Yahtzee Croshaw
 | This article may be written from a fan's point of view, rather than a neutral point of view. (August 2009) |
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw | |
|---|---|
| File:Yahtzee Headshot Escapist 070309.jpg | |
| Born | Benjamin Richard Croshaw 24 May 1983 |
| Occupation | Video game critic |
| Employer(s) | The Escapist, Hyper, PC Gamer |
| Known for | Zero Punctuation |
| Website | Fully Ramblomatic |
Benjamin Richard "Yahtzee" Croshaw (born 24 May 1983,[1] Rugby[2], Warwickshire, England) is a comedic writer, video game journalist and author of adventure games created using Adventure Game Studio software. He writes articles for Australia's Hyper magazine, a major games publication. He uses his website "Fully Ramblomatic" as an outlet for his own work, including weekly dark humour articles, essays, fiction, and webcomics. He is currently making a series of video-reviews named Zero Punctuation for The Escapist, as well as the weekly column Extra Punctuation. In the February 2008 issue of PC Gamer (US), Croshaw took over Gary Whitta's "Backspace" column as a contributing editor.
Games
Originally Croshaw created a series of adventure games with MS Paint starring his signature character Arthur Yahtzee.
Croshaw became known in the Adventure Game Studio community for the Rob Blanc trilogy. He then created The Trials of Odysseus Kent, which was mentioned by PC Plus magazine as "AGS Showcase" in the November 2003 issue[3] and the Chzo Mythos series. He also helped found the collaborative Reality-on-the-Norm series by creating the first game, Lunchtime of the Damned. The series has gone on to have over 50 episodes since.[4] Some of his recent works have experimented with the AGS engine to produce games in other genres than the point-and-click adventure games that AGS was designed for, such as Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, and the 1213 series. He has also made an adventure demo called E for the commercial venture Aberrant Entertainment, for whom he works. He also created a total conversion for Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition called Age of Evil.
Croshaw writes his own games and their graphics and animation using Photoshop and Microsoft Paint[citation needed], though he does not compose his own music.
Arthur Yahtzee Trilogy
A series of adventure games written in Visual Basic 3 during Croshaw's high school years. They star his signature character, from which his Internet alias is derived. In Friday: Death to Arthur Yahtzee a group of mutants who Arthur once defeated are back and out to get him. In Saturday: Arthur's Odyssey Yahtzee has to face forces trying to mess with time, a quest that leads into Yesterday: The D-Gate where Arthur faces the villain Cathode. These games showcase the first examples of the humour and writing style that Croshaw became known for in his AGS years. The games were created before Croshaw had his own site and thus were hosted on the site of a friend, once that site went down they were sent to Croshaw's FullyRamblomatic.
Rob Blanc Trilogy
A series of adventure games that follow the adventures of the fictional character Rob Blanc, an unassuming English chip shop worker who is abducted by the High Ones, the secret rulers of reality. He is told that he is to become the "Defender of the Universe", to provide a counter balance to all the evil that is being done in the galaxy. In Rob Blanc I: Better Days of the Defender of the Universe he is sent onto an alien space ship to find out what happened to the crew, and prove himself as a worthy defender of the universe.[5] The second game Rob Blanc II: Planet of the Pasteurized Pestilence features Rob returning to Earth while the High Ones construct his ship. While there he notices a green haired teenage male following him, and inside an elevator both of them find that they have been sent into outer space. Landing on an alien world, they find that the natives believe them to be the ones prophesied to cure a great plague which is enveloping the planet, and are thus forced to live up to the legend. [5] The third and final game Rob Blanc III: The Temporal Terrorists begins on Rob's space ship where he and Paul, now his sidekick, are finally ready to start really defending the universe. Their first mission soon comes, somebody is removing all of the time from the universe, and Rob and Paul must find and assemble the parts of the Reaman Time Drive (RTD) to find out who is responsible for it. All of the games follow the same point-and-click interface typical of the AGS engine they were built on, with most of the puzzles involving the finding of objects. The series' humour is similar to The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf.
Chzo Mythos
5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice, are the four parts of a horror series. In 5 Days a Stranger, the player controls the shady cat burglar Trilby, who stumbles across a demonic force that manifests itself as a masked killer in the tradition of Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, while finding himself one of a group of strangers thrown together in an abandoned mansion and being picked off one by one. 7 Days a Skeptic emulates the claustrophobic horror of Alien following a spaceship crew that finds a mysterious artifact floating in space, four hundred years after the events of 5 Days a Stranger. Trilby's Notes, set in a hotel which exists in both the real world and a horrific alternate dimension in the style of Silent Hill, goes back to flesh out the origin of the cursed African idol from the other games. 6 Days a Sacrifice is the last and final episodeto the John DeFoe tetralogy. It links all its three previous episodes and completes the story of Chzo and John DeFoe.
While the first two games use the point-and-click interface typical of adventure games, Trilby's Notes requires the player to move with the keyboard and type commands with a text parser, similar to the early Sierra On-Line King's Quest series.
Up until Trilby's Notes, Croshaw relied upon RPG Maker's included MIDI files for musical accompaniment. Some argued that these fantasy-inspired songs didn't mesh well with the horror aspect of the games. In response, Croshaw enlisted outside help for the music in Trilby's Notes. That game's soundtrack, composed by Mark 'm0ds' Lovegrove, was received warmly by players.[citation needed]
In November 2007, Croshaw released Trilby: The Art of Theft, a stealth platform game based on his 1213 codebase. Although Trilby is the game's protagonist it is not directly linked to the Chzo Mythos storyline.
1213 Series
1213 is a trilogy of horror science-fiction games. The episodes tell the story of the suffering and eventual escape of an amnesiac victim of experimentation, codenamed 1213, from his cell, freed by his unseen tormentor. On escaping, 1213 sees that the facility's other guinea pigs, all similarly named to himself, have also escaped and have been turned into zombies, slaughtering the employees.
1213 is notable for being a surprisingly authentic reproduction of the traditional platformer experience using an engine originally designed to be used in the production of point-and-click adventure games. Simply animated, many elements of the game reflect the original Prince of Persia gameplay mechanics,[6][7] though it incorporates aspects of gunplay found in Another World and Flashback: The Quest for Identity.[8]
Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment
AitGoFW features cynical science fiction humor similar to Sierra On-Line's Space Quest, but mixes adventure elements with turn-based space combat, resource trading and space exploration gameplay mechanisms reminiscent of space simulator titles like Star Control and Wing Commander: Privateer. AitGoFW is both a parody of and tribute to science fiction games and movies. For instance, a major plot point is the deployment of Redshirts (an obvious homage to Star Trek's disposable red-shirted crew members), who are used as cannon fodder when the situation planet-side is deemed too dangerous for the ship's crew. The easily replaceable Redshirts invariably die, often in gruesome and darkly comic ways.
Special Editions
The Chzo Mythos and 1213 games were both later released as special editions. These can contain author's commentaries, extended endings or even extended notes giving backstory. Yahtzee allowed people to get these each time they donated over five dollars American to his site but as of July 2009 they were given out for free on his site, as he no longer had need of donations to support himself.
Game Damage
Game Damage is a game-themed television series pilot co-starring Croshaw with Matt Burgess and Guy "Yug" Blomberg from the website Australian Gamer. On 15 December 2008 the pilot was released on YouTube[9]. A website has been set up to promote the potential series.[10]. The show featured gaming news, comedy sketches, reviews of MMORPGs and three special reports, one of which involved Croshaw in a discussion of the adventure game genre. The series is currently in production and an announcement is expected within the coming weeks.
Zero Punctuation
Zero Punctuation is a weekly video-review column by Croshaw produced for The Escapist. The series started after Croshaw produced two reviews for Fable: The Lost Chapters and The Darkness Demo and uploaded them on YouTube, after which The Escapist contacted him and offered him a contract.[11] Reviews are released every Wednesday, with Tuesday previews on G4's X-Play. Yahtzee's unique reviewing technique is to speak with unbridled critique and is best known in this series for his generally scathing reviews of mainstream games, as well as often extremely colourful comparisons and rapid-fire speech. Psychonauts, Bioshock, No More Heroes, The Orange Box, Painkiller, Saints Row 2, H.A.W.X, Prince of Persia, Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3 are some of the few games that have actually received a favorable review (He also gave Grand Theft Auto IV a rather favourable review, but then later nulled the review, citing a lack of good games to compare to at the time). The Valve Corporation game Portal is the only game he has ever reviewed in a completely positive manner and is rated as one of his top 5 favorite games of all time; the other four being Silent Hill 2, Spider-Man 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Fantasy World Dizzy, all glimpsed in one of his videos, albeit blurred. However, in a later video he makes a scathing revision to Fantasy World Dizzy, in reference to the poor quality of the game by today's standards.
References
- ^ "Fully Ramblomatic blog entry "8/4/06: Fucking Ada"". Retrieved 2007-12-27.
- ^ "Adventure-treff (interview)". Retrieved 2008-06-04.
- ^ Zipped PDF scans of PC Plus November 2003 article on AGS, featuring The Trials of Odysseus Kent cited 15 November 2006
- ^ http://www.realityonthenorm.info/games.php
- ^ a b http://www.justadventure.com/reviews/RobBlanc/RobBlanc.shtm
- ^ PopMatters.com review cited 25 December 2006
- ^ GameHippo.com cited 25 December 2006
- ^ Independent Gaming: 1213 Episode 1 cited 25 December 2006
- ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXvdoTYlVtk
- ^ http://gamedamage.net/
- ^ "Gamespot Blog Entry: "PressSpotting: Ramblin' with Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw"". Retrieved 2008-07-18.
External links
- Fully Ramblomatic Ben Croshaw's official website
- Zero Punctuation on The Escapist
- AGS Games Award winners
- Template:AGSWiki
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