Baud Attitude

OK, by the standards of, say, a Square-Enix Epic RPG, Borderlands isn’t a LONG game.  I spent 32 hours playing through it, and that’s barely enough to get through the tutorial in some games.

By my standards, however, that’s an awful lot of time to devote to a game, and I think that speaks to the addictive quality of this particular one – rather than just sticking to the main story and blowing through to the end, I sought out and did every single little optional side-quest, even though it meant revisiting certain areas three or four times.  Honestly, I could stop typing here – I can’t give any higher recommendation – but I think I should probably put more words on the screen and flesh this out a bit.

Basically it boils down to this: If you like collecting lots and lots of loot and looking at the little numbers associated with each bit of loot and you like getting bigger and bigger numbers, this is the game for you.  It helps also if you like a) post-apocalyptic settings in movies and games, and/or b) westerns, especially western/science fiction hybrids like Firefly or Hong on the Range, because the game consists of running around post-apocalyptic-pseudo-Western wastelands, shooting things, collecting the guns that they drop and going to go shoot bigger things that will then drop bigger guns and so on and so forth.

In addition, while the game does have a few semi-scripted sequences, it allows you a surprising amount of freedom.  If you’re used to games where exits from rooms stay mysteriously locked until you’ve defeated everything in the room, you’ll be surprised by Borderlands.  While there are a couple of sequences where, yes, you’re trapped inside a room with a boss and can’t leave the room until you’ve killed the boss, they’re far from the rule.  Toward the end of the game, in fact, I was getting kind of bored of shooting hordes of random cannon fodder, so I didn’t actually bother fighting anything in the two levels before the final boss fight – I simply ran from the entrance of each level to the exit, ignoring the things shooting at me.

The designers also found some ways to avoid the “everything’s brown” trap that seems to infect a lot of first person shooters these days.  Yes, the environment is, well, it’s largely shades of brown and gray, but they seemed to seek out ways to stick some more color in it; there’s a lot of red and yellow objects and you can change the color of the vehicle you’re driving around – I chose a nice vivid pink that stood out neatly against the background.

Sadly, most of the things you’re shooting look exactly the same from level 1 to level 30.  The game mixes it up a little bit here and there – just when you’re getting tired of shooting alien dog-things and mutants in hockey masks, it throws alien bug-things at you for variety – but all in all I think there are about a dozen enemy types and then a few palette swaps.  This wasn’t a deal-killer for me, but I’ve heard it mentioned and it is a valid critique.

Another thing I’ve heard an awful lot is people complaining about the game’s ending, and I think it’s both valid and invalid to complain about. On the one hand, it’s very anticlimactic – not the sort of thing you expect from an action game – but on the other hand it’s the perfect ending for the genre of story it is.  I won’t go into it more than that, but really: If you’re expecting a “Star Wars” sort of ending, you’re going to hate it.  Think “Road Warrior” and you’ll probably be happier.  The story leading UP to the ending is pretty fun, but really requires you to go digging around into the side missions where a lot of the actual character development is hidden; if you just power through on the required missions you’re going to miss a lot of story.

Oh, and while the game plays just fine with a controller – well, at least, with the Xbox 360 Controller – it doesn’t adapt at all to the fact that you’re using a controller.  You’re going to have to remember that the game wants you to press, for example, the Y button when it says “press the Space Bar”.

I’m unsure whether I’ll dive straight into any of the DLC.  I only spent ten dollars on the game during Steam’s summer sale, so dropping $30 on the DLC pack seems kind of silly.

As an aside, I tried finding images for this post to show the various enemy types but couldn’t find any particularly good ones.  I did, however, stumble across this amazing bit of fanart by Zephos – I’ve only put the small version of it here; it links back to the flickr page where you can see the full-size version and check out the rest of their work. I found it particularly amusing because I a) played through using the Siren character and b) had a fondness for incendiary SMGs.

I’m not much of an online gamer. Considering I spent 8 years playing Everquest, that may be kind of an odd statement, but I don’t think it’s too odd to point out that MMOs are in a completely different category from, say, Counterstrike. They’re slow-paced, persistent affairs, and you spend an awful lot of time building up characters that actually grow to have identity, which is a bit different from games where you’re basically centering your crosshairs over the noggin of xXxDaKilla666xXx, pressing the trigger, and moving on to look for xXxDaKilla667xXx, repeating as necessary.

In truth, I did have an Xbox live membership for a year, mostly to play with a small group of friends, but I let that lapse when I realized that I was probably playing online for 3 hours or so every other week and spending 50 bucks for it.

In all honesty, if Activision would just start releasing $20 versions of the Call of Duty games with the multiplayer stripped out, I’d be the target market; the last one I paid for was CoD4 and subsequent ones simply haven’t been justifiable as full-price games.

But I digress.

Anyway, I’m not much of an online gamer is the point I’ve been trying to reach for the last couple of paragraphs, and by now you’re probably hoping that I’ll get ON with things or – more likely – you’ve simply stopped reading.

Anyway, I decided that I would make an honest effort, this year, to give online multiplayer a bit more of a fair shake, inasmuch as PC online is generally free of charge and I have an awful lot of games in my steam account with multiplayer modes.

The first thing I tried my hand at was Team Fortress 2, which I’d actually played a couple of hours of some years ago when I went to a LAN cafe with some friends, before they got tired of it and wanted to go back to Counterstrike. I had a memory of it as being a cartoony and not terribly serious shooting-mans game, and I’d heard that it had evolved into something more like an MMO, with item drops and crafting and trading and hats.

I gave it three or four hours across a few servers before deciding that it wasn’t for me – it’s much too late coming to this particular party. I did find a server where folks didn’t seem to mind holding my hand a bit, and I’ve favorited it in case I get an urge to go back, but in general…

Killing Floor, being the multiplayer cooperative game where you shoot zombies that isn’t Left 4 Dead, was a completely different experience. Being able to choose games by difficulty setting meant that I was pretty much able to find games with other newbies, and I never felt like I was completely outclassed as long as I was picking one of those.

It also has an offline mode where you can, should you choose, do some level grinding on all skills except the medic skill, which requires another person to get hurt and for you to heal them.

Put simply, Killing Floor had me coming back the next night for more, and I suspect I’ll be back again as soon as I’m done playing the story mode of Borderlands, which is another offline grind/online multiplayer game and the next candidate for trying online.

I don’t see myself becoming a hardcore hours-a-night player, but I’ve enjoyed the experiment so far and I’m looking forward to going through the rest of the titles in my library that have online support.

Interestingly enough, all three of these games are available on the Mac, which is quite a turnabout for the state of Mac gaming – I will admit, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I’m playing the PC versions because my gaming PC can push out a heckuvalot better visuals than the 9400m in my MBP, but the OPTION is there.

Lest you get the impression that this winter break was all about Man’s Eternal Struggle With Technology, I did take a few hours – okay, more than a few – and finished “Just Cause 2”, a game my wife has dubbed “Just ’cause” because it’s a game that makes you do crazy things just because you can.

Like, why would I steal a speedboat and then ram it directly into the nearest beach so I could marvel at the side of the explosion?  Just ’cause.

Anyway.

Just Cause 2 features a reasonably generic Mercenary Commando Secret Agent Badass Man named Rico, though he goes by Scorpio.

Right there, you know he’s badass.  I mean, getting people to call you “Scorpio” with a straight face?

Anyway, Scorpio has a wrist-mounted grapply hooky thingy, an unlimited supply of inexplicably-materializing parachutes, and the uncanny ability to correctly drive or pilot any kind of vehicle from a motorcycle to a jumbo jetliner.  Oh, and he’s good at shooting things.  Pretty good basic set of skills.

You, that being the player behind Scorpio, get dropped onto a Fictional Southeast Asian Country that’s recently undergone a coup, and your goal is to bust things up, find out what’s behind the coup, and install a new government.

Pretty heady stuff.

It’s not my normal kind of game, to be honest.  Normally I like games where you go from level 1 to level 2 to level 3 and so on until the end credits and the heartbreaking bit after the credits where they hint at a sequel that will never ever come.  Just Cause 2 has “story missions” but actually doing any of them is entirely optional and comes as kind of a side bonus to the main focus of the game, which is being a colossal jerk and blowing stuff up.

Looking at the Steam Achievements for the game, it looks like  a lot of people choose that tactic – while 74.1% of people complete the first two missions, after which you’re given more or less free roam of the world, only 54.6% complete the third mission and the number drops quite quickly after that – less than 20% of people actually complete the seventh mission and “finish” the game.

See, the fundamental currency of Just Cause 2 is something called “Chaos” – blow up, say, an oil drum, you get 10 Chaos, blow up a surface-to-air missile launcher and you get 1500 Chaos, and so on and so forth.  As you accumulate chaos, you unlock story missions, so the basic premise of the game can be boiled down to “build up 435000 Chaos and then do some rather short missions”

I was reminded rather a lot of Jak and Daxter, where I was always collecting small shiny things to unlock a mission and then I’d have to collect more small shiny things to unlock the next mission and so on.

Anyway, you are given more or less free reign in how you generate this chaos, so I spent a lot of time following this basic template:

1) Sneak into a military base, steal a helicopter.

2) Take off, blow up the SAM launchers that are now shooting at me, take heavy damage in the process.

3) Shoot up the military base until more helicopters are sent after me.

4) Jump out of my current (badly damaged) helicopter, grapple to one of the other helicopters, throw the pilot out and use the newly acquired helicopter to shoot down any others.

5) Go looking for another military base.

Also I spent a fair bit of time stealing jumbo jets and flying them under bridges, which didn’t generate me any chaos and wasn’t helpful in any way with advancing the plot, but which was awfully fun regardless.

The other game I was reminded of while playing Just Cause 2 was Katamari Damacy, which is probably the weirdest connection ever made but which I think applies.

See, in Katamari Damacy, you have lots of levels where you start off as a tiny tiny thing, then as you get bigger you see the same level from a new perspective, and this changes as you get even bigger, and pretty soon you’re rolling up things that were insurmountable barriers before.

Just Cause 2 sort of has the same thing going on.  There was a bit where I had to go about 20 kilometers to get from Point A to Point B to continue with a mission, and of course I stole a jet for this and was merrily zooming along, and then looked down and realized that, if I’d wanted to, I could have run from Point A to Point B on the ground, swimming through watery bits or maybe taking a boat, maybe grabbing a motorcycle for some parts…I could freely “zoom into” the world at any point and there would be something there.

It’s pretty mindblowing thinking about how much work went into this game.