Irony!

The best wrestling game to come out for the Gamecube, if you ask me, was Day of Reckoning. Unlike most wrestling games to that point, instead of picking one of your favorite wrestlers from the roster, this game forced you to create your own character. Of course, I made a wrestler that looked like me, if I looked like a Professional Wrestler.

While I got the face more or less right, it was still pretty obviously a wrestling videogame version of me.

All that to say, I haven’t been able to successfully recreate Shepard in Mass Effect 3, but I did get the face that he’d have created if he sat down and created his own wrestler in Day of Reckoning.

As such, I sit and wait for the fix and play other video games to fill the Mass Effect 3-shaped hole in my heart.

Now, one game that I am enjoying so far is Binary Domain. This is a game that had the misfortune to be released the same week as Mass Effect 3 and was overshadowed by it.

The first thing I should tell you is that this game was developed in Japan rather than in the US (so there are a lot of really interesting cultural assumptions on display).

With that in mind, I’ll give the basic story. The world has had a Global Warming catastrophe and something Waterworldy has happened. Much of the world is now under water and people have had to build new cities on higher ground. Because of the catastrophe, robots have replaced people as hard labor. There are two countries that excel at making robots… The US and Japan. Well, the US, of course, stole most of Japan’s ideas and capitalized on their stolen intellectual property and then shut Japan out of the marketplace… and now robots with a veneer of human flesh are showing up. Worse than that, these robots don’t know that they’re robots.

Oh, yes. Replicants.

This is a third-person shooter (think Gears of War) but with a Japanese flavor of Narrative moving the story along.

So far, I’m finding it very engaging. Now, I’m not saying that I won’t drop it like a hot rock the second they fix my face in Mass Effect 3… but I do find it somewhat satisfying to give my money to a game company that includes, even if it’s only as a core idea in the narrative, accurately recreated human faces.

And, after Mass Effect 3? I can see picking it back up and finding out what happens.

So that’s my recommendation for you this week.