Running Gags

Yahtzee occasionaly uses jokes or characters that have been used before.

Zero Punctuation terminology

 * Uncle Tusky: Used mainly to emphasize a random or perplexing element within a game.
 * Loneliness:  Used mainly for games where it is said that multiplayer is needed to fully experience the game.
 * Fantasy World Dizzy: A game he (sarcastically) considers as the best game of all time.
 * Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Used to illustrate moral choice systems.
 * Yahtzee's Dad: Used as a comparison to either a character or a gameplay style that Yahtzee considers to be incredibly boring.
 * Lee Drummond: Yahtzee's high school bully. Yahtzee enjoys taking revenge by mentally imposing Mr. Drummond's face over the enemies in first person shooter games.

Game design and genre terminology

 * Triple-Cunted Hooker: Used mainly to emphasize a game doing too much.
 * Press X to not die: Used to illustrate Quick Time Events.
 * Flipped on its head to "Press X to not I'm not even to fucking touch this one" in the Tomb Raider review, in reference to a pre-release controversy about a particular quick-time-event sequence.
 * Spunkgargleweewee: Used to describe overly linear first person shooters that emphasize story, cutscenes and setpieces rather than challenging the player.
 * Jiminy Cockthroat: Used to describe bland, open-world, crafting survival games that only includes the aforementioned mechanics and features as a mean to drag out the player's playtime, thus making the game boring and chore-like.
 * Nose-picking is mentioned frequently when talking about mundane actions on the part of either the player or NPCs.
 * Cockup cascade: Used to describe situations, usually in stealth games, where a player's failure to pull off a desired operation forces them to improvise, which in turn puts them in an even less desirable position; usually mentioned to signify that a game has no margin for error or provides no option to salvage failure.
 * The Endingtron 3000: Used to describe game design where once the game is complete, the player is offered a (thinly veiled) choice on which ending they want, usually after which a non-interactive cutscene or video is shown and the game ends.
 * Ghost Train Ride: Used to describe action games that are a repetitive sequence of three elements - expository sections ("The Queue"), spectacular but rigid set pieces ("The Thrill") and some token gameplay which is often dull ("The Gift Shop").
 * ♫ Random documents and audio logs ♫: Used to describe - in song - the video game storytelling device where the player must piece together the world's backstory from various items scattered around the game world that reveal emails, voice recordings, diary entries, etc. from previous inhabitants of the world.

General running gags

 * Yahtzee references making a supervillain sandbox game called "Mankind Has Yet To Recognize My Genius, The Game" at least three times.
 * Yahtzee often uses an image of a red-haired man with an expressionless face to portray a boring character or the unwashed masses. This is one of Thomas Ruff's "Expressionless Faces" found in one of Yahtzee's Google Image searches.
 * According to his IAMA on Reddit: "He just makes me laugh. I've seen Ruff's other expressionless faces and all of them have some hint of emotion, like surprise or a little smile, but Mr. Expressionless has nothing. He's hollow. Dead in the eyes. And that's why I love him."
 * When given the option in RPGs and MMOs, Yahtzee gives his characters very silly or profane names like "Twattycake", "Titwank", "Fuck me", or "Useless".
 * Occasionally, Yahtzee will use a face of David Hasselhoff, or, primarily in the case of Manhunt, a face of Big Brother from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
 * He used a Mickey Mouse face in the Epic Mickey review to comment how it's kinda Orwellian.
 * Every time Hitler makes an appearance he's accompanied with a caption saying "ACH."
 * "People always say to me: Yahtzee, you (description indicating manliness...)"
 * Lampshaded at one point with "Yahtzee, you ordinary person...", and subverted in his Sims 3 review: "Yahtzee, you inappropriate menstruation joke".
 * Ending sentences (and reviews at one point) with: "...not gay!"
 * As an example, regarding multiplayer Modern Warfare 2: "...lying in long grass watching each other's backs, not gay."
 * Subverted with Driver: San Francisco wherein he says "So I guess I am gay!"
 * In his review of Driver: San Francisco, SERVE AND PROTECT is used sarcastically on the cop protagonist's ability to possess drivers to crash into one another.
 * Rattling off a list of numbered sequels and turning it into a football score, i.e., (Half-Life 2, Silent Hill 2, Thief 2, Spiderman 2, (Arsenal: 3)). (A generic British joke, possibly first coined by Spike Milligan in William McGonagall Meets George Gershwin.)
 * Within the Dead to Rights: Retribution Review, the long gag, recurring joke of Yahtzee Dead To Rights: replacing every RE- word with the game's title, but the RE- word in place of Retribution, i.e., "Dead To Rights: Retribution" isn't technically a sequel since the plot starts out the same as the first game, so perhaps a better name would've been Dead To Rights: Remake. Or perhaps Dead To Rights: Revisionism. Let's just hope it doesn't end up Dead To Rights: Retarded. That would be Dead To Rights: Regrettable."
 * Likewise a similar gag was done for Red Dead Redemption ' s Word Salad title; Yahtzee took Red Dead Redemption and complained that the game is neither red nor dead. He then went to call the game throughout the review by several alternate names, namely Brown Alive Redemption, Blue Poo Atonement, Green Spleen Submarine, and then Purple Monkey Dishwasher, the latter of which he re-used in his review of Black Knight Sword &amp; Hotline Miami.
 * Similar to the Red Dead Redemption example above, Yahtzee kept changing the title of Alice: Madness Returns for things like Return of the Madness, Return of the Jedi, Return of Jafar and Batman Returns.
 * Other examples of him incrementally altering a game's name each time he says it until it's something stupid (lampshaded in those exact words when describing the gag in his review of Medal of Honor: Warfighter &amp; Doom 3: BFG Edition) include Zack &amp; Wiki (Wack & Ziki; Zim & Spacky; and Wank & Sticky;) Two Worlds II ​(Two Whatever Two; Two Dediddly Two; and Two Wahdiddydiddydumdiddy Two;) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Skimpy Nightie; Sexy Underpants; and Dirty Knickers;) Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (Kingdoms of Hurbedur; Kingdoms of Alamo; and Kingdoms of Whatever It Was;) Dishonored (Dish-Honour-Red; Dish-On-A-Red; Soap-On-A-Rope; and Cat-On-A-Hot-Tin-Roof;) Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (Wrath of the White Wale, Wrath of the White Guilt, and Wrath of the White Privilege;) Beyond: Two Souls (The Ellen Page Variety Hour; Ellen Page-apalooza; The Ellen Page-David Cage Rage Gauge; and Despite Ellen Page, I Am Still Just a Rat in a Cage;) FTL: Faster Than Light (mentioning that the abbreviation "FTL" probably also stands for "Faster Than Light", then proceeding to call the game "Faster Than Light" followed by 3-word phrases that rhyme with "Faster Than Light", namely Faster Than Light: Whiter Than White, Faster Than Light: Piggies In Shite, Faster Than Light: Shit's Getting Tight, and Faster Than Light: Riddled With Spite;) Lords of the Fallen (Fords of the Lallen, Fjords of the Lawnmower, Inlets of the Hedgetrimmer,) and Everybody's Gone To The Rapture (Everybody's Gone On Holiday, Everybody Goes To Ravenholm, Everybody Loves Raymond, Everybody Put Your Hands In The Air Like You Just Don't Care, Everybody Wants To Rule The World, Everybody's A Little Bit Racist, Everybody Do The Dinosaur.)
 * In a similar vein to the ones above, when a game has two different names depending on their region, Yahtzee would incorporate the names together such as with A Shadow's Tale (Lost in A Shadow's Tale). Or if a game has similar themes to older games such as King's Quest: A Knight to Remember (The Secret of Mon-King's Isle-Quest, The Secret Princess of Monkey-Bride-Land)
 * Sometimes, when a developer's name is part of the game title, Yahtzee will say the game title followed by "by [insert developer's name here]" Instances when he has done this include Clive Barker's Jericho (Clive Barker's Clive Barker's Jericho, by Clive Barker,) Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X (Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., by Tom Clancy,) and, in his review of Alice: Madness Returns,(American McGee's Alice)
 * A character bending over and asking to be, er, taken advantage of will often be saying "In mah butt."
 * "THRRRP" and "TRUMP" being used to indicate farting sounds.
 * "WURRGH" being used to indicate zombie noises, groans, etc.
 * "HURK" being used to indicate sounds of suffocation, choking, etc.
 * Pulling out his "Like God of War but" stamp.
 * Hungry Hungry Hippos seems to be becoming one of these as well.
 * His evident dislike of Glasgow and Blackpool.
 * His use of the phrase "Eating all the pies" (or pancakes) to mean taking up space seems to be becoming one of these as well.
 * Bland names being attributed to the Crackdown Naming Committee.
 * Floating Hallucinations commanding people to "KILL THE WHORES" (or in one case, "mildly inconvenience" them).
 * When Yahtzee mentions time travel, an image of the TARDIS or H.G. Wells' Time Machine almost always appears.
 * His evident love of Branston Pickle and Cadbury's Creme Eggs. At one point, he once tried replacing the filling of a Creme Egg with Branston Pickle, which wasn't very successful.
 * "OH NO EVERYONE CAN SEE MY BUM" being used when people bend at the waist.
 * His (past) fear of theme park mascots has been mentioned in several episodes as well as on his old website.
 * Pritt Stick and Vegemite seem to be becoming two of these as well.
 * Dolphins and dolphin-focused bestiality.
 * Starting with Lichdom: Battlemage Yahtzee spells out colons in game titles as dry heaves (HRUUH).
 * The idiom "People who live in glass houses (shouldn't throw stones)" being used to illustrate hypocrisy.
 * Giving away his opinion in the first sentence of the review and then immediately acknowledging that action. (Sunset Overdrive, Dark Void, Godzilla)
 * In Maneater, Yahtzee acknowledges it before that introductory sentence.