Binary Domain is in a class of unfortunate shooters, along with games like Quantum Theory, The Conduit, and Jurassic: The Hunted -- games that are generally unremarkable, except for their perplexing failures to measure up to the specific blockbuster franchises they ape (Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty). To its credit, the model for Binary Domain is more ambiguous, and less well-established; it's trying to be a story-driven sci-fi epic, and other contenders in this field - Bionic Commando, Dark Void, Vanquish - have had their own shortfalls. But even more so than those titles, Binary Domain trips over poor execution -- not in some, or even most of its mechanics, but in all of them.

It's a bit pitiable, because hints of an ambitious high-concept peek out from underneath the game's wreckage. I can picture an awesome pitch for this game: in a near-future, semi-apocalyptic world, rebuilt with the help of a robot workforce, the powder-keg of fear regarding robots infiltrating human society has just been tipped. You play as part of an international special-ops team sent in to Japan, itself torn apart by civil war, to investigate the suspected source of a robot disguised as human -- while the specter of a multinational corporation's plot looms overhead. You can cripple robots like Dead Space's necromorphs, taking out legs, arms, and heads to change the pace of a battle; and you can order your AI teammates with voice commands (or button presses) to effect tactical superiority. These teammates even have a relationship status with your character, based on how well you order and treat them, which feeds back into their willingness to accept your commands.

This could be a great game, right!? But none of the ideas have come out correctly. The game's script is in dire lack of writing quality, the plot is haphazardly assembled (the full backstory isn't introduced until after the first hour or so), and the voice acting is flat, annoying, and filled with bad accents. Basic controls like snapping to cover, vaulting over obstacles, and reloading are bafflingly different from every other game of this type. Enemies are easy to slow down, but take way too many bullets to finish off, even from the beginning. And the friendly AI is laughable, and frustrating, since your buddies love to run into your line of fire and then get mad at you for shooting them. (Yes, I covered this before when I tried the demo -- no, I'm not sure why I expected it to be any different now.)

And then there's the configuration application. Yeah, not "screen" -- application. It's a separate app. While it's not uncommon for a PC game to ship with a separate config binary, for making settings (particularly benchmarking) without opening the game first, Binary Domain's config app is the only way to set a majority of the game's settings: including graphics options, key bindings, mouse/stick sensitivity, whether to show control prompts with keyboard keys or controller buttons, and, yes, inverting the look axis. The in-game settings screen is basically pointless; to change anything of value, you need to exit the game and run this sidecar app, then return to wherever your last save was.

The config app itself is indicative of the number of shits Sega apparently gave about this game. At first, it didn't even exist, or was at least missing a number of vital settings (I'm not intimately familiar with the game's version history); and it's plain from looking at the thing, with generic unstyled buttons and fansite-quality background images, that the app was done by a B team at best. Evidently, getting the actual game's developers to put these vital settings in the game menus was just too gosh darned expensive.

And that's the real problem with Binary Domain, and why it falls into the "unfortunate" category. It wasn't impossible for this to be a good game. But not enough people cared enough about it to make it so.

Progress: Chapter 2

My interest in the LEGO games had begun and ended with the first LEGO Star Wars (the one for the prequel trilogy) -- I dismissed the concept as simple, silly, and dumb. And years of sequels iterating on the same formula, cashing in on other popular franchises, did nothing to dissuade me from this impression. Nevertheless, LEGO City Undercover caught my eye - and not just because of the desolate landscape that is the Wii U's current software library - for appearing to eschew the flimsy smash-em-up premise of other LEGO games, and instead taking a kids' toy approach to Grand Theft Auto. As it turns out, that's sort of a half-truth.

For a studio which tends to crib from an established license, Traveller's Tales (here via its TT Fusion studio) has managed to insert a fairly serviceable plot into LEGO City Undercover. You play as a hero cop, responsible for a high-profile arrest, who left LEGO City in disgrace after revealing the identity of a key witness; but when the crime boss escapes, you must return to the city and track him down again. But don't be fooled by the gravitas of the premise -- although the story takes some legtimately interesting turns, the whole thing is told in a lighthearded, jokey style. Not only is the game's writing a triumph for kid-friendly humor, but it also squeezes in a treasure trove of parodic send-ups, from Dirty Harry and James Bond to Starsky & Hutch and My Cousin Vinny. Yeah, it can feel corny, but I dare you to listen to this game's script without laughing out loud at least a few times.

LEGO City itself is somewhat inspired by San Francisco, with a prison island and a big suspension bridge, but incorporates a diverse arrangement of environments. There's a skyscraper-filled financial district, and a Chinatown area, along with residential zones, parks, beaches, docks, even farmland and a castle. There are subway stations and taxicabs for fast travel, and you can steal or call-in cars, boats, and helicopters to get around -- but in my experience, you'll cover plenty of ground just by finding a secret and following its trail. The city is dense with activities, from tiny collectibles and platforming puzzles, to time trial courses and full-blown criminal chases.

The dark side of all this is that so many of these activities are blocked by progress in the campaign missions. Some collectibles require specific "undercover" jobs, like cats you can only rescue as a Fireman; some obstacles require specific abilties, like doors that need a Robber's crowbar, or teleport pads only an Astronaut can use. And because much of the city's content requires combinations of abilities to fully exploit, it's difficult to justify even starting to scour the city for collectibles, until you've fully completed the story and unlocked all your undercover aliases.

As for those story missions? Well, they're alright, and the aforementioned humorous script helps it along. But the gameplay itself can get tedious. There's physical combat, and early in the game you'll "learn" some martial arts, but there are only three kinds of enemy -- one you can take out with any move, one you can only take out with counters, and one (in the last level!) you can only take out with throws. There are puzzles, but they're the definition of basic, never with any more depth than matching colors. As in the city, there are situations where you'll need the right outfit, but it's just a matter of switching costumes to match the obstacle. And there's still a heavy emphasis on smashing the bricks out of LEGO scenery around you, to uncover a key or re-assemble into a door or something. There is a simple joy to these missions, but - especially early on - they can't conceal their shallowness.

Contrary to other LEGO games, Undercover also lacks any kind of multiplayer -- this isn't something you can literally play along with a child. But me and my other technically-adult friends had a great time with a pass-and-play routine; as long as your playing companions are any good at sharing, this should work fine.

So the missions can drag on a bit, but you're rewarded for your efforts with a big, active city you can explore and commit vehicular LEGO-cide in. It helps that the game is a beauty to look at, too, and with appropriate scene music and sound effects for its cartoon-cop theme. (Although to be fair, I have to mention that the game's framerate takes a dive in scenes with a lot of background detail, and this can lead to some frustrating input latency.)

Anyway. If you're looking for a different take on open-world hijinks, and don't mind having to do some semi-mindless missions to get there, LEGO City Undercover is a pretty safe bet.

EDIT: Hey, so I forgot to mention one of the game's other significant flaws, loading times. There's a lengthy loading screen when you start the game, then another when you actually load a save file; there are loading screens when you enter and exit Police HQ, when you begin and end missions, and sometimes just for cutscenes. Luckily this doesn't come up often when you're just sandboxing around, but the PlayStation 1-length loads are a real pain to endure.

Better than: Prototype
Not as good as: Sleeping Dogs (but, for what it's worth, LEGO City has way more content in it)
I didn't realize: that some other recent LEGO games have open-world aspects too, namely LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes and LEGO The Lord of the Rings. Now I'm interested.

Progress: Finished the campaign, plenty of collectibles left

NOOOOOO!!! LucasArts is gone, and though there's the hopeful rumor that it could be resurrected by a licensor, I'm less than confident.

Progress: Gave Up

Despite the abrupt opening, Tomb Raider starts slow. At least, looking back, the beginning sure seems like it was pretty leisurely. There's something to be said for the way Lara is introduced as helplessly out of her element, but I still think the first few hours could do with some cutting -- because the remainder of the game is breakneck-explosive-awesome, and it's a shame the ramp-up doesn't start sooner.

One of the reasons the initial pacing seems awkward, is that the game is front-loaded with open exploration areas; there are more such areas later in the game, but not as tightly packed together. I guess this isn't as much of an issue for players who'd rather race through the campaign, but for someone like me who loves exploring nooks and crannies for extra content, Tomb Raider's early moments can drag on a bit.

Another reason is the story. Once it gets going, Lara's tale is intriguing, exciting, and compelling; but until that point, it seems more like she's just faffing around on the island, trying not to die. It's telling that her companions from the ship, who actually become relevant as the game progresses, barely make an appearance for the first several hours.

It's also worth noting that, if you take the time to explore and collect, Lara comes across as pretty stupid. The island is littered with hints regarding the ongoing plot; finding and reading even a fraction of them should help you figure out the game's mysteries hours before Lara does. Note to Crystal Dynamics: consider doing alternate scripts and dialog for cutscenes, depending on whether - based on finding certain collectibles - Lara should have some idea what's going on.

Alright. Those are my complaints. That being said, in spite of the room it leaves for improvement, Tomb Raider is one of the finest games I've had the pleasure of. It's remarkable, not necessarily because it does anything new -- its terrain-clambering, environment-solving, shooting, fighting, level-ups, upgrades, collectibles, and optional levels, have all been done in many other games, and often in combination. But because Tomb Raider executes all of these concepts so well, it elevates itself beyond other games with a mere subset of them.

Uncharted's live storytelling, in Nate and Sully's impeccable banter, is one thing Tomb Raider doesn't do as well. But otherwise, it's hard to pick a feature that Tomb Raider doesn't meet or exceed its peers at.

For me, the icing on the cake is that the exploration and collection aspects are designed with a minimal focus on backtracking. If you only ever explore the areas you're newly introduced to, you'll only miss a minor fraction of hidden items; and you'll still have no problem getting enough experience and salvage to fully upgrade your Lara.

Which is a big part of the game's spirit; just as Lara's character becomes more hardened and durable as the story goes on, your abilities and weapons will also become much more powerful. Tomb Raider rejects Uncharted's late-game scenario, where you feel outgunned by heavily armored foes -- instead, it hands you a magnum and an RPG, and tells you to shoot through them.

There are plenty of power fanatasy games out there, but Tomb Raider is one of the few that feels like an empowerment fantasy. Like a good Metroid, or Batman: Arkham City, Tomb Raider sets you out in a hostile world, but allows you to completely master it by the end. It's a great feeling, and Tomb Raider does a great job of it.

Oh, and I guess, for some reason, this game has some multiplayer too. Really? Man. I mean, at least it doesn't feel like the quality of the single-player campaign is diminished. But really?

Better than: Resident Evil 4, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, every Uncharted game
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham Asylum (because of Batman's high-quality voice acting, and because of Batman)
Approximately equally good as: Metroid Prime, Assassin's Creed III

Progress: Finished on normal, 89% completion

My last Visual Novel experience was mixed, to say the least. But Analogue's sci-fi hook - investigating a derelict colony ship - and free demo (plus a recent sale), got me interested. And I'm glad they did.

Analogue is even less interactive than 999, as it doesn't have any puzzles -- well maybe one, in the form of a simple hacking minigame midway through. But the game is mostly about reading: discovering the story through log entries, and limited conversation with a pair of AI personalities. The central plot thread is steeped in intrigue, and the AI characters' convincing presentations of emotion really hit home.

In its most basic form - that is, playing through the game once to unravel its mystery (don't worry, the most-informative ending is also the most "natural" path to follow) - Analogue is a great representation of the skirt analogy: at 1-2 hours, the game's long enough to cover its subject, and short enough to keep it interesting. There are alternate story paths that can provide some more tertiary details, and unlock additional endings; and though I found myself motivated to unlock them all, I don't know that I would necessarily recommend this.

Unfortunately most of the details you'll uncover by trying to unlock more than the first ending, are strictly related to the ship's neo-feudal court antics, which I found to be extremely dull. There are some interesting discussions, buried in the deeper bowels of the plot, about cultural norms and gender roles. But personally I felt like I'd gotten all I needed of this in my first playthrough.

Analogue may not have much "game" to it, but it's not as banal as a non-game. There is an interesting story here, and the way you discover it is genuinely cool.

Better than: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, L.A. Noire
Not as good as: BioShock, BioShock Infinite
Really, try the demo: you've got nothing to lose but an hour of your day.

Progress: 100%

As far as I know, the only reason I haven't made the "Tower" rating yet is because I haven't been able to sustain the necessary population count for it (I can go over it at times, depending on lunchtime rush and hotel occupancy, but never for more than a whole day). My tower is already 100 floors of fully-built space, so the only non-destructive way I have to lure more people in is to fix low ratings, and since I've also maxed out my tower's elevator shafts (elevator wait times clearly being the source of most complaints), the only non-destructive way to do this is to lower rents. There is a save-data hack tool for SimTower that is supposedly able to batch-edit rent settings, but I can't get it to work under wine.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I give up. But it was fun while it lasted.

Progress: 5-Star Rating

Some games have a singular moment that defines them as truly unique, unforgettable experiences. In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, this was when the King of Red Lions showed Link the sunken kingdom of Hyrule, suspended in time and sea. In Chrono Trigger, it was when the party traveled to 2300 A.D. and witnessed the apocalypse created by Lavos. BioShock's moment happened almost immediately, when you first descended into Rapture, and saw and heard Andrew Ryan's incredible propaganda (or, arguably, when you meet Ryan face-to-face midway through the game).

BioShock Infinite's defining moment doesn't happen until the very end. But it's worth it.

While I wasn't entirely fair last time - like I said, the game I'd experienced thus far wasn't bad - I maintain that it starts slow and awkward. Clearly the beginning's purpose is to acquaint you with the world of Columbia and its oddity, but it really doesn't do very well at this; it introduces characters and ideas, but doesn't explain any of them, from the source of the town's labor and the secret of its flight, to the motivations of the story's central players. And although it shows you gameplay- and setting-elements like the Handyman and the Mechanized Patriot, it fails to discuss these ideas in any depth. Beyond just being uninformatively dull, this situation actually makes Booker's character difficult to believe, as he scarcely questions the incredible, unexplained world around him.

Much of the first third revolves around a subplot which, although it happens upon one or two vital bits of backstory, is itself fairly unnecessary and borderline irrelevant. These hours of the game seem to be more focused on introducing gameplay mechanics, even the unfortunately tedious ones -- like secrets in locked rooms or encrypted notes, which require extensive and dull backtracking. Fortunately there are few of these throughout the game, but they consistently and significantly interfere with the game's pace.

The second third picks up, although more in terms of gameplay than in narrative. It figures that, almost instantly after I'd complained about the game's flat arsenal, it would introduce new and interesting weapons (although these, too, grow old before long). The sky rail system becomes more integral to combat, as does Elizabeth's tear ability. But even in the game's middle section, the story is more questions than answers, and not that many questions to boot.

It isn't until the game's final third that things really hit their stride. Large and complex battles will exercise all of your shooting and vigor skills, not to mention keeping tabs on Elizabeth's tears, and taking her aid (she'll sometimes toss you ammo, health, and other consumables, when you're in desperate need). Plot events finally get Booker and Elizabeth curious about her powers, and about the forgotten secrets of Columbia. And as I said -- in the end, it all seems worthwhile. BioShock Infinite's ending is a triumphant combination of satisfaction and mystery, answering what was set in the game's beginning while still leaving plenty to speculate over after the end.

Ultimately, I did get what I wanted out of BioShock Infinite; it just took me the game's length to get there. And while, as with its predecessor, there are elements of its gameplay I'll forget - and others I'll have to forgive - that defining moment, its revelatory conclusion, will stay with me.

One more thing, before I do forget it: BioShock Infinite has no manual save function. It only has checkpoints and autosaves. Presumably, this is in order to force narrative continuity upon the player, but it also means two potentially disastrous things: one, if something interrupts your save, like a power outage or crash, you may end up having to repeat a lot since the last checkpoint; and two, there's effectively only one save slot. Seems like a problem, right?

Better than: BioShock 2, Dishonored, Spec Ops: The Line
Not as good as: BioShock, in some ways, but...
Basically as good as: BioShock, by the time the credits roll.

Progress: Finished on medium difficulty

I've got complaints about BioShock Infinite, so if you don't want to hear them, you'd better stop reading now.

BioShock, for all its successes, cheated in a couple of important ways: Rapture was already decrepit when you got there; and the general gameplay was fairly eclectic. The first meant that there was no reason for live dialog (except in very special circumstances), and that there was no need to show the environment's transition from splendor to squalor. The second meant that the fairly basic gun set didn't matter all that much; ammo varieties, plasmids, hacking, and environmental hazards kept things plenty interesting.

BioShock Infinite tackles both of those cheats head-on, and I'm not convinced that these were wise decisions.

In the first case, Infinite begins by showing you Columbia at its finest: gorgeous vistas coated in liquid sunlight, lush gardens and well-dressed citizens, children playing in the streets and at sidewalk carnival games. Naturally, this peace doesn't last long, and you have to start shooting up dudes before too much time passes. But past this, other ne'er-do-wells rapidly appear, and not just out of the underground -- in firefights, and in common public areas. If an area isn't already in conflict by the time I get there, I can count on it to erupt soon. I think the message that the game is trying to convey, is that the city leadership is lying to its elite citizenry about public order. But the message I keep getting instead, is that the game is lying to me about the feasibility of this city, and that level design isn't any fun unless the architecture is already ravaged by conflict.

Infinite also goes to an intense amount of effort building a relationship between you and the captive girl Elizabeth. Which is all well and good in theory, but in execution, this dynamic just hasn't been given enough care and polish. I'm not that far into the game, and there have already been two instances where spontaneous dialog spoiled a scripted reveal (that is, a character ends up explaining something twice, and gets a reaction the second time). Also, for having such a weighty script, Elizabeth sure says "Oh." a lot. Maybe once a minute when I'm not in a firefight. In any other game, these would be non-problems, but I expect a better attention to detail from something that is so deliberately story-focused.

I have some other misgivings about the story's believability, but I'm willing to give those the benefit of the doubt for now.

As for BioShock's second cheat, its varied mechanics compensating for a simplistic arsenal? Well, this time around, someone's decided that Booker needs to be more like Marcus Fenix and Master Chief. You can only carry two weapons at a time, so you'll have to drop a gun to pick a new one up. Maybe you'd expect those weapons to be pretty kick-ass, to make this a meaningful choice, but they're just your standard set of shooter armaments: pistol, machine gun, shotgun, rifle, sniper rifle, and so on. So your gun choice is more likely to be based on ammo than on personal preference.

Vigors (this game's plasmids) aren't very numerous, and mostly follow a common template of "click to shoot, hold to lay trap." There are no hacking games at all -- you can pick locks, but, disappointingly, by collecting picks and then telling Elizabeth to use them. Weapon upgrades don't change ammo types or properties, they just fulfill standard roles like more damage and bigger clips.

I haven't done very much with Elizabeth's "tears" (as in rips, not weeping) yet, so they may go on to surprise me. But I haven't been super-impressed so far. I'm hoping that some scenarios really get into exploiting the fact that, although you can only have one tear open at a time, you can switch them whenever you want. The most promising aspect of the gunplay, is the skyhook rails; but I haven't had much chance to use these in combat situations, yet.

BioShock Infinite isn't a bad game, at all. When judged against other modern first- and third-person shooters, it comes out looking pretty good. But that isn't really what I wanted, or expected, from a BioShock follow-up; and I don't think it's naive of me to believe that I wasn't alone in this expectation. What I expected was an engrossing story of political sci-fi and human ambition, told through eccentric characters and an even more eccentric world. And those elements are here. But the uncanny valleys of Columbia's stability and Elizabeth's personality, and the shooting game's transparent attempts to make itself more like other shooters, keep distracting me from it.

I've still got plenty of game ahead of me, and it's possible for that sentiment to change. I really hope it does.

Progress: Met the Vox

I've still barely scratched the surface of the new Tomb Raider; I installed my copy of Heart of the Swarm yesterday; my Club Nintendo post-play surveys for New Super Mario Bros. 2 and Paper Mario: Sticker Star expire in two days; not to mention the rest of my ridiculous backlog (why did I buy so many games in December!?). So of course, instead of playing any of those, I've been playing a 20 year-old elevator simulation game.

The recent brouhaha over SimCity 5 - which, is hilarious, by the way - reminded me of the joys of property construction, and specifically of childhood hours wasted in front of SimTower. If you're not in the know, SimTower is in many ways a vertical iteration of the classic SimCity formula: your job is to build a tower that's attractive to little sim-people, be it with offices, condos, hotel rooms, fast food joints, swanky restaurants, movie theaters, et al. Unlike a traditional SimCity (and oddly like the new one), you don't necessarily have to provide for all the needs of any individual sim-person; it's totally fine, and expected, for sims to e.g. live elsewhere and only come to your tower for work, or live in your tower and then go work somewhere else. But unlike SimCity 5, you don't have to give a flying fuck about that "somewhere else." You just have to sustain your internal economy and try to push up your population to gain ratings: 2 stars, then 3, then 4, and 5, and ultimately a "TOWER" rating for being the most awesome tower ever.

It's a shame that the game's remakes and sequels haven't really modernized the game much - though to be fair, I know little of the Japan-only The Tower DS released in 2008 - because the freedom and simplicity of SimTower makes it very accessible, and consistently engaging for the duration of your tower. But there are aspects of the game that have been left in the 20th century, like the inability to batch-process property modifications (you'll instead have to inspect every single property one by one), certain properties which mystifyingly can't be demolished (so make sure you place them correctly the first time), hard limits on the numbers of certain properties (and elevators, which is crippling to large towers), and vague in-game indicators of why a property has a bad evaluation (e.g. "Conditions are terrible" without any elaboration as to why).

Nevertheless, 20 years later, SimTower is a fun and charmingly-polished diversion. It's aged surprisingly well, aside from the technical puzzle of running it in the first place. (It's possible to get going in a copy of Windows 3.1 running in DOSBox, but ultimately the best solution I found was in Wine on Linux, in Windows 3.1 version-mode and with virtual desktop emulation.)

Better than: SimCity SNES
Not as good as: I dunno, a better city simulator, I guess?
There are some fan-made attempts to remake this: but they're either abandoned, still in slow development, or just not very good.

Progress: 5-Star Rating

Don't screw this up, Deep Silver. You know what I'm talking about. (In fairness, THQ, but that's hardly comforting.)