Viewer Discretion Advised

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

Yahtzee really has emerged as the reviewer of the people, unreservedly tearing apart the industry’s biggest titles with a unmatched honesty and brutality.

The great thing about his reviews is that not only are they incredibly entertaining (as long as you’re not easily offended), but littered with concise insights into some of the glaring flaws in the games’ core mechanics. He really does a great job of making the industry seem quite infantile, setting a challenge to all developers to take note of our past mistakes, and get on with evolving as game designers as opposed to loosing ourselves in the war for prettier visuals.

This week he deconstructs Burnout: Paradise to brilliant effect, but I’m posting the video here to reference one of his opening lines: “One of my measures of a good game is one that teaches me something.” Quite relevant I thought.

P.S. I saw the guy at GDC while coming out of a session and he looked positively terrified. I would be too if I was suddenly surrounded by all the people I’d been tearing to pieces behind the safety of the internet for the last 6 months.