Drummie666 said:
I like bulletstorm and he dissed it.
If what he did for that game was "diss" it, then it's no wonder people think all he does is spew vitriol, if the 'mild disappointment' it feels like he actually expressed triggers that sort of response.
The reason people get upset is out of insecurity for their own beliefs, and that if someone proclaims that they're wrong, then they have a knee-jerk reflex that says that they themselves couldn't possibly be wrong, and that it is the vitriolic reviewer that is wrong. (He actually addressed this in the mailbox episode, alluding to the responses he got from people who saw the SSBB review)
Having said that, I think Yahtzee falls into the same trap that people like Jon Stewart fall into: the idea that because what they say are opinions channeled through a medium of comedy, that two things are true: 1) that ultimately what they say isn't that important, and because of that, we have 2) that when they disagree with an established convention, the only reason they expressed that opinion was to be funny.
Personally, the idea that Yahtzee expresses only negative opinions about games, with only a few exceptions (Amnesia and Portal/Orange Box being the notable standouts) strikes me as having highly selective judgement as to what he claims about said games. I think the reason people think he's constantly negative is that they're used to the mainstream review process, whereby only exceedingly bad games actually receive that kind of negative criticism, and even mediocre games might get poor ratings, but their reviews are still very rose-tinted.
But acknowledging for a second that his reviews do lean far more to the cynical side than neutral, the notion that "he's only expressing his opinion (comically), therefore, it shouldn't matter to you" seems almost as farcical as the knee-jerk reaction that fan-boys take. You should care about what people like him have to say about the medium. You don't have to agree with him, but realize that there's more to it than just saying whether he likes a game or not. The reason he doesn't (usually) do the "Yes this is good" or "No this is shit" part is out of acknowledgement that that's not the point of the review, the point is to explain what's good about the game, and what isn't, and not try to summarize the thing in one sentence.
Oh, and the debate between reviewers and critics: There's no difference. I'm sure a dictionary will make some sort of distinction between the two, but the actual, pragmatic difference between the two is not going to matter. At the end of the day, both are discussing what's good and what's bad about a product, both will try to rate it overall, and both are completely subjective. One might argue that the "reviewer" will stray closer to neutrality, but with such a term really being pretty nebulous in its definition, (plus, the word "criticism" has had its definition warped and twisted in ways unimaginable) I'm not sure that particular criterion counts as a valid comparison between the two.
