Borderlands + DLC

Once I cleaned the ridiculously large accumulation of dust out of my tower, I was able to play games on it again without them lagging far outside of playability. I started on the thickly outlined, cel-shaded FPS RPS Borderlands to break my long dry spell of PC gaming.

In the beginning you can choose one of four characters. It’s your stereotypical fare spanning from a vainy steroid- ridden meat sock to a pair of tits stacked on an ass. I was going to go for the soldier but I always end up doing that because it’s safe. So instead I chose the Hunter.

Each character gets three skill branches to develop. Out of those I went with Sniper first. Each character also gets a special ability. Mine was… Well I got this attack falcon… hawk? Anyway the cool thing about it is that you can just send it out and it’ll go find the closest enemy and kill them if it’s strong enough. You can just sit behind a rock while your bird goes and kills people. Well, only one at a time and it has a half minute cool down. Sometimes though, the bird will get stuck somewhere or just take a retarded amount of time to attack. I’ve literally stood for several seconds watching some guy come at me with an axe over the horizon, the bird swarming around him waiting and waiting… and waiting until I eventually have to take action by blowing his head off with a shotgun. Thanks for nothing stupid bird.

The world is obviously an homage to Mad Max even going so far as to insert actual references to the movies. The only problem with working with that material is that you can only take about two hours of playing in a humongous desolate desert junkyard before your brain goes numb. And it’s that way for the whole damn game. Everything looks the same; boring. The only way you can tell where you are is by constantly bringing up the map screen. Not even the heads up compass is very reliable thanks to the terrain layout. Luckily you have outposts which you can teleport between which takes off a lot of the travel time. That is if you can remember which name corresponds to which monotonous junk pile.

In a double whammy with the repetitive landscape, you also have repetitive enemies. There are maybe like six different ones? That’s excluding the ones that are just larger versions or other ones or different color swap elemental types. Another annoying thing is that sometimes the enemies will get so close to you, you won’t even be able to shoot them. Especially the midgets. Why the hell are there so many midgets? It’s almost like forty percent of the planet’s population is composed of midgets! Midgets who run at you screaming and giggling!

At some point you get the ability to drive cars which would be a lot more useful if they didn’t handle like a morbidly obese man with unicycles for legs. And rest assured if there’s only one obstacle within twenty miles of you, you *will* hit it. As if just driving wasn’t shitty enough they make you do vehicle combat to. It’s awkward and difficult enough to take out just one other vehicle but right after you do, two others will spawn directly behind you from out of fucking nowhere and blow your ass into outer space.

Now where did I park the car? Oh yeah, I left it hovering five feet off of the ground outside of the prison.

The whole objective of the game is to find “The Vault.” The Vault is supposedly some giant treasure that only opens once every two-hundred years. While you play, you take on missions to gain experience points, special weapons and money. Some missions have to do with the main quest. Most don’t. You’re main reason for doing them, aside from the three reasons I just stipulated, is so you don’t have to listen to someone jabbering in your ear every fifteen seconds about new missions available over in Fetid Stinkhole. Seriously, I only need to be told once. If I don’t break my legs to get over there ASAP it means that I’m doing more important things. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. The constant harassing could have been easily replaced with a simple map symbol or highlight that appears.

There are guns everywhere. You’re constantly on the lookout for better ones trying to compare and see which numbers are higher. This one does a lot more damage but the accuracy sucks. This one has a higher fire rate but only holds two shells. It came to the point where all of the numbers started to blur together and I just stopped caring. I hadn’t found better weapons in six hours of gameplay so why continue wasting my time? I didn’t even pick up expensive stuff to sell it because my inventory was always full of situational weapons. Hell, I never even carried anything to heal myself with. I always just used the health regenerating shields.

SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>

Eventually you get to the Vault. The final boss which was hiding inside it, though huge, is quite literally the easiest boss in the entire game. I’m not sure if I understood everything I was supposed to at the end but what I took away from this was that the final boss was stupid easy and there was absolutely nothing worthwhile in the Vault… Awesome.

END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>

The Borderlands DLC is a mixed bag. The ones I played included The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, Mad Moxxie’s Underdome Riot and The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned.

Right off the bat Armory loses points for having driving central to the gameplay. My computer started lagging like… a morbidly obese man with unicycles for legs because for whatever reason they decided to make the environments huge. It’s not like there are a lot of enemies on the screen or the environment is extra complicated, they just added eighty percent more expanse of sand and brown rock texture.

T-Bone Junction is the only town in the area. The whole place is extremely linear which is just great to have when you’re already dealing with repetitive terrain and enemies. From there you can only go either north or south on the freeway. Why there’s a freeway, I have no idea. It’s been road blocked in several locations by the soldiers of the Crimson Lance. Every few times you have to get out of the car and fight your way to some gate controls. Luckily once they’re all open, they stay open.

After playing for about two hours, I really wanted to quit. The problem was that I had yet to see an outpost, you know, the things that let you teleport between places you’ve already been to. I kept seeing new places and then checking the map looking for outpost icons so that I could be sure I could get back quickly. I jumped the car off of the ramp and made it inside the prison which is part of the main quest. Then I just turned off the game because I figured that There was no way I couldn’t have passed at least one outpost.

Once I had acquired the constitution to sit through another session of Borderlands, I ran it again and loaded my file. Much to my chagrin, I found myself spawning at fucking T-Bone Junction. As it turns out, there are no outposts *anywhere* in Armory except at T-Bone Junction. In case it’s not clear how incredibly terrible this is, here’s a little map which simplifies the problem.

Every single time you load the game, you’re going to have to drive the car and/or walk/fight through all that shit completely over again. So basically never turn the game off until it’s finished. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more repetitive, it does. What the hell where they thinking?

So after driving down the same highway for the thirtieth time, (unless you habitually alt + tab the game into your tray or let your machine overheat if you’re on a consol), you get to the secret armory. Then you fight General Knoxx which is a real bitch when you’re doing it alone. He gets to use a giant mech suit and several waves of minions. It’s actually very similar to the final fight in Avatar…

You know, it just occurred to me that the Borderlands planet is also called Pandora. Holy shit! It’s the same planet! Just after the inevitable nuclear holocaust carpet bombing that the Na’vi signed up for after they drove the military and mining company away.

Once he’s dead you have to go blow up the armory. You’re also supposed to loot it but for some bullshit reason, you have to start the two minute countdown *before* you loot it. Then you have to loot it quickly and escape. I of course didn’t find anything in one and a half minutes that I cared about or if I did didn’t have nearly enough time to digest the spreadsheet of numbers and stats in order to figure it out. You barely have enough time to fully open five chests and take nothing.

The Underdome is just what you’d expect, a bunch of tourney shit. So I don’t care.

Last but not least; the Zombie Island of Doctor Ned. This is by a WIDE margin the best thing in Borderlands. For one, it’s not in a fucking desert.

I don’t even need to say any more. You already get my point. It’s on an island with a spooky deserted mining and logging camp that became overrun with zombies. The whole thing is very tongue in cheek and actually funny. The beginning cinematic is narrated by Marcus who narrated the first cinematic. I kept having to remind myself that he wasn’t Strong Bad. Doctor Ned is actually Doctor Zed with a mustache… glued over his surgical mask. Everything generally has a much sillier air than the rest of the game. The level design kind of makes it feel like a more fanciful Painkiller.

The bad things are; still no more than one outpost. I don’t even mind so much since this area is a lot smaller than Armory, making getting around less aggravating and tedious. I was over-leveled for the area. What can you do? Most of the enemies are just zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies. Every time you get a zombie headshot, the zombie drops a brain. The brains are labeled as mission items but there’s never any reason as far as I’ve seen to collect them. I don’t know why they exist. Still, If the game had been a lot more like this, it would have been much less mediocre.

Drake's Fortune FAQ

1. Why doesn’t Drake run at a pace that indicates that he would like to live?

2. Who the hell is shooting me?

3. MORE climbing shit?

4. What kind of grenade beeps?

5. Why is the aiming suddenly inverted for the vehicle segment?

6. Why are exploding barrels only identifiable as exploding barrels after you’ve already killed everyone around them?

7. Why does it take indefinitely longer for someone to train a gun with a laser sight, (a tool that makes aiming easier,) on me than it does someone to train a gun without one?

8. Legible ancient books?

9. In the humid jungle?

10. Really?

11. Where the fuck do I go?

12. Is *this* where I go?

13. Is *this* where I go?

14. How on earth did you make such terrible quick time events?

15. Is *this* where I go?

16. Do I HAVE to drive the waverunner again?

17. Where are all these exploding barrels coming from?

18. An exploding barrel factory?

19. That feeds into the river?

20. What kind of gun is Navarro using there at the end?

21. Some kind of magical sniper shotgun perhaps?

Infamous

In Infamous you play as a Cole McGrath, a guy who has electrical superpowers thrust upon him in a Marvel-esque fashion, acquired through the activation of a device known as the “Ray Sphere” which also causes a humongous explosion destroying a large portion of the city. You crawl out of the crater as the sole survivor and dust yourself off.

As if that wasn’t bad enough the whole city becomes quarantined due to a plague outbreak. In a ridiculously short period of time the sociopolitical power within shifts to three factions or gangs which operate almost like they’re in some kind of urbanized version of The Road Warrior.

The main focus of the game is to reacquire the Ray Sphere and either destroy it or use it to make yourself more powerful.

The first cool thing you notice while playing, (well, besides being able to electrocute things,) is that no matter how high of a building you jump from, you don’t get injured.

You run your first mission and then get introduced to the first gang. Then you make enemies with them. Then suddenly for the rest of the game you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being shot at. Seriously, if you’re running down any given street and there’s less than two guns shooting at you, it’s your lucky day. Needless to say, it gets really old really fast. You’ll be minding your own business trying to climb a building to reach a blast shard or a mission start point and the bullets will be pelting you, slowly chipping away at your sanity. People on rooftops from half a mile away with impossibly perfect aim. It’s like trying to play World of Warcraft, (or really anything,) with someone sitting next to you poking you hard in the ribs every ten seconds. And it always has the potential to just keep escalating and escalating. You’ll end up having to reenact the entire hospital climax from Hardboiled just because you took a slight detour to grab one blast shard.

There are primary missions and then there are side missions. All missions give you experience points which you use to upgrade your powers. The side missions also help you take over territory in the city which will clear areas of gang members, significantly reducing the amount that you get shot at in that area and believe me, you will want to do every single one. You will want to launch a genocide. One can only take being jabbed in the ribs for so long before one wants to rip the person’s finger off and ram it through their eye socket.

Some missions are good or evil and some have choices that you must make along the way that will help either align you as evil or good. It’s a long process becoming totally good or evil. The different results are the game ending, your powers, your appearance and things that happen as the story progresses. The city changes somewhat accordingly. If you’re evil, people will shout threats at you on the street and even throw rocks or take a swing at you which is silly because if you play the game anything like me, hitting you with a rock is going to be the last thing they ever do.

The problem I have with the missions is that they get repetitive sometimes. You go into the sewer over and over to restore power to parts of the city. Out of like the forty side missions there are only about six different scenarios which just get copy and pasted.

Your motive to go into the sewers, besides being able to recharge yourself in the city with the power back, is getting new powers. Every time you go in the sewers you get a new power, all of which use electricity in some different way. You can throw shock grenades, ( yeah I don’t know how they work either.) There’s something which is basically the equivalent of a lightning ball rocket launcher. Both are very fun to use if you don’t mind blowing up every car and pedestrian within a two block radius.

There’s a psychokinetic push but it’s not called that because it’s electrical again… somehow. My first time playing through, I practically forgot this move even existed. My second time playing through I learned just how awesome it was. Why waste time shooting someone on the roof when you can just shove them off. You can even kill someone by rolling a car over on them. The weird thing about it being a fairly short ranged attack is that you might try to push an enemy who’s a little too far away and they’ll only stumble backward slightly. The car behind them however will be ripped from the ground like a styrofoam cup in a hurricane. What’s with that? If I’m trying to use my powers to defeat an attacker, it’s difficult but if I use them to make a pointless spectacle, then they work great?

There’s a precision electrical bolt which is basically just a sniper mode. Time slows down and the camera zooms in over your cursor which has suddenly adopted some kind of head repelling power. Anything that’s not a headshot might as well have been shot at the ground. The other reason you don’t want to miss is because it uses a stupid amount of energy. Three or four shots and you’re about depleted.

One of the more interesting powers is the polarity shield which is basically a transparent shield that you make in front of you. You can steer it around like the camera at where the gunfire is coming from. It doesn’t block explosions or RPGs or melee attacks or even point blank gunfire which blows. But what’s worse is that while you’re desperately trying to steer the shield in between you and wherever the bullets are coming from, Cole is trying to die. He stands with his head and legs completely unprotected and doesn’t even try to shield them. So if the enemy’s above or below you with a non planar trajectory you’re screwed. There is also no good way to run while shielding your back and that out of every possible scenario is the one you want most of all.

When a mission effects your karma negatively or positively it sometimes seems random with no relevance to what the morality factor actually was. If you’re evil, restoring the power makes you more evil but if you’re good, restoring the power makes you more good. Eliminating crime throughout the city is considered neutral. Healing wounded pedestrians makes you good but if you bio leech an enemy, (kill him to completely recharge your own energy,) it makes you bad. But at the same time if you beat the enemy to within an inch of his life, (AKA on the ground and no longer a threat,) then kick him off of the roof, killing him out of spite, it has no effect on karma. The good counterpart of bio leech on an enemy is arc restraint… which doesn’t do shit to help you.

At one point in the story you have to make a decision to either save your girlfriend or five doctors.
So which one is the evil route? Well it turns out that saving your girlfriend is evil. I have a problem with this. Maybe saving her was not in the interest of the greater good but I don’t think it makes you evil. The first time I played through, I was trying to save her but I accidentally climbed the building with the doctors and she died. Funny how such a stupid mistake can be made when it’s night and you’re being shot at while under stringent time constraints. The second time I played it, I chose the correct building and… it wasn’t her. It was a decoy. The bottom line is that you can’t save your girlfriend. Well that’s a load off of my mind.

To get around the city, you basically run everywhere which is fine most of the time since you can run pretty damn fast. You can climb almost anything which has its own set of annoyances. In Uncharted your parkour exploits are always fraught with extraneous and confusing bullshit. Where do I go now? Is this a ledge? Is that a ledge? Do I jump to that jumbled mass of vines? Okay, I’ll try. Oh no, it was just scenery. Now I’m dead and have to do the whole thing over again for the eleventh time. Man, I love this!

In Infamous you have the opposite problem. If you press the X button you jump into the air. It also activates a super-powered neodymium magnet inside you, making you gravitate to the nearest edifice where you become molecularly bonded to the architecture. Sure it makes climbing a building easier but inevitably when you have three semiautomatic RPGs and a gun turret pummeling you mercilessly, you’re going to want to get off of the damn wall. Pressing the O button is supposed to make you drop and it does… two feet down to the next ledge. Then you press it again and again and again and again, slowly working your way down until you eventually die from the gunfire. The other option is to try and jump away from the wall which either produces similar results or causes you to attach yourself to something else like a telephone pole or the building across the alley. When you’re trying to dodge bullets in the street, you always end up ducking behind a car or grabbing on to shit when all you want to do is just run the fuck away. Why is it so difficult to let go of a building or run?

Occasionally at super critical moments you will fail to grab on to something you were clearly close enough to grab. Sometimes you go to an edge and press O and you can’t drop down. Sometimes you can’t walk over a slightly convex surface or in between two random objects. Sometimes you need to climb an object which was obviously forgotten about when they were handing out climbing protocols.

Whenever you enter a new area, you get a bunch of new assholes with new guns and basically have to start from square one. It’s frustrating because your new enemies will always be much stronger than your old ones which greatly diminishes your sense of growing power. As you grow stronger, things just get harder. I know there is supposed to be a difficulty curve in video games but at no point do you ever feel powerful. You always feel like the underdog.

Now that you’re in the new area the people take three precision lightning bolts through the head to kill, plus they’re invisible half of the time, plus there are flying grenade launchers which also turn invisible, plus random proxy mines on roof tops. The more powerful you get, the weaker you feel. If you want to feel powerful you basically have to beat the game and turn the difficulty on easy.

At least the gangs in the Neon District and Historical District have heads to shoot. The other jackasses look like amorphous piles of garbage ambling down the sidewalk.

Water kills you. I don’t believe they mention this at any time in the game or even the manual so you just sort of have to figure it out the hard way. I don’t really get *why* it kills you. You’re obviously immune to electrical shock already so why would water make a difference? Maybe it makes you short circuit like a toaster in a bathtub or something.

Sometimes when you die in water, the controller has to vibrate full throttle for half an hour before you can play again. I hate this. The controller is vibrating about sixty percent of the time while playing. It vibrates when you’re hit with bullets or explosions or landing on the ground or shooting lighting or having hallucinations or a train’s passing by or you’re riding on the train, or you’re electrical capacity is being upgraded or you’re grinding on a power cable or the railway, which unfortunately is about the fastest way to get around.

I don’t know what other people think of controller vibration function but I find that it irritates me more than… whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be doing. It’s kind of helpful sometimes to have a little extra feedback so that you know when you’re being attacked but for the rest of the time, it’s either annoying or I couldn’t care less. It’s not fun to hold the controller when it’s vibrating and fighting to escape my grasp. Maybe I’m weird that way but whenever I grind the railway for a significant distance, I just put the controller on the floor until I think I’m almost to my destination. It’s either that or hold it until my hands go numb. The worst part is that the game has no way to turn off the vibration. Trust me, I looked.

In the end everything is revealed to you about the plot involving the Ray Sphere and it’s one big spoiler. After you’ve watched the credits, you’re free to just screw off and do whatever you want, which is great if you’re a completion whore like I am. On a related and bizarrely introspective note, as I was slowly grinding for points so that I could get my last power upgrade, healing the same people and killing the same respawn bad guys, I realized something. Empire City is purgatory.

Red Dead Revolver

Suddenly I realized that my Playstation 2 game collection is almost solely comprised of Japanese shit. So I went out and got Red Dead Revolver used at Rasputin Music for four dollars. Seriously, that place can’t be a legitimate business. Prices that low have to be the result of some shady doings going down behind the scenes.

Anyway, RDR is a wild west shooter made by Rockstar. This is probably the most infamous game developer due to the copious amounts of questionable content in their games. You see that little R with the star, you just have to flip over the box and read the novel of parental warnings on the back. When I did this to RDR I was shocked to only find two things; blood and violence. That can’t be right, I thought. Sure enough, it wasn’t. Off the top of my head they forgot use of alcohol/tobacco, sexual themes and language.

In Red Dead Revolver you play as Red; a bounty hunter who’s parents were killed when he was twelve. The game is part sequence of events story and part bounty hunting where you take jobs. Each mission brings you closer to tracking down the consortium of bastards that killed your family. You get money for bounties which you use to buy guns, repair guns and buy extras like characters and levels you’ll never use in multiplayer versus. You also get money for every hit you make depending on the anatomical region, which is weird and a bit excessive. A headshot is actually worth eight dollars. By the end, you have so much money, you’re lighting your cigars with it.

When I first went through the tutorial, I was surprised that the way you shoot requires holding L1 to draw your weapon and pressing R1 to fire. Usually in PS2 shooters it’s hold R1 to draw and press X to fire. I wasn’t sure about this R and L thing at first but then I played it a little bit and it wasn’t so bad. Then I played it a little bit more and decided, no I was right the first time. It sucks. It’s fine for earlier levels where there are miniscule amounts of bad guys thrown at you at a slow pace. But when it gets intense and you’re just up against one continuous flood of enemies, you’re constantly holding that L1 button and let me tell you it really wears out your finger. You’ll get to the point where you’re strafing around shooting your gun off one second and then the next it’s holstered. Red’s like, “No, I’m done. Piss off.” You think something’s wrong with the game or the controller. Then you notice that your finger is actually too weak to hold the L1 down any longer.

You can take cover behind walls and objects and then lean around the side to shoot. This is a mixed bag. It’s nice to have something that shields you but you really don’t want to be glued to a wall when a handful of enemies storm around your cover. The funny thing is that when you surprise an enemy that’s glued to the wall, they are practically invincible until they actually leave their cover. *Then* you can kill them. The other thing that blows about cover is that when you’re against a wall you can’t dodge bullets. This seems like something you shouldn’t have to worry about when you take cover but if your hand is sticking out past the edge unprotected, it *will* get shot until you pull it back. But by the time you realize what’s happening, you’ve already lost half of your health just from getting shot in the fucking hand. Whenever you poke your head out to shoot, that will get shot too. Case and point, somehow you get shot a lot more hiding behind a wall than you do running around alone in a barren field. Never take cover.

The game’s gimmick is the “Dead Eye.” As you kill enemies, your dead eye meter fills up which basically equates to how long you get to use the ability. When you activate it, time slows down. Then you drag your crosshairs over the bad guys in sight. Little red targets appear all over them; as many as there are bullets in your gun. When you exit dead eye mode, you fire off a staccato of bullets which if executed well makes short work of them. In a way it’s kind of like bullet time but without the fancy John Woo acrobatics. This ability is however pretty useless for far away enemies and enemies that are moving, which is very annoying.

Another unique aspect to shooting is the duels. Okay, this is something I’ve never understood about the wild west mythos. Two guys face off, draw their guns and shoot each other. It’s the logistics that kill me. It’s not ten paces, turn and fire. It’s draw and shoot at any arbitrary moment. Obviously someone has to initiate. And if someone goes first, how is it fair, or at all an unbiased evaluation of who was the baddest. And what’s with quickdraw tournaments? Who the fuck would enter a tournament where basically everyone dies?

Anyway, there are parts in the game where a dueling sequence is initiated. You can be up against anywhere from one to three opponents, (which is pretty fucking ridiculous.) When this happened the first time, I was trying to read the tutorial which was coming up on screen. Damn this is complicated, I thought. This is the most complicated part of the game. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to fully comprehend it because the stupid tutorial was scrolling through automatically. Thanks a lot. After my unavoidable loss, I read the manual because it actually *lets* me read it. Dueling is basically just a manual dead eye mode. You press down and then up to grab and draw your weapon. Then time slows down. You drag your crosshairs over your opponent(s) The cursor turns red whenever you cross a part of the opponent’s anatomy that you can hit. The whole deal is to locate and tag as many spots as you can as fast as you can before your opponent fires on you. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you fail to draw your gun. I don’t know if it happens when you push up too fast or what but it’s really aggravating.

You actually get to play as several different characters as the story progresses, which is interesting. Except for when you play as General Diego. Not that it’s not interesting but that level is horrible. General Diego is one of the bad guys. In the one level that you control him you are supposed to fight Yankee forces on the other side of this bridge like that one scene in the Good the Bad and the Ugly. Shit’s exploding all around you and you can’t see from the smoke and debris in the air. The North side’s cannons are constantly firing, sometimes at you, so you have to just keep running. Although that doesn’t even work. They predict where you’re running and they put a lead on you. You have to do serpentine. Unfortunately you can’t focus on that because there are a bunch of assholes running around and shooting you too. You try to take cover under the bridge to take out the men but somehow the cannonballs get you anyway. When you get hit it takes you a while to get back up again and by the time you do, another cannonball is already inches from your face. The only level checkpoint is too far into the level which means you get to do the first half over and over and over.

Come to think of it, pretty much anything involving Diego sucks. Fort Diego is also a pain in the ass because you basically get to the end of the level and then die. The intensive trial and error part is conveniently located at the very end and the only way you get to do another trial is to play the whole level again… then die again. Rinse and repeat. The whole thing is that you’re supposed to get up to this gatling gun and take out the guys using it. (And yes, it takes a long time to get there.) Now once you capture a giant gun, what’s probably your next course of action? *Use* the giant gun! The courtyard below you is full of enemies. Why not cater them with a buffet of led sandwiches? The problem is that once you get on the gun you start getting shot a hell of a lot, (even more than if you were behind cover.) And occasionally someone will sneak up behind you while you’re using it. Also the gun is a piece of horse shit. It swivels around radically out of control, making it nearly impossible to train it on anything. And even when you do, the bullets have about as much stopping power as the old revolver that you started the game with. So compare that with the gatling gun from Darkwatch. That thing was slow but once you got it centered you could rest assured that anything behind your crosshairs was going to be vaporized into red mist. But point being, you go for the gatling gun, it gets you killed without fail. Don’t ask me why you’d go out completely unprotected into the courtyard filled with enemies that already have a bead on you, but that’s what you do. You spend like three or for minutes killing enemy after enemy only to have them continually respawn and only after the allotted amount of time has been wasted can you progress to the boss fight and receive a checkpoint. What a crock of shit.

Among the other levels that suck is the bar fight level. There are no guns. Just fists and bottles. For some reason you’re trying to protect the three saloon girls that run aimlessly through the bar. (What the hell did they ever do for you?) If two of them get knocked out, you lose. The fight is well, perfectly random. There are about a dozen fighters all punching each other and/or saloon girls. The combat is terrible. (Think fist fight with Silent Hill controls, terrible.) It takes half an hour to move the camera to where you want it and by that time you’ve been thrown across the room by someone and have to adjust it again. After being tossed four times in a row, you’ll begin to think that that’s the only thing they know how to do. And the process takes so long, you wish there was a fast forward button just so you can get back on your feet again. Sometimes you’ll be standing a good ten paces away from an enemy and you’ll just suddenly gravitate or teleport into their hands so that they can throw you. Everyone runs around chaotically making it extremely difficult to actually engage anyone. They all have WAY TOO MANY hit points. Ideally you want to work one of the assholes into a corner where they can’t escape and then just wail on them for three minutes until eventually they don’t get back up again. The level is hard but thank God it’s short… or at least simple.

The last level is the assault on the mayor’s mansion… and it’s a fucking nightmare. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that your two friends Jack and Annie are with you. Sure, they shoot guns but Jack has a tendency to get himself killed which is an automatic game over and Annie has a tendency to kill you, which is also a game over obviously. Easily the worst part of the whole level is when Jack has to pick the lock on the front door of the mansion. You have to hold off an enemy tsunami of unbelievable proportions for three minutes while he sits there defenseless. Why are we even picking the lock in the first place? I bet ten to one we could just kick the door in and if not, just jam a fucking stick of dynamite in the keyhole.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all of the enemies were just regular guys but there are also guys dressed as generals who have their own names and life bars. I think they’re all on drugs or something because they have super human strength. It takes like three to four pointblank headshots to bring one down. That will never happen though because they don’t walk in a straight line for longer than a fourth of a second. They jump around like an acrobat and sprint up flights of stairs backwards doing 75 miles per hour. If you don’t kill them quick, (which obviously you won’t) another one will show up and then you have two. Then you get another one and you’ve got three plus half a dozen regular guys and then you’re just fucked.

Once you beat a level, you get rated on things like accuracy and damage taken. Passing the level automatically unlocks something but if you get a high enough overall rating you get a second unlock. You have the option to continue to the next level, replay the last level or quit. Chances are that the only reason you’d want to replay the level right then and there is because you want a higher score to unlock the second thing. If you don’t play it again right then and there, you don’t get to play it ever again unless you play through the whole game again. Seriously now, what is this? No level select = Bullshit

Red Dead Redemption is out in May. Looks awesome.

Banjo Tooie

About ten years ago, I couldn’t wait for Banjo Tooie to come out. I had just played Banjo Kazooie, which I thought was awesome and I couldn’t help but be excited by all of the secret sneak peeks for the sequel that they stuck into the game… I never played it. I ended up selling my Banjo Kazooie cartridge and eventually I forgot all about Banjo Tooie, until now.

I must say that starting this game was a bizarrely intense nostalgic experience… but that won’t stop me from ripping it a new one.

The game starts out exactly where the last one left off. The evil witch Gruntilda is still trapped under a giant boulder. Her two, previously unheard of, sisters come by and rescue her. Then comes an extremely tedious cut scene with dialogue that takes forever. It’s almost as if they consolidated every cut scene in the game into one giant cut scene, because you literally don’t see any more scenes until the end of the game.

So, the weird sisters kill bottles who was the mole that taught you various moves in the previous game. Then you have to go talk to King Jingaling and you find that all of the jinjos are gone again and you need to find them. Boring… Then you talk to Master Jiggywiggy. Come on. Come on, damn it! I want to play a video game, not read a 500 page novel.

Eventually you get to go in an actual level and do something. As you play, you begin to notice that the golden jigsaw pieces that you’ve been accustomed to collecting aren’t as easy to find anymore. You used to be able to just climb something really tall and find one there or shoot eggs at everything to unlock stuff. You used to be able to just look around, find a puzzle, solve the puzzle, get a fucking jigsaw piece. Banjo Tooie however, is a lot more ambiguous about things. Some levels you could literally go in for the first time and waste an entire two hours before you figure out how to get a single jigsaw piece. It gets boring pretty fast.

Some of the pieces you can’t get without a special move from a later level. Sometimes you’ll activate something and you’ll see a little scene where a door opens or a jigsaw piece appears somewhere but you have no idea where it is. You might think you know and you’ll rack your brain over it for quite a while before finally giving up. Then, three levels later you’ll find that place. Interlacing the levels like this was an annoying idea. You gain access to levels by getting more jigsaw pieces over time. It’s really frustrating to be working on some puzzle that you can’t fully solve until several hours later in some locked place you’ve never seen before. How are you even supposed to know that you can’t solve it yet? I did one where I pushed a giant ice cube off of a cliff in one level. It fell in hot water in a different level where it melted. Then I went to that level where I hit a switch that let the water flow into yet another level where I got the puzzle piece. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if each step of the puzzle wasn’t revealed to me in reverse order.

In each level you can find Mumbo who was the witch doctor that helped you in the previous game by transforming you into different things and also Wumba, the sexy Indian girl. In the old game, Wumba didn’t exist. Now that she’s here, she’s the one that transforms you into things while Mumbo helps you by letting you control him and use his powers at specific locations indicated by a pad on the ground with his face on it. Having the two of them seems pointless to me. Either replace Mumbo or don’t introduce Wumba. We already know that Mumbo’s capable of doing both jobs, so… yeah.

By the way, big T-rex is the best form for looking down Wumba's top.

To get any magical assistance, you have to give each one of them a globo which are these weird creatures that predictably hang out within feet of whoever’s house. What the hell is the point? If the globos are always right there next to where you need to use them, why not just make the price free?

And now it’s time to play “Old Game Versus New Game.” (never mind that they’re both old games)

In the old game when you collect five honeycombs, your life bar increases by one on the spot. In the new game when you collect the specific ever-changing amount of honeycombs, you go to the fucking store and buy a life bar upgrade.

In the old game when you collect all five jinjos in a level, you get a puzzle piece. In the new game when you collect a random-ass number of same-colored jinjos scattered across random-ass levels, you get a puzzle piece. There are also asshole fake jinjos that attack you when you get close to them.

In the old game you could shoot eggs and that was the solution to everything. In the new game you can shoot eggs, fire eggs, ice eggs, grenade eggs and remote control exploding eggs; most of which you‘ll never use. The only two that you really need/care about are grenade eggs and the remote detonation eggs.

In the old game Banjo and Kazooie stay together where they belong. In the new game you get to separate them, thereby making them both grossly inferior to the whole. The first time you get to separate them, you automatically play as banjo. You notice that your life bar is about half of what it was and suddenly you realize that you don’t have any moves other than run and jump. Then you ask yourself, why in the hell would I EVER want to separate them? What purpose does it serve? In truth it’s a great way to get you killed but eventually you do learn some character-specific moves that make it a little more bearable, (pun not intended.)

I have to say though that the worst part of the separation aspect is that life bar. I already mentioned that it’s smaller but not only that, the bar you have with a solo character and the bar you have when they’re together are independent from each other but only in a negative way. If you get the crap beaten out of you playing solo, (which is highly likely,) and then you join back together, your together bar will be proportionally lower. However, if you heal yourself back to full health while you’re together and then separate, your solo bar remains the same as it was before you healed yourself. How does that even work? You were at full health and now suddenly you’re injured again without ever even taking damage? Furthermore, if you fully heal one of the characters in solo but not the other one and then join together, it will show no change on your together bar. Then if you separate again you will find that the character you just healed is now back to the health they were before you healed them. In short, the only possible way to heal your characters in solo is to heal both of them in tandem before you join back together. The only way to heal your together bar is to be together while doing it. But if you’re goal is to injure yourself, the life bar system is suddenly highly flexible and accommodating.

Aside from that there are just a lot of little stupid things. Like everywhere you go there are various holes in the walls that you’re supposed to go in but there’s never any indication as to how you’re supposed to get in. You might need to be Kazooie or Banjo (concealed in his backpack) or transformed into some other animal or you might need to be using one of the remote control explosives. You’d think that the hole’s size would give you some kind of clue but no.

Look at that. I’m clearly small enough to get through but it still won’t let me through!
When you step on a character switch pad you have to press A to use it. But when you step on a warp pad you have to press B to use it. You will ALWAYS get it wrong.

Music notes are used as currency for getting new moves instead of getting jigsaw pieces. They also greatly reduced the number of notes per level and greatly increased their worth. You will never not have enough. They stick them all together in the same place which is lame.

Pterodactyl Land only has one family of pterodactyls. What, do they rule the land or something?
The game in general isn’t as good as the first one. Although when I started it, I had only two wishes that I wanted it to fulfill.

1.) No Snacker the Shark. I fucking hate him! Surprisingly, he was not in the game just like I wanted. But I was still extremely hesitant to enter any body of water due to PTSD.

2.) No quiz show. In the fist game you had to beat this quiz show where Grunty asked you stupid questions about things in the game. It was long and tedious and If you got too many wrong, you died and had to start over from the beginning. Well there WAS a quiz show but it wasn’t nearly as horrible.
The final battle is right after that, where unbelievably Grunty will continue to occasionally ask you quiz questions. If you get them right she goes easier on you. Come to think of it, the final battle is also easier than it was in the first game.

The ending is, well… Did you ever see Hostel II? Where the girl’s head gets cut off and the kids play soccer with it. It’s the same ending. What the hell Rare?