Uszi from The Escapist"
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Yahtzee just likes to piss people off.
That's the most valid conclusion you can take from this. I feel if he hadn't specifically mentioned the miscarriage it would be one thing, but this is Yahtzee using the escapist money to launch a personal attack on someone he's been building a grudge against for months.
Next, he'll dedicate an entire ZP to endorsing an American Presidential candidate.
You can say that stuff here if you want.
Even if he has a grudge it didn't make his points any less vaild.
I guess I got burned.
Any time I comment on the actually ZP videos themselves, it's always heat of the moment and never thought out. For instance, I spent quite a bit of time pointlessly dredging up game play videos to defend my views that Smash Bros is not a button smasher.
By the time I got to FR, though, I realized it really wasn't worth my time, and I wasn't particularly in the mood to debate those sentiments (If anyone responded to me on the Escapist, I did not know about it). I think I posted once more in the ZP comment section, I later on in the same day.
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None of that is to say that I wish to back done from that view point. I'm assuming your post, Ghello, was a request for me to restate and defend that argument here. So I'll explain what I meant:
My point wasn't so much that the criticisms were not valid (they were and still are), but that I wasn't sure that I was prepared to accept Zero Punctuation as an extension of Yahtzee's blogging sphere.
The difference between the webcomics review and all of the previous ones was the degree of professionalism. All the earlier ones were either specific assignments from The Escapist, or they were done as part of the greater assignment, to review games. I even think the Mail bag showdown fits into this category: it was still video game related, it was relevant to his reviews, and it was professionally done (Yahtzee's particular flavor of professionalism, but hell that's what we want to watch).
The webcomics review on the other hand pushes us into a gray area in between funny, professional reviews/critiques coming from Yahtzee, and a nastier zone of Yahtzee bitching about whatever he wants to at the time. Like I said in my original post, I don't mean that it's some sort of jump off the deep end; for me, it would have been perfectly fine without the miscarriage reference. That's what made the change: it went from "veiled-criticism-of-CAD-while-still-credibly-remaining-a-criticism-of-webcomics-in-general"
TO "thinly-though-not-really-thinly-veiled-criticism-of-Buckley."
My argument is that there is an enormous, unfunny world of difference between the former and the latter. And that after that review you have to concede that Yahtzee's first goal was not to make us laugh, but rather to piss off one specific person and perhaps his fan base.
My first qualification: Yahtzee is perfectly entitled to soap box here at FR, or in any of the media he creates for the site, or at any of the panels he does.*
My second qualification: Maybe it also rubbed me the wrong way because it was also a total rehash of things we have already heard from Yahtzee. I don't care enough about CAD or Buckley to want periodic updates from Yatzee reaffirming his unchanging hatred for B^U.
*Unless of course they tell him the panel is on a specific topic, like, say, video game reviews, and Yahtzee begins to bitch about how much he hates Buckley's guts. That would also be, IMHO, unprofessional.
This post has been edited by Uszi: 07 July 2008 - 08:14 AM