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

Tales From the Hood (1995)

s Why are black-centric horror films generally pretty awful?  By black-centric, I mean the modern trend of hollywood equating movies with a black cast to have some sort of an "urban" bent.  Generally, this sorts of films are the most generic possible plots with the addition of some terrible THUG LIFE aspect.  I rarely see them in video stores, but apparently there's some dark and sinister subsection of BET that's producing them, since they seem to premiere a new take on "VAMPIRE GANGSTER HEIST INSERT WEED JOKE HERE" every month or so.

There are exceptions, of course.  Most would probably point to The People Under the Stairs and Candyman, films that used the whole notion of black people being the underclass to more affluent white people and added a horror bent to that.  However, I'd also argue that Tales From the Hood should also be considered a classic in this category.  If the title doesn't make it obvious, Tales From the Hood is a horror anthology, divided into four stories with an extra "framing story."  The latter involves three INNER CITY youths planning a drug deal at a funeral home maintained by a mortician whose face pretty well determines how things are going to end up here:

 oh hai guys clarance williams iii here

The mortician, being the one with the drugs, is able to leverage his way to telling the four main stories.

Three of the four stories are pretty generic (though not really bad) social commentaries with a horror twist.  The first involves a former black cop who quit the force after seeing his corrupt cop partners beat and murder a black activist.  One year later, he lures the cops to the gravesite of the activist for revenge purposes.  It's basically the Thin Blue Line version of Creepshow's "Father's Day," even to the point of the zombie activist (whoops spoilers I guess) having telekinetic powers.  Still, it gets to the point quickly enough, and there's nothing technically wrong with this story (nor really any of the other stories).

The second story is all about domestic violence, with a kid telling his COOL AND HIP BLACK TEACHER that he's all bruised up because there's a monster beating him up.  The monster, of course, is his stepfather who has a tattoo of MONSTER on his arm.  Monster, monster, monster.  Happy ending due to child apparently having power to kill people by ripping up his drawings of them.

The final story involves a evil gangster who is arrested for his crimes, but takes an offer of freedom by participating in a "rehabilitation program" that is basically the Ludovico Treatment, but with more spinning chairs and nurses in weird latex fetish uniforms.  I'm not sure whether it or the Monster story is the worst one of the bunch, as while the final story features some shocking and provoking actual photographs of violence against blacks, the impact is diluted both by the pictures being intercut of footage of guys in bandannas jumping around firing guns, and the program director (who is basically a solemn Whoopi Goldberg) telling the gangster, "Cain was the first murderer, Crazy K.  He killed his brother HOW MANY BROTHERS HAVE YOU SLAIN?!?!?!"  I understand the message is that black-on-black violence is just furthering the cause of racists, but there has to have been a better way to express it.  Eventually, the gangster fails the treatment, and is sent back to the moment he was arrested, except now instead of being arrested, he's killed by the three gangster in the framing story.

Oh yeah, and then when the gangsters are finally revealed the coffins where the drugs are purportedly kept, they instead find their corpses and oh wait the mortician is actually satan.   

Ultimately, I just wanted to use this review to talk about the third story, which is easily one of my favorite short horror tales, KKK Comeuppance."  When you open with a political ad stating: "You can give it any name you want.  The fact is, affirmative action, quotas, reparations, all mean one thing: Another qualified individual won't get a job or an education simply because he's not the right color.  I thought that's what we were trying to get away from," dissolving to the picture of the whitest person imaginable, you know whoever wrote this had some fun.  The whitest man alive is running for senate, was a former Klansman, and every thing he says is basically what I unironically heard while living in Arkansas.  He's also living in a house that was the site of a former slave massacre which resulted in alot of displaced souls until a later owner transferred all of the souls into dolls.  There's even a picture hey why is one of the dolls whited out???

this was basically what reading highlights as a kid was like

Like all killer doll stories, we get scenes of the doll inanimate (though still able to trip an Uncle Tom image consultant down the stairs), randomly appearing in spooooooky places.  Eventually it reappears on the staircase, prompting KKK Guy to declare that "THERE WILL BE NO REPARATIONS" while throwing a bowl at the doll, and declaring war on a "VOODOO BITCH" while impaling a painting of her with her dolls with an American Flag.  Eventually the doll attacks directly, but is quickly subdued, and tied to a dartboard, though KKK guys uses a shotgun in lieu of darts.  All looks well as "NOT EVEN SOME VOODOO NEGRESS BITCH SPELL CAN OVERCOME THE POWER OF A DOUBLE BARRELLED SHOTGUN," but the painting now suddenly has roughly six dolls whited out.  White supremacy oopsie, as now he's dealing with a whole bunch of "YOU LITTLE...NIGGLINS."    Also, the original doll returns, and the double barrelled shotgun isn't so helpful now, so he retreats to the previous room only to well

 

 

 (seeing this as a 10-year-old really had a profound effect of my attitude towards other races)

In perhaps the most subtle bit of writing ever, KKK Man covers himself with the American flag as the dolls approach and you get the rest.  Again, easily the best story of the bunch, in acting, writing, and general horror movie vibe, like a top-tier Tales from the Crypt episode.  That's the complement, by the way.

Again, it's not really a must-see horror film, and one could even call it a series of spooky morality tales with the exception of KKK Comeuppance, but it's still probably the most socially challenging horror film about black people (and really in general, unless you count silly WHITE PEOPLE PROBLEMS), which is fairly depressing when you think about it.