no matter how many emails he gets. Honestly, while his shtick is negative exaggeration, I think he does not want to ever have to do a letters episode again, and if it were because of KZ2 he would sound a lot like the Sessler's Soapbox you posted with his response to the KZ2 review comments.
Heck, I am not even partially of the mind that Ben Croshaw actually agrees with most of what his alter ego says.
In fact, I am always shocked to see so many people appear to actually take his "reviews" seriously, and not as the clever shtick of entertainment that it is.
His shtick is entertainment, because it sells. But what he is doing is far from making stuff up, just more like a negareview. In a world where game reviewers will give games 9.5-10 scores way too often, even after they spent one paragraph of their review pointing out flaws (if it has flaws why is GTA4 a 10?) he creates a very stark contrast. And by not giving some arbitrary score you have to actually listen to his comments, thus making him seem much more harsh than others, when in reality he just left out the excessive praise.
If you ever read the negareviews Joystiq posts, which is where they combine all the negative comments regarding a game from multiple reviews, you will find that there are even more criticisms to be had of even 9.5-10 (er 95-100, see arbitrary) metacritic rated games than Yahtzee gives.
So, I think it is just that he does exaggerations of real negative aspects of games. I know that I saw his review of Super Mario Galaxy and he made a comment regarding "wanker's cramp" due to the lack of a traditional control option and an extremely large amount of waggle. I just giggled and went on. Then I beat the game and after the final boss fight my wrist was sore due to all the waggle.
Similarly, he commented on Guitar Hero requiring a mutated third hand or trained pet spider to play on hard or expert, while medium just required overcoming the use of an often underutilized pinky finger. In my case, on Rock Band's guitar I made the jump from easy to medium with little problem. But when I attempted hard the difficulty increase was much more than just a step up. Not only did it require mastering a fifth button with four fingers, but it also sped up. The extra button alone takes forever to get used to, but add in the speed and I'm still playing on medium.
Basically, his points are real (although I still don't know what the unlimited ammo gun he mentions in MGS4 is) but you cannot expect them to have the same degree of effect that he mentions. Heck, in some reviews he even mentions going back to play another game that he already called crap. Obviously it wasn't too bad.
And that as much longer than I intended it to be.
