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.
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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.
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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.
