Binary Domain: Rhymes with "Buy This Game".

I just finished a game that had been sitting on my "to do" pile for months and months. That game is Binary Domain, and I was horrified to discover that it only sold 20,000 copies at launch. The videogames industry is bad and you should feel bad.

The last time I came away from a game feeling this pumped (mixed in with absolutely nail biting moments of OH MY GOD THEY'RE DEAD THEY'RE ALL DEAD NO WAIT THEY'RE ALIVE YAY) was the finale of Mass Effect 2. Everything you do here can get your team killed, and I'm still not sure if it's possible to save everyone / get the whole team horribly murdered.

That alone is replayability you can take to the bank, especially as my first runthrough chalked up a considerable list of casualties. I got the end I wanted for my character, but I have a feeling I could have done so much better for the team which becomes a primary concern as the game winds to a close. I mean, nobody is a Mordin or a Zaeed but you won't want to see anybody get smeared across a wall.

Despite looking like a fairly generic shooter, it mixes a fairly intelligent plot concerning transhumanism bereft of the "I'm so smart and angsty, look at me" trappings of Deus Ex (doing a better job of it into the bargain) and mashes it up with the Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2, stretching it out over the entirety of an eight or so hour long campaign.

The bare bones of it are that you lead a team against an endless army of increasingly large robots, managing your team mates, their abilities and their loyalty levels. Everything from your (frequent) interaction with them on the battlefield to how your orders pan out (and associated daredevil antics) will decide how the game challenges you, how the team operates and even who lives or dies. Levels are varied, the numerous setpieces veer between spectacle and odd bouts of timer countdown tension and a couple of excellent vehicle levels break things up nicely.

Typically you have a squad of three or four with you, occasionally walking into absolute fragfests where your entire team goes up against what seems like every robot on Earth at the same time. The QTEs are well done and the plot seems to delight in throwing curveballs at you - there were a number of occasions where I sat rolling my eyes at the direction the story was telegraphing, only to be pleasantly surprised when it pulled the rug out from under me.

One particular character's trust level seemed to take what was going to be a rather frustrating cliche - that I couldn't even physically influence as it took place in a cutscene - and turned it on its head. One of many "fuck yeah" punch the air moments. Binary Domain has a few scenes like that, and beyond shooting things in the face (while arguing with your antagonists at the same time) you really don't know which direction the story will go in towards the end.

It sometimes felt like playing Vanquish from the perspective of a team of regular grunts, instead of Dude Mc Awesome in his robocyber ninja suit - especially when fighting the (often massive) enemy bosses, who'd certainly give some of the cyborgs from that title a run for their money. I never felt threatened by the enemies in that game - here, you're powered down appropriately and the team is absolutely crucial to evening the odds. That may not be for everyone, but I loved the Hell out of it.

Unfortunately, this game had no fanfare, no marketing and (from what I can gather) came out at the same time as Mass Effect 3 which is a great way to launch your ship and set it on fire at the same time. It's entirely possible there won't be a sequel, which is a horrible, horrible shame and it takes pride of place on my shelf alongside Alpha Protocol as "things that should have another go but probably won't get one". And this is a hell of a lot more polished / fun than AP. If you were hoping for some sort of Suicide Mission 2.0 in Mass Effect 3 and were given three month's worth of PTSD as a result of what you ended up with, you could happily wash away some of that nasty aftertaste with what's as close to the next best thing as makes no difference.

If you wanted your suicide run a little longer and decked out with a bigger team onscreen, there's absolutely no excuse to delay buying this game any further. It's big, it's colourful, it carries a nice line in humour, the characters aren't douchebags and the tension of endlessly making decisions / looking after your squad as they walk into their worst day ever is pretty much through the roof near the end of the game. If I can somehow work out how to juggle the team throughout the six chapters in a way that gives everybody enough trust / loyalty to survive the finale, you can bet there'll be a few more rounds of punching the air in celebration.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have robots to slaughter in a manner befitting a group of big goddamn' heroes.

Arkham City: What went wrong?

[Note: I'm surprised to find that this semi-rambling commentary on my not so good experiences with Arkham City got lost in the Posterous edit pile. I'd forgotten how much this game annoyed me, so better late than never. Looking back, I think my initial "what are you even doing" response to this game still rings true for me.]

Arkham City is one of the most user unfriendly packages I've ever seen in years of gaming. I'm more than a little surprised given how good the first game was.

Peeling open the tin reveals...uh....some flyers with DLC codes and a promo leaflet for another game. Where are the instructions? Oh well, the game must tell me everything I need to know.

Confusingly, the game begins with Catwoman. There are a few basic fight prompts, but no indication of how to do takedowns, keep bad guys down permanently (come on, I don't remember given I played the first game an age ago) or anything else. When you switch to Batman, you realise that no - the game dumps you on a rooftop and it is not actually going to tell you the first thing about what you have to do, how to play, how to fight, how to keep the bad guys down, how the new gadgets work, how the old gadgets work, situational context for using said gadgets and etc.

This is the first time in a long time I've been pretty baffled by a big release. Worse, I started on Hard so about fifty pastings later I thought I saw a menu telling me I could change the difficulty at any time. Either I imagined it or the menu was wrong, because all I could do was start again on Normal.

This is not going well.

I decide to take a break from my opening game fiasco and redeem the other DLC code - a "store exclusive" piece of content called the Joker Carnival. So of course, I type in the code on the dashboard and am told the "Code has already been redeemed".

What.

If you're going to butcher one of the hottest sequels to one of the hottest games in recent years by chopping up single player content into DLC, you better hope the damn things work. As it turns out, there's four pages worth of complaints about my issue on the official forums and forty plus on other DLC problems. Nobody is helping or assisting those with problems as far as I can see.

Well, no problem - I'll contact Rocksteady technical support. Except - the game didn't come with instructions, but their website says to contact technical support via the method listed in the game package.

So hey, this is going well.

I ended up sending two emails asking who to contact about the problem to their info@ address - of course, I didn't get a reply because I was asking about a problem instead of sending them a drooling missive or asking where I could buy something.

I also pinged their Twitter feed, but it's too busy promoting 10/10 review scores and launch parties.

In the middle of all of that, I discovered a rather long thread wondering where the instructions were due to people not actually knowing what the controls were, how to do Riddler challenges and everything else I already mentioned.

It seems Rocksteady didn't know where their instructions were either, because the only way I was able to find them was via a random forum post saying "here they are" posted a few days ago. Hilariously - or not - there are apparently errors in some of the commands listed too.

Am I the only one that thinks this is at least a little bit unacceptable? Exclusive content that doesn't work, DLC code issues galore, missing instruction manuals and a lack of any kind of tech support to assist with those problems?

 But of course, who cares because the box has a 10/10 sticker on it and best game ever so run out and grab it, kids. I don't think I saw a single review for this game mention there are no instructions. How is that possible? Surely not everybody was issued some strange instructionless review copy?

Wow, I haven't even got to the game yet. Well okay: the raging "best game ever" style 11/10 reviews all seem horribly over the top. The intricate focus and stealth / planning aspect of the first game have been replaced by a city that is effectively dead and contains no content, unless your definition of content is "beat up the same bunch of guys over and over again as you go from location A to location B".

Because you're in a "prison city", there are no random pedestrians to rescue (unless you count the "political prisoners"), and absolutely nobody in the entire city besides goons to beat up.

That's it, that's the entire city content. I was hoping for a lot of deep city based interaction, but all it is is a dead zone populated by goons that you'll quickly get tired of flying over while trudging from A to B each time you decide to do a main story mission. Oh, you can perform some OCD style collect em up nonsense if you want (pop 10 balloons, shoot 15 security cameras, smash six penguins or whatever) - but I can only imagine the sort of skull cracking boredom you'd have to be suffering from to want to actively do that.

The actual story missions? Yeah, those are good. I have a horrible feeling the "city" aspect of the game is going to severely reduce the amount of main mission content and it's going to feel quite short by the time I'm done. There's also strange moments where the game arbitrarily decides things for you - early on, I was finding locked security consoles that I couldn't hack because I needed to download "Municipal access codes" or something. Okay, fine - I guess I have to go look for those codes. But later in the game during a main story mission, I'm trapped in a room, need to hack a console and Batman says "I need to download Municipal access codes" and then just goes and does it. Hello, immersion breaker.

Let's put it this way, it isn't a good sign that I'm enjoying the Predator room challenges more than the main game.

There's balls, there's big balls and there's BioBalls

You have to hand it to a marketing department that can come up with something like this. One of the ballsiest marketing ploys I've ever seen...this is how you make monocles pop out and launch themselves into orbit.

Mass Effect Thematic and Structural Fixes: The Extended Cut

Spoilers. Spoilers EVERYWHERE.

Here is my money / time no object rejig of Mass Effect 3. Some things to note:

I don't mention Starchild (much), Suicide Mission 2.0, choices not reflecting in the third game or the ludicrousness of basing your entire game solution on "Here's a magic space weapon, we don't know what it does or how it'll stop the Reapers and we'll keep drumming this into your head throughout the game because we literally have no sensible solution other than a magical off switch. If we tell you this enough times, hopefully you'll just accept and roll with it. Love, the writers". I already covered lots of those things here, so just assume all of that has been magically replaced - with space magic - by something that makes sense. Also Xzibit memes.

And here we go....

Don't place important plot points into optional DLC

1) As it turns out, the exploding relay in the Arrival DLC has caused lots of confusion with regard the ending of ME3 (did the relays blow up? a) Yes b) No c) Space magic). Worse, the supposed "trial" is completely absent from the start of ME3 so they can get to the shooty bang bang quicker. As a result, the start of ME3 makes little sense if you were expecting, you know, a trial sequence. There's no explanation whatsoever of why Shepard is even sitting in his room eating those three square meals a day.

Remove the railroading from ME2

1) "If you can keep up, great. If not, I'll stop the Reapers without you" I knew I'd end up going toe to toe with The Illusive Man when my totally Renegade Shep, who just gave TIM the Collector Base had the option of telling the guy he just gave the Collector Base to to "shut up".

My expectation before this happened would be that ME3 would have Paragon Shep working with the Alliance and Renegade Shep would be with TIM. The only possible reason you'd be forced into an artificial conflict with TIM would be if Bioware couldn't work out how to depict a conflict between small puny humans and 100 foot tall death machines in a satisfactory manner. I'm almost certain I won't be making this point later.

(Don't) take back Earth

1) "Take Earth back" is a great way to convince Dudebros and those unfamiliar with the series to jump on board because they're more likely to get that than "Take Thessia back", but as far as Mass Effect goes my Shepard has the familiar sensation of being railroaded into being some other Shepard again. Renegade, space born Shep who sent most of the Batarian race to their grave without a second thought and killed a bunch of other dudes in various hilarious circumstances couldn't give two tits and a monkey about a planet you've never seen for the duration of the series.

Also: it makes no sense that Shepard would be so desperate to have every species battle the Reapers on Earth unless there was some poorly telegraphed plot point from near the end of the game that would require them all to be there, despite them not possibly knowing at the start of the game that this would be the case.

I'm almost certain I won't be making this point later.

Hold fire!

1) Having the invasion kick in right at the start of the game is a nice distraction for anyone wanting to shoot things, but the amount of exploration and questing related to your search to find a way to stop the Reapers is severely limited as a result. Everything boils down to "here's a big shooty battle, and now here's another big shooty battle". They should have taken the "up against the clock" mechanic of whether you saved your crew by going through the Omega 4 relay in ME2 and really thumbscrewed the player into making some desperate choices. At no point did I ever feel any dramatic tension, because it was clear from an early point in the game that I was just going to railroad through a bunch of main missions in an order I couldn't alter.

How much more interesting would it have been if you'd been on a set of smaller, more intimate missions as you travel to places like Thessia and Palaven to come up with some sort of solution to the Reaper threat? Instead, I got a moon that looked like Tuchanka with a colour swap and a railroaded chunk of Thessia that looked like it used Ilium assets without the purple light.

Intermission: Don't reduce dialogue to background noise

1) Not really relevant, but then again maybe it is. There's a whole chunk of game on Palaven's moon where you're just running through endless bland rock corridors to reach the next objective. The whole time, Vega and Garrus are talking and you're just running....and running.....and running to get to your next objective. In previous games, they'd have taken the time to take a breath, have characters stand around and just talk. Instead, the player is focusing on running - and this scene seems to take so long that I end up focusing on "Are we there yet?" instead of listening to the conversation. This is an awful attempt at giving dudebros something to do instead of immersing themselves in conversation.

The enemy of my enemy doesn't matter, have some Cerberus

1) Well, looks like I'm bringing up that whole thing about Cerberus after all. Not only does it make no sense as to why my Renegade Shep is instantly plunged into conflict with Cerberus in ME3, it also makes no sense that the "protectors of humanity" spend their entire time trying to kill the one man in the Galaxy who has proven himself capable of killing the Reapers.

How much of this game do I spend fighting Cerberus, being distracted by Cerberus. being foiled at crucial points in the story by Cerberus instead of, you know, doing something about Reapers? Why does this game have no primary antagonist outside of TIM? Why does Harbinger have this great build up in ME2, only to spend the entire game mute with a brief cameo, even though the original voice actor is in the game? "Harbinger speaks of you", says the Reaper on Rannoch. Well that's good, because he sure as Hell doesn't speak anywhere else. Tell him Shep says hi.

2) I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that having 100 foot tall death machines as a foe is only a good idea if you have numerous interesting ways to combat them. Given that the sole fight you have with one involves rolling around like an idiot while a Reaper with an aim so bad I can only assume he's a Stormtrooper, it would seem nobody quite knew what to do with the things. They're great at smacktalking you; they're good at telling you their goals are "beyond your understanding" (lol kidding); having a satisfying showdown, not so much.

See also: the Benny Hill chase on the Galaxy map. I was expecting something other than a game over screen to appear should you be caught.

So what do you do? Yep, have some Cerberus.

3) Kai Leng. You don't even get the satisfaction of winding up TIM throughout the game, because you get this lamer thrown at you instead. Bad enough he recharges shields by sitting out in the open, he only even takes out Thane because a) Shep & co have a bad case of cutscene incompetence and b) we're supposed to believe that the deadliest assassin in the Galaxy decides to go close quarters with a Ninja waving a sword when he's armed with a gun?

Oh God. No....just no.

Intermission: "They were gunned down while having drinks and watching the game."

FULL BODY ARMOUR AND SPACE HELMETS.

Multiplayer and variety

1) There's no way to know this for sure, but I tend to suspect that even accounting for basic reskins in ME1 and 2, the variety of enemies in ME3 is reduced because it's a lot harder to balance things in multiplayer if you have an endless amount of different bad guys, skills, stats etc. Better to have  few guys from each group and be done with it. Of course, while this makes things more straightforward in Multi, it impacts on singleplayer. And it doesn't help that every other mission seems to be fighting Cerberus goons.

2) Hey look, another impact of multiplayer on singleplayer: poorly thought out battles. When almost everything in the game is shooting stuff, you'd better make sure the combat isn't predictable. A shame then that the combat in singleplayer often boils down to "fight three waves of goons", or "one of your squad has to fiddle with this button so now it's two versus about twenty".

Don't even get me started on that final shootout with the seven or so Brutes and the handful of Banshees.

3) As far as I can tell, most if not all of the N7 missions are just multiplayer levels with - you guessed it - horde style attack waves. Get rid of all of this.

Intermission: The Citadel is not the Normandy

Remember the Citadel in the first game, and how it was one big area and you could get lost? And how in the second game it was reduced in size to a sort of intergalactic shopping mall but still had a decent feel of "I could get lost here, and there's still a bunch of staircases"?

I've yet to see anyone point out that the Citadel in ME3 is pretty much the Normandy in structure and layout: a small collection of rectangular shaped boxes. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head the Citadel even has the same amount of floors. What went wrong here?

Intermission: What have we done so far?

1) Allowed you to side with TIM, or not.

2) Kept Arrival in the game rather than made it optional.

3) Delayed the invasion.

4) Kept the trial in the game, instead of starting it with a confused setup

5) Removed the focus on Earth because your Shep might not actually care, also horribly foreshadowed plot development.

6) Removed the conflict with Cerberus whether you side with TIM or not, because however you look at it this does not make any sense. This siding with one over the other should have affected gameplay and resource choices, not who you spend most of the game shooting at.

7) Made the Reapers relevant again by giving Harbinger his voice back.

8) Freed up resource by ditching the awful N7 missions. Goodbye forever, horde mode.

9) Ditched multiplayer, while I'm at it. I could be wrong, but I've yet to see Bioware mention that you need to do multiplayer to see Shepard survive at the end of the Destroy ending. This is all I can find.

Phew, that's a whole bunch of nipping and tucking. What now? Well, we assume the start of the game has better pacing and makes more sense. The first half of the game is Shepard & co finally getting to see all of the homeworlds you've wanted to explore since day 1 (with no corridor shooting, bonus). Then when the Reapers finally come knocking, the game would play out much as it did before I started typing because the "recruit the funny looking aliens" campaign worked fine despite my endless complaints over too much shooting.

Wind forward to the end of the game, which isn't focused on the Reapers anymore because in a brain straining effort on the part of the writers to try and think up a way to kill them we got that stupid kid, horribly circular logic and the knowledge that while Rannoch Reaper is allowed to comment on your (at that point) failure to unite the Geth and the Quarians, Shepard isn't given any dialogue option to point out that he did unite them both when the Starchild gives his speech.

AMAZING.

But anyway. You heard me right, the Reapers should not have been the end of the game, the end of the game should have remained the Dark Energy threat raised in ME2. Everything would have come down to letting the Reapers harvest and look for a fix, or take them down then try to fix it yourself.

Rather than the "high level" Starchild, they should have been killed off with the somewhat more mundane (yet infinitely more believable) military might of your assembled armies. When I had to choose between Krogan and Salarian, I thought this is how it would go and my eventual alien race ally choices would save or doom the Galaxy.

Well, we know how that panned out. All the same, your choice of eventual allies should have been the dealbreaker. Not enough tech strength? Shepard doesn't beat the Roopers. Not enough brute force? Shepard doesn't beat the Roopers. A decent mix of the two but maybe one or more species had to bite the bullet to reach this stage? SHEPARD BEATS THE ROOPERS.

If you screwed up, everybody should have been squished in a tube and 50,000 years later we should have had a cutscene where some dude discoveres Liara's "warning: Repears galore" recording under a rock somewhere. If you got it right, you had a bunch of missions to solve the Dark Energy problem as per the ditched leaked script. Maybe there could have been an additional bonus where even if you allowed the Reapers to reap, they may have found a solution themselves after turning everybody into fishpaste based on if you'd done certain things throughout the three games. I mean, there's so many directions they could have taken this.

Feels bad, man.

Putting an IGN writer in your game? What could possibly go wrong?

Oh right. This. This is what could possibly go wrong.

I'm not sure if the icing on the cake is where she reveals she hasn't finished the game in question herself, or where she just invents words like a genuine Willy Am Shakespeare ("Babsolutly")?

Actually no, calling the fanbase of a game she appears in "entitled whiners" while working for a company whose job it is to review videogames would be the icing on the cake.

Eventually the post was simply deleted instead of updated with an apology, which arrived here. Then you have this frankly amazing "I'm closing my blog / no I'm not" emofest here.

See Bioware? This is why you don't put people in games who write about games - even if they write things like "Babsolutly".

It's telling when one of the most articulate commentaries about the whole end of game fiasco on a gaming site is written by a structural biologist rather than any number of videogame wesite staffers, who (based on the previous half a zillion entries seen so far) would more likely ramble on about how gamers are entitled, how they need to shut up. how they wanted a "happy ending" or how a game is a work of art (because as we all know, nothing screams artistic integrity like a game finishing then popping a "Buy DLC" prompt immediately afterwards).

Or hey, let's go over that Moriarty drama again. Is he still throwing a hissy fit on Twitter? I have no idea, I blocked him in advance so I never have to risk seeing any of his cutting insight.

Games journalism is a sideshow. Many years ago, I sent a review of Silent Hill 1 to a major "official" publication when they advertised writer positions. I went there, had a face to face, walked around the office and the offshoot of the interview was that I was "too critical" (isn't that people are supposed to be paying me for?) and I should consider writing about movies instead.

It didn't take me long to notice a good portion of the staff there were walking around in what had to be free promotional clothing for [insert game of the month here].

THIS IS AT LEAST TEN YEARS AGO.

Can anyone tell me what major changes have taken place in games journalism since then? Because the next time random games writer guy accuses gamers of being "entitled" and being at fault for simply wondering where the "sell sell sell" promo blurbs of publishers ended up in the game: you may want to ask yourself if you paid for that cool dudebro free hoodie, the guest pass to all those VIP parties and the six free games your company let you keep.

Meanwhile, one of the best sources for critical thinking in gaming right now seems to be the Forbes Gaming section. Not only does it make a lot of sense, there's also zero risk of seeing the word "Babsolutly" which I'm pretty sure is missing an "e".

Game Dev PR Fiasco Roadshow

Mass Effect 3 spoiler warning.

Game dev makes ill judged post on forum:

Instant demotivational poster in the most unfortunate way imaginable.

Did you see Vent Kid on the Citadel?

I did.

There are people out there who think the ending to Mass Effect 3 is actually one big fakeout, and from the point where Shepard is hit by the beam onward nothing is real and its all a piece of attempted Indoctrination by the Reapers.

A lot of debate is framed around whether or not That Stupid Kid(TM) at the start of the game is real or not.

For example, why is Shepard the only one that reacts to him? Why did the kid go from the roof of one tall building, climb up the inside of another tall building in a VENT, say "you can't help me" then crawl back down again?

Okay, that last one could just be bad writing but anyway.

While the below doesn't solve the supposed mystery of indoctrination theories, this does perhaps address the question of whether That Stupid Kid(TM) is a real stupid kid or a pretend stupid kid.

I was wandering around the Citadel and decided to take a look at the tribute wall. I'm not sure if the pictures there change over time, but this is from the start of the game:

Click to Enlarge

See anything? Sure you do. Directly to the right of my FemShep there's two framed photographs.

Click to Enlarge

Boom, one stupid Vent Kid. "Last seen on Earth".  I did wonder if I had a case of mistaken identity, but that stupid face (first picture down) is forever burnt into my brain as the ultimate symbol of how to trash a franchise in ten minutes or less so there we go.

On the bright side, this probably means Vent Kid died horribly in the introduction.

So there's that.