Comedy in Games Should Be More Than Just Quips | Extra Punctuation
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- čas přidán 8. 02. 2023
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Edit: fixed! Thank you!
Subtitles are desynced by about 1:30 from the ad read. I was very confused by the images chosen till I realized it was an ad lololol 😅
Please fix it
Of all the Loot Box advertisements and advertisements in general thrown down viewers throats, this one looks quite interesting to me. Signed up. What've I got to lose?
Maybe mention it's only available in US and Canada? First fricking sponsor bit I've actually been interested in for quite a while, and that's a LOT of stuff to click through before you find out, at the last step of the process.
Very sad we can't get in the U.K.
I am deeply confused by you not currently having a kitchen? How does that even work?
Comedy in general should be more than just quips. It feels like the quip comedy we see in most modern media is a rather aggressive attempt at forcing some kind of popular meme to get tonnes of free marketing from people spamming that meme.
A good example is that time your teacher dies in Hogwarts Legacy and Rookwood cursed Anne.
The equivalent of the jumpscare for horror
I feel like there's gotta be some kind of Hollywood quip farm somewhere, where writers in cages are fed small portions of scripts and told to "punch up the dialogue" without any context. If they can't make a focus group full of midwest moms who religiously use Facebook laugh, they get sprayed with the hose.
I'm always reminded of "Every Frame is a Painting"s essay on how visual and engaging Edgar Wright, Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan's comedies were, and how modern "comedy" movies are an absolute shitshow in comparison.
@@thymicere3911 who
Disco Elysium is the last time I really laughed aloud.
Tried to punch a kid. Missed and fell. Kid mocks me. Try to bribe the kid with alcohol to get back in his favor. Get scolded saying he’s not a drunk loser like my character demand that I should buy him cigarettes.
Funniest stuff I had played in a while.
I lost my shit at the scene where 4 separate officers spend a good 15 minutes of real world time roasting the shit out of you and each other for losing your badge
Just discovered this game from a friend. Missed the skill check for seducing the woman at the beginning of the game and ended up blurting out, "I want to make fuck with you". I nearly died laughing.
I started a replay of it last week and it actually made me laugh out loud again, the newly added voice acting makes it even better! The writing is master-tier. No game has done a better inter monologue, the things in your head telling you to do absurd shit based on how you built your character in so gratifying. It really does influence you in-game.
Having not yet played the game, that description made me laugh out loud. 😂
Being told by a receptionist that you are behind on your room rent and you owe alot of moneyy, So I did the smart, logical thing. Ran away and did a max payne style dive while flipping the receptionist double birds.
Gaming is one medium where the rules of how to make comedy is so different to film/TV. The lack of control the writers have over the exact experience you'll have means a lot of film comedy methods are off the table entirely. Comedy games need different rules
Stanley Parable is a fantastic example of using the medium's strength to make jokes
I agree. Comedy games either need to be railroads that send you down the tracks of set jokes (like Stanley Parable or Portal 2), or designed to have funny gameplay (Team Fortress 2 is my golden example of this. The taunts, voice command lines, ragdolls, and ability to set up keybinds to ragdoll or fucking explode at a keypress leads to natural genuine comedy gold from players just fucking around).
@@conflictt3224 The point is that Stanley Parable doesn't railroad you. Every choice you can possibly make becomes a joke in of itself
@@carrot708 The Stanley Parable is a wide variety of pick-your-own railroads, though. Each path you can take has variations, but they're linear experiences that mock the very idea that you ever had a choice. Even the endings where you do make a choice still kinda prove you don't, like the explosion ending.
As an example: Once you start the confusion ending by going down the lift, you can't pick up the bucket, climb out the window or close the door on your office. It's a railroad from start to end, but you have to choose to get on it.
@@LordSusaga "once you [make a choice], you [suffer repercussions of that choice]"
damn it's almost like choice can exist inside a framework in which every possible option has been found. that's literally the point. or something. idk. didn't play it. guess we're the same in that respect.
@@NoConsequenc3 I have played it. There is literally a line spoken to you that says "No matter what you choose, you'll be walking someone else's path. Turn off the game. That's your only real choice."
Also, if YOU had played the game, you'd know that the window, door and bucket are unrelated to the confusion ending. The reason they were removed was to KEEP you on the confusion ending, instead of dropping you in a different ending. In other words, it's a railroad you can't get off.
And the comedy comes from the railroad sections where you have no choices, even if it's based on the choices you made to get there. One ending starts with "Wait, how did you choose that? That wasn't supposed to be an option", and it's a rigid railroad from there to the end credits.
I think the reason Buffy's quips worked for so many people is that it's a deliberate part of the show's aesthetic. They're a bunch of teenagers trying to have a normal life despite basically living in a horror film, and the quips come across as endearingly human efforts to maintain the illusion of normality in the face of traumatic situations. In a lot of media, the quips are thrown in without any thought to what it says about the characters, and so it just comes across as out of place and obnoxious.
People in stressful or demanding occupations where they see a lot of bad stuff, e.g. first responders, coroners, ER doctors and nurses, combatants, often use detached humour or irony as a defence mechanism. It makes sense that a group of teenagers who are effectively that but dealing with supernatural horrors, not just everyday ones, would do the same.
I didn't watch much of Buffy so can't comment on that. But I did watch Firefly and the quipping worked because it came across as a coping mechanism for the deeply flawed characters of the show. Yes, Captain Malcolm Reynolds is a smug bastard who likes his quips. But that's because he's a disillusioned drifter trying desperately to hold onto the last shred of hope in his idealized philosophy about freedom.
Now take that to his other lesser works. It doesn't work very well for all the reasons and quickly became old hat when applied to the MCU. Kinda worked well for Tony Stark, but again, when well written he's a deeply flawed recovering alcoholic who just had a rude awakening on the harshness of reality.
Something else about Buffy was that it knew when NOT to joke (at least early on). There are a lot of situations where something genuinely bad happens and nobody cracks a joke--or if they do, it intentionally comes across as awkward / inappropriate in universe.
Another good example along those lines is Farscape. The MC gets isekai'ed to the other side of the galaxy, and spends several years out there. He's constantly making pop culture references that literally no one but him understands, because that's how he's holding onto his memories of his Earth life, even as he acclimates to alien culture.
for me the comedy came from the subversion of expectation (as much as that term has been dragged in recent times)
an example, from the spinoff series angel, angel and spike are having a "who's the protagonist" pissing match over some false prophesy that says one of them (it says "the vampire with a soul" or something which applies to both of em) would drink from the chalice of endless torment or something pretentious like that. they go through this dungeon, and fight, etc etc and in the end spike gets to the chalice first, drinks it, braces for pain and then goes "it's mountain dew"
that made me laugh, they went through the whole "my first D&D dungeon" set up so the chalice not only not being anything special but (presumably flat) mountain dew, was funny.
or in the case of firefly, there is this scene, the crew are being hunted by henchmen of this guy they had betrayed in an earlier episode (or mighta been earlier that episode i don't remember) and they have defeated them and have em lined up outside the ship, he goes to one and says "this is all the money i owe [guy's name] take it and leave us alone" or something to that effect, the guy says "we will never stop hunting you" and makes a big speech, and the captain goes "shame" and kicks him into the turbine, goes to the next guy "this is all the money i owe" the guy cuts him off "got it, we'll leave you alone" or something to that effect. that was a funny scene, i didn't expect him to kick him into the turbine, and the other guy doing a 180 from the first after seeing that was funny.
the quips were hit or miss, i remember "dawn's been kidnapped, must be a tuesday" (buffy aired on tuesdays.)
oh and i remember this scene, this big all powerful demon had just been put back together (he was cut into like 5 pieces and each pieces spread around the world) he gets more powerful from sucking the energy out of people and is going all chain lightning on a mall and buffy shows up, he mentions how "no weapon forged can harm me" she goes "that was then, this is now" and pulls out a rocket launcher. angel and drucilla were next to the demon and when they seen that they jumped out of the way and the demon just says "what's that" before being blown to pieces. i thought that was funny.
one i quip i kinda liked, angel is trying to pull a sword out of a stone demon, only someone worthy can pull the sword out, he goes through this big ritual and such, goes to grab it and gets flung back, spike taunts him in a sing-song voice "someone wasn't worthy" that gave me a chuckle.
I always wondered if the rise in quips had something to do with the decline of grand scale comedy films. It's possible that their unbiquity is simply due to the fact that a quip based on tone will always translate to an international audience, whereas generally jokes do not.
Most likely. I wouldn't even mind it quite so much if that were being done out of a genuine desire to make things more accessible, but let's be fucking real - it's done out of a desire to make it as broadly appealing as possible to make as much money as possible.
as a non native English speaker I can confirm that sometimes studios need to change the joke to the point of nothing make sense when translating to different languages, its even worse when watching subtitles. Animes are a good example, there was a time where fansubs would explain the joke so they wouldn't lose the original essence, now its clear that professional subs change the joke so they make senses in English.
I think the issue is that engaging comedy is hard but shitty dialogue isn't. Best example is Mr. Bean. Atkinson never said a single word throughout the whole thing, yet he's a comedy darling across the globe. Or the Cornetto trilogy and Jackie Chan's Hong Kong stuff where the comedy is visually presented as a cause-and-effect manner, rather than shitty dialogue explaining the joke.
Tldr, "quippy comedy" can be manufactured en masse, but proper visual comedy is hard and requires talent.
Also they can be easily added at the last minute by comedy writers, hired to punch up scripts with quips. That's about all they could be asked to do, as they can't change anything, because all the action sequences are being animated before the final story is ever figured out.
@@danilooliveira6580 all according to keikaku
I'm familiar with that "sex on television" joke, but man, it just doesn't hit the same anymore now that television sets have become way too thin to reasonably support the weight of human beings.
Honestly the idea of someone Banging on a Flatscreen is hilarious in it’s own way
Why do you think he keeps falling off them?
@@Nulthazor You can lay it on the floor and use it as a mat
On the contrary, that makes it even easier to fall off.
Wasn’t there a torture device that you’d sit on and it’d split you in half? That’s now a plasma screen tv
Also, I watch more TV on my phone than anywhere else. Am I supposed to have sex on my phone?
I find that the strongest form of comedy that games are able to utilize is situational humor. Like in LISA: The Painful, where a man running an orphanage asks the protagonist to grab a bucket of water to put out a small fire, and it is instead a bucket of gasoline that sets the children ablaze. The man screams that he meant the other bucket, and the camera pans up to one that was off screen by a wide margin. You rush over to that bucket as fast as possible, but when you return it's just him and a pile of ash where the children were playing. He then says "this is the second worst thing that has ever happened to me." It works beautifully within the way the game operates, and adds levity to the desolate world but is still very much a part of that post-apocalypse.
I haven't played the game but I have seen that scene via Dunkey's vid on it. That shit had my dying laughing. I agree wholeheartedly, the game literally won't even let you get the actual bucket of water if you go for it first.
Probably the funniest game ever
LISA the Painful is probably one of the funniest games ever made.
And also one of the most heart wrenching.
I had the exact opposite reaction, I personally quit the game right there. It's funny in isolation sure, but part of me just couldn't handle it so I had to stop playing.
I even came back some months later and stopped playing again when we got to that fight where you have to lose people to win.
"Dying is easy, comedy is hard."
“Your teacher dies in Hogwarts Legacy and Rookwood cursed Anne.”
@Speed McWeed the comment didn't deserved any further input because it doesn't say anything of value. I understand your confusion, but sometimes is better to let irrelevance go back for whence it came.
@@klaussone whence
A work in any other genre can fail and still work as a comedy, but a bad comedy has nowhere to hide.
@@alex.g7317 cual es tu punto hermano? Incluso si trato de ser sumamente caritativo, dudo mucho que tu intencion fuera de mejorar nada.
One of the reasons the quippy dialogue worked so well and took off in Marvel was because the first character to do it was Tony Stark. You said that quippy dialogue doesn't work for you because it makes everyone sound like a "smarmy ponce". Tony is a smarmy ponce, his fatal flaw is his egotism. He doesn't take anyone around him seriously because he has the brains and money to do basically whatever the hell he wants. That sort of dialogue worked because it worked for Tony Stark. It also highlighted his character flaws. He's in a life or death situation, but he's making jokes about it. It reminds the audience of his disconnection and egotism, but also his genuine charm and wit.
But it doesn't work for everyone, especially when they are not Robert Downey Jr.
Very good point. I think that's also one of the reasons I felt like Tony Stark became less iconic and interesting the further the franchise went, because everyone was quipping and he no longer came across as uniquely disconnected
It should also be noted that not everyone in the Avengers was quippy. Captain America - Tony's foil - was notably not quippy, instead being sincere and earnest.
It also worked in firefly, because not everyone was quippy. Quippiness is good if it fits the particular character. It's like garlic - characteristic and zesty, but you wouldn't add garlic to blueberry pie, unless the management would pressure you into doing it because, apparently, their excel tables show that kids love garlic and want it everywhere.
Borderlands3 have this problem that not only they put garlic everywhere, they forget to cook it into something edible.
I think it also worked in Firefly because they all had good, and different, reasons to be quippy. Jayne was abig douche, but also sort of insecure, Zoe was coping with having to go into danger just to make a living, and Mal was an actually inspiring leader, like when he and Wash are captured, and he's trying to keep spirits up.
Arguably, you could blame Bill Murray for popularizing it.
Part of me feels the larger problem with all the quips these days is that everyone is trying to ape what's popular, while not necessarily understanding what made it attract audiences in the first place. This honestly can be said for a lot of things that strike a chord with people. Thing becomes popular. Corporations learn the wrong lessons. They beat it into the ground with bad and mediocre media until the next popular thing to ape comes along. Rinse and repeat. I'm not against the quips. What I am against is when it's all over the place and not done well.
Much like the games that want to be "souls-like" but only copy surface elements. It turns out losing your xp when you die and getting it back if you run back to the spot doesn't really work when you haven't designed the levels to make that traversal tense.
That pretty much hits the nail on the head. It's the old "cargo cult/monkey see monkey do" problem. Big heads make their people build elaborate mock-ups of airstrips, performing bizarre rituals that emulate the day-to-day activities of airstrip operation, in the hopes that they make a bounty of goods manifest out of the aether, without understanding the intricacies and minutiae of how modern goods are manufactured and distributed.
It happened with Half-Life and Amnesia, with the wrong lessons being learned from those high-profile successes, and we're still feeling the damage caused to those genres. Though thankfully, the Boomshoot Renaissance and recent revival of classical survival horror have helped heal the ills caused by a glut of ill-conceived spunkgargleweewee and mechanically-minimalist haunted houses respectively.
Indeed. 1 "quippy" character is fine. That can be their "thing". When every character is MCU Iron Man, it stops being novel and funny.
@@PacMonster0 Firefly had all of the main cast be "quippy", and it worked out well for that show. What made it work though is that they were all "quippy" in a different way, about different situations. It also helped that each character had a personality other than "quippy", which is what a lot of these fail.
@@keltzar1 You beat me to it. The souls games are popular for a lot of reasons, and boiling it down to a few mechanics and having a slowly dying world as the setting isn't going to get you any of that.
It's like going to a really good restaurant and trying to copy their food at home by just making something with steak, mashed potatoes, and asparagus. I'm sure it'll be decent, but it won't be the same. A gourmet dish isn't good just because it has specific ingredients, it's the execution and how the individual ingredients are mixed together and prepared.
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a work, that's how art works, but you have to understand what made the original good. Dark Souls wasn't good because of a stamina bar, difficult combat, and losing your souls, it was good because of the give and take between offense and defense that the stamina bar creates, combat that rewards skill, determination, and meticulousness, and the care that you had to take when navigating the area, lest you lose your souls, but the forgiving and rewarding nature of the mechanic where you can recollect them if you can just make it back to where you died.
The souls games are difficult, but also very fair and rewarding, and aping a few mechanics and the setting isn't going to get you the same magic.
Apart from good comedy requiring mastery, it can also be expensive, especially in live-action. You mentioned the Naked Gun movies, but the example I stick on for that is from Top Secret, another ZAZ movie. Val Kilmer's character is being beat up by Nazi goons, when he passes out, has the classic "Oh no, I'm back in high school, the exam's tomorrow, and I haven't studied" dream, then wakes back up to being punched, smiles, and says "Oh good, it was just a dream." That's a day or two of filming, on another set, for the sake of a gag that gets thrown off like it's nothing. Modern comedies won't spend that much time on a joke that quick.
Haha, that sounds great! Thanks for the recommendation!
Top of my head I think 30 Rock and Community are the only live action comedies that would do stuff like that for time to time
It has infected a fair bit into D&D with people constantly quipping at each other, and as a result, I end up playing as a character that takes things seriously and subsequently end up becoming the funny one. There can be humor mined out of being the straight man in the group, exasperatingly telling the quipper to shut up and actually do what they're good at.
Plus those dialogs within a d&d campaign are created on the spot. No script, just in the moment.
Maybe games need to connect with that. Let the atmosphere create those moments. It does not have to copy everything out there. Let it gain its own identity from start to finish
People always forget that comedy loves a straight man to play off of.
@@fluidthought42 it is like a song, it has to build off from a melody, the beat, harmony, and lyrics + vocals. It cannot function with just one part alone
Sigh. Why do they keep missing what makes comedy work?
It also helps that dnd is played with other people and my sense of humor degrades the instant i'm actually around other people. Plus if someone tells you to stop quipping you hear that in the session and not after the game or something has finished
@@kadosho02 probably why Yatzee liked High on Life. Justin style of comedy is to get a weird and funny scenario and just mine jokes out of it through non-stop improv.
Always thought the Arkham games had underrated comedy. The thug conversations both fit and enriched the world of Gotham.
@@FrankDux-uo7igThey weren't quipping
There's actually a point that you make here that is quite interesting, about them being all quippy and facetious in a serious setting not being funny on its own. This is why a lot of comedy has "straight men". Comedy with goofy or facetious characters only really works well when they have people to play off of who play things straight, and those are the people we're generally supposed to empathise with.
That is true, and yet the MC of Forspoken constantly fluctuates between quip master and serious (while also being just an all round not very likeable person) that it just really begs the question is this a serious story or not. Not that you can't have moments of brevity in a serious story, I've seen good examples, where they use the settings own logic for the humor that makes sense in universe and doesn't poke fun at itself or meta. Forspoken is just not one of those.
I think a great example of that is True Detective. Rust Cohle's downbeat, pessimistic, brutally and deliberately serious philosophical dialogues work a million times better with Marty being the straight man- not just because it makes it easier to listen to for viewers who aren't into that sort of thing, but because it also makes them fucking hilarious. It also helps that Rust is saying meaningful things, and the contrast to Marty's 'commonsense normality' (which the show goes on to demonstrate everything wrong with) heightens the impact of the philosophy. Rust himself also isn't entirely humorless. And the show itself is about some really serious shit, but it's also one of the funniest shows I've seen because the humor is so organic and doesn't take away from the horror. Most importantly, it knows when to let itself be totally serious and not undercut it with jokes.
Way I see it, there is 2 types of quippy.
1 is "I am so good at what I do I can joke about it while everything falls apart around me.", like Deadpool for instance, in which the comedy is supposed to be derived by how not seriously the quipper is taking it. There's a route into seriousness when the situation is so dire that they shut the hell up, but otherwise in order to be relatable in a grand scheme you need to have someone outside the context they're familiar in to drag them into the real world and smack them across the head when they're acting up too much.
2 is the "If I stop joking about this very dangerous situation I'm in it's going to sink in and I'll freak the hell out so I'ma keep talking and hope I distract myself from it." Like Spider-man (or at least how he usually starts out). The comedy here lies essentially in the fact that quipper is very much bricking it and there's the moments of relatability when things finally calm down and they're save to freak out after the face.
Yeah case 1 is the thing you see push back against. And I think it's because it makes them look like psychopaths. It works for Deadpool because he is one, and, like you said, the rest of the world reigns him in.
The whole "oatmeal" metaphor at the end was so perfect, combine it with what Sterling says about these companies wanting "all the money" and it really makes sense how games have gotten so bland. They want to capture the entire market, saying something means some people won't be interested so they say nothing, and to generate interest they spend a ridiculous amount of money on development to make the graphics ever more spectacular and to pad out the content as much as possible.
Disney is a market juggernaut and going for the same strategy in film, and I really think it's gonna result in a repeat of the musicals crash of the 70s.
I'm tired of this type of media.
That’s upsetting, mainly because it seems accurate and plausible
I wish that developers thought it was OK for us to actually think a little bit. We don’t need to be fed everything in a game.
@@tealablu3759 the devs are not paid to think, unfortunately
I will say in defense of Whedonesque writing is that between firefly and the avenger films is that it worked in those because while it was quippy, it never forgot characterization first and allowed it’s characters to be serious and more than just sardonic and disaffected. The problem is that other writers saw the success of those films/show, and things like guardians of the galaxy, and only saw the quips without internalizing that those quips mean nothing if they aren’t said by strong, fleshed out characters. That’s pretty much what always happens when a style pops off, other people try to replicate it but in the process miss what actually made it work and basically rip the soul out of it
A point regarding Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and why it was (barring Yahtz) well-received where Whedon's later attempts were less so
Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a specific reason for characters to talk like that. Joss Whedon knew that any attempt to capture teenage dialogue would become hopelessly dated and out of touch roughly fifteen minutes after it was catalogued, because that's how teenage dialogue worked.
The quippy, snarky dialogue was an attempt to naturally emulate how *all* teenagers speak, with all its awkward foibles and fumblings. Much of the bizarre phrasing and clunky humor came not from an attempt to look smooth and badass, but its opposite- an attempt to humorously represent them as real people, who sometimes forget how they wanted to phrase something halfway through the sentence and can't quite remember what the word they wanted was so they just shoehorn a clumsy description into the sentence in its place.
It was an attempt at realism. It was meant to sound organic.
The more recent quippy bullshit sounds anything but organic. It all sounds like every hero and heroine has their own little writing room where the hacks who do SNL and Simpson gags workshop all their lines for them.
"...blowing them up should send their ragdoll sailing through the air like team rocket blasting off again"
That one just killed me
The way people blame the raise of self aware quips on Marvel reminds me of how people turned on the Shrek movies and blamed dreamworks for popularizing a checklist of things like poop/fart jokes, celebrity voice actors and satire in general really.
Fault for the rise in celebrity VA can be largely laid at the feet of Disney, who lied to Robin Williams.
MCU is literally the reason media has devolved into lazy quip comedy
@@Leto_0 I believe he wanted them to not make merchandise of his character or use him in advertising. They told him they wouldn’t, then they did. It’s been a while so I might to slightly wrong but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist.
@@MapleLeafAceIt's not the MCU's fault, it's the imitators
Whedon actually created the twist "What if American Buddy Cop dialogue but not in a Buddy Cop movie."
Quip is basically the heart of Lethal Weapon.
Shane Black also has a subtlety that Joss Whedon often lacks, which i say as a person who enjoyed Buffy and Firefly.
@@SonofSethoitae "Had." Remember The Predator?
The quipping in Lethal Weapon, at least the very first one works because a lot of is borderline gallows humor.
Riggs (Gibson) is a suicidal mess (he's the Lethal Weapon) and so the humor between him and Murtaugh (Glover) is always understood as being a way for them to deal with some serious issues, such as Riggs wanting to very much to not be alive anymore.
It's like the scene in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs where James Franco says to the other guy on the (literal) gallows "First time?" It's funny because it's (literal) gallows humor, humor in the face of real danger and real dramatic stakes. But real danger and real stakes have all been sanitized by corporate focus groups and parent organizations so all we're left with is quipping in the face of some slight and very very temporary discomfort, and not any real danger.
The stuff about how quippy dialogue worked with Army of Darkness because Ash screwed up and he ended up looking like an idiot is probably why it works so well in Hi-Fi Rush. Chai quips a lot, and he screws up a lot, and he’s seen as a bit of an idiot. And he’s also funny. Though it also helps that Chai isn’t the only comedy type the game has, seeing as it has colourful bosses, wacky level designs, humanised robots, and scene where Chai ‘infiltrates’ the enemy base by landing in a packed cafeteria.
I really enjoyed the kind of Monty pythonesque humour in old-school runescape quests. It's self-aware without being too cheesy or self-indulgent. I also like how you aren't treated as a hero, but just another insignificant character who might get the job done or will probably just die.
"They asked if I had a degree in Theoretical physics. I told them I theoretically have a degree in physics!"
-Man in charge of the last standing power plant in the post apocalyptic Mohave
In Nathan Drake's defense, when his dialog isn't quips, but payoff for a Chekov's Gun of sorts, then it really works. When he, his brother and his mentor are dangling off the side of a mountain with nothing but the tow winch of the jeep they rented, it's legitimately a good joke when said mentor was saying, "Why did you pay extra for the tow winch?" It's good setup and payoff and that's funny, at least to me.
Kid Icarus Uprising is one of the few games I can think of that’s primarily driven around comedy that really works for itself, and I think a large part of that has to do with how little the chatter interrupts gameplay; the game rarely stops you for anything beyond short boss cutscenes and it still does a lot to build up the climax of each chapter before getting there. And also that despite how tongue in cheek it is it’s still a very earnestly told story.
Agreed. Kid Icarus Uprising is super underrated.
A perfect example. I watched reviews, and they agreed. I never played Uprising, because I did not have a 3DS. But to know what it was capable of with its narrative, and character dynamics. That is amazing
Hi fi rush was also pretty funny.
Not to mention it was able to balance the fourth wall breaks in away that they never detract from the tension
Like there’s a loading screen joke and a reference to smash bros but the characters never jump out of the screen to tell sakurai that the premise is idiotic or they pause the action and add a monochrome filter to talk about the fight and cliches
It helps that it used the double screen of the 3ds to literally separate dialogue and gameplay.
Man I miss Games like Kid Icarus Uprising, they come out so infrequently
Think the best way for games as a medium to approach comedy is through emergent gameplay. Some of the hardest I’ve ever laughed playing games was playing Overcooked, GTA free roaming with friends, and Hitman. You’re creating your own situational comedy.
I remember setting up a pie-making machine in Plate Up that would burn the place down if the pies were allowed to back-up too far. Part way through the day I suddenly shout "Oh no, the pies are reaching critical mass!", and two of us have to start running in and out of the restaurant taking pies to the bin. It was so absurd I completely broke down laughing for ages, perfect emergent gameplay
Personally crossover Fighting games are a great source of comedy, things like seeing ryu kick donkey Kong in the dick or frank west running spiderman over with a shopping cart never gets old for me.
its probably why Kojima games work so well, he is the master of emergent gameplay and negative possibility. and its a strange juxtaposition, because his games tend to be super serious and dramatic, and you can play them like that, but then it kinda let you break the tension ? like, the game are designed in a way that it doesn't feel strange to break the tension.
I do so much laughing playing Hitman. Sometimes it's 47's shitty puns making me giggle. Sometimes it's because I've gotten into a cock-up cascade with like 20 guards dead in a hall outside a bathroom. Sometimes it's because I killed a target and wasn't expecting the result (the grape press kill in Mendoza being one of those).
Ah yes. I laughed a great deal when in Unrailed, I accidentally blocked my friend, causing him to be blown up by his own dynamite.
"Oh, f*ck yeah, we blew them up! Did you see that? That was f*cking SWEET!"
That actually did get a laugh out of me.
Really love these longer videos where Yahtzee can just talk about a single point or two. Keep up the amazing work! 👍🏻
I remember playing through Jazzpunk, and grinning and guffawing like a doofus at every gag it threw at me. That game is basically if the Naked Gun guys made a walking simulator, which may not be to every person's tastes, but when that description is up your alley enough to give a shot, MAN does it nail every beat.
Good comedy games definitely exist, but whether they'll succeed in making you specifically laugh still largely depend on whether both its genre of gameplay AND comedy can connect with your personal tastes.
One game where I was very glad for all the quips was Hades. Zagreus delivers his lines in such a nonchalant, honest way that it doesn't even need to be a joke; it's appealing all the time.
And it makes sense for the situation he's in-neither he, nor anybody he's fighting, can permanently die. You can have a moderately-friendly chat with Megaera or Theseus after you've both killed each other a dozen times. So of course he'd stop taking it seriously.
YES, perfectly described! The dialogues with Hypnos or Theseus, for example, never fail to put a smile in my face simply because the dialogues themselves are so fun to watch.
Deadpan delivery from an angsty teenager is something you would expect, really. Especially when most of the quips are way more horny than funny.
When I played Hades, I was surprised by the _lack_ of banter. I feel like most stuff Zagreus said to the gods was just "thanks". It wasn't annoying but there weren't any funny gags either.
@@Kriss_ch. That may be because while Zagreus can hear the Gods, the Gods can't hear Zagreus back.
I think some of the old LucasArts Adventure games like Day of the Tentacle did comedy pretty well. Usually by using audio/visual gags rather than quips.
The original Sam n Max was so dang good. The whole section with the fish eventually ending up on top of the ball of twine is just a beautiful series of increasingly funny escalation mixing different forms from refference to absurdity that's up there with any bit from one of the comedy great fiilms that you could care to name
@@stryke-jn3kv Percent sign ampersand dollar sign
@@stryke-jn3kv Still is. I still play it from time to time because of the humour.
I am ashamed I had to pause to process the sex on television joke... Maybe it's time for me to get some sleep.
SAME!!! Haha came here specifically to post this, glad I wasn't alone! 😅
Fairly certain that was a Monty python joke
Might have book ended the lumberjack song
No it just wasn't funny or actually made sense at least to me so don't loose sleep over it mate
@@Assassin5671000 yup its weird that he used that as an example of a good joke when its just a dumb play on words that is something else that is over used lol
It didn’t come across as a joke because his delivery was awful. You need to see Graham Chapman tell the joke while dressed as a prissy old woman.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was a refreshing antidote to the quippy humor trend. I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe during the scene when two rocks were having a conversation, and it was completely silent. Games could take a lesson from that kind of writing.
Such a good movie. Also just having sight gags was hilarious. Like the hot dog fingers king and I happening in the background
That movie was fantastic on every level. Loved it.
Disco Elysium is probably the only game I have played where I honestly just start laughing out loud at the writing. There have been many games that have given me the occasional chuckles and broad smiles, but the kind of laughing I did playing Disco was a first, for sure.
I like what Yahtzee said once in a podcast some years ago about Whedon's writing: take your favorite line from any of his shows and try to name as many other characters as you can who couldn't possibly ever say it themselves.
I don't know if I've ever heard anything so quintessentially *grumpy* as that last oatmeal line. Even from Yahtzee himself
So, quippy dialogue is basically the equivalent to a jump scare? Or a tickle? Or, alternately, a suffocating ball pit that smells weird as you sink deeper and deeper into the morass that is every single bit of media they expect you to consume?
He’s said before that jumpscares are the equivalent of fart jokes
Its that issue that the writters dont get the beauty of silence as if they feel that their audience will get bored if they dont hear someone talking.
I remember seeing a photo make the rounds on social media of a sign in a movie theater. The sign told viewers that the silence in one of the scenes is for artistic effect and isn't a technical problem. Pretty sad state of affairs. And it's not just the beauty of silence- the beauty of not talking. Mad Max Fury Road was so beloved for many good reasons, but one that I heard a lot (and agree with) is that not a word of dialogue is wasted, and that dialogue is only there when it needs to be. When something could be communicated another way, it was.
Tonal dissonance is a lot of this too. This was another big issue with forspoken when compared to like...Hi-Fi Rush. The silliness isn't out of place there.
Also hi fi rush isnt cynical humor like forspoken.
I found Hi-Fi Rush extremely unfunny (minus a few slapstick gags) and most of what Yahtzee says here applies to that game too. Action games need to have an element of coolness, they can't constantly undercut themselves in fear the audience thinks they're trying too hard to be cool, it just gives a lame vibe.
@@marcusaaronliaogo9158 that too.
@@Froge0 I disagree that hi fi rush is unfunny ngl. I just think it fits the early 2000’s cartoon aesthetic.
@Froge He also compared Forspoken to Army of Darkness, and that's where Hi-Fi Rush succeeds where Forspoken fails. Chai is intentionally an idiot, he's not a super cool badass. When he's being facetious, it inevitably bites him in the ass, which makes it more endearing and less annoying because he's constantly being taken down a peg. It's only when he starts getting more serious and treating the situation with a bit more weight that the game eases up on him a bit and lets him have a few unironic wins.
Hi Fi Rush was great too for that reason, it had actual, carefully crafted gags. It was legitimately funny at various bits.
Chai getting yeeted into the wall was hilarious!!
"quippy" dialog works if it's an expression of something. Like frustration,or fear. Indiana Jones is the first thing that comes to mind where this is done well. Probably better examples. It should also have a bit of dark humor tinge. Which probably supports the idea that there needs to be more than just the dialog to anchor the humor to. Of course more commonly it's just to fill silence so people don't have to think about anything, and to distract from the issues with story, plot, game play whatever.
I agree about Indiana Jones. I always found "why is it always snakes?" To be very funny, because he's genuinely terrified of them and not playing it down, and they are in fact everywhere! 😂
I find Blackadder a great example as well.
The protagonist is incredibly quippy, always making comments like he is above everyone else. Partially because he is. Being British humour, you get self deprication like in the Somme scene ("it will work the 17th time, they'll never expect it").
But what makes the witty humour work is how is criticising something. Blackadder is always making a point about something, showing it's absurdity, and laughing in a usually grim manner. The Somme scene is a great example as it shows an officer class that is stuck up in its own ways and convinced that it will be successful, even after the "17" failures. We can also see this through Monty Python and the Holy Grail where Arthur is presented as a clearly dumb character that makes witty comments, such as the "unladen swallow" with the man from scene 23.
The Quippy humour doesn't exist on its own in shows like Blackadder and Monty Python, but in combination with everything the materials do to built up it's humour. While both are comedies and thus are able to decide their whole time to perfecting their humour, any comedy being put in a show that is primarily another genre can still learn from it as to allow for brevity. I feel shows like Arcane and Castlevannia are great examples, and I find God of War Ragnarok to be a pretty good example in gaming.
@@freewyvern707 Blackadder was the rowan Atkinson one right?
@@jiminyhickerbottoms1846 yeah
While Yaztzee is clearly using it as a negative example in this vid, that's exactly why buffys quips work for me. Buffy isn't trying to be funny all the time. It's honestly a pretty depressing show at times with how much shit the characters go through. The quips work because they come across as a very human attempt to maintain some level of normalcy amidst the traumatic situations the characters are constantly being put through. Can't help if yahtzee doesn't find it funny, thats all subjective, but I think he's wrong to lump it in with this phenomenon (though Wheadons later works, particularly his superhero movies, are absolutely part of it).
Favorite line from Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is "My foot bone is going to connect to your ass bone!"
* modern writers seeing the title *
I'll pretend like I didn't see that...
Modern Writers don't know good comedy.
That last gag actually made me laugh out loud- and it’s a great example of what he’s talking about
That one about the backlash against cynicism actually got to me. Cynicism can be useful, but it doesn't lead to anything getting better. In fact, it is a golden prison that preserves the status quo. I think Yahtzee is right in that the collective consciousness is breaking out of the prison of cynicism and moving into action.
Maybe that is why a lot of creators hate the current generation. They made their living peddling cynicism and sarcasm. It was funny, but they weren't willing to confront what comes after the laughter is over and the problems are still there. So now that the people who are coming after the cynical/sarcastic decade, the ones fighting for something new, they just find the old insufferable. The old hate this because they are still in charge, do not want to adapt, and have pulled the ladder up behind them. Yet the old failed to realize that life is going on outside their walls, the walls they used to gatekeep everyone else, while the world inside is slowly dying.
Well said. One VERY important thing to remember in the modern day is that dangerous political extremists LOVE cynicism, disengagement, "it's all pointless" conspiracy theories, and "they're just as bad as each other" rhetoric. Voter disengagement and cynicism makes it very easy for their small, motivated hardcore to have disproportionate influence.
@@quintessenceSL I agree.
Thats also why I vibe with hi fi rush, its so uncynical that the previous ceo of a megacorp is somehow genuinely a decent person.
@@marcusaaronliaogo9158 That's the weirdest example to bring up considering there really are no good CEOs
@@paulgibbon5991If anything I'd think the "extremists" are the ones that want to act, and it's the centrists and apoliticals and "moderates" that want nothing to change because it scares them.
Henry Stickmin as a slapstick game : *Fewer words greater impact*
The funniest game is Mutant Football League. It's a parody of practically all sports games, and the jokes are hilarious. If you don't take the game seriously you'll also laugh at the stupidity of the prank plays, like bribing the ref or running down the field with a shotgun, shooting away at oncomers. I laugh every time I play it, it's a hidden gem.
The line about quips creating a sense of detachment is 1000% true. I think High On Life's quippiness works because the game is inherently unserious. The game even tells you to not take it seriously. Aliens are guns and humans are drugs and there is a dude selling alien cum. Being disattached from the in-lore ramifications of the events is perfectly fine because we are constantly told we shouldn't really care in the first place. Forspoken, however, is serious. We are told to care about Frey and about the people of Athia. To respond to that seriousness with quips is insulting. Borderlands is a weird mix because it wants to be both. It wants it's comedic seriousness but it also wants it's emotional moments. It's constantly floating the line, which sometimes works (BL2 does this IMO) but it's really, really, friggin hard to do.
That's what I'm saying; BL2 had Anthony Burch write the story and possibly much of the comedy. I don't know who he is, but he must have a better comprehension of how comedy works, or at least how to properly apply it to the wacky world of Pandora. BL3 had THREE writers, who probably did only rudementary research on how to comedy in Borderlands, not having actually played it.
I think a lot of writers these days are deadly afraid of their serious stories coming off as campy or corny, that people will look at the big dramatic scene and call it melodramatic and laugh at the writers effort to create serious tension or drama.
Making the characters quipy, making them detached and make fun of the serious things happening is almost a reflexive self-defence mechanism, just make the character constantly lamp-shade all the stuff, nobody can really laugh at us if we laugh at ourselves first.
Except of course, many of us want to take the serious stories, well, seriously.
We want to engage with the worlds, want to be immersed in it, we want to be feel that tension, be swept along in the drama.
But if the creators constantly undermines all moments that could be tense or dramatic by having a smarmy character constantly take the piss out of it, than it's not going to work.
If the characters can't take their own reality seriously, how can I as an Audience?
I agree Apple Cinnamon oatmeal is fantastic. You have good tastebuds 👍
We need more games like The Bard's Tale 2004.
Yes we do, but finding a replacement for the late Tony Jay will be hard.
I laughed so hard at that first "kill the rat" quest, and many other points.
I laughed multiple times at Hi-Fi Rush. The character of chai is basically a "moron who doesn't know he's dumb" is just so good. It has stakes, characters are actual characters with goals and personalities.
And when chai is a quippy asshole he gets his shit pushed in for it.
He spends the entire first section of the game talking about how he's a Rockstar and then gets selected as a "trash picker"
Spoilers for Hi Fi Rush
>Almost convincing a baddie to switch sides after a boss fight
>Everyone surprised at Chai being smart
>Chai taunts the baddie
>Side character literally says “OH COME ON!” while baddie enrages
You’re so bloody right xD
@Will Phoenix spoilers again
Chai, after defeating the baddie proceeds to hit her head on every single door frame. on the way out.
At the final door he carefully steps through, only to have it pop closed and whack her in the head again.
Later in the game a side character comments on a robot that showed up in a cutscene
"Someone probably spent a lot of time building that. It's strange that we never fought it. I bet that person was kind of upset that we never did"
4th wall breaks literally talking about the making of the game. Just *chefs kiss*
I remember many years ago, there was a game on PC called Armed and Dangerous and it was funny not only because of it's dialogue but because of it's absurdist gameplay.
God help me, I know what game your talking about. It's actually "Armed and Delirious".
The creator was quoted as saying "It was not the product of a deranged mind.", Yet playing it for more than five minutes immediately disproves that.
@@sarahshydale4051 God, I know of that by proxy thanks to Ross's Game Dungeon and it's a fever dream. Nothing more or less.
Yakuza is about the only series of games I can think of that has genuine comedy that isn't quipey.
It probably also helps that most of the time, the comedy is reserved for side quests, while the main story plays it straight in terms of tone. Plus the fact that the protags are either very serious people (Kiryu/Saejima/Majima) or they're just ordinary dudes (Shinada/Ichiban/Akiyama) thrown into absolutely ridiculous situations is a good balance.
I'd say South Park and Saint's Row but yeah, series aren't really aiming at comedy anymore.
I was taken aback recently when watching a let's play of the dead space remake where the two NPCs tell Isaac he has to do a bunch of dangerous things to fix another thing, and Isaac simply responded with "okay". I was reflexively bracing for something sarcastic, but there wasn't. Just an earnest reply, which kept the tension where it was and didn't deflate it with a quip.
I think a big point of why quips were so heavily used also applies to what’s happened to entertainment in the past two decades with globalization and a growing of foreign audiences: language barriers. Jokes are some of the hardest things to translate, especially when the joke is tied in some part to the type of language or tone used (which is effectively ALL of comedy that isn’t generic quips).
As such the joke needs to be super generic in order to simplify things and be more marketable
In mild defense of Buffy, I think it helped that only Xander really came off as smug... and that was because he was the most useless. Each character had a type of quip so it didn't just turn into a quip-off and they knew when to not do it. You could have proper dramatic stakes.
Uncharted, on the other hand, was more like 80s buddy cop comedies where the characters refused to take any situation seriously so it always feels like light comedy. And this plagues Narvel movies as they give almost every franchise the same comedic voice and later we have to pretend Iron Man and Starlord aren't telling the exact same jokes in the exact same situations, while Thor and Captain America increasingly do their bits, too.
For me, I think there's only so much insincerity I can tolerate at any one time. If I'm currently enjoying Borderlands, then that's one less slot open for another quipy game... and that dance card got so full I jettisoned the entire MCU after the second Guardians movie just to make room.
I think Love & Thunder was when the MCU hit quip overload for me.
@Paul Gibbon I love Guardians 2 as it's fairly sincere between the quips... it's just when I realized how much time I was wasting on MCU movies without really liking them all that much. They high mediocrities with a handful of exceptions.
@@stevenclubb7718 I think the difference is that GotG 1 and 2 knew when to STOP quipping and actually let a serious scene be serious. L&T just couldn't let a scene finish without that bloody rock man undermining it.
@Paul Gibbon That's why I mildly defend Buffy. Yes, it's quipy to the extreme, but it knew to keep them out of the big dramatic moments. Starlord finding out his father killed his mother wasn't immediately undercut by Rocket going, "well, that sucks". Gunn can be surprisingly sincere at the right moments.
The rest of the MCU just seems to struggle to make any of the stakes seem real by having characters drop the quips and take the moment seriously
The video starts at 1:38 btw
Best part about sponsored videos is that they get paid for doing them, not for us watching them. It's like having an ad blocker without the guilt.
who tf has guilt for an adblocker lol.
I was prepared to start my "well, actually..." monologue but Yahtzee did book end with the comedy is subjective observation which I think is the main point. It's the reason why Curb Your Enthusiasm, Mr. Bean, Airplane, Bojack Horseman, and Up In Smoke aren't all loved by the exact same people though they are all well loved and appreciated by their fan bases.
One of the best laughs I ever got from a game is from Divinity Original Sin 2. The game is, to put it mildly, unapologetic about its violence, dubious desicions you need to make and everything in between. There are heartfelt moments, and they are done with very little cynicism, but a lot of the game is brutal. I mean, to give an example, mercy killing a shark you got done speaking to, eating the leg of a kid it just ate to gain its last memories, and then using that knowledge to comfort the kid's friends. Brutal, unapologetic and heartfelt. That's the bizarre tone line this game straddles over constantly.
So, during the final act, you are talking to carrier pigeons who are convinced their friend is "just sleeping" (he isn't). Then you can decide to take out the item the carrier pigeon choked on and put it in your inventory. Then the narration goes: "You are given occasion to wonder -- not for the first time on this journey -- 'what in the void am I doing?'" I was laughing for hours.
It's always so weird to hear Jack's voice not in a RedLetterMedia video. And so sober sounding.
I want Dad Jokes. Bad puns.
Visual puns.
Going so far for the sake of a pun, I feel, would do a lot to characterise someone.
There's also things like Giligan Cuts, or what have you. Like, when doing random encounters, have the characters tempt fate as a way to add comedy to proceedings and warn players that something's about to go down.
You’d love Earthbound
There is a lot of dark humor in games like Skyrim, Bioshock, and Fallout. Like reading a log about smugglers stealing fuel and then panning back to exploded barrels and raider skeletons.
If you want to enjoy some really funny, well written games, I cannot recommend West of Loathing and Shadows over Loathing enough. Every scenario you end up in has a bunch of really clever, well written jokes and were the first games to actually make me laugh out loud in a long time. Please check them out when you can.
Scrolled too far down to find this! Loathing games are brilliant comedies that I can't recommend to people enough!
What gets me about this quippy comedy is that nobody wants to commit to any overly elaborate joke anymore. You could have things like a boss getting one-shot after so much buildup, a ghost train ride scene where the building you're in gets destroyed and the macguffin you wanted gets smashed to pieces, or maybe even mock your character for slowly walking along by anchoring their feet for a second. These rarely happen anymore.
This video should be required viewing for every writers’ room in every creative industry, not just games.
I think quips in video games could work if they were always said exactly once, even if that means silence later on. And by exactly once, I mean literally the game is writing to a file that always saves the state of the quip flags so even on reload they don’t play again.
Its almost as if comedy is all about timing 🤔
"Hrgh, I think that enemy ... got the point."
- Archibald
Listening to Yahtzee deconstruct humour is like listening to my science teacher tell me about each ingredient in my oreo cookies. It's exactly like that.
I like light-hearted slapstic as a form of humor, which is why I really like a number of the shenanigans in Hi Fi Rush--at least when going through it for the very first time ("fresh").
This was a great FP episode, mainly because it ended when it actually felt like there was nothing more to be said. I hope you do more like this. I enjoy the other FP episodes, but a lot of them feel like the introductory paragraph to some larger diatribe that gets cut off before it can get halfway through making any kind of point.
In games there was only one time that a game made me laugh, and that was with GTA 4 of all things, my brother explained that the parking space outside the apartment could spawn certain vehicles with a code put into Niko's phone. Since we didn't know what was what we tested codes to see what cars we got, then all of a sudden we found ourselves with a speed boat in our parking space. It still makes me smile.
I, too, love the Apple and Cinnamon oatmeal, especially when I mix it with Bananas and Cream or Peaches and Cream.
I really wonder what Yahtzee would think of the Loathing games (West of Loathing, Shadows Over Loathing) since they are some of the only video games that I personally consider to be straight up comedy games (and they also happen to be my favorites).
I laughed so hard at West of Loathing. Well worth the $10 (or whatever it was)
I think the problem with quips is that they were funny when they were something new and interesting, but a major facet of comedy is being caught off guard. If it's expected, then it just doesn't add anything.
That team rocket blasting off again line was on point
My favorite High on Life moment is the teddy bear that just wouldn't die
Forspoken is not a comedy game, the whole game is the joke itself
Im wanting to see Yahtzee's take on Hi-Fi Rush. I love the jokes/puns they give as they seem to fit with everything about it
Hi fi rush feels sincere and is actually having fun. Forspoken feels like it hates itself.
West of Loathing is a game where the comedy actually works. The writing is very good and there is a constant stream of jokes that the whole game is built around.
Same with the sequel, Shadows over Loathing
"now that's what I call sticking the landing" -Leon when he sees a dude staked to death
"I've played some Forspoken recently.", damn. Sorry to hear that man.
Not even into the video, and I completely agree with just the title
Last time I really got a laughing fit playing a game, was in Blade and Sorcery. There I was, stuck in an alley on my knees, holding my enemy's sword-hand by the wrist, hiding from archers, whilst trying to stab him in the ass because that was the only place I could reach with my dagger. The absurdity and surrealism really struck me as quite hilarious😂😂
This is one of the most important videos game/movie creators NEED to see right now
I've been thinking about how Army of Darkness and Forspoken is different, and one of the conclusions I've come up with was that if Ash was dying he would say something meaningful and sad, if this forgettable girl was dying she'd do a "deez nuts" joke, because she feels that one-dimensional.
TBH I don't see Ash saying anything meaningful if he was dying, just something raw. Also depends on who was seeing him die. Just him? A good ol' "Fuck....". Someone he looks favorably towards? Aiming for positive or nonchalant. Enemy? Smarmy. But there would be emotion there.
@@leadpaintchips9461 Meanwhile, forgettable girl's last words is a run-on paragraph for no one listening.
I hope the success of Everything Everywhere All At Once leads to more absurdist comedy
I hope not personally. I hardly laughed once during it. I'd hope for more Banshees of Inisherin esque humour
This is perfect because I can agree with what is quippy and and isn't while also disagreeing on what meets those criteria.
There is something so inherently funny to the witty vitriol of a professional presenting a sound argument with acid determination.
I was talking with my roommate and we couldn't explain WHY we found Hi-Fi Rush genuinely funny while we ranted about Forspoken. I think you hit the nail on the head; It's not just a series of quippy one-liners; The cutscenes were filled with genuine jokes.
I think the Army of Darkness comparison applies to Hi-Fi rush too, Chai acts cocky but he's really a buffoon and his unwarranted ego makes it all the more hilarious each time he screws up.
Psychonauts does it so well. God I love Psychonauts. I wish they made a sequel.
You capping bro? There is a sequel
@@Froge0 HUH? You mean Tim made another one of those?
@@KitePerson Psychonauts 2. And also Rhombus of Doom for VR as an interquel
This is perfect timing, I just started playing No One Lives Forever for the first time and it feels like a whole other medium we haven't had since, in a way I couldn't put into words.
There was also all the comparisons between Forspoken jokes and Hi-Fi Rush, when one genuinely makes me laugh and the other not so much.
Kind of makes me think Yahtz hit the nail on the head. Stuff like Naked Gun worked because it wasn't just some random quips, but they were part of a carefully crafted joke. And not just in words. What happened on the screen before and/or after, was a part of that joke. The quips were not the whole joke. They were either punchline or setup for an actual joke.
A joke generally built on the incongruity and resolution school of humour. Like, there was an actual "oh, that's what he meant" moment to make it funny.
As you say, just being facetious isn't by itself humour. Too many writers these days think that just having a character look at a red light and go "that's green" is funny. (And bonus points if they think saying it very loudly makes it even funnier.) It CAN be if it's a PART of an actual joke, but if it's the whole thing and just happens once every 10 seconds, that becomes just characterization instead of anything else. And even there it can fork into all sorts of different kinds of characterization than "funny". Like, if someone says it's ok, when they're getting into danger, it may just show that they're scared and reassuring themselves, rather than comedy gold. But when they just say the opposite of whatever random stuff is happening, then at best, yeah, that characterization is "smarmy ponce", and at worst it's jarringly bad characterization.
I was just thinking about this topic when I recently played hi fi rush and it managed to get some laughs out of me. The main character quips a bit, but there is an acknowledgement that the main character is a bit of cocky dunce. And there’s also more of a wider variety of humor than just facetious dialogue so I ended up being surprised at how often I laughed at the game’s jokes.
Hi fi is a genuinely funny game, absolutely. The well rounded cast and the light hearted tone definitely help it. Forspoken is a pretty dour game in terms of the setting, while hi fi is a cool number about a band of underdogs, one of which is a genuine idiot (and not fake dumb either, genuinely dumb, which is used for great comedic effect) taking down an evil corporation
I think the issue that people had with Yahtzee liking High on Life is less that they didn’t find it funny, and more that they found it genuinely hard to sit through, and it’s sometimes offputting to see someone who you’ve grown to genuinely respect as a writer and a reviewer going to bat for something like that. But comedy is definitely subjective, and although this will definitely make me take pause next time he evaluates a game’s humor, he’s definitely still got my complete confidence in his ability to analyze a game in terms of both its design, and it’s place in the context of the modern games industry.
Also, I know these vids are made primarily by Nick the editor, but putting on a clip from the “shooting a kid” bit while Yahtzee is talking about how the game doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard was an unfortunate choice, considering that scene is the most “trying too hard” scene I’ve seen in that entire game
Yeah his High on Life review definitely gave me pause. It's one of the few times I think he genuinely missed the mark completely on his conclusion with that game.
The way he said it succeeded in not giving a shit about itself just felt wrong since it's writing feels like it's trying way too hard to SEEM like it doesn't give a shit. The comedy forces itself upon you and keeps slamming itself in your fave like it's saying "is this funny yet???"
I still like Yahtzee but that HoL review was just...idk man.
@@MapleLeafAce I’ve sort of been coming to the slow and difficult conclusion that Yahtz isn’t exactly on the level as far as comedy writing goes ever since I read one of his books
Yea. That High on Life review was hard to watch, especially given how weirdly disconnected this video ABOUT COMEDY seems to be from every opinion he has about that game. High on Life is the DEFINITION of "trying too hard," and his inability to at least partially recognize that makes his other scathing criticisms feel a good bit more random and aimless.
Man, I really appreciate your in depth discussions about all things video game related. So many years of beautiful content ^^
You're more successful at doing something great than most, don't discount that fact my dude
Thank you for years of consistent dedication and effort and grats on all the variation you've tried with your projects over the years, big accomplishment to try things you believe in (also hooray for you with the fam gig, it really change my own life , bruv)
Love you and all my brothers and sisters of this world. ZP til the end! w00t!
Saints rows joke actually begins at the end of each gang story when your character talks and confuses the people around him. Lol
word of the day: facetious
Not often I see your content when you seem to relentlessly repeat particular words. And your vids are an invaluable source of new vocabulary for me, and I am sure, for many others. Combining entertainment with growth.
I totally agree with your take on the forspoken. Along with the performance issues, the dialogue was a major reason why I gave up on the game.
Pizza Tower made me pause the game for laughing multiple times without a single spoken word of dialogue.
It's also one of the best games I've played in the last couple years.
I can definitely remember Firefly making me laugh constantly and also I think it did a pretty good job at giving heavy scenes the gravity they require. Then again, I haven't wathed that show in 15 years.