Advent Calendar, Day -1: Operation Matriarchy, The Non-Review

The original plan – original as of five days ago, anyway – was to review a free demo the PC game Operation: Matriarchy. Sadly, the demo crashes every time I try to load it, which is either a fault with the program itself or (more likely) my machine just can’t handle that many bikini cyborgs at once. The size of the demo also had the effect of maxing out my download limit, so I’m reduced to worse-than-dialup speed until January, meaning I can’t dig up anything else in place of it. Nevertheless, I can still mount an expedition into the game directory and attempt to piece together the experience from what I unearth.

An unknown extraterrestrial virus attacks all female population of
Velian planet and makes them unrecognizable. Their bodies change,
and their minds fuse into a collective intellect, probably
controlled by some non-humanoid creatures.  Male population,
though virus-resistant, are no longer independent sentient beings
and serve as bio material sources for further genetic experiments
and as part of complex biomechanical systems. Society transforms
into sort of a matriarchal formicary.

Without warning, the alarmed figure of Dr Glenn Bench, his face white with fear, staggered into the laboratory, one sweating palm held to his chest, the other clutching a computer print-out in a vice-like grip. “Professor Stamp”, he gasped, “all the female Velian colonists have fused together into a collective hive-mind and the planet has become…” he squinted at the print-out “…a sort of matriarchal formicary. What could possibly have caused this?”. Professor Gavin Stamp lowered his space pipe from his lips and stared thoughtfully at the lunar surface for what seemed an age. “Some non-humanoid creatures”, he said, returning his gaze to Dr Bench. “Probably”.

You are a private paratrooper of the Government expeditionary
corps attaching Velian. As you fulfil missions, headquarters send
you more along with corresponding weapon and equipment options,
and you grow better and better informed about where the Velian
human anomaly roots in.

Yes, not only do we have every single first person shooter cliche imaginable, but every single antifeminist cliche imaginable as well. A Space Marine is stranded in the ruins of a former human colony planet that was assimilated by an alien techno-virus, but it’s a matriarchal virus that turns men into lifeless drones and women into (literally) man-eating monsters. Thoughtfully, the virus at least made them sexy monsters. Maybe it’s a nanomachine offshoot of the magic feminist gas from The Wotch.

I don’t like to be reminded of Torchwood at the best of times, but just looking at this screenshot is giving me flashbacks to “Cyberwoman”. Surely if ever there were a premise with a built-in safety net, it’s cyborgs fighting dinosaurs while the main characters randomly cop off with each other, but Chris Chibnall is a very special man (with hindsight, at least nobody gets buried alive for 1300 years before being dug up and continuing the exact same conversation they were having when they got buried). What is worth noting about the enemies, though, is that – if the screenshots I stole from Gamer’s Hell are anything to go by – they’re not all Gieger Barbie.

What the hell is that thing supposed to be? The thing at the front looks like a snout, and sticking out of the head are either ears or horns. Is it a minotaur? A matriarchal minotaur? I’m surprised more MRA screeds don’t compare women to minotaurs, actually; beyond the obvious “cow” comparison, women are well-known to trap men in labyrinths of deception and emotional manipulation from which the only escape is to slay the beast and retrace your steps using the string of empowerment. Escaping from the Minyos that is the matriarchal west, however, men may fail to hoist the white sail of activism, causing a despairing Warren Farrel to hurl himself into the ocean. It’s worth a shot.

Exploring the directory also yields hundreds of sound effects in .wav format, including what I assume is in-game dialogue. Sadly, none of it is particularly matriarchal in nature, so you’ll need to go back to your copy of The Wicker Man if you want your fix of “The drone must die!”. But we do get…

• “Hey, wake up, soldier! Time to knock those scoundrels into… … … …WHATEVER YOU LIKE!” (A woman’s giving you orders, so the game’s not sexist anymore, phew!)
• “Look … Pavil … drag me to that … control … panel … … … … over there“
• I asssume this is a monster sound effect. It’s incredible, whatever it is. If the sexy matriarchal minotaur in a thong makes this noise, it may well justify not only the existence of Operation: Matriarchy, but the human race itself.

Bored over Christmas and have a computer capable of running first person shooters more complex than Wolfenstein 3D? Why not try Operation: Matriarchy for yourself!

Advent Calendar, Day -7: Further repeats, but this time it’s actually relevant, sort of

Men’s Group, a little known film about a bunch of blokes attending self-help meetings, has been named the best Australian film of the year at the Inside Film (IF) Awards.

Riiiight… I saw Men’s Group when it screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and my response was a mixture of ambivalence and irritation which I don’t think I communicated very well first time around. Having had more time to think about it, I ended up using it in a compare/contrast school essay, along with Not Quite Hollywood, in which I discussed sexual politics, as is my wont. So, in celebration of it being named best Australian film of the year – to be fair, I don’t know what the competition was – ctrl+c, ctrl+v.

Advent Calendar, Day -10: In Stores This Christmas

The all new “Complete Pricks” Top Trumps set!

Advent Calendar, Day -13: Creative Critters (repeat)

Speaking of my deceased former website, what follows is the final article I wrote for it, back in early 2007. Because 95% of the audience had ceased reading by that point and the entire wretched experiment was shut down shortly after, most people never saw it. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but not as entertaining.

Occasional Advent Calendar, Day -14: In a parallel universe, I made hundreds of these

Shortly after my old site collapsed into a hideous mess, I considered resurrecting it as a shrine to awful Anime dubbing. The Manga UK dubs from the mid 1990s are the prime offenders here, and not just because of their stock company’s inability to keep up an American accent for more than three syllables. Although I’ve never had any official confirmation, the sheer lengths the scripts go to to shoe-horn in as much sweaing as possible suggest that they were trying to get their classification bumped up to an R in order to seem more adult, since cartoon violence didn’t cut it on its own. This led to some truly unsayable lines, with gems like “You can kiss my butt and call it ice cream, you limp-dicked faggots!”  being commonplace (For any fans of obscure sci-fi trivia out there, the scripts were written by George Roubicek, an actor who himself graced us with an improbable Yank accent in the 1967 Doctor Who story “Tomb of the Cybermen”).

I eventually dropped the idea on the grounds that it would be too bandwidth-intensive, but by that point I’d already made a test video which featured the most memorable lines from the Hyper Combat Unit Dangiaoh dub. Weep at the thought of what might have been.

And as a bonus, somebody else’s compilation of the far, far worse Devilman dub.

Advent Calendar, Day -20: A comic I found in a skateboarding magazine that somebody left in the high school art room

Advent Calendar, Day -23: Stepin Fetchit Conquers the Universe

I’ve written about the probematic depiction of race in Warhammer 40,000 before, which ranges from common-or-garden thoughtlessness (according to the previous edition there are about four coloured guys in the entire universe, raising the question of where they came from, since the universe is quite comprehensively mapped out for us and it’s all white) to crassness (two of these four were a shirtless savage called “Axe Man” and a guy who looked exactly like Mr T) to surprisingly decent (there aren’t any aliens modelled on foreign stereotypes, the closest thing being the Tau, who have Anime-lookin’ robots and sort-of-samurai shoulderpads). The biggest positive, though, were an army of Space Marines called The Salamanders, who were depicted as dark-skinned without any associated baggage. We had stereotypical Space Marines in The Thousand Sons (sort-of-Egyptian, so they’re either undead or mysterious sorcerers) and the White Scars (sort-of-Mongolian, so they all ride bikes and their leaders are called Khans), but The Salamanders… The Salamanders were expert blacksmiths who had access to superior equipment and specialised in using flamethrowers. Their skin colour wasn’t, for once, the be-all and end-all, and wasn’t even remarked upon in anything other than the painting guide.

They were the biggest positive. Because a few moths ago, the latest edition of the Space Marine army book retconned them:

Yes, now they start off looking “normal” before radiation mutates them into black people. And not just black people, “daemonic” and “terrifying” black people. Now, aesthetically I can understand the reasoning behind making a bunch of fire-obsessives look like they’re made of volcanic rock. I don’t think you could ever entirely get rid of the dark skin = monster baggage, but I can see this working out with minimal fuss in a universe that also has non-monstrous black people in it. But… The Salamanders are the only consistent portrayal of dark skin in Warhammer 40,000, and now – for no good reason – they’ve been retconned into mutated space minstrels.

We shall return to these pastures shortly, when we discuss the relationship between colonialism and giant lizards.