Some of you who are frequent flyers of the online gaming community may be familiar with game critic and hobby-level indie developer Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, creator of the Zero Punctuation semi-serious, semi-satire game review video series. While he reviewed GTA V way back when it first launched and GTA Online a while later, the game has once again come to be the theme of one of his videos in the new "Judging by the Cover" series.
Judging by the Cover is yet another parody series where Yahtzee satirizes the cover-art of video games and movies, trying to extrapolate what the source material is about solely on it. Obviously, for the sake of comedic effect, the the attempt is not a serious one.
In the GTA V episode of Judging by the Cover, Yahtzee riffs on the disjointed mass of images used in the collage, instead of a single cover image. His narratives of a left-to-right and right-to-left are extremely imaginative and really quite... far out. We'd have loved to hear what he comes up with for top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top versions.
The video perfectly captures Yahtzee's comedic style, which has becoming the defining aspect of the highly popular Zero Punctuation review series. His reviews of GTA V and GTA Online both reflect this style — his videos are popular because of his funny style of criticism. He himself has said that his positive reviews aren't nearly as popular as the ones which rip up the game in question.
Exaggerating many of the same criticisms as what fans have noted over the years since initial release lends itself perfectly to the videos, providing all of Yahtzee's jokes which spiral wildly off topic relevant grounds to jump off from. The load times, the quitters and the Win/Lose ratio buffers are all part of the reality of GTA Online, as are the insane stunt maps.
GTA V's story mode not featuring any truly likable protagonists is another grip often brought up, despite the massive fan following that has amassed around Trevor, who very well could be representing the mindset of the average GTA fan while playing. If we get down to it, we're all murderous psychos when given a controller*.
To be fair, Yahtzee does share his positive views on the games and their cover art, so he isn't entirely critical.
What other humorous joke-reviews of GTA V have you encountered over the years?
