Ben Croshaw

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Ben Croshaw
Ben Croshaw
Born	May 24, 1983 (1983-05-24) (age 25)
Employers	The Escapist, Hyper, PC Gamer
Known for	"Zero Punctuation"
Website Fully Ramblomatic

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw (born May 24, 1983,^[1] Rugby^[2],Warwickshire, England^[3]) is a British-born author of adventure games created using Adventure Game Studio software. He also writes articles for Australia's Hyper magazine, a major games publication. He uses his website "Fully Ramblomatic" as an outlet for his own work, including weekly dark humour articles, essays, the novel Fog Juice, and webcomics including Yahtzee Takes On The World and his most recent, Chris & Trilby. He is currently making a series of video-reviews named Zero Punctuation for The Escapist. In the February 2008 issue of PC Gamer (US), Croshaw took over Gary Whitta's "Backspace" column as a contributing editor.

1 Games
2 Zero Punctuation
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Games

Originally Croshaw created a series of adventure games with MS Paint starring his signature character Arthur Yahtzee.

Croshaw became known in the Adventure Game Studio community for the Rob Blanc trilogy. He then created The Trials of Odysseus Kent, which was mentioned by PC Plus magazine as "AGS Showcase" in the November 2003 issue^[4] and the Chzo Mythos series. He also helped to found the collaborative Reality-on-the-Norm series by creating the first game, Lunchtime of the Damned. Some of his recent works have experimented with the AGS engine to produce games in other genres than the point-and-click adventure games that AGS was designed for, such as Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, and the 1213 series. He has also made an adventure demo called E for the commercial venture Aberrant Entertainment, for whom he works.

Croshaw writes his games and creates their graphics and animation himself using Photoshop, though he does not compose his own music.

[edit] Chzo Mythos

Main article: Chzo Mythos

5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes and 6 Days a Sacrifice, are the four parts of an ongoing horror series. In 5 Days a Stranger, the player controls the shady cat burglar Trilby, who stumbles across a demonic force that manifests itself as a masked killer in the tradition of Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, while finding himself one of a group of strangers thrown together in an abandoned mansion and being picked off one by one. 7 Days a Skeptic emulates the claustrophobic horror of Alien following a spaceship crew that finds a mysterious artifact floating in space, four hundred years after the events of 5 Days a Stranger. Trilby's Notes, set in a hotel which exists in both the real world and a horrific alternate dimension in the style of Silent Hill, goes back to flesh out the origin of the cursed African idol from the other games.

While the first two games use the point-and-click interface typical of adventure games, Trilby's Notes requires the player to move with the keyboard and type commands with a text parser, similar to the early Sierra On-Line King's Quest series .

Up until Trilby's Notes, Croshaw relied upon RPG Maker's included MIDI files for musical accompaniment. Some argued that these fantasy-inspired songs didn't mesh well with the horror aspect of the games. In response, Croshaw enlisted outside help for the music in Trilby's Notes. That game's soundtrack, composed by Mark 'm0ds' Lovegrove, was received warmly by players.^{[citation needed]} 6 Days a Sacrifice is the last and final episode to the John DeFoe tetralogy. It links all its three previous episodes and completes the story of Chzo and John DeFoe.

In November 2007, Croshaw released Trilby: The Art of Theft, a stealth platform game based on his 1213 codebase. Although Trilby is the game's protagonist it is not directly linked to the Chzo Mythos storyline.

[edit] 1213 Series

1213 is a trilogy of horror science-fiction games. The episodes tell the story of the suffering and eventual escape of an amnesiac victim of experimentation, codenamed 1213, from his cell, freed by his unseen tormentor. On escaping, 1213 sees that the facility's other guinea pigs, all similarly named to himself, have also escaped and have been turned into zombies, slaughtering the employees.

1213 is notable for being a surprisingly authentic reproduction of the traditional platformer experience using an engine originally designed to be used in the production of point-and-click adventure games. Simply animated, many elements of the game reflect the original Prince of Persia gameplay mechanics,^[5]^[6] though it incorporates aspects of gunplay found in Another World and Flashback: The Quest for Identity.^[7]

[edit] Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment

AitGoFW features cynical science fiction humor similar to Sierra On-Line's Space Quest, but mixes adventure elements with turn-based space combat, resource trading and space exploration gameplay mechanisms reminiscent of space simulator titles like Star Control and Wing Commander: Privateer. AitGoFW is both a parody of and tribute to science fiction games and movies. For instance, a major plot point is the deployment of Redshirts (an obvious homage to Star Trek's disposable red-shirted crew members), who are used as cannon fodder when the situation planet-side is deemed too dangerous for the ship's crew. The easily replaceable Redshirts invariably die, often in gruesome and darkly comic ways.

[edit] Special Editions

While all the Fully Ramblomatic games may be downloaded for free, Special Editions of most of the later games are available for a donation. These Special Editions contain commentary, extra music and occasionally additional gameplay or exposition.

[edit] Interactive Fiction

Croshaw also created some Interactive Fiction games, including the Countdown Trilogy. Details can be found on IFWiki^[8].

[edit] Zero Punctuation

Yahtzee's cartoon alterego in Zero Punctuation

Zero Punctuation is a weekly video-review column by Croshaw produced for The Escapist. The series initially started after Croshaw produced two reviews for Fable and The Darkness, and uploaded it on YouTube, after which The Escapist contacted him and offered him a contract. Reviews are released every Wednesday, and every week's review is previewed on G4's X-Play the Tuesday before.

In these videos Croshaw reviews a recent game or games, using his rapid-fire speech delivery (which gave the name for the column, although he claims the fast talking was "by accident"^[9]), analogously followed by a minimalistic cartoon mirroring what has been said. The videos are typically around 4 minutes of length, and usually feature two commercial songs at the start and at the end, usually lyrically relating to the game context (although sometimes only tangentially), and the end credits often feature humorous notes about how Croshaw's reviews can anger the viewer. A recurring character in the videos is a small imp-like character (who also appears in the Zero Punctuation logo), usually playing various supporting roles as either the antagonist or the sidekick.

Croshaw, more often than not, provides highly critical reviews of games, usually focusing on a game's obvious faults and comparing them to praised older titles - he also noted that "No one likes it when I'm being nice to a game" (referring to his positive Psychonauts review) ^[10], and "I know it's not very funny to love a game", on a rare occasion, when he "couldn't think of any criticism for Portal". ^[11] During many occasions, Croshaw has asserted that he considers video game design as an art form, and often points out that he focuses on the gameplay itself instead of the visual assets. (A notable exception being Crysis, where he momentarily praised the graphics, but also noted that the game engine is unexploited.)

There have been a few exceptions to the review centering around a video game: One episode featured a rundown on the seventh generation of gaming consoles, one episode was a selection of short toons created for the GDC and recently, one episode featured a "showdown" of various emails Croshaw received after the less-than-flattering review of Super Smash Bros Brawl. Two episodes featured hidden machinima shorts at the end: The episode about The Witcher had a short profanity-laden conversation made with Painkiller, and the episode about Sim City Societies had a short created with Garry's Mod using maps and character models from Team Fortress 2.

His style can be considered similar to that of the British TV critic Charlie Brooker, which he acknowledged and being his "biggest influence", though his characteristic "sweet hat" is unique in all respects. ^[9]

The reviews led to a four hundred percent increase in the Escapist's traffic.^[12]