#I tried to choose movies that weren’t wildly popular too so a lot of the movies I loop a ton aren’t on here

[acesammy]

I think u have some really good taste & takes in the media u enjoy… SO… I was wondering if you’ve got any movie recommendations? <: any genre is fine! I kind of get stuck in a loop of rewatching my favorite movies and shows, but it’s nice to try out new stuff every now and again :D any suggestions r greatly appreciated <3 thank u in advance!!

hi!!

omg this is such a great ask thank you so much!! I’m ngl I also tend to loop movies, so idk if any of these will be shocking or new, but here are some of my favs :D

Rocketman (2019)- this is my favorite movie of all time and I could not tell you why really. I just think it’s such a fun way to do a biopic and has a really wonderful framing device that lets you know that the story isn’t quite accurate to life, but the emotions are.

The Big Sick (2017) - man I don’t even know. This movie has so much heart and makes me feel the entire range of human emotions. It was such a comfort movie in college that now it’s ingrained in me. It definitely has some bad tropes admittedly but it’s so genuinely good that I don’t mind. Also it is a movie about an event that happened to the lead actor and his wife. She was involved in the film as well.

A knights tale (2001) - SO much fun. I quote this movie daily i stg.

28 days later (2001) - needed some horror on this list bc tbh that’s all I watch nowadays. Ik this is on like every horror rec list, but I didn’t stop thinking about it for weeks after I watched it. Barbarian (2022) - another horror rec. I just really liked this movie. It was well made, and it was truly horrifying. Not in a ‘im scared’ sorta way, but in a ‘that’s fucked’ sorta way.

ok here’s some random recs that I don’t really have an explanation for, just going through my Letterboxd to remind myself of the movies I’ve watched lol

Logan Lucky (2017)

Mollys game (2018) - this one isn’t necessarily /good/ I just like it a lot

Kubo and the 2 strings (2016) - Laika studios.. the animation is breathtaking

Game night (2018) - stupid…. Fun tho

[sketchiedetails]

Beat Binary Domain again. I think it’s a great companion piece to Vanquish, since they’re both Japanese cover shooters and have a mix of similar and different approaches to the genre.

Binary Domain is a third-person cover shooter starring Sargeant Dan Marshall, an IRTA operator who infiltrates Japan along with a small group of other IRTA operators known as a Rust Crew to hunt down Yoji Amada, the head of Amada Corporation, who is under suspicion of creating Hollow Children, robots that were made to resemble humans. Hollow Children are an example of sentient AI, which is a direct violation of the New Geneva Convention Treaty.

If I were being reductive, it’s a Gears of War clone with SNATCHER-esque sci-fi trappings. Most of the game is about Dan and the gang making their way from the outskirts of the city and into its heart where the Amada Corporation lies. As Dan, the player will always have at least one AI buddy by their side as they fight. One of the core themes of the game is the importance of teamwork, and it’s expressed in gameplay by having every member of the Rust Crew have a Trust meter which you can affect during fights; chaining successive kills, pulling off headshots, finishing off robots with melee attacks, and reviving downed allies will improve your teammates’ Trust, while attacking them or taking too long in a given area will lose Trust. In the quieter moments of gameplay, you can have light conversations with your squad and your dialog choices can also affect their Trust.

What makes Binary Domain a good counterpart to Vanquish is that they’re both third-person cover shooters made during a time when the market was saturated with that genre due to Gears of War’s popularity, but they’re the only ones I know that were made by Japanese developers - they’re like a time capsule for a very specific period.

In terms of game design, they differ wildly in gameplay but still share some uncanny similarities: both games feature robots as the main enemies. I’m not sure if there’s a censorship thing in Japan that prevents showing copious amounts of gun violence onto people and maybe that’s why both studios chose robots, or maybe both studios wanted to take advantage at the creative potential they could have over enemy design by having non-organic enemies.

And yeah, they really do take advantage of that potential. They both have basic enemies as light infantry but they both get more creative as their stories progress. Both games have a robot panther as a miniboss, and an early boss from both games return every now and then as less imposing enemies. One difference I noticed with boss design is that for the most part a boss fight in Vanquish will usually be a one-on-one affair between Sam and the boss. In BD, boss fights are usually one big target surrounded by a horde of machines that will act as minor distractions. In a way, BD’s bosses reflect the theme of working as a team since the Rust Crew operate in a similar fashion with Dan taking point and the rest of the team providing support fire.

Both games feature QTE’s and they’re both ridiculous in context, but in BD it feels more like run-of-the-mill action movie stunts - jumping off falling platforms while your teammates try to catch your hand, dodging falling debris - whereas in Vanquish they’re so over-the-top they border on farce yet both types of QTE’s feel like they fit with their respective games’ tones.

The biggest difference in both games is how they feel to play. Vanquish is about being a superhero in a battlefield: you boost over large arenas and flank enemies while the NPC Marines draw their fire. Sam is meant to feel like the deciding factor in a fight; without Sam, the Marines wouldn’t stand a chance against the RI’s. With the ARS, Sam can run headlong into a firefight and risk enemy fire without any chance of serious harm, and only the bigger foes can really cause Sam to lose his footing.

Binary Domain feels like a more conventional cover shooter, with an emphasis on cover placement and squad commands. You can bark commands at your teammates and they’ll follow your orders based on their current situation and their level of Trust. You can also flank enemy units but you need to coordinate with your AI squad and make sure you don’t catch them in your line of fire. When you drop from a great height, it takes Dan a while to recover before he can start moving again. Getting too close to the more colossal enemy types can cause Dan to stagger around their footsteps. If Vanquish feels like being a superhero in a battlefield, then Binary Domain feels like a soldier in a foxhole. Vanquish’s fights are quick, rapid-fire skirmishes and BD’s fights make you feel like you’re always outnumbered but never outgunned (I can’t believe I could make a Prodigy reference work here).

Like Vanquish, Binary Domain lets you upgrade your equipment but you can  upgrade your squad’s equipment as well. You can also purchase nanomachines that offer passive buffs that you and your teammates can equip to get an edge in fights.

What I like about Binary Domain’s gameplay is that it does more with locational damage against robotic enemies than Vanquish. While both games have locational damage that can affect how enemies will perform based on what kind of damage they take, it’s not really that useful in Vanquish and can actually be a riskier option since damaged infantry units will go into kamikaze mode and crawl towards Sam before self-destructing; it’s only in the challenge missions where the system showed how helpful it could be against Romanov units.

If you damage a robot’s head in Binary Domain, they lose their IFF ability and will shoot at their allies. If you shoot off their arms, they’ll take take time to pick up the gun with the other hand. This dismemberment system carries across most of the enemy units you encounter in the game and it can offer the player some tactical depth because they can choose to headshot as many robots as they can to distract the enemy and when the bigger threats are down the player can then finish off the stragglers.

My issues with Binary Domain lie mostly in its story (which I’ll talk about in a separate post because there’s a lot of ground there I wanna cover), but there are some parts of gameplay that could have been done better:

- I was never sure how effective squad commands were throughout the entire game. As far as I know, you can’t point to specific points in a given area and tell teammates to go there for positioning and I wasn’t sure if I could get them to direct their fire at specific targets. Maybe I missed something during the tutorial but I mostly ran headlong into fights to avoid shooting my teammates and told them to either ‘Shoot!’ or ‘Regroup.’

- Because I wasn’t really sure what squad commands did, they weren’t really that much of a help during certain boss fights. One fight is against an aircraft that’s supported by an endless horde of drones which always got in my face so they took the brunt of the force when I fired a rocket. I wanted my squad to shoot them down while I focused on the big guy, but I always ended up clearing the area around me myself before setting my sights on the main target.

- Even though the game shows that you have three weapon slots, you really only have two because you will always need to have a Pistol weapon since it has infinite ammo and when you go down because of a serious injury, you need a weapon to draw while you’re crawling around. I wish you could carry three slots and the Pistol would just appear either during the setpieces when you needed it and when you were in your Down status.

- The final boss fight is pretty disappointing compared to the more ridiculous setpieces the game featured. It’s a bullet sponge where you have to take advantage of the sparse cover in the arena while you whittle its health down bit by bit until you get to its final phase and then look for any weapon in the arena that can stunlock it before it unleashes a devastating attack.

Overall, my issues with Binary Domain don’t take away from the experience. I didn’t point it out yet because I’ll probably talk about it more in the next post, but the game is really funny. The game manages to pull off comedy edits and timing in a way I never see in Western games these days. And as serious as the game tries to be, it is for all intents and purposes a B-grade action movie and I appreciate a game that can laugh at itself along the way.

Originally, I thought I was gonna just compare Vanquish to MGR and BD, but after playing all three games in quick succession, I might actually have some material to compare Metal Gear Rising with Binary Domain, since they both have elements of trans- and post-humanism in their settings.