Mailbag Showdown

This week Yahtzee turns the angry, yellow eye on you, the viewer. Particularly those of you who have sent him email crying about the Super Smash Bros. Brawl review.

Transcript
Funnily enough, I don't get direct hate mail as often as you might think. I guess you're all afraid I might ignore you to death. But the Brawl review brought in an unprecedented - and yet not entirely unexpected - amount of negative feedback, and I thought rather than just dispense bile all the time, it would be nice to sample some for a change and perhaps also take the opportunity to respond to some of the slightly more valid arguments. So without further ado, go team retard!

[spelling and grammatical mistakes in the letters have been preserved in this transcript as per what Yahtzee showed in the visuals]

"F*** you. SSBB is awesome. I'm pretty sure that the reason you don't like SSBB is that you were crap at it. Its true isn't it? And don't try to blame it on bad contols or opponents having super moves that strike you out in one hit. Its because it took you five hours to figure out up was jump and A was attack. Now who's the twat?"

Well, it's certainly not you, because you've just been upgraded to dickhead, and a presumptuous dickhead at that. Actually, I don't remember making any reference to bad controls or overpowered super-moves in my review, so either you've got the wrong address or you're projecting so hard you could point yourself at a wall and show off PowerPoint presentations. But the accusation of simply being bad at games is one I've fielded before, and while it's true that I've never beaten the Luigi and purple coin challenge, I like to think I review for everyone and considering I've been gaming for most of my life, most average people are going to be even worse than me, and that's a scary thought. By the way, it's all right; you can swear on the Internet, your mum probably isn't going to read it. I know, because she's too busy being fucked by me.

"This 'review' by and large was pretty poor. Just because people want it doesn't mean he should do it, and Yahtzee, pretty clearly, is and has been nothing more than a professional troll for a good while now. If this entire video wasn't clearly for the purpose of bashing a game he quite clearly doesn't like in the first place, it might actually have been more entertaining than listening to a grown man cry about 'peer' pressure."

It's true, I didn't like Brawl before I even started playing, but then, the same is true of every game, object, animal and human being I encounter these days. Since the Internet is almost diametrically opposed to the notion of quality control, in recent years, it's been a lot easier to just assume everything's shit until it can prove itself otherwise. I like to call it the "Guantanamo Bay" approach to reviewing. But as for why I review stuff by popular demand regardless of personal feeling, it's partly because it feels more professional than constant self-indulgence, but mostly because I use my traffic figures to measure my worth as a human being. I like the idea of "a professional troll", though - it makes me think of a hideous creature under a bridge, handing out business cards.

"This guy is so played out. It must suck not enjoying ANYTHING in life and wasting your time searching for things to hate"

Yes, I suppose that would suck, you'll have tell me what it's like sometime.

"You suck, SUCK, at reviewing video games. How can you even call them reviews without a score? It's more of a rant on games that are mainstream, just because they're main stream, doesn't mean that they suck. You obviously have absolutely no taste in good games. You don't even talk about the game really. If you don't like it, you just point out every little thing that's bad about it."

Okay, I put my hands up, he has me there. I do point out every little thing that's bad about a game, but then, I'm a critic, it'd be weird if I didn't. If I put people's balls in my mouth for a living, I'd be a prostitute, or possibly a GameSpot employee. But I criticize, so I'm a critic. And I don't believe in scores because I don't believe a complex opinion can be represented numerically. You like numbers? How about four, as in fourk you! Do you really need someone in authority giving you a simple "yea" or "nay" before you buy anything? Why don't you roll over so they can stamp on the other side of your face?

"In your entire review you never said anything about how fun the game is to play with your friends. Perhaps you should lay off the cheap vodka and play the fucking game with some real buddies."

Okay, this one confused me. I played it with friends and we didn't have fun, what more do you want? By "real buddies," I assume you mean people who actually like Smash Bros Brawl, but I don't really regard any people like that as "buddies". I prefer to regard them...from behind bullet-proof two-way looking glass.

"There wasn't really much of a review here. From a purely objective standpoint, SSBB is actually quite a superb game (as you can tell from reading reviews)"

I think you should look up the word "objective", because I don't think it means what you think it means. It's worth remembering that all reviews are subjective personal opinions, and if you personally enjoy the game, then they shouldn't really get to you - unless of course there's a despicable little niggling doubt in the back of your mind that maybe you're not having as much fun as you've convinced yourself you're having, which doesn't go away no matter how many times you try to slap it down with the wet flannel of weak excuses, like this one:

"I'm not a fanboy-"

Yes you are!

"-but you may have judged Brawl a bit harashly. Nintendo made it so that the players could have fun mercilessly beating the ever-loving crap out of their most hated characters, like the Ice Climbers."

[Yahtzee degrades into dismissive gibberish from "loving" onwards]

Why am I reminded of the all-purpose theist cop-out argument, "God moves in mysterious ways?" Nintendo is a big boy now, he doesn't need defending. Small-time curmudgeons like me are not going to reduce anyone who works there to tears, and they care even less about you. I've never really understood the almost crusader-like fervor that consoles attract; most people would say it's because your mum is only prepared to buy you one console, and if it turns out you didn't pick the winner, the best thing to do is go into denial until the very fabric of reality spontaneously changes, because God knows that's more likely to happen than you admitting fault.

Speaking as a person who is white enough to afford all the consoles, this is probably the most balanced generation of all time, with it all coming down to what you personally want from the console. The Wii is an excitable little yappy bastard: good with children, but a little exhausting; the PS3 is the big, dependable black monster - slow, but lovingly bringing in your slippers every morning; and the 360 is just a good all-rounder that only occasionally pisses itself and dies.

Addenda

 * Loves each and every one of you really: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
 * All names of correspondents in this article have been changed to protect the innocent and the retarded
 * Gonna need a bit more time to play GTA 4