Critical Style
Croshaw, more often than not, provides highly critical reviews of games, usually pointing out the faults that he implies other professional reviewers ignore in high-profile releases. He also provides negative reviews of less popular games, such as Haze and Hard Reset, and tends to shun certain genres of games, e.g. JRPGs, RTS games and fighting games or certain overused conventions, e.g. Nintendo's continuation of its long-running franchises (or more precisely their continuation of these franchises while still making what Croshaw considers to be the same game), and " old arch-nemesis" quick time events. He predicted that the Wii's control scheme would just be a short-lived gimmick. He often uses popular FPS series like Call of Duty and Battlefield as examples of bad modern games, although he gave Call of Duty 4 a positive review.
The reviews are not always negative, and he has praised some games. For example, Portal, Psychonauts, or Silent Hill 2 all received positive 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, Portal 2 and Spec Ops: The Line were named as his Games of the Year of 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively. Croshaw started his review of BioShock by acknowledging that "Despite all the horrible things I'm about to say, it's still probably one of the best games of the year", but spent the rest of the review criticizing it, because "No-one likes it when I'm being nice to a game" (referring to his positive review of Psychonauts).
He also discusses popular topics related to video games, such as criticism of former Attorney-General Michael Atkinson for his opposition to mature-rated games in Australia, where he currently resides, and topics not related to video games, often for humorous purposes, such as Branston Pickle and the United States government.
Croshaw also cites the work of British television critic and PC Zone journalist Charlie Brooker as the "main inspiration" for his own reviewing style, as well as the writings of Douglas Adams, Sean "Seanbaby" Riley, and Old Man Murray's Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw.
Read more about this topic: Zero Punctuation
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