The coolest part from this past Saturday's Game Criticism panel at PAX was when one of the panelists, The Onion and GameDaily writer Gus Mastrapa (seen above uncomfortably close to your screen), let loose the following:

"Some people have been asking when game journalism will have its hard-hitting criticis, its Pauline Kael, someone who elevates game criticism to the next level. I would say that people like Penny Arcade and Yahtzee are our Pauline Kaels."

Yahtzee, as the more misanthropic and uncompromising of the three, seems the best fit for the "everything you like sucks and you're a sucky person for liking it" style for which New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael became so infamous. As a graduate of film school, Kael always chafed my sensibilities more than she invigorated, while Yahtzee appeals to me as pure vitriolic, cathartic glee... but now that I think about it, aren't they just as similar as Mastrapa is suggesting?

Is it a generational divide? Or the fact that while the moving image has become a very decentralised art, gaming is still largely the pop culture trash heap that Kael was writing about in the 60s? Is Yahtzee the bastard, disagreeable, totally right genius of our up-and-coming mass medium?

(Individual pictures from Google. Don't be hatin' for the face time, Gus. You know I love you.)