Bordering on the Bored

Since none of you duders came to my aid, I just went ahead and ploughed through this lovable little scamp of a video game by myself. And good golly, isn’t that just a jolly little FPS to romp around in? Coming back to it after a couple of years away from the Xbox 360 version of the game, and getting down to the juicy PC version (it ain’t that terrible, despite what many people say about the UI, as it happens, you should be using a Xbox 360 controller anyway) was a great experience. The amalgamation of blasting through half remembered parts of that game along with experiencing the new sights and sounds proffered by the DLC that I had missed out on the first time around (namely, Claptrap's New Robot Revolution) was really quite a good bit of fun.

The instantly familiar heft and weight of the weaponry was somehow soothing to my ailing digits, the tried and true left trigger/right trigger combination of firing a scoped combat rifle into the squishy heads of distant enemies was like a warm comforting blanket around my shoulders. In fact, this familiarity was fed by more than just these feeble human feelings, but also due to the fact that I was still using the same wired Xbox 360 controller that I had bought in October 2008, and which I had originally played Borderlands with back in 2009. There is a small story to this particular controller (and in particular, the particular parts that make up this particular controller) that maybe, someday, I’ll be able to share with you all. If you’re good, and don’t leave any of this homemade content on your plate.

What a crock of shit all that was, maybe I should write about why I thought this was an awesome game in 2009, and why I think it’s still pretty not bad today, or whatever day I post this edition on (yeah...that’s right, these posts are called ‘editions’...bringing back that magazine terminology for twenty does). Here we go.

I started a completely new game on a completely new platform, but I still choose to roll with the only class that I had ever poured any serious amount of time into, the soldier. It’s not as if I’d not tried out the other patrons of punishment during my first go-around with the game, but the time I spent with the other four characters probably totalled something in the region of a dozen hours or so. The primary reasons for picking the same guy once again are that I really like having a deployable turret with homing missiles, team ammo regen, grenade regen, huge magazine sizes on scoped combat rifles, along with grenades and bullets that heal my whole team. All of these little features packed into the soldier really suit my style of gameplay, at least in this game, which is to usually stay out of way of enemies and put about 500 corrosive rounds into their skulls from outside of their effective range. Now, Mordecai and his affinity for sniper rifles could of course reach out and touch those distant enemies with great ease, but those rifles tend to be semi automatic and have small magazines. I like to be able to go from burst fire to fully automatic as and when the situation demands.

I’ve not forgotten that all of the classes can indeed make use of all of the weapon types, but the way I tend to play is to stick with the favoured weapon of that particular class, I find I can make the most of class mods and proficiency levels that way. Speaking of class mods, and their interaction with your skill points (oh yeah, this game includes some RPG elements...hmm...), did you know that even though you can only have five points assigned to any one skill in your skill tree, any bonuses applied by class mods invisibly stack above and beyond that ‘maximum’ number, all the way up to nine points in total, made up from five points from the tree and four points from a mod. Huh, that’s not a thing that’s ever mentioned or explained at any point in the game, ever. Which is a shame, at least for the ghost of past me, because I never knew that the first time around. I rectified this by making damn sure that I exploited this functionality throughout my recent playthrough.

My faithful soldier is called Walter White, and I can role play him. Wait, no, that’s not really what I mean, let me try and explain what I’m getting at. As we all know, Borderlands has a light sprinkling of RPG Parmigiano-Reggiano all over its meaty FPS lasagne base. Now it clearly isn’t a RPG in the same way as Fallout or The Witcher or Baldur’s Gate is, but it does have those flavourful crunchy nuggets of RPG elements mixed up in there. I, however, am not talking about functionality or mechanics, loot tables or the levelling up that is bestowed unto the player by these associated RPG elements. What I mean by role playing in this case is that, more than any other single player/co-op FPS game that I can care to remember, you are being constantly encouraged and rewarded by the effect you are having upon both your enemies and your teammates. The role that you are playing. Not through dialogue choices or a colour-coded morality wheel, but through the weapons and abilities that you bring to bear on your opponents, and the well-defined niche that you are filling inside of the team dynamic. More words coming at you in the next paragraph...

In a 4 player co-op campaign game of Halo 3 (which is great fun, by the way), you have a ‘role’ as part of the team in relation to the weapons that you are carrying, which in turn probably comes from your skill and ability with those said weapons. There are certain people who are expert snipers, and will never pick up a hammer or a sword, then there will be those people that prefer to stick with plasma weapons in order to effectively rip through enemy shields and so and so forth. Due to the weapon balancing that Bungie does in its Halo games you are actively encouraged to change weapons as the situation demands it, you cannot physically reach out to an opponent who is 300 feet away with a shotgun, so you must switch up or scavenge up something else to deal with the threat. Ideally, your teammates will be aware that you are holding the sole shotgun among your group, and therefore target the enemies that you can not...ideally...

Now, these roles as defined by balance of player ability and weapon limitation in Halo 3 are morphed into something quite refreshing when we look at how Borderlands handles things, at least in my gorgeous watery blue eyes. You have quick access to any one of four weapons (not quite from the beginning of the game, but still early in the grand scheme of things), with no restrictions as to what kind of weapon you are able to use at any particular time. Unlike what we find in the Halo games, where every weapon behaves in the same way every time, you are able to supplement and upgrade the effectiveness of your armaments in Borderlands. This, of course ties into those scrummy RPG elements mentioned earlier, upgrading and levelling up and whatnot. But what I feel that Borderlands is giving me here is a continual feedback loop where I become more and more invested in using a weapon, along with the feeling that I'm playing into the role that the combat rifle is best suited to.

I’ve just spent all that time just rambling about how I think the combat rifles in Borderlands feel rewarding to use.

I THINK WE’LL END THIS TRAINWRECK THERE FOR NOW THANKS!?

I'll sit quietly and think about what I done, and try to form actual real boy thoughts about this game and talk about other goods things that are on the inside of it, suffice it to say that it's still a great game overall and it remains as enjoyable as ever. And except for the slight inconvenience caused by the lack of warp points inside of the DLC levels, I have learnt to love it all over again. The warp points are just a minor issue that I’m sure Randy has personally fixed for Borderlands 2, which will drop into my gaping British computer machine in 45 days time.

Some of the numbers related to me playing this game:

First played: 21 July, 2012

Last played: 4 August, 2012

36.7 total hours on record

51 of 80 (64%) achievements earned

First achievement earned: And They'll Tell Two Friends (21 July, 2012)

Last achievement earned: It's so realistic! (4 August, 2012)

Level 44

Level 30 combat rifle proficiency

34 items purchased

72863 total shots fired

573 kills from critical hits

2411 combat rifle kills

437 sniper rifle kills

149 pistol kills

10 rocket launcher kills

9 SMG kills

0 shotgun kills

City of Guilds

The first pre-purchase beta weekend is nearly here! I'm in the planning stages of getting together a group of funky guys to talk about this game. Come on down and play with us, and let me know if you wanna be in a video or podcast or something.

Harbinger

Not that anyone is going to be reading this shit, I am still going to post within the bounds of the UK Video Game Spoilers Act 2003. As such, please be aware:

Here be spoilers for all three of the Mass Effect games. What do you mean you ain't finished them all? Get to it! It's okay, I'll wait...

There we go. Right, let's get on with the show!

Yeah, so, Mass Effect 3 was kind of a roller-coaster for most people wasn't it? A mostly great ride with a bit of a slow start, a gradual build up to a fast-paced, interesting and fun several hours (these are the bits where you are doing loop-the-loops and corkscrews and shit), followed by a frantic and climactic finale, which then resolves with you suffering a horrific ride malfunction and results in everyone dying and generally not having a fun time. Oh...wait...

I am not even going to get into the good and the bad and the ugly of the final sequences of the last game in one of this generation's greatest ever franchises (other than to say that I think BioWare could have done better, as they have demonstrated many times before). What I am going to do is gaze into the very window of a person's soul and talk about some cool/scary things. That person? The Illusive Man. And the window? His Paragon-blue eyes.

As demonstrated by the two above images, both the The Illusive Man (hereafter I'll refer to him simply as TIM) and Shepard sport (albeit optionally in games 2 and 3) these fairly obvious glowing eye thingies, which no one at any point in any of the games ever acknowledges or asks about, which is rather interesting. I mean, there are dozens of crazy looking doodads and flibberty gibbets stuck onto the various races throughout the game, and there are hundreds upon hundreds of individuals who you come across in your journey for galactic peace, and not a single one has ever been shown to have these sick looking glowing eye-rims.

As far as I'm aware you can only get the Renegade version of these eyes, as well as the accompanying 'scarring' in ME3, as stated in the game you are not yet fully healed from your re-constructive surgery and without acting nice to people (choosing the top-most options in dialogue wheels and the blue colour-coded Paragon options where available), you are basically letting the Dark Side flow through you and ravage your body in a outwardly physical manner. If you roll deep enough into the Renegade options you end up looking like you've got red hot magma boiling away just under your skin, combined with your Terminator eyes you look like the baddest badass that has ever existed IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY.

That brings me to my first major point, you can only ever become the evil-looking Shepard Commander in ME3, if you recall back to the second game there was the option for both sides of the moral scale to be represented through the medium of your face. You are in essence forced down the ruthless Renegade path if you want those sweet scars (there still exists the option to get your face completely scrubbed clean in the medbay). Now with the only other person in the galaxy boasting the Paragon version of this flair, it got me to a-thinkin...which side of the conflict is TIM really on, and which side does HE think he is on? And if the answer is that TIM is kinda a good guy, is it actually the case that the player-controlled character is actually travelling down the road of being a total dick.

The parallels that can be drawn between TIM and Saren are clear on a surface level, they have both fallen under the spell of Indoctrination (a single Reaper, Sovereign, in the case of Saren and an unspecified Reaper or Reapers with TIM). However, the major difference between the two is that Saren knows he is being Indoctrinated, and willingly submits to it, safe in the knowledge that Sovereign won't fully corrupt his mind due to the deterioration of his abilities and overall usefulness to the goal of opening up the Citadel for the impending invasion. TIM on the other hand, has trodden heavily down the path to the dark side in a really screwed up way, he uses salvaged Reaper/Collector technology to explore how he can essentially counter-Indoctrinate the Reapers (the little boy AI at the end of the game does indeed say that TIM could have technically done this, he happens to fail in this instance as his mind was already under the control of the Reapers). His experiments result in him killing thousands upon thousands of refugees as well as many members of his own personal army. Through TIM's eyes he is trying to get the upper hand on the Reapers, but in his eyes the Mass Effect moral scale still deems him as being a super-great guy!

The shenanigans that occur at the end of the game, with Shepard and Anderson and TIM in the control room of the Citadel, do show TIM finally snapping under the realisation that he being controlled (or so I hear, as a Renegade I just shot him as he was threatening to execute Anderson), yet his eyes have always stayed the same colour throughout two whole games. I doubt a case could be made for saying that TIM was Indoctrinated even in ME2, as he goes to great effort to keep Shepard's body out of the Collector's grubby hands. Maybe over the course of that game we are seeing TIM becoming a sleeper agent for the Reapers? Hmmm...

To explore this point more I'll be making a second post, maybe like a video review thing or maybe just words, I don't know yet. I just wanted to get something down that reminded me to talk about this rather odd little thing I noticed, even back in ME2 I thought it was cool/strange, there was this obviously dodgy dude with the same Paragon eyes as me, laying out the orders to do some rather kinky things. Anyhow, until next time, keelah se'lai.

Bombed and Wasted, and it's all just Diabolically Fine

Jesus Christ, I must stop writing headlines like Alex Navarro, oh wait, that reminds me of some news that happened to him and some other video gamey people you might have heard of.

THE GIANT BOMB DOT COM STAFF ARE MOVING BACK INTO THEIR OLD GAMESPOT OFFICES!?

The very same offices that Jeff and Ryan and Brad and Alex and Vinny all left upon the removal of Mr Gerstmann from his position as Editorial Director in 2007.

Oh, and Double fine are making a brand new point 'n' click adventure game for Windows, Mac and Linux

Oh, and inXile are making a brand new top-down RPG (a sequel to 1988's Wasteland), for WIndows, Mac and Linux.

Oh, and Diablo III now has a release date, and is available for pre-purchase right now! FUCK.

Oh, and the pre-purchase date for Guild Wars 2 was also announced. That says to me that we are really moving towards the end game in the development cycle for this monster of a MMORPG.

Oh, and Mass Effect 3, the sequel to one of the best video games of this generation came out just recently. That seems like something I should play...and it is!

Did I wake up in crazy town where all this wild stuff just happens upon the regular? Because it seems to me that shit just went all wild and awesome and weird in the space of about a week.

Back to the Front

Coming right back atcha! Rolling in hot off the heels...of...well me not having done an update for a good while, sorry! Even though I had planned to post at least a little something everyday, it turns out I have failed in that grand endeavour, however, it is through the flames of adversity that our revolve tempers like steel. Or something.

The long and short of this is that I will try my very best to improve my writing habits and my vidz. Some news that has spurned me back into action is the recent leaking of some details on everyone's favourite 16 player, competitive deathmatch FPS game (with experience based levelling system)...

SIM CITY 5

I can still vividly recall my many hours spent with the various versions of this fine gaming series, that funky jazz music, the crazy depth of intermingling all that technology, TAXATION. 2013 can't come soon enough!

Double fine and dandy

So, there's this video game company called Double Fine, and they have raised over $1,500,000 as development funds for a brand new point 'n' click adventure game. Funds, given freely unto them by fans, no venture capitalists, no loans, just normal people who believe in/trust/love Tim Schafer (as well as his band of merry men and women).

Now we have Mr Chris Avellone, of Obsidian Entertainment, making noises about possibly wanting to try to attempt some kind of similar thing at some point in the future.

Those guys down at Double Fine have created something very special with just their attempt at this endeavour, something that goes beyond just the software they are going to put out at the end of development, but they have gone and put ideas in people's heads. Very cool ideas. Inside cool people's heads.

I fuckin' love the video games.

Anno 2070 and on and on and on

So, I've been mucking around with producing some video content, namely a Long Look of the fantastic real time strategy game Anno 2070. I plan to get through the entire single player campaign of this thing whilst on tape, learning and tweaking things as I go, figuring out how to balance audio levels, syncing up video and audio tracks, selecting the best way to capture and encode console and PC footage and how to talk whilst playing a damn video game! I'm basically treating this as my 'learning on the job' training, I hope at some point in the future I'll be able to get all these things nailed down and be able to blast out hot polished content into your eagerly waiting faces.

Since I am on the subject of Anno 2070, we may as well jive for a minute on what I think about it, after putting around seven hours of playtime on the clock these will only be fledgling opinions and may well change over the course of the next 20 or 30 hours.

As far as RTS games go, this one differs a little from the norm (by that I mean the Command and Conquers and StarCrafts of this world). Here the focus is on a cycle of harvesting raw materials, processing them, turning them into useful products for construction or trade and then setting up supply lines with the AI characters on the map to boost your income/barter for the items that you need. This is placed over a familiar framework of city planning, taxation, management of power and food supplies, research and development as well as your inhabitant's happiness and safety.

With the emphasis on cultivation and trading rather than fast paced out-and-out warfare (although combat is a part of the game, in all my hours so far I have destroyed naught but one little pirate ship), you are guided down a slightly more gentle path in terms of pace and just how many actions you are expected to perform and respond to. This suits me just fine, as a big fan of those types of RTS games I am still more than willing to try something a little different from my usual experience, that being: Dawn of War, Homeworld, StarCraft, Command & Conquer, Dune II, Company of Heroes, Total Annihilation and Warcraft (other video games are available, or so I'm told).

I'm still finding my way with this game, but the more I play the more I feel like I'm learning a subtly different set of skills when compared to those aforementioned RTSes. I am, however, up to my ass in this one mission where my economy has just dropped right out from under me, I think I'm about 90 minutes into a mission that should have been completed in around 20. Whether it's just me or I've encountered a nasty bug, I don't know yet, can YOU help? /turns to point and look directly at you.