A Week in Gaming #36: 9/5 – 9/11

All the things I’ve said in the past weeks about my progress being slowed down or halted is true. I’ll say that right off the bat. The second week of school, despite only having two days to it via Labor Day being a day off, has firmly cemented in my mind just how much work I’ll have to do. That, plus the game of this week, have shown that I have made almost no progress.

Today is Borderlands, for the Xbox 360. That’s seriously all the progress I’ve made this week, and I’m actually cheating in writing this since I beat it this morning, not on Saturday. But considering the alternative is to write a full post on one of the DLC (Zombie Island) for it alone? Screw that, I’m breaking the rules for once.

I got this as a birthday present on Sep. 4th from a good friend of mine. He showed up with a new copy of the game and a 1600 MSP card for Zombie Island of Dr. Ned and the Secret Armory of General Knoxx. Since then, Borderlands is the main (see: really only) game I’ve played the entire time. So far, I’ve had a fun time.

First person shooter meets the procedurally-generated items and RPG system of Diablo/Diablo II. Fast-paced gun action mixed with an addictive RPG theme. This game has become a form of crack for me, and I can say that most of my AM waking hours lately have been spent with it.

Playing a Soldier in single player and a Berserker in multiplayer, I went through the game with a mellow form of glee the entire time. I did have a few things to nitpick about it, despite this joy. For starters, the repetition. I know, stupid thing to say considering it’s a first person shooter. But it does hold truth: If the quests I received weren’t ” go kill this guy, or kill X of this creature”, they were “gather Y amount of this”, or “go meet this person” or “go flip this switch”. Generic archetype quests straight from an MMO. I was fine and dandy with the first 50 or so, but when that’s all the game kept throwing at me? Nyeh, it became boring.

I also didn’t like the difficulty scaling. When I was fighting with my friends, it was fine. The loot we got was substantial and good, and the enemies were a challenge. On my own the game was a cakewalk and I didn’t see good loot for hours upon hours. Despite selling over a thousand items, I’d keep the same guns for hours on end, and I never changed my Class Mod after the first 8 hours or so. I’ve got 30 hours in this character now. If it wasn’t crap, it was novel, and stuff like the boss items were just as negligible.

On the other hand, I enjoyed what little plot we did get. It’s got the same presentation as the Left 4 Dead games: You only know vaguely why you’re there and that’s your motivation. It’s up to the player to either ignore the plot completely or really dig to try to find all the good plot elements that in just glancing over the game would have them be missed. One of these, for example, that I really liked is how Patricia Tanner’s character develops as you find her ECHO logs. Yes, they’re completely optional and you don’t even need to listen to them, but as you go from Day 1 all the way to Day 719 (in like 15 logs total), her character has such a radical development that it made me connect with her more by those than actually interacting with her.

For a single-player experience, it did wear on me and the ending of the vanilla game was a disappointment. Then again, all of the bosses I’ve fought have been utter disappointments and this was no change. With friends, the difficulty is higher, teamwork is there and there’s the feeling of awesome group effort that really permeates the game. So, get it? Yeah, I’d say so. Be choosy about the console you get it on, considering you need to pay for Xbox Live to play the game online while online co-op is free on the PC and PS3, but it’s a fun game if you’re into shooting, random drops in an RPG system, or a mix of both.

Sorry that there isn’t more to this post, or more content in general this week. Classes are sucking up my time and my creativity so this week was pretty vanilla. Again, sorry and hopefully we can look to a better article this coming Sunday. If nothing else, I’ll have something to write about then. Until next time. o/

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