Alright, I know this is pushing it, both in terms of what constitutes a review and what is fair game TO review, but this is too long to put in the ZP comments thread, and while reviewing a review is a bit... meta, I don't see anything wrong with it in theory. And now that I've discovered these forums, I promise to write some traditional reviews in the future.

So, in the hopes this thread doesn't get me banned on my first day, I present the following letter to Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw:

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SUBJECT: Noah's Arcade Presents Zero Punctuation

I promise this is constructive criticism, not a rant. Really.

First off, nothing wrong with a new intro. New is good. Professional is good. Two problems with what you've done:

1) It's generic. The randomly whizzing characters are fury signifying nothing, and the music screams "we're using angry guitar to prove we're subversive and 'mature.'" Most criminally, it has no sense of humor, to say nothing of yours in particular. I know you're self-conscious, because it seems self-consciousness is largely what motivated the new intro in the first place, but remember that your personality is the only thing Zero Punctuation has ever had going for it. So put it out there.

2) It's vacuous. I mean in terms of information. I'm a video editor, so I know that creating whizzy intro graphics is, among other things, loads of fun. But that's an impulse that should be restrained. TV shows need only enough intro to announce that WE ARE STARTING NOW... Get out of the refrigerator and pay attention! Web videos need even less. The unique song selections in the old intro essentially meant the review was starting from second 01. Now we have to sit through a full 17 seconds before getting any new content. This isn't going to "grow on" anybody in a few weeks, because in a few weeks we'll all be tuning it out/skipping past it/grabbing a soda... and nobody will care anymore about all the hard work you went to.

By way of suggestions, I just want to share something user Altorin posted in the LEGO Indy review forum: "I really liked ... the simplicity of just seeing yahtzee holding a controller with a look of hopeful confusion." I love that sentiment. Maybe 'confusion' is the wrong word, but 'hopeful' is spot on. Another good phrase would be 'quiet resignation.' Your new intro, with its rather violent visual barrage, gives the impression that you are an angry reviewer wandering the countryside with your big reviewing hammer, looking for unworthy games to prey upon. But I have in the past felt as if you want to be a gentle soul - that you aren't looking for a fight but are just trying to enjoy yourself - and that the games themselves are the bad guys. They are the ones that suck, that are humiliating you, angering you, and otherwise doing everything possible to spoil your good mood (with humorously successful results). And yet you soldier on, sitting down before each review with controller held lightly in hand, face blank because it can't choose between apprehension and cautious optimism, as if to say, "Well, here goes nothing..." Sort of the way Wile E. Coyote looks right before he pushes the operation button on his latest ACME purchase. I want to avoid the temptation to suggest a new form for your intro - but I hope you'll keep these images in mind while considering the appropriate tone it should set.

Thanks for reading (assuming you did). Long time, first time and all that.

-[name]

P.S. Nope, I can't avoid temptation. I think you should keep the new music for the outro, but use something jauntier for the intro over top an animated scene that varies each week ala the Simpsons' couch gags. The Colonel Bogey March comes to mind, but I didn't mention that earlier for fear it would invalidate all my other opinions.

P.P.S. It occurs to me that, being British and younger than me, there is a possibility you might not get the joke in my subject line. Oh well.

It occurs to me that being insecure and egotistical you felt the need to point out your own 'joke', just in case the readers missed it. Explaining/pointing out/young boys a joke is not funny. Oh well.

This just made me laugh. Intro was made by Russ Pitts.

It really doesn't matter who physically made it. I'm not criticizing anybody's ability with After Effects.

That's some nicely insightful commentary, and not rant-like at all.

Thank you! I understand you're the composer, and have been getting lots of flak (which I've happily contributed to), so that means a lot.

I don't care about the opening\ending as long as the review is funny it's alright with me

greatgreybeast:
Thank you! I understand you're the composer, and have been getting lots of flak (which I've happily contributed to), so that means a lot.

Well, as I've mentioned I'm not taking the flak too personally. I'm not making the big creative decisions about which direction to move with the intro/outro, and I've been doing this for enough years that a bunch of knee-jerk shrieking on a forum isn't going to damage my ego too much. My client is happy, therefore I am happy.

I have to admit, though, that I have been entertained by some of the attempts to describe the new theme music's stylistic direction. I understand that it is generic hack bland wannabe warmed-over emo death nu-metal Xtreme pseudo hard rock tripe.

Whatever the case, I can appreciate a measured, well-considered, well-intentioned professional criticism as much as the next guy. :)

Nice job. Ignore Sabazius, I didn't find it egotistical and thought it was in fact very diplomatic and well thought out. This in mind, I have to agree with Ricky1992 in that it may have been better to wait another week or two in case this is just Yahtzee testing the waters with new styles.

At any rate, good job, and I look forward to your future game reviews (if you don't get banned, that is).

I thought it was a great, professional critique (and I highly doubt you'd get banned for it). I really liked the music selections for Yahtzee's reviews, and I couldn't have said it better how they felt like part of the review itself, not just a "WE ARE STARTING NOW."

When's the next review coming? :)

No idea. I'm having a little trouble deciding what to review. I play almost exclusively adventure games and first-person-shooters (no middle ground for me!), and adventure games are dead while shooters are out of season. So the question I'm mulling right now is: what can I say about an old game that won't make me sound late to the party?

Your review is competent, eloquent, and lacking in spite or bile. In short, the last thing I expected. Well done.

Personally, I preferred the old stuff too. Sorry, Messrs. Dorsch and Croshaw, but the old intros became an interesting guessing game, trying to guess the link between the song and the body of the review. It was more fun than the sadly average offering we have now. Again, my apologies to Mr. Dorsch, but I had to say it.

greatgreybeast:
No idea. I'm having a little trouble deciding what to review. I play almost exclusively adventure games and first-person-shooters (no middle ground for me!), and adventure games are dead while shooters are out of season. So the question I'm mulling right now is: what can I say about an old game that won't make me sound late to the party?

Anything you like, as long as it's interesting analysis and you can back it up.

As for the original post, it's more an open letter than a review. Why not send an email to the guy? I suspect he'd probably read it, provided you keep it brief. It's not a knee-jerk rant- there's plenty of logic in there- so you've nothing to be ashamed of.

Look forward to your 'traditional' reviews!

Gigantor:
As for the original post, it's more an open letter than a review. Why not send an email to the guy?

Yes, well, you caught me. This is exactly the email I sent to him last night. I reposted it here to kill two birds with one stone. :) It is probably too long, especially considering this topic has probably generated feedback on an order to rival SBB, but, well... to paraphrase the famous quote, I didn't have time to make it shorter.

Moved to the off topic forums.

I agree with you. Maybe you were a bit too critical of the new intro, but I liked the old one, it was witty, fun, and original. The new one does seem pretty generic and boring.

But guess what? It doesn't matter what we think. The last thing a person like Yahtzee is going to do is change his intro because fans didnt like it... Heh, imagine that.

ElephantGuts:
I agree with you. Maybe you were a bit too critical of the new intro, but I liked the old one, it was witty, fun, and original. The new one does seem pretty generic and boring.

But guess what? It doesn't matter what we think. The last thing a person like Yahtzee is going to do is change his intro because fans didnt like it... Heh, imagine that.

well he did review a jrpg...still the world would end

I'm astounded that you felt this needed its own thread.

nilcypher:
I'm astounded that you felt this needed its own thread.

Why wouldnt it? Its a pretty major change, why shouldnt we have a thread to discuss it?

it's just filler, does it really matter; oh wait i'm adding to the thread.....

I am extremely neutral on this subject.
[taken from fullyramblomatic.com]
The review of Lego Indiana Jones this week also brings with it a new, original theme tune and intro sequence. And so, as reliably as the tides, there has been a lot of hostility towards it. Most of it I'm putting down to the human instinct to be opposed to sudden changes in routine and status quo. I'd like to point out that if the reviews had had original music and an intro like that from the very beginning no-one would have cared. I'd also like to point out that I kind of thought everyone was here for the video game criticism, which is unchanged.

Firstly, no, this wasn't because of pressure from the Escapist. It was my idea to spruce up the videos and make them look a bit more professional, because otherwise it reflects poorly on me. Extreme paranoia concerning copyright infringement may also have played a part and I wanted to err on the side of caution.

The new intro might be a bit PEPSI MAX for you but frankly I like it. It gets me pumped. And for the music I asked for something awesome with squealy guitars because I'm extremely white and therefore into classic rock. Give it a few weeks, I'm sure it'll grow on everyone.
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Just making sure everyone knew about this.

ElephantGuts:

nilcypher:
I'm astounded that you felt this needed its own thread.

Why wouldnt it? Its a pretty major change, why shouldnt we have a thread to discuss it?

That's the thing, it really isn't. It's not like Yahtzee has fundamentally changed the way he presents his reviews, it's just a few seconds of music at either end.

Besides, there already is a thread to discuss it, the discussion thread for the video.

sabazius:
It occurs to me that being insecure and egotistical you felt the need to point out your own 'joke', just in case the readers missed it. Explaining/pointing out/young boys a joke is not funny. Oh well.

I got the impression he was arrogant, and egotistical, I mean he did call a mods work crap and use big words for the sake of using big words.

Not sure if this deserves its own thread or not, but I do think it's nice to have a relatively sane thread in which to discuss these things - this one not being tainted by the Destructoid cast-offs who enjoy flinging poo in the ZP threads - so I'm all for it.

To the critique: it's interesting. I don't really agree with it, but that's a given ;) As a long-time video editor (and producer, and director, and etc. etc.) myself, I tend to agree with you about the need to stay one's hand on the Whizzy Graphic Button, but in this case, with a TRT of just under 12 seconds, half of which is devoted entirely to relatively motionless title cards, I think it's a bit far fetched to suggest the effects are overstaying their welcome. But that's just me. Granted, I'm well aware everyone has different tastes as far as this sort of thing goes, but seriously, the opening "The Escapist Presents" logo has a longer run time than the whizzy part of the ZP intro. To my eye it's exactly just enough announce the show then get out of its own way. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

But here's the really exciting thing (to me): Having done this sort of thing for quite some time, I can say with all seriousness, a large measure of authority and a great amount of conceit that after a week or two no one will even notice the intro. In fact, I'm quite sure the only reason people are noticing it right now is because it's new and different and therefore offensive to that part of the brain that expects things to be in the same place we left them when we return to the room. I don't know if, after a few weeks, folks will have become more amenable to the new intro, or if they will have simply ceased to care, but I am quite sure that it will no longer matter one way or another.

As you yourself pointed out, people just don't notice or care about the Ooh Ahh Whizbangs we spend most of our time on in the editing room. They get tuned out. That's just the way it is. And really, that's kind of the point. Because seriously, as someone in this very thread already said, the intro is just a bookend for the content. The ultimate color or shape of it just isn't that important in a relative sense, beyond signifying that it's the beginning of Zero Punctation and not, for example, Regis and Kelly. If I can say this, having spent a month or so producing the music with Ian and about two weeks assembling the graphics myself, then so can anyone.

One thing I will point out isn't accurately addressed in the above critique (and I'm going to assume this comes from a place of being an editor rather than a producer, but that could just be conceit on my part), is the brand identity of the show and how the intro fits into that. You talk about tone, but with all due respect (because I do sincerely appreciate the measured tone of your critique), I think you're missing the boat there.

What's actually not very well known is that Yahtzee and I spent about a week back when The Escapist first acquired the series trying to come up with a name for it before finally agreeing to "Zero Punctuation." He was originally calling the reviews "Fully Ramblomatic," but that didn't have quite enough zing. So we threw names at each other, and I forget who, exactly, spouted the words zero and punctuation, but I do remember they were spawned from focusing on the elements of his reviews that set them apart from everything else: his rapid-fire delivery and seemingly endless store of breath. That is to say, his brand identity. The phrase "Zero Punctuation" captured the essence of his style perfectly and we knew immediately we had it.

With that in mind, the new intro tries to recapture that original feeling in graphical form, and this is going to be a great, big "duh" but I think it succeeds admirably. The screen fills with text before imagery takes over, blazing past almost too quickly to follow, emulating Yahtzee's lyrical style and uncanny ability to perfectly animate his thoughts. You may call the intro vacuous, but that's kind of the idea. It adds nothing to the tone of the series that wasn't already there, merely reminds the viewer of what he's about to watch. As if to say, "Yo, it's time for that show with the cartoon bits and the fast-talking guy." There were plenty of ways we could have gone with the intro, but a live-action, Friends-style montage of Yahtzee in his apartment, for example, just didn't seem to fit the bill. Zero Punctuation isn't about Yahtzee, per se, it's about his reviews. Therefore building the intro out of his reviews seemed the only logical choice.

And now here I've done it, wasted an hour or so of my time and killed about a thousand words on the altar of defending something I, a few hundred words ago, claimed wasn't all that important. That's what the internet does, people; it gets you drunk, convinces you your opinions actually matter and seduces you into the notion you have something interesting to say. Then you wake up the next morning in a pile of your own word vomit with a giant throbbing headache and an inbox full of angry flame mails. Take it from me. I've been here since the beginning, and no matter how hard I try, I still can't force my opinions to mean diddly squat, no matter how often I take them for a walk and allow them to crap all over someone else's tubes.

In closing, for the record, I'm quite pleased with the way both the music and the graphics turned out, and I think both elevate the brand identity of the series in way it had been sorely needing. In fact, I look forward to the day when, long after anyone has ceased to give a crap about the damn intro, Yahtzee walks into a room somewhere and the music begins playing, or a screen comes to life in some darkened room or internet café, suddenly filling with the animated graphical intro and everyone has the same thought simultaneously: "Zero Punctuation." That is, after all, what a theme and intro are for.

Part of the enjoyment that came from ZP was seeing what music Yahtzee would pick that best suited the game ("Two little boys" for the Army of Two review still makes me laugh). By having this intro you have removed two jokes from the video, and if you watched ZP for the jokes than you are going to be disappointed.

I however do not watch it for the humour, I watch it for game (and once a movie) recommendations and I used too assume so does everyone else. Because of this I don't feel that there is anything wrong with them. They add class to ZP and make it look much more professional. They are also nicely animated, unlike the plain text on blue field that used to be the intro.

I like them.

PS: Nice title Russ :)

nilcypher:
Besides, there already is a thread to discuss it, the discussion thread for the video.

That's a fair point. But I think this thread is justified for a few reasons.

For one thing, I wasn't just making a reactionary comment or platitude to express my feelings for the new style, but attempting a critical analysis to explain where those feelings come from. Which also included some observations on Zero Punctuation in general and video-making for the web in general into the bargain. All of which is why I originally posted it in the Reviews section (though I don't begrudge the move).

For another, the ZP comment threads are a zoo, where any attempt at serious conversation would quickly get lost in the din. I did actually post over there, once to make the Wayne's World analogy and again to pat Altorin on the back. But, being the egotistical fellow that I am, I didn't want to just shout my more carefully considered opinions into a jet engine.

Finally, and most importantly, as many people have pointed out - completely accurately - Zero Punctuation is about the actual reviews, not the packaging. That's not to say packaging and presentation aren't important. After all, if they were of no consequence, then the change wouldn't have been made in the first place. And I am, as you may have caught, a professional editor, so I do have a few insightful things to say about the subject. But I DON'T want those things, however insightful, to clutter up the ZP LEGO Indy forum, which should be for people to discuss what they thought of the review, what they thought of the game, what they thought of what Yahtzee thought of the game, what they thought of what other people thought of what Yahtzee thought of the game, what they.... have I mentioned how much I love the word 'meta'?

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EDIT: So, yeah, pretty much what Mr. Pitts just said. Thanks for the "word vomit," btw. I think we'll be agreeing to disagree about the tone of ZP, and I maintain the intro is almost double the length it ought to be... but I don't care because I'm too busy basking in the light of civilized discourse. Your second-to-last paragraph is awesome.

I understand your motives, but to me this is like the people who complained when Kelloggs changed the name of Coco Pops to Choco Crispies.

Russ Pitts:

With that in mind, the new intro tries to recapture that original feeling in graphical form, and this is going to be a great, big "duh" but I think it succeeds admirably. The screen fills with text before imagery takes over, blazing past almost too quickly to follow, emulating Yahtzee's lyrical style and uncanny ability to perfectly animate his thoughts. You may call the intro vacuous, but that's kind of the idea. It adds nothing to the tone of the series that wasn't already there, merely reminds the viewer of what he's about to watch. As if to say, "Yo, it's time for that show with the cartoon bits and the fast-talking guy." There were plenty of ways we could have gone with the intro, but a live-action, Friends-style montage of Yahtzee in his apartment, for example, just didn't seem to fit the bill. Zero Punctuation isn't about Yahtzee, per se, it's about his reviews. Therefore building the intro out of his reviews seemed the only logical choice.

While I'm not entirely fan of the new intro, I didn't really understand why I didn't like it. It was beautifully done, from a visual standpoint, and it makes sense that this was the direction you went, but these things I already knew, and still didn't like it, and still didn't know why until I read your reply Russ, and more specifically that paragraph. Now this is just my opinion as well, and as you've stated, I too can't force it to mean a bloody thing to someone else, never mind to you, but what the hell, might as well give my insight right?

Yahtzee's reviews have always been one long rambled run on and witty blurb with, as the chosen title denotes, little to no punctuation or pauses. However, the old intros were, at least for me, a nice calm antitheses before the storm of the review and the credits offered a sigh of relief after the rant. It's almost as if the intro was the long inhale taken before a long rambled rant, and the credits were the exasperated gasps taken after, signifying that he's done. The new intro however just throws one into the fray with no warning, and though the pretty colors and sounds are amusing on the most subconscious level, you already admitted they would be mostly ignored anyway, as supposed to the old one where it could even be considered part of the review itself as well as the old credits.

Does this make the new intro and credits bad? Hardly. It is again just my opinion on the matter, and hardly meant to attempt to sway you one way or another. All in all, good work at the very least, and know your work is appreciated now before it's widely ignored.

I enjoyed getting the often incredibly obscure jokes from the intro and outro music, but it doesn't hurt the overall quality of the review now there is a specialised intro.

And by the way, I did not get the joke in the subject line. Explanation needed for a clueless Brit.

I'm with nilcypher, this thread is so serious it makes me laugh. I mean, if I wasn't convinced the people on this site were obsessed with ZP before...

(Nothing against the OP, or any post after it, I just think this is a little ridiculous)