Benjamin Richard "Yahtzee" Croshaw

Video game critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is best known for his breathless rants about mainstream forms of interactive entertainment, and has previously been quite negative about the Nintendo Wii U.

However, in his most recent column for The Escapist, Croshaw appears to have mellowed ever so slightly, and actually has some positive things to say about the console:

I could not, by any stretch of the phrase, be said to be 'coming around' to the Wii U. And yet - that being the sort of statement inevitably followed by the words 'and yet' - I seem to have been getting more use out of it lately.

I'm still not impressed by blatant gimmickery - although I'm not as sniffy about the controller as I was about that of the Wii U's predecessor, complaints about battery life notwithstanding - and there's this weird insular nature about Nintendo and its jealously hoarded IP combined with the stark whiteness and gentle soundscape that remind me of an alien sterilisation cult. It's like the beginner's guide to becoming a Mac user. And yet (here we go again), there's definitely something about it I find comforting, like a big woolly sweater with built-in blinkers. Maybe because it's the only major next-gen console that seems content to, mainly, just be a games machine.

Could the sharp-tongued critic ever be fully converted to the Wii U? Do you share his feelings about the console being "comforting" in the face of the media-focused Xbox One and PS4, both of which want to be the centrepiece of your living room rather than just being a games console? Or does he have a point about the "gimmickery" which surrounds the system? Drop a comment to tell us what you think.

[source escapistmagazine.com]