Ben Croshaw - Zero Punctuation

Zero Punctuation is a weekly video-review column by Croshaw produced for The Escapist. The series started after Croshaw produced two reviews for Fable: The Lost Chapters and The Darkness demo and uploaded them on YouTube, after which The Escapist contacted him and offered him a contract. Reviews are released every Wednesday, with Tuesday previews on G4's X-Play. Croshaw is best known in this series for his generally scathing reviews of mainstream games, as well as often extremely colourful comparisons and rapid-fire speech. Portal, Psychonauts, and Silent Hill 2 are some of the few games that have actually received favorable reviews and first/third person shooters are usually compared to Half-life series as model examples of the genre. Saints Row 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Just Cause 2, and Portal 2 were named as his Games of the Year of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 respectively. The Valve game Portal is the only game he has ever reviewed in a completely positive manner and is rated as one of his top 5 favourite games of all time, the other four being Silent Hill 2, Spider-Man 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Fantasy World Dizzy, all glimpsed in one of his videos, albeit blurred. In his Soul Calibur 4 review, he left a message at the end saying that the "Top 5 List" should not be taken seriously. Also, in a later video he makes a scathing revision to Fantasy World Dizzy, in reference to the poor quality of the game by today's standards.

There have been many recurring minor motifs in Zero Punctuation throughout the years that the show has run. Croshaw frequently uses an image of a man with no expression in his reviews to represent stupidity or boredom, which he got from a collection by Thomas Ruff. He also has a recurring trend of referencing Branston Pickle and his love for it. This trend was more common in 2007-2008, and has since diminished in frequency.

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