Yahtzee has a lot of problems as a reviewer, the first and largest being the lengths he goes to to put everything bad about a game up-front and almost NEVER mentions what's good about a game, even if he thinks the game's good parts outweighs it's bad ones. I can't say how many times I've listened through a patently negative review only to hear him finally say, "but overall, I like <insert-game-here>, it's this, it's that, so count this as a recommendation", and think to myself, "Wait, WHY is it good? That has to be the worst endorsement I've ever heard!"
In fact, Yahtzee is the only guy I tend to get reviews of most games from, so I never even CONSIDERED playing the excellent Mass Effect games until realizing Bioware was only JUST beaten by Valve in that Developers competition. Let me tell you, while his criticisms were accurate, they were footnotes compared to the creative and narrative masterpiece I got to experience.
Oh, and of course Yahtzee's intense prejudice concerning the Wii.
I don't really play the Wii often aside from the first-party Mario stuff, but even so I know how necessary the Wii and Nintendo are to keeping the gaming scene anchored. Whether Yahtzee likes motion controls or not, he needs acknowledge that Nintendo is THE only console-making game company out there that's a GAME company, and not a gaming arm of a giant multinational mega-corporation like Sony or Microsoft are. Nintendo knows the stakes, they know how to keep the industry thriving, even if they've wasted a lot of shelf-space on shovelware despite being the #1 selling console in the console-slaughter that is the current gaming-scene.
Yahtzee puts a lot of value on new IP's and is probably disappointed that Nintendo does tend to crush other newer Wii games by continually releasing new Mario content along with all the other Nintendo classics. But at least Nintendo acts like they're making stuff intended for kids and have a major mascot. It's unrealistic to want to squeeze Mario out of things when he's basically gaming's Mickey Mouse.
As MovieBob has said, video games are TOYS, and they're core audience must be the YOUNG. Microsoft and Sony are on the road to destroying this industry the same way comic books imploded in the early 90's, by only making stuff for all the 17-35 year olds and leaving the next generation in the dust. By catering only to an inevitably shrinking number of older fans WITHOUT seeking out NEW ones, the industry will quite literally suck it's own DICK, into an oblivion of the sort the comic book industry has YET to recover from. Sony and Microsoft, this one is on YOU.
Nature abhors a vaccuum; it's is not natural, nor is it good business, for 80 - 90 percent of an entire consumer-base, namely kids, to be spoke for by only one company, who happens to be your chief competitor!
Yahtzee isn't helping either. Whether he realizes it or not, his words carry as heavy a weight as as there can be, and when he dismisses Nintendo, the Wii and the old-school Nintendo titles as he does, he reinforces a stupid notion in lots of his followers, that games for kids and games set in a non-realistic style, aren't worth anything, and that Nintendo is the enemy, holding us back. Now, I don't think this is what he really MEANS, but he sure doesn't elaborate on it very well.
Yes Yahtzee, I love IP's too, and yes, I'm not big on motion control either, but God Damnit, Nintendo is the last pure game-makers out there. Sega is gone, so is Atari. And the day this industry becomes prohibitively unprofitable, Sony and Microsoft will pull their entire divisions, because they can, because gaming is only one thing they do, not the ONLY thing. Nintendo will then be the last and only game in town, who can and WILL sustain and rebuild the industry on their own. Because in the video game...er...GAME, there can be no substitutes for the real deal.
