Zero Punctuation Game Reviews

The Jester · Post by **The Jester** » 2007-09-20 01:56am

These video game reviews are hilarious.

Panzer Grenadier · Post by **Panzer Grenadier** » 2007-09-20 02:22am

Holy crap the Bioshock review describes my feelings toward that game to the letter. Glad to hear im not the only person who thought the game was pretty much a dumbed down deus ex with less choices.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2007-09-20 08:55am

Panzer Grenadier wrote:Holy crap the Bioshock review describes my feelings toward that game to the letter. Glad to hear im not the only person who thought the game was pretty much a dumbed down deus ex with less choices.

Hey, I hear Bioshock is harder if you go to max difficulty and reload the game every time you die instead of respawning.

But yeah, that review was pretty much dead on. It was a good game, but man am I glad I only rented it.

Paradox244 · Post by **Paradox244** » 2007-09-20 09:29am

Zero Punctuation is great, he does a new one every Wednesday. And there are two of the ones he did before his Escapist gig on the review page of his website, which is also quite funny.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2007-09-20 10:22am

Zero Punctuation is awesome. Watch the Heavenly Sword and Console War bits.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2007-09-20 12:27pm

Awesome! That Bioshock review was hilarious, even if I intend on getting the game someday when my PC won't explode trying to load the menu.

I love cynical reviewers. This is what Stark should be doing, but he let a Limey beat him to it.

Paradox244 · Post by **Paradox244** » 2007-09-20 01:42pm

Another good site for this sort of thing is Angry Gamer. The podcasts especially are awesome.

Drooling Iguana · Post by **Drooling Iguana** » 2007-09-20 03:18pm

Kind of odd that he'd complain about Tomb Raider: Anniversary being a ripoff of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, since the original Tomb Raider was nothing more than a blatant ripoff of the original Prince of Persia but in 3D.

Laughing Mechanicus · Post by **Laughing Mechanicus** » 2007-09-20 03:31pm

Drooling Iguana wrote:Kind of odd that he'd complain about Tomb Raider: Anniversary being a ripoff of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, since the original Tomb Raider was nothing more than a blatant ripoff of the original Prince of Persia but in 3D.

And the original Prince of Persia is just a rip-off of 'Arabian Nights' but in a game. Let's all play the 'Locate True Creative Primacy' game!

CaptHawkeye · Post by **CaptHawkeye** » 2007-09-20 03:47pm

Panzer Grenadier wrote:Holy crap the Bioshock review describes my feelings toward that game to the letter. Glad to hear im not the only person who thought the game was pretty much a dumbed down deus ex with less choices.

You never have been. Me, Stark, and Hotfoot have been pretty hostile to the game from the start. And i'm quite happy my friend let me borrow it. Because it was NOT worth 60 dollars, or a long term position on your shelf. This review pretty much nailed everything we thought was sub-par about it. Old System Shock/PC RPG fans will probably hate it since it is insultingly simplified. And even on the hardest difficulty it's still piss easy. Maybe I would have liked the game more if it hadn't been hyped so much. People were treating it like the second coming. Which was only made worse by the developer's fantastic claims about it.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-09-20 04:59pm

CaptHawkeye wrote:
Panzer Grenadier wrote:Holy crap the Bioshock review describes my feelings toward that game to the letter. Glad to hear im not the only person who thought the game was pretty much a dumbed down deus ex with less choices.
You never have been. Me, Stark, and Hotfoot have been pretty hostile to the game from the start. And i'm quite happy my friend let me borrow it. Because it was NOT worth 60 dollars, or a long term position on your shelf. This review pretty much nailed everything we thought was sub-par about it. Old System Shock/PC RPG fans will probably hate it since it is insultingly simplified. And even on the hardest difficulty it's still piss easy. Maybe I would have liked the game more if it hadn't been hyped so much. People were treating it like the second coming. Which was only made worse by the developer's fantastic claims about it.

There's always a skeptical contingent, and no Panzer, you're not alone. I'm one of the people who really liked the ideas of it, but was disappointed with the reality. Note, BioShock is a fun game, and you can enjoy it, but there's a lot of unneccessary frustration and dumbed-down ness to it. Plus, the place was aptly described to me as a "modular space station under water" which is basically just a rehash of the original setting, basically.

So while it's totally cool to have the game be just a romp around in the underwater city of Rapture, that's not how it was marketed, or how it has been recieved, and that adds extra grit to the crapsandwich and makes plenty of folks resentful. It wouldn't be as big of a deal if these weren't supposed to be CRITICS who help me make a decision about if or if not I spend 60 bucks on it.

The main reason I reacted badly is that, coming from Oblivion, I was instantly struck by how dumbed-down the combat was... then that there was no inventory management whatsoever... and hardly a decent information management screen, no specialization, etc.

I was like "Block the wrench! Use my--wait, I can't block!?" and then I realized that most games don't have blocks, and I'd just been playing Oblivion too long. Being jackhammered by some kind of big-lipped zombie afraid of my judgemental stare wasn't the game experience I wanted. I thought we were exploring a dead city! It's not dead! It's crawling with zombies and a few normal people! Where's the mystery? The intrigue? I barely have time to get immersed in the atmosphere before some rabbit-masked hooligan from MANHUNT bursts in on me and tries to fuck me with a wrench. Once I finally died in a massive firefight between a bunch of guys and me using a tommygun that apparently fires jellybeans, I popped back right next to the firefight from one of those tubes. And then again, and again, and again. Wah?

In the little game demo, it was much more exploratory in tone, so I was a bit offput by the game as well. So... good game, not amazing. Sad! Too much of an obvious X-Box port, especially with the plasmids that are in-game but disabled at the moment to make people pay for them later as an expansion.

Andrew_Fireborn · Post by **Andrew_Fireborn** » 2007-09-20 05:16pm

Covenant wrote:In the little game demo, it was much more exploratory in tone, so I was a bit offput by the game as well. So... good game, not amazing. Sad! Too much of an obvious X-Box port, especially with the plasmids that are in-game but disabled at the moment to make people pay for them later as an expansion.

Wondered when people would get around to exploring the cut/unreleased side of the game.

Haven't been keeping up on it since I got disheartened around Apollo Square. (Still don't feel like finishing it... Just... to easy)

So what did they find buryed in the code?

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-09-20 05:22pm

Some extra stuff related to plasmids that aren't in-game, but which the game shipped with. A video and other stuff relating to some kind of 'shove people away' plasmid and some others... I forget. That's really not unprecedented, since they knew they wanted to release new plasmid packs. They announced it like 2 days after the game shipped.

Like these bunch.

This isn't a big "HOW SHAMEFUL!" comment, but it's just a little bit of an example how the game was rebranded for the Xbox, which favors small episodic packages more than a PC game. The easiest way to do episodic installments like that on a PC is via Steam, which everyone hates. But they're gonna have to do some kind of distribution, look at the code:

Code: Select all

[ShockGame.ShockUserSettings]
HasPlasmidPack1=False
NeedToShowPlasmidAnnouncement=False

It's also silly how they made the game shadermodel 2 incompatible, beside the fact that it barely took some modders a week to make it work with shadermodel 2. I've kinda set the game aside for more than a week now after I got to the fish market area. Just not feelin' it.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2007-09-20 08:13pm

Hey, I was looking forward to Bioshock for a long time... sadly, the demo turned me right off with it's spawn-wave bullshit, and the full game being laughably easy (easier than FEAR even) didn't help. I pride myelf on not being a fanboy, so I reversed my position on Bioshock pretty quickly. Didn't even pick up my preorder.

Drooling Iguana · Post by **Drooling Iguana** » 2007-09-20 08:15pm

Aaron Ash wrote:
Drooling Iguana wrote:Kind of odd that he'd complain about Tomb Raider: Anniversary being a ripoff of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, since the original Tomb Raider was nothing more than a blatant ripoff of the original Prince of Persia but in 3D.
And the original Prince of Persia is just a rip-off of 'Arabian Nights' but in a game. Let's all play the 'Locate True Creative Primacy' game!

I'm just saying that ripping off Prince of Persia is what the whole Tomb Raider series is based on (that and tits) so it's odd that the Zero Punctuation guy is singling Anniversary out over it.

Nephtys · Post by **Nephtys** » 2007-09-20 09:04pm

Zero-Punctuation is hilarious. I found the Heavenly Sword(s) thing this morning too (thanks Covvie!) and... well. The Bioshock one's pretty right on. I was really hoping for Bioshock to be System Shock 2 improved in gameplay, with a not-sucky version of STALKER's gameworld. Only underwater. What I got was a set of linear levels with no need to go back, and no sense of an actual living city. And console-itis. Ugh.

Back on topic, the guy's funny as hell and his visuals are definately amusing.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2007-09-20 09:15pm

Nephtys wrote:Zero-Punctuation is hilarious. I found the Heavenly Sword(s) thing this morning too (thanks Covvie!) and... well. The Bioshock one's pretty right on. I was really hoping for Bioshock to be System Shock 2 improved in gameplay, with a not-sucky version of STALKER's gameworld. Only underwater. What I got was a set of linear levels with no need to go back, and no sense of an actual living city. And console-itis. Ugh.

Back on topic, the guy's funny as hell and his visuals are definately amusing.

The hype really soured it. If we look at this as a type of Shooter game, it fares more favorably. It draws a more fair comparison to Halflife than System Shock. Needing to backtrack through a respawned area of Halflife wouldn't seem all that unrealistic, since you're playing a gun game--you know the point is to throw shit at you until you die, or it dies.

With the way they spun this game though, it ended up being a big disappointment, since there was no Ghost City feel, or Living City feel, or City feel at all. Just respawning zombies that meander in place and occasionally use objects. It's not like they're DOING anything. STALKER had the advantage of factions with nebulous goals in mind, whereas here the Splicers are even so brainless as to be puppeteered around by phermones. Honestly, would it have killed them to leave the crazy Splicers as Chaotic Violent characters that make up a roughly living city, and have the 'puppet minions of Rand' filled by a subset like the Spiders?

Ah well. I often blame things for what they could have been instead. Evaluating the game for what it is, it's a great shooter. But it's no RPG at all. The laughable 'choice' dynamic is just on-off switches like other games have done before. Honestly, I preferred HL1's 'choice' at the end. At least that one had spunk.

Erik von Nein · Post by **Erik von Nein** » 2007-09-21 12:27am

Oh, gods. Those videos were hilarious. Pretty much did capture everything wrong with BioShock. I mean, I beat it with the "evil" (read: confusing as to why it's different) ending, but that was easily one of the most disappointing game (with the easiest last boss I have ever fought in my life, electro-gel, lol) I've played in recent memory.