Binary Domain (Sega, 2012)

so let's make a long story short:  if you like the idea of expansive violence towards robots, and can tolerate third-person shooters, then you're gonna fucking love binary domain

I'll be honest.  I fucking love killing robots, to the point that it's a nonsexual fetish for me.  Like most fetishes, this thing can be traced to my childhood.  I had seen roughly 20 hardcore violence horror films before I saw Batman: The Animated Series's "Heart of Steel" (THANKS DAD), but its violence has always stuck through to me.  For those that don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of Batman cartoons (shame on you), the two-parter episode revolved around a HAL facsimile who wanted before logic and order for Gotham and blah blah blah.

What's important is that the evil computer fashioned various duplicates of important citizens, all of whom attack Batman in the climatic confrontation and are gruesomely dispatched.  And by gruesomely I'm not exaggerating, the writers clearly relished getting around cartoon censorship by murdering robots instead of humans: the robots are exploded, violently electrocuted and then exploded, and in the case of a Marylin Monroebot (I wish I was joking), crushed under an elevator, but not before the force of the elevator cracks her neck to a 90 degree angle.

again, this was at a time when a bad guy actually getting a shot off with a (non-laser) gun was considered PUSHING THE LIMITS, so witnessing this on tv did a fair number on my brain.  I started to give extra credence to games that gave me unrestricted robogenocide, even if they were terrible.  I...I once tried to argue that the Terminator 2 arcade game was good.

The point is that like how SOCIALLY ENLIGHTENED game critics will slobber all over a browser clicken on texten game because half of the choices turn you into a transgendered lesbian, I feel like my own personal predilections hamper me from honestly reviewing a game that features more exploding-robot-heads-per-minute than any other.   But the fact that all the reviews I've seen on this game were either the troglodyte "GRAPHICS GOOD FUN" variety or some four-part attempt to talk about how "cyborg queer theory" factors into the game, I have to give this a go.

First off, the plot who cares about the plot.  Binary Domain is basically someone trying to mimic a hideo kojima plot while respecting the player enough to try to do it in five minutes or less cutscene chunks, which is to say it's a massive disaster but at least it's not a boring disaster like kojima's shit.  There's robots everywhere in futureland, you're part of some anti-advanced-robot multinational task force, and oh no someone is making robots that look like humans in neo-neo-tokyo.   Specifically, you're some awful american white dude archetype whose only defining character traits are that he REALLY hates robots and that he has yellow fever.  The supporting characters could have been more, but thanks to the game's laughably bad interaction system (more on that later), most of them are just somewhat creative nationalistic stereotypes, such as Hot Asian Sniper and Butch As Hell British Explosives Lady.  Except for Bo.

Jesus christ, Big Bo.  I found it sort of surreal that someone attempted to do a social justice positive critique of this game, because holy shit I'm sure there are more racist portrayals in video games but I'm having trouble at the moment because jesus look at that name BIG BO BIG BO BIG BO

he also has a permanent bugeye thanks to superior graphics

Big Bo is your second in command, and is probably the most fleshed out character in the game, existing as a mixture of that one horrible stereotype from Gears of War and Barracuda, a primary villain during Garth Ennis's Punisher run.  He is basically every sort of id tendency that a person who has never been around black people would think a black person would have.  He's so horrible, but also probably the only genuine source of humor, even if the source of that humor is straight up racism.  While every other character is trying to give lip service to the plot, Big Bo's contribution is WHOA BOSS THAT SHIT WAS CRAY or WHOA BOSS LOOK AT DEM YELLOW GALS.

But like I said, plot in a game like this doesn't matter, what matters is the gameplay and most of the time it delivers in a way I've only seen in a few games.

85% of non-boss encounters in this game work basically the same way: you and your two chosen comrades versus about eight to twelve robots that look like the soap sculptures with a million vertices from Will Smith's I, Robot.  First off, you tell your comrades to stay the fuck back because friendly AI is unbelievably useless and only good at stumbling into your gunsight while you're firing full auto and using up your limited supply of magical revive packs.  But once your idiot teammates are locked in the attic, the magic begins.

The big thing about Binary Domain's robots is that they feature actual "location based damage."  I know, 99% of the time when games use this word, it means "leg shots do less damage and headshots are lethal," but holy shit what you hit actually matters here.  Shoot a robo-leg enough times, and eventually it explodes so they crawl after you, terminator-like.  Shoot a robo-arm enough times, and it'll have to switch weapons to the OTHER arm!

But the head.  Oh, the head.

what you should be doing the entire game

If you destroy a robot's head, it'll suddenly turn its comrades, who in turn will instantly turn on this headless traitor.  I don't know if it's just me, but the joy of seeing seven other robots immediately stop shooting at you to awkwardly fire at decapatron never ever got old.  The best part is that headless robots will fight each other if there's none left, so most of my fights ended up in a sort of slap fight you'd see in a Tool video, sans 6 video filters.

Occasionally the game tries to "switch up" this winning formula, either by throwing you against some dumb bullet sponge miniboss or asinine vehicle section, but you're never pulled away from the essentials for too long.  It's also nice (and maybe a little sociopathic) to say that at no point does the game decide you have fought enough robots and now have to fight EVIL HUMAN BADDIES.

THIS IS YOUR GOD

The game also throws alot of bosses at you, and this games manages to finally break the "all bosses are boring bullet sponges that you shoot at then roll away from until they stop attacking" curse that a wizard placed on every third-person shooter.  So now only half the bosses are like that, but the other half are genuinely creative multi-stage struggles that are more akin to those white-knuckle "IT'S GONNA BE YOU OR ME ASSHOLE" battles from Smash TV.  The first major boss fight is versus a giant robot spider where you have to slowly whittle down its component parts all the while dodging a steadily increasing tempo of explosions, and it's genuinely one of the best boss fights I've ever experienced.  There's only one genuinely fucking awful boss in all of Binary Domain, and I'm sorry if you play this game based on my review and get to that fucker.

This might sound like faint praise, but I genuinely admire how the game simplifies everything that isn't shooting robots, so you can always go back to shooting robots.  There's a way to upgrade your stats and guns through purchasable nano things, but the game throws so much dosh at you that you never have to choose what to get, it's pathetically easy to min-max upgrades, and even if you're too lazy to do that, the bonuses provided are minimal to the effect on the game.  The guns themselves are either your massively overpowered assault rifle, your infinite ammo pistol that's surprisingly decent, and an assortment of forgettable firearms that you can use up and forget.  You have a trust system with your teammates, but I realized pretty much immediately that the key to maxing trust was just to blindly agree with whatever they asked, and once again the effect of trust has zero effect aside from plot shit (and what do we say to plot, kids).  There's some voice command option, but it's absolute shit so you'll turn it off immediately.  The collectibles are so negligible even I didn't feel obligated to look for them,

No, Binary Domain understands me.  It knows I hated all that decision-making and talking plot garbage from Bioware and "smart FPS games."   It gets that if you can't write a good plot, just make it dumb as possible, that cutscenes exist only to be ludicrous sci-fi watchwords, that when the endgame arrives with the expected twist parade, it should not take pride in its facile surprises and instead just throw a giant robot dog at me.  Binary Domain is good because when you shoot the clunky cylinder-shaped robot transport crafts while the robot is still attached, both the craft and robot will spin in the air a little bit before violently crashing into the earth, and there's nothing preventing you from doing this over and over again.

now take bo's hand, and enter a happier place

gamergate, lessons learned, and god you are stupid but maybe we can make you better

so it's 2015, and I think it's fair to say that gamergate, barring some miracle tumblr rupture that disgorges SECRETSJWTACTICS.WPD into the hands of little timmy, is a fucking joke.

Note, I'm not saying "dead."  Internet stats don't lie; people keep inexplicably joining the movement and retweeting idiot shit, but whatever momentum this movement had is dead.  The -one- actual victory gamergate could look back on with pride, Intel's pulling of revenue from gamasutra, was reversed months ago, and since then absolutely nothing has happened.  You can log onto their dumbass subreddit for proof of this:  any pretense of DEFEATING BAD ETHICS is gone, now it's just a million upvoted topics about "oh no this sjw is attacking one of our brothers, alert alert alert."  Oh yeah and you got the FTC to UPDATE THEIR FAQ ABOUT SITE REFERRALS.  I realize mike cernovich is too busy selling juice to explain administrative law to you, but this doesn't mean shit, and for any actual enforcement to go through will require alot of time and pain and will probably be defanged by powerful lobbies (yes, there are lobbies more powerful than the gawker/polygon cartel) so nothing is going to happen.

SQUAWK ETHICS IN GAME JOURNALISM

Simply put, you guys stared into the vagina abyss, and are now bizarro world tumblr.  and while this means the idiot dance will probably continue for awhile longer since all of your moves are now basically identical to people who use "cis-garbage" unironically, nothing is going to actually happen.  You guys wanted to be the big brain confounding its opponents with a variety of devilish tactics, instead you're the stupid gargoyle whose attack pattern is bashing its head into the wall over and over.

So, what's the point of this blog?  Am I just another pathetic white dude lording it over other pathetic white dudes?  Heavens no, because I'm here to actually offer advice to you idiots on how, the next time a golden opportunity to ruin the lives of self-important people comes up, you don't drop the ball so fucking badly.

ADVICE 1: PICK A BETTER TARGET

If there's one thing you shitheads need to figure out, it's this.  What am I talking about?  Consider a comparison between the Republicans of the mid 90's and today.  In the mid-90s, despite winning an explosive mid-term election under a united banner, almost nothing of real note came out in that time aside from a long-simmering hatred towards a certain political family.  The republican part of today is a fractured fucking mess, but still managed to destroy this midterm election and seems to be well on their way to destroy this country.  Do you what the difference was?

Bill Clinton, for all his faults, was a consummate genius when it came to controlling the mindset of the American public.  The dude banged a trashy intern and literally lied under oath, and yet managed to crawl out of this as someone that moderates and non-radical liberals adore, while feared by conservatives.  Barack Obama is absolutely fucking horrible at this controlling of the narrative, and thus is just simply hated by everyone around him.

the face that launched a thousand nerd tears

I'm sure that when eron "fuccboi" gronj's manifesto came out, you guys smelled blood in the water.  finally, you thought, a real scandal we can really sink our teeth into!!!!  in hindsight, of course, you dumbasses should have pulled back after the first recon-in-force forays into attacking zoe quinn.  Not because the scandal was actually completely bunk, of course, history is built on such false pretenses.  No, because Zoe Quinn, like Bill Clinton, is extremely adept at controlling a narrative.  Her first reply to the accusations was a masterful blend of victimization, hatred, and vague language.  Oh sure, the "we do not negotiate with terrorists" line was eyerolling to people that had followed the scandal from the start, but here is the thing that you stupid fucks don't seem to understand: that response was never meant for you.

You see, while you dumbasses were high-fiving themselves over wacky doritoes videos and finding zoe's horrifying nude pictures, zoe was quickly laying the groundwork for the dominant narrative that would appear in basically every mainstream media portrayal of gamergate from then until now.  I don't want to toot my horn, but I basically called this before gamergate was even coined.  And yet, even when it was clear that whatever emotional instability zoe had gave her tremendous abilities in terms of wrangling allies and making you look like idiots, you kept portraying her as public gamer enemy number 1, which is exactly what she wanted.

At this point Fortuna Virgo must have taken pity on you, because a golden opportunity was presented in the form of Leigh Alexander, who waddled onto the scene, tripped into several open cans of gasoline, impaled herself on a gate, and gasped out ",,,gamers."  And what did you do?  Inspiration struck!  You roughly wiped the gasoline from Leigh, and proceeded to use those rags as ammunition against Zoe, because NOW WE'VE GOT A NAME BOYS.

I can't emphasize what a bonehead move it was to continue focusing on zoe quinn and her ever expanding cabal of echo boxes instead of immediately turning onto Leigh.  Leigh is an earnest person that actually seems to care about video games, which means that if you readjusted your sights and terrorized her, she might have folded and then people would have actually taken notice.  Let's remember that gamasutra was the only website shoddy enough that advertisers actually pulled out of, but instead you decided that THE REAL ENEMY was gawker and vox media, which actually have stuff like money behind them and thus didn't fucking care about your dumb protests.

Of course, I can understand why this lateral move wasn't made, because gamergate was always a bloated, slow mess that couldn't actually adapt quickly.  This totally not obvious segue segues into my second point:

ADVICE TWO: PICK COMPETENT LEADERS

I sort of blame the 4chan ethos for this.  The anonymous army shit is great for small scale terror, but is terrible at the sort of long "message is the medium" operations.  Obviously, for something as glorious as gamergate, leaders were needed.  And holy shit, was nothing delivered.

I mean okay, you have Total Biscuit.  And InternetAristocrat can be funny mostly because he obviously doesn't give a brass fuck about any of this besides ruining people's lives.  Aside from that, though, the various spokesman personalities you've formed out of clay are just about the least interesting people on the internet.  And that's fucking -killing- you.

Part of the problem is that when you went searching for organization faces, the vast majority were already established anti-feminist youtube duders.  Before you open your fool mouth, the problem isn't the anti-feminist sentiment, it's that they're all PHENOMENALLY BORING to anyone that doesn't 100 percent buy into what they're saying.

it says alot about gamergate that even its idealized avatars look incredibly bullyable

Do you know why people are always talking about Feminist Frequency videos, but don't seem to care about those mundanematt or sargon of akkad videos you always post as a reply?  It's not the entrenched control that sjws have over the american mindset, it's because anita is really good at moving from one striking image to the next while showing human expressions, while your videos are a nasal voice talking for 45 minutes over the static image of a skull or some ASSyrian diety.  Or maybe you want to show them that guy that looks like an alternative future version of anton levay that never got over his school bullying, yeah that will work, it HAS to work.

I've never understood this, since the very essence of right-wing thought lends itself to an easy, populist speaking style.  It's the reason that right-wing radio and tv always gets more viewers: people like bill o'reilly and mike levin are accomplished at creating constant tension and interest with their voices.   Even if you disagree with what they say, it creates a sort of electric thrill to argue with them over the various noise boxes.  All I get from listening to the innumerable google hangout videos gamergate loves to post is "holy shit does anyone ever shut up how can anyone normal  ever listen to this" and the answer of course is that they don't.

the original dumb nerd

Obviously this isn't as easy a problem to fix, since it requires someone that actually understands how to talk to people that aren't fucking nerds and would have the testicular fortitude to tell other figureheads "shut the fuck up im taking over this monkeyhouse, otherwise we're gonna have ourselves a night of the long fedoras."  Still, this is needed, because of the third thing you guys need to figure out.

ADVICE THREE: DEMAND MORE FROM YOUR MASTERS

Oh, don't be so coy.  Look, it's not a big secret that gamergate is, to at least some degree, sponsored by certain rightist organizations.  It's just the same as how alot of left-wing interests latched onto and sponsored the tumblr version of gamergate.

It's not actually the same, though.  MSNBC and various left-wing stations frequently feature spokesmen from the anti-gamergate faction.  Fuck, anita was on colbert or daily show or something. What has the right done for you?  There's basically been zero discussion of it on right-wing radio or tv.  Breitbart assigned as your handler an unstable gay guy that wrote prior to all this about how pathetic gamers were and obviously still doesn't respect you, but all of you still lap it up because of your fundamental lack of self-respect (id go into this more but this post is already too long).  Simply put, and get ready because this might hurt your feelings, the companies you are dogmatically supporting view you as dogs, useful as a diversionary tactic and a way to terrorize leftists, but not giving a shit if your support costs you your job, family, or sanity.

Granted, gamergate isn't in the best position to ask for some sort of legitimacy token since, as discussed above, you guys haven't done much besides making random people fearing for their lives. but jesus, is it that hard to find some photogenic nerd that doesn't have a history of explicitly supporting rape to stumble onto fox news and talk about the harassment he's suffered from angry feminists, all i wanna do is just play some video games guys *pout*.



I don't know if anything will ever happen from this blog, especially since even with an actual leader, there's likely always going to be a contingent of sadsacks that, dare i say it, actually like the victimhood lifestyle.  But, a man that hates everything can dream.