Banana Scoop

Here it is lady and gentlemen, my first pure video game related post.  Today I’m talking about a game my friend recently let me borrow: Gearbox’s 2009 shooter RPG, Borderlands.  The format of these posts will usually be about my personal experiences with the game and what I’ll praise and critique about it. Before I begin talking about my experiences/thoughts about the game, I’ll give you a quick summary regarding some back story.

The planet of Pandora is a desolate wasteland.  The world seems to be run by bandits and the dangerous wildlife that inhabits it.  A team of treasure hunters have been sent in to discover the ultimate treasure, only known as the vault, on Pandora.  You take control of one of the four ‘classes’: a hunter who uses sniper rifles, revolvers, and a deadly bird, a siren, who specializes in smgs, and disappearing in and out of battle, a soldier, who keeps a portable turret, a combat rifle, and shotgun at his sides at all times, and the berserker, who when enraged, starts punching things with his fist.  On your way to finding the vault, you’ll need to blast your way through hordes of bandits, animals, and bosses if you want to survive.

While not fully characterized...I still like these guys

The term shooter RPG element is probably what makes this game so great.  For the videogame terminology ignorant, shooter references the ‘first person gun firing’ games and the RPG [role playing game] term represents the leveling-up/skill customization aspect of it.  Let me go into it a little bit more why this is so significant.  Most first person shooters, like Halo or Call of Duty gameplay are purely based on skill with little customization besides the type of gun you’re holding.  In these types of games, the levels you play through are relatively straightforward and linear.  Where Borderlands breaks the typecast so well is throwing in the RPG element of it.

The RPG element allows free roaming and an addictive level up concept.  And combining this with the mass amount of guns available, the catch phrase of this game has been given ‘shoot and loot’.  The leveling concept gives way to skill trees often found in more traditional RPGs like Diablo and Mass Effect, where after leveling, you can point points into skills that either help you in a range of ways from battle damage to self-healing.  This allows the character you play to be best suited to your playing style, whether it be support from behind or upfront fighter.  The RPG element also has quests for your character to complete, most of them you can do on your own time between raiding enemy bases or completing side missions.  Hours can be lost in simply walking around, taking enemy bases and selling the loot obtained.

Two guns and a pair of heavy fists are sometimes required to take down one baddy.

The looting is another interesting aspect of Borderlands.  I mentioned above that there are bajillion of guns available.  There are no two of the same guns.  Each gun is unique in the aspect that it has different stats, from critical damage to fire rate to accuracy.  This makes each gun you pick up worthwhile, and more than often you’ll find yourself full on equipment between raids, needing to make way to a vending machine to sell of your loot.

In the artistic terms of the game, the game is uniquely beautiful.  It makes use of cell shaded animation reminiscent of Time Splitters and Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.  And with a badass opening to the tune of ‘Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked’, the game has unbelievable style.  Also contributing to the style is that splash screens introducing bosses and characters.  Playing like a Guy Ritchie or Quentin Taranino film, it’s hard to not enjoy the humor and style that comes with this game.

”]A drawback to this game is the lack of focus on the story element.  A lot of story is lost in the written dialogue that’s meant to advance the story when you accept a mission.  I find myself most of the time simply skipping these elements and just following the story arrow waiting for it tell me who to shoot.  But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, mainly because you have so much fun getting there and shooting up the place, that you forget you don’t technically have a motivation for getting there.

Now a drawback that I actually have an issue with is the difficulty of the single player campaign.  I once threw a couple of hours into a single player campaign, only to have myself dying and fighting the same enemies over and over again in the name of completing one mission.  Death not only means starting over, but losing 10% of your money, having the enemies regain health, and in some cases respawn their friends that you’ve already worked so hard to kill.  The difficulty curve is not something I was able to deal with for a while, so when I first got this game, I wasn’t too compelled to continue playing only to have my face be smashed in by badass psychos.

Fck this. These guys would be impossible to kill by yourself. You need a friend more than you know.

But then I discovered the true way to play this game.  It turns out I wasn’t the only one having this problem, as most gamers did.  The way this game is meant to be played with friends or online.  Having more than one person on the map may increase how tough enemies are, but most things can be accomplished with having someone else take the fire while you need to recharge your shield.  I have two experiences with playing with more than one person.

The first experience is when I logged onto the PSN and decided to play with random online people.  I tried to join a map with people close to my level.  And when I joined, we had fun for a while, until someone twenty levels higher joined our server and starting killing everything with ease.  This didn’t prove much fun, and things got a little confusing when three people are all trying to do different things without a microphone.  So I tried to go a different route for having fun with a friend.

Chaos ensued online. Too much chaos for my taste.

If the younger generation is reading this, the term couch cooperative might not ring a bell.  The term stems from back in the 90s and early 2000s, the only way to play with more than one person was sitting in a room with four controllers and having your player take up about a fourth of the screen.  So I called up my old friend and asked him if he wanted to try out a new game I obtained.  Several days later, the man bought the game himself to quench his addiction.  Together, we raped the Arid Badlands, New Haven, and Rusty Commons West, and we had a good time doing it.  And with a game rumored to have at least 60 hours of gameplay plus the DLC [downloadable content] we have unlocked from the Game of the Year, I’m sure we have many hours left of finding the vault.

Truth be told, ever since playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare III, I’ve played two Shooter RPGs, this and Mass Effect 3.  And while Mass Effect 3 was far more emotional and a better looking game, it’s hard to deny Borderland’s addictive style and gameplay.  And as I grind through Bruisers, Raiders, and Skags, I burn through time until Borderlands 2, with the release date set for September 18.

See you September 18th. I'm playing Zer0, what about you?