Introductory posts, part 3. And maybe some content.

So, one motivating factor in starting this blog was the purchase of bucketloads of games as part of Steam's big giant summer sale thing. I put down about $185 and got a bunch of games. Some of which I wanted to get anyway, some of which were bundled, and some of which were super cheap and looked cool. What I'm thinking I'll do is alternate posts about WoW with those about other games I am playing or have played. Then you'll be sorry.

So far the biggest hit of the sale has been Borderlands, which has the RPG-lite feel of Diablo II in a first-person shooter package. It's set on a distant planet called Pandora - no relation to the Pandora of Avatar - which is mostly deserted with a lot of garbage dumps and other post-occupation debris. The range of enemies isn't huge - I'd estimate fewer than a dozen creature types, which is small enough that I really SHOULD be counting them rather than estimating.

The range of guns, on the other hand, is massive. They come in various styles, shapes and sizes, with different enhancements - collecting more damaging, more accurate, and cooler guns is a major part of the game from the beginning on. There are four character classes, each of which has available bonuses to different weapon types - as well as other differences. I've only been playing one class all the way through, and solo at that.

I liked Borderlands on the PC so much that I bought a copy for the xbox - I wanted to play with Midori and having it on the xbox made that more likely. Since cross-platform is an impossible problem to solve, we tried playing split-screen and... it kind of sucked. There just didn't seem to be enough screen space to see the world clearly, or to navigate the character pages. It was massively awkward.

The NPCs are full of personality, and the game is full of the little references that make me giggle so. For example, one of the enemy types is a batlike creature called a Rakk. One of the rakk bosses is called Rakkinishu - which is the name of a Carver boss from Diablo II. (The other little Carvers run around shouting "Rakkinishu!" so you know he's coming. They'd be cute if they weren't trying to cut off your elbows.) In Borderlands, Rakkinishu drops a piece of armor called a "Cracked Sash", which was the name of the WORST item in DII. Just thinking about it brings back memories of looking at the clock to see that it was 3 am and I was still only halfway to Kurast.

I'm going to give Borderlands a rating of 4 bobbleheads out of 5. It gains points for the good things I mentioned in this post, and loses points for the bad things I mentioned. Do I have to write everything twice for you people?

One day I may go back and put some links into this post. I hear that links are good things to have in a blogs.

Ciao,
Dolbia