Zero Punctuation
The series began after Croshaw produced two reviews for Fable: The Lost Chapters and The Darkness and uploaded them on YouTube to wide acclaim. Something Awful owner Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka offered Croshaw the opportunity to produce Zero Punctuation for his website for next to no money, which Croshaw turned down.
After this The Escapist contacted him and offered him a contract. Reviews are released every Wednesday, and every week's review is previewed on G4's X-Play the Tuesday before.
The reviews became vastly popular, leading to a four hundred percent increase in the Escapist's traffic. Some have compared it to Penny Arcade in terms of influence and popularity.
In these videos, Croshaw usually reviews a recent game or games, using his rapid-fire speech delivery (which gave the name for the column, although he states the fast talking was “by accident”), analogously followed by a minimalistic cartoon mirroring what has been said.
The videos are typically around four minutes of length, and formerly featured two commercial songs at the start and at the end, usually lyrically relating to the game context (although sometimes only tangentially), which have since been replaced by a single, standard opening sequence consisting of clips from past Zero Punctuations and guitar music. The end credits often feature humorous notes about how Croshaw's reviews can anger the viewer and also contain some of the characters from the review engaging in slapstick (chasing each other, being eaten, blown up, etc.).
A recurring character in the videos is a small imp-like character (who also appears in one of the Zero Punctuation logos), usually playing various supporting roles as either the antagonist or the sidekick, often taking the place of enemies in the game.
The imp is in fact a stylized version of a “darkling” from the first game Yahtzee reviewed, called “The Darkness”, in which Yahtzee referred to it as an “Evil Imp”. It has been referred to as an imp in the closing credits of the review of Super Mario Galaxy.
Critical style
Croshaw, more often than not, provides highly critical reviews of games, usually focusing on a game's faults.
His reviews are frequently hostile to high-profile releases such as Halo 3, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Soulcalibur IV and Metal Gear Solid 4, and he occasionally states that he expects provoked e-mails from the series' more devoted fans (at one point devoting an entire episode to responding to the irate fanboy mail from SSBB).
He also tends to shun certain genres of games or overused and recurring "gimmicks" in gaming, such as JRPGs, fighting games, MMORPGs (pronouncing it "Mumorpugah" and spelling it "MUMORPUGER"), Nintendo continually remaking its old franchises, ("Mario's ground has been trodden, bulldozed and purged with fire and salt") and his "old arch-nemesis", Quick Time Events. (which he calls "God of War-style Simon Says button-mashing sequences", at one point devoting a short live action video in the middle of a review to address the developers directly.
He notes that it is actually Shenmue that introduced Quick Time Events to gaming, but God of War is the more popular and well-known franchise.)
The reviews are not universally negative though, as he praised games such as Saints Row 2, Painkiller, No More Heroes, Call of Duty 4, Psychonauts and "The Orange Box" (At one point he said he "couldn't think of any criticism" for Portal, as well as using the game several times as an example of a "perfect" game). Even in negative reviews such as the one for Haze or Alone in the Dark, he noted a few positive aspects, stating the latter had "the potential for true greatness".
In fact, Croshaw started his review of BioShock by acknowledging that "despite all the bad things I'm about to say, it's still probably one of the best games of the year", but spent the rest of the review harshly criticizing it - he explained this by saying "no one likes it when I'm being nice to a game" (referring to his positive review of Psychonauts), while previously noting that "I know it's not very funny to love a game" for Portal. Croshaw has expressed hope in upcoming games, provided developers "get it right" (Notably, during the end credit sequence to his E3 2008 review, he expresses interest in the potential displayed by the game Mirror's Edge).
As a hint towards what he thinks as the ultimate game, Croshaw at one point stated that "The console wars are all ultimately futile, as the best game ever, Fantasy World Dizzy for the Commodore 64, has already been made." Croshaw also did a special feature on the Dizzy series in Australian Hyper Magazine February 2006.
Brawl.
One episode was a review of webcomics, taking several stabs at Ctrl+Alt+Del (a webcomic he claims to have a personal hatred of, having previously called it "the Rubbish King, sitting proudly on a throne of rotting meat" and stating outright "I fucking hate Ctrl+Alt+Del", later noting that "I look at CAD and I see a lot of misdirected potential").
One episode consisted of reviews of trailers of games shown at E3 2008, commenting that almost every upcoming game was a sequel.
Some episodes featured hidden shorts at the end:
The episode about The Witcher had a short profanity-laden conversation made with Painkiller
The episode about Sim City Societies had a short created with Garry's Mod using maps and character models from Team Fortress 2.
The Lego Indy episode featured a "review" of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where a seemingly bored Yahtzee proceeds to mutely make face and hand gestures, ending the review with flipping the viewer off. At the conclusion of the following week's review, Alone in the Dark, Yahtzee provides captions for the gestures.
The episode about Silent Hill Homecoming had a short sketch, using clips from Silent Hill 1 and Silent Hill 3.
It resembles the short after the Witcher as it was done in the same way: clips from games are taken and the dialogues are voice-overed.
List of episodes
The Webcomics episode marks the end of the use of Yahtzee's "personally made with music relating to the game" openings.
In addition, Croshaw also created two episodes before joining Escapist Magazine:
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