In a previous article, I mentioned Minecraft, a retro-styled independent sandbox game which is quickly becoming a bit of an internet sensation.  I recently started playing it, and I’ve been writing an account of my experience starting out in the game.  The following chronicles the first four days (and nights) of game time, and my character’s adventures therein.

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Minecraft, Day 1

I appear somewhere along the coastline.  In the distance, hills, mountains, and majestic cliffs appear, some apparently floating in midair.  Everything is blocky, to be sure, but expansive and new – a whole world to explore, full of potential.

For some reason, though, I start out along the coastline, walking along a nice natural peninsula.  There are copious amounts of sand, formed, of course, in varying stacks of blocks, but they crumble easily with a few short whacks of my admittedly blocky fist.  Once broken, they are quickly collected, appearing in my inventory to be resurrected later.  Only a few minutes in, and I have my first tools of creation.

I collect a few flowers in similar fashion, then proceed down to the waterline, going for a quick swim.  I notice that the sand next to the water is barely containing it, and I wonder what would happen if I broke it down…  sure enough, water begins to flow into the now-empty space, and in a few short minutes I manage to create a miniature stream flowing along a short, sandy beachside cliff.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I recall some of my minecraft “basic training” – exploration is all well and good, but to get much further, and to work with things more complex than sand and dirt, I’ll need some sort of equipment, and for that I’ll need wood.  However, I don’t want to go wandering away across the expansive landscape and lose track of my miniature work in progress.  So, I do what any reasonable person would do – I build a large spire of sand next to it, a monument that should be hard to miss from any observation point along the shoreline.  A world in Minecraft is a truly expansive thing, with a hugely varied landscape – the downside is, of course, that unless you pay very close attention to the landscape and mark points of interest, it’s quite easy to head off exploring, get disoriented, and have a very tough time trying to find your way back to what you were working on.
Luckily, though, the trees are only a short ways away, and while they’re a bit more stubborn than sand, they eventually fall to the might of my seemingly untiring, unbruising fist.  There are also
a few animals milling around – I take a moment away from my lumberjacking to pound one of each into submission with my fists, but they don’t seem to do much interesting besides running away, or poofing into nothingness when vanquished.  As they do, though, I notice the trees have sprung up some saplings nearby, so I harvest those as well.

Now I have some wood, though, and it’s a relatively simple matter of popping into my inventory and doing a bit of amateur carpentry.  Apparently, that blocky fist of mind also doubles as a half-decent saw, as in no time at all, I’ve reduced the raw sections of tree trunk into a handful of planks and sticks, some of which I use to pull together a workbench, which can be used to build the actual tools that I’m looking for.  Of course, once I plop the workbench down randomly atop a small cliff overlooking a calm lakeside valley, I realize that there’s no real way to pick it back up again.  No matter, though, as it builds things fine wherever it happens to be, but just in case, I make another spire of sand nearby so that I can actually find the thing again.  I start playing around with various wood derivatives, and end up with a wooden hoe and pickax – not the sturdiest things in the world, but it’s a start.  With a pickax, the mining part of the game can actually begin, as harder things like stone are now mine for the taking.  Except…  as I build things, the background seems to be getting dimmer and dimmer…  night is beginning to fall, and I’m out here in the middle of nowhere, completely exposed.  While the pigs and ducks are probably heading off to sleep, I’ve heard that other, nastier things come out at night – visibility is quickly dropping, and here on a flat plain, things could come at me from any direction.  But where to go?

The answer quickly becomes obvious:  it’s time to go back to my spire on the beach.  It’s up high, with a good line of sight all around, and only one real angle of approach – the rest is bordered by the ocean, and too high for land-based creatures to reasonably jump.  I quickly hop up the blocky staircase to the top of it, just as the light fades the rest of the way.  It’s night, and I’m relatively safe, marveling at the pixelated stars and blocky moon as they emerge in the sky.

I spend the night digging up a bit more sand, and adding some more altitude to my spire.  Overall, though, the night is calm, and nothing comes to assault my makeshift tower, leaving me to await the dawn, taking in what I can see of the panorama spreading out around me.

Day 2

Once dawn has arrived, though, I realize that I don’t much like the dark.  It’s time to go looking for something to alleviate that – an area made out of stone, which might just have some deposits I could use to shed some light on the situation, as it were.

I start out by exploring the little valley with the lake, next to where I had placed my workbench.  It’s mainly unremarkable, but there are a few more animals in it now, and I notice that there are plenty of trees around – which I make sure to harvest.  On the far side of the valley, though, the cliff leading up is mostly dirt – but some stone as well.  I jump up along a natural staircase at the top, but once I make it over, I miscalculate a jump – and fall into a rocky cave.

No problem, though, as I’ve got my pickaxe – it makes relatively short work of the stone, which I collect, and I pile up a crude staircase of dirt to climb back out.  The only problem is, there’s just stone in the cave, apparently nothing else – still, the stone should help at least a bit.  I notice, though, once I’ve climbed out, that there’s a good-sized stone cliff nearby, so I head over to investigate.

I jump my way partway up the surface, gathering a bit more stone, but nothing else interesting appears, aside from gravel.  Then, I round the corner, and see a truly amazing sight – a huge stone cave, open almost to the top of the entire mountain – even though it’s just made of blocks, it’s still one of the most impressive geographic features I’ve ever seen rendered in a game.  I take a moment to marvel at the grandeur of it, but upon closer inspection, there seems to be nothing but stone here as well.  It also looks quite dark towards that back, and even during the day, bad things lurk in the darkness…
Eventually, I move on, and int he next cliff over, I strike pay dirt – hidden in the rock face is a nice, big vein of coal!  My pickaxe makes short work of it, although it’s looking a bit worse for wear, but on the upside, I now have a number of lumps of coal.  And while that might seem like a bit of a consolation prize in any other context, it is, in fact the key to producing light.

I begin to head back, getting a bit disoriented, but once I find my way back to the coast, it’s easy enough to get back.  As I head back to my spire, though, darkness once again begins to set in.  Not a problem, though, because I now have torches!  Coal and sticks (and some unseen method of ignition), and my spire is quickly lit, a beacon of light fending off the darkness.  I climb back to the top, taking in the much more visible view, and getting ready for another long and relatively boring night.

Boring that is, until something hits me, and I tumble from my tower into the water, losing half my health.  I turn to look around, and I’m hit again.  Then I see it, standing on the sandy cliff above me – the crude, blocky grey visage of a skeleton, faintly illuminated by torchlight, shooting arrows at me.  I try to evade them, but the current is too strong, and I’m a sitting duck.  In one short, sharp encounter, it’s all over.

I respawn (luckily, the game allows that) where I first started out, a ways down the beach from my spire.  All of my stuff is gone, though.  I notice it, though, scattered about where I last perished.  And there’s the bloody skeleton – somehow, it’s fallen off the cliff and into the man-made river that I created before, trapped just like I was, hopping mad and still spitting arrows.  I try to pummel it into submission with my versatile fist so I can retrieve my stuff, but it arrows me down before I can get more than a couple of hits in, and I’m back at respawn.  This stalemate continues over a few more lives as dawn finally breaks.

Day 3

Somehow, I manage to get the skeleton to run into one of the torches I’ve placed, and it runs around on fire for a bit.  Finally, it’s weakened enough that I’m able to finish punching it out – oddly enough, or perhaps not, its body pulverizes into arrows, which I duly collect, although without a bow, they’re not of much use.  I manage to salvage a few additional bits of equipment, but everything else is lost, so I head off once again in search of materials and equipment.  One thing I realize, though, is that as neat as my sand spire is, it’s still quite vulnerable.  I need a place that’s more defensible, more enclosed, or I’ll be easy target practice for the next skeleton that happens upon it.

I head back out to the caves beyond the valley, digging out some more stone with my close-to-failing pickaxe.  I head back and fashion some better things, this time out of stone – a better pickaxe, and a basic sword, which will hopefully fare better than my bare fists if I encounter any more enemies.  So far, the game is living up to its name – I’m doing plenty of both mining and crafting.  By the time I’ve done all this, though, it’s getting later in the day, and I know I need to come up with a better living space soon, or its back for another long and dangerous night on the spire.

At the other end of the valley, the cliff is more dirt that stone, so I start digging into the cliff face, carving out a small room.  I can’t go too far, though, as the cliff isn’t that far away from the sea, and I realize that if I go too far, my newly carved room could quickly be underwater.  Still, it’s cozy enough, and reasonably protected.  I put up a makeshift door that I constructed earlier to keep the baddies out, and build a small shelf in the corner.  It’s getting dark, so I toss a couple of torches on the wall, slam the door shut, and hunker down.  For the first time, night has fallen, and I’m actually somewhere safe.

Day 4

It’s time to improve my initial dwelling, but first, I’ll need some more materials.  So, I head back over to the cliffs.  There’s plenty of stone there, and those ever-elusive coal deposits – between the spire of brightness and my new dugout dwelling, I’m fresh out of torches.  The trip to the cliffs is uneventful, as I mostly know my way by now, and I pick up some more stone and coal, as well as pestering the odd animal I encounter along the way (by which I mean punching them to see if they turn into meat, which for some reason they don’t – not that that would normally make any sense, but hey, games made of blocks don’t always need to).  Chuffed about my reasonably easy success, I turn around to head back – and promptly fall into another random cave.

I manage to climb my way back out, but I’ve somehow gotten turned around, and don’t recognize the landscape.  I wander around for a bit, and eventually cross a ridge, and see what I think is the ocean – and I know that once I reach that, I’ll be back on track.  Instead, though, it’s a series of lakes in a huge valley, and I realize that I’m even more lost, stuck in a suddenly alien landscape as my precious minutes of daylight leak slowly away.  It’s a totally open valley, and there’s no really good place to hide.

There’s a high spot nearby, though, not quite a mountain, and if I can get my bearings from there…  I quickly hop up the side of it, and scan around into the distance, and think I recognize one of my sand towers off in the distance, near what must be the coast.  Heartened, I quickly traverse the terrain, only stopping to harvest a bit more wood, and realize that I’ve made it back with time to spare.

I realize that having more visibility is a good idea for my main base, so I build yet another big sand spire above my dugout.  Doing so, though means digging for sand along the beach, and I stupidly dig the patch of sand beneath my feet… and fall into yet another cave.  Oh well, it’s still light, so I’ll get a bit more mining in, I think, and set off to mine some more stone – forgetting just how close I am to the water.  I dig through one block, and all of a sudden, water pours in, and I’m quickly thrown deep into the cave system by the torrent.  I manage to free myself from the water flow, but I’m now in the middle of a cave, and it’s getting pretty dark.  I climb towards the light, mining through whatever blocks might stand in my way, but I’m still too far in, and the light is beginning to fail…  luckily, though, I’ve got plenty of dirt and sand left over from my earlier excavations, so I’m able to build yet another hasty staircase to escape before the cave gets too dangerous.  Then, it’s back to my dugout, and I seal my door just as the darkness fully arrives.

For the heck of it, I build a furnace, and give it some fuel, solidifying some of the stone I’ve harvested into… some type of harder stone, apparently.  Looking around, though, I realize that the tiny room is getting a bit cramped.  Well… time to expand, then.  I dig a bit further back and see… starlight.  Well, that’s no good – I hurriedly seal it off before anything can drop in.

Well, if I can’t go out, maybe I can go down.  I pick a place towards the back and start drilling down, going through dirt into stone.  I remember not to dig out any of the places I’m standing on, though, and luckily so – I only dig down two squares before I realize that I’ve just drilled through the ceiling into yet another cave system below…  one containing some crazed green monster trying to jump into my house!  I put that stone back quickly indeed.  Probing around, I discover that the whole house is pretty much on top of various cave systems – expanding down or in either direction ends up in new caves filled with beasties, while the other two directions lead into the lake and the ocean, respectively.  I resign myself to the tiny burrow for now, putting up a small storage chest as well, while realizing that once daybreak arrives, it’s probably time to find a roomier, less limited location.

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If you’re interested in a more visual experience of playing through Minecraft, there are various videos available on Youtube, or you could check out the game directly.

This is a story that begins with a bit of disappointment, and ends with hope, mostly.

After somewhat of a drought in 2009, the anticipation was that 2010 would be a banner year for games, with many first-party, big-name titles being released.  As a result, I decided to make sure I had enough room in my budget to pick up a good number of them.  Fast-forward to August, and I’ve bought a grand total of 2 at day-one prices: Just Cause 2, and Mass Effect 2.  (Another anticipated title, Supreme Commander 2, somehow got stuck on the back burner, only to surface just a couple of months later at 1/5 the release cost).  And looking forward to the holiday season, there are maybe 1 or 2 more that I’m still anticipating, if that.

How did it happen?  Hard to say, but I probably should have considered how prescient a certain event in 2009 was in terms of my perception of first-party games: namely, the debacle surrounding the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 (y’know, I’m noticing an awful lot of 2s showing up in titles… original IP, anyone?  But I’ll get to that in a bit…).  After playing the first one and enjoying it immensely, it seemed like a no-brainer to pick it up, but in the intervening months, through a series of horrible decisions about the game, I actually went from having the perception that the game was a must-buy, to refusing to touch it at any price.  I certainly wasn’t the only PC gamer who was disappointed that the game ended up turning into a warmed-over console port with botched multiplayer and no customization or mod support whatsoever, but as a console game, it sold well…  only encouraging publishers to follow suit with other limitations on other games.  Perhaps I should have anticipated similar shenanigans in 2010, but, naive or not, I still held out hope.

But then 2010 did roll around, and the issues started rolling in.  Bioshock 2 drops to widely varying reviews, plagued with a DLC-on-the-disk scandal, and despite my love of the first game, I pull a MW2-style perception flip and decide to wait on it – and I’m still waiting.  Ubisoft rolls out their horrid online-only DRM system, causing me to write off their entire catalog of games indefinitely.  The mod support and other features in Starcraft 2 get scaled back, along with my enthusiasm, and on and on…  Game after game comes out, but broken or deficient in some way, and I have no desire to pay full retail price for it (especially with the ridiculous bump of a number of games to the $60 console price point, despite the lack of license fees on the PC platform that might lead to such an increase).  Even looking forward, towards upcoming games, Fallout: New Vegas is playing around with preorder DLC, and Test Drive Unlimited 2, aside from the preorder nonsense I mentioned earlier, was rolled back to at least January of next year (or possibly March, if Steam’s release date is to be believed).  If I didn’t know better, I’d almost swear that first-party developers were actively trying to discourage PC users from buying their games, at least on day one.

However, first-party game developers and publishers, while they may dominate most of the market, aren’t the only show in town – there are plenty of independent developers working on a wide variety of different types of games, many of them innovative new ideas, or at the very least, refreshing takes on played-out or underappreciated genres.  Of course, to be able to actually take on these sorts of projects, especially if they’re a bit more advanced than you’re average casual game, you need a way of funding the initial game, which you can then sell, and use the profits to produce more.  That, of course, is the sticking point, and one of the reasons for much of the first-party gaming shenanigans and lack of creativity that had so turned me off this year: big games need big investments, especially for AAA-quality titles with the latest graphics, and publishers don’t want to commit to investing in a game that they can’t guarantee sizable profits from.  Because of this, no one takes much in the way of risks, and the titles with 2 or 3 after their names greatly dwarf the amount of completely new ones.

Of course, there are some signs of hope.  A number of the major publishers have hosted indie game competitions, or started partnership programs with indie studios to help produce more games, but these agreements often come with their own drawbacks, such as the publisher taking all rights to the game in return for their investment.

I did read with more interest, though, about the creation of the indie fund, a coalition of already successful independent studios creating their own investment group to direct funds toward promising indie games, helping them get off the ground without demanding onerous profit arrangements or IP ownership.  Unfortunately, as far as I’m currently aware, there’s no way for individuals to become involved with that project, but I did discover that there are also a number of indie studios that let you do something similar.  Essentially, you preorder the game, which gives the company the working capital they need to continue development.  In return, in addition to getting a full copy of the game upon its release, you get to play around with the game as it’s being developed, trying out new features as they’re implemented, and often having an unprecedented amount of communication with the developers.  It’s really quite a different experience – instead of paying for a game from a big published who couldn’t care less what you think, you get to actively put your money towards getting the games you’re most interested in published, while at the same time getting an inside view of a game as it comes together.

So, long story short, I decided to take a different route with at least part of my gaming budget – given my disappointment with first-party games this year, I would instead take some of that money and put it towards some of these independent, self-funding games that I want to see built to completion.  I’ve found a few so far that are definitely worth mentioning, especially as they’re quite a bit more than investing in an unproven idea – all of the games that I’m going to talk about here have, at the very least, some sort of playable preview.

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Overgrowth – by Wolfire Games

Wolfire Games first came to my attention with their sponsorship of the much-loved and often-imitated Humble Indie Bundle, a promotion featuring a half-dozen games by independent developers in a pay-what-you-want format, along with the ability to allocate some or all of the payment to charitable organizations.  One of the games included was their own production, Lugaru, which is a rather impressive third-person fighting game, a genre that seems very rarely implemented these days – in fact, before Lugaru, the only other PC game with that sort of beat-’em-up style of gameplay was Oni (which, as I’ve probably mentioned before, is one of my all-time favorite games).  Currently, they’re working on the sequel to the game, Overgrowth, as a self-funded venture, both from their own sales as well as preorders.  That preorder, though, gives you direct access to the game as it develops, including frequent developer builds that let you try out all of the new developments as they occur.  It’s still very much in alpha, but you can already explore a number of nice-looking maps in the game engine (or even create your own), as well as explore them using a test character.  It’s been an interesting experience so far, and if you like that style of game, I think it’s definitely worthy of support.

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Minecraft – by Mojang Specifications

If you’ve been looking at gaming-related stuff on YouTube lately, you’ve probably heard about this one already.  It’s really quite a deceptively simple, yet amazingly complex, game concept: essentially, a character spawns in a dynamically-generated world constructed entirely of different types of blocks, which can be collected, placed, and crafted in near-infinite ways.  The only goal: do what you need to do to survive in the world, and beyond that, you’re pretty much only limited by your imagination.  It’s a sandbox game in the most literal sense, in that pretty much everything in the world can be changed, modified, or reconstructed to your liking.  I’m always hesitant to use the phrase “emergent gameplay,” but in a game like this, you really can make your own fun, and I’ll probably discussing that part of it in quite a bit more detail soon (I already have another post in the works detailing my first experiences with the game, and how it can quite easily veer off in interesting and unexpected directions).  The preorder is amazingly inexpensive (probably even more so if you’re in Europe), and in return, you get access to an alpha build of the game that is already quite stable and mostly feature-complete, at least for the singleplayer version (the multiplayer is apparently a bit less further along), and the game is receiving regular updates that add even more features as it proceeds towards its beta release.  Despite the seemingly retro-looking graphics, this is a game with incredible potential, and even in alpha, is already rivaling most AAA games in terms of value for money.  I like this game quite a lot, and I hope it succeeds – given how successful it’s been so far, I don’t think that’s much of a stretch.

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Interstellar Marines – by Zero Point Software

This one is certainly an interesting project, despite the fact that it is taking on a somewhat tired genre and trying to do something a little different with it, or at the very least, a bit more polished, with an interesting environment and keen attention to the way it feels to actually play the game.  The developers claim that they’re trying to produce a “AAA Indie” game – basically, a game that can measure up to the major first-party titles in terms of graphics and scope, but more independently funded, with some funding coming from preorders of the game.  However, at the moment, this one’s a bit more faith-based than the others.  Trying to go AAA does require quite a bit more cash, with budgets ranging from one to many millions of dollars – based on their own released preorder figures, though, my back-of-the-envelope calculation makes it look like, with the most optimistic estimates, that funding from individual players probably comes in at a bit under $100,000.  Because of that, they appear to have slowed development as they look for other investment partners, and full development seems a bit less certain at this point.  However, they definitely have a viable product – they’ve already released a trio of previews for the game, with pretty professional-looking graphics and gameplay so far, and all of them are playable directly in your web browser.  Based on those previews, if they are able to figure out how to get a funding model that gets them the resources they need, they seem to have the underpinnings for a very solid shooter, with more web-playable previews coming out to allow players to see more and more of the game, until its final release.  As with any of these preorders, there’s some risk of never seeing a final product, and this one makes me a little more wary as you don’t seem to get to download the previews directly, so if the site goes under, you don’t even have the previews to play around with.  However, if you can tolerate that risk and want to support an ambitious indie project trying to play with first-party publishers on their own turf, a not-too-expensive preorder will net you the first game on release, as well as full access to all of the previews as they arrive, as well as various bits of insider access – pay a bit more, and get a preorder for their entire planned trilogy of games.  I haven’t actually bought into this one yet, but I’m definitely intrigued by it, especially after seeing just how solid they’ve got the mechanics of the game down in the previews they’ve released so far.

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If you’ve read the comment threads on many of the PC gaming furores that have erupted this year, you’ll inevitably see someone making the comment to vote with your wallet: if you don’t like what the game has to offer, don’t buy it anyway, and don’t threaten to pirate it – just don’t buy it, and use your money to get the games that you like, and support the studios that you think are deserving of your business.  While I may not make a huge difference as a solitary consumer, this year, I think I’ve been doing just that – shying away from games and publishers that are doing things I don’t approve of, and steering my money towards the games I’m really interested in, and developers who I’m happy to support.  There are more options for PC gaming than ever before, and it’s truly heartening to see things like the indie fund and successful, self-funded studios being able to thrive alongside the more mainstream competition.

As you may know, I am primarily a PC gamer, largely by choice – the only console I own is the Nintendo DS handheld, and that’s primarily because a full-fledged computer won’t fit in my pocket.

Generally speaking, I don’t talk about consoles, primarily to avoid the heated debates on the virtues of specific console systems from their zealous advocates, but also because I used to think that, for the most part, consoles didn’t affect the way I wanted to game.  PCs and consoles are different, and cater to different needs, and I’ve never been interested in debating which one is superior – if the device you’re using works for you and suits your needs, then it’s none of my business to dictate to you what I think the superior system is.

However, in recent years, the line between consoles and the PC has begun to blur, and as a result, decisions that are made on the consoles are bleeding over into the world of PC gaming as well.  Many PC games are ports originally programmed for consoles, and occasionally vice versa.  This makes sense, as PC and console hardware is not all that different, and so developing for multiple platforms at once is generally more efficient.  Unfortunately, it does mean that games which are ported from console to PC often carry the limitations of console games along with them.

To address these issues, I’m starting a series of short articles where I discuss some of the issues that I see with the “consolization” of games being ported to the PC, why I find them to be concerning as a PC gamer, and (hopefully) brainstorm some solutions.

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To start with, let me address one of the most immediate differences between many console and PC games, and perhaps one of the most glaring for PC gamers: the use of checkpoints to save progress in a game, rather than a global save/load game command that allows for the saving of current progress at any point in the game.  I have discussed this a bit previously under frustrating game design, so please bear with me if you’ve heard some of this before.

Most PC gamers are familiar with the standard save system:  when you need to save, pop back out to the menu, choose to save your game, and it’s saved – you can quit, come back, and load it up again, and you’re right back where you were before, with all of your progress saved.  Most console ports, on the other hand, do away with this system because it’s more awkward to navigate menus on a console, and so the less you have to do, the better – so, instead, they simply opt for the game to automatically save your progress at certain points.  This also has an advantage of making save files smaller, for consoles with limited storage space – all you need to do is store the players character stats and the checkpoint number, rather than the specific coordinates and geometry of a player’s arbitrary location, screenshots to identify the area of the save, etc.

However, the use of checkpoint systems carries a rather significant disadvantage: if you want to stop playing, you can’t simply save your game and come back to it later.  Instead, you have to keep playing until you reach the next checkpoint, or whatever progress you made past the last one is lost.  In certain games, this can set you back quite a bit – for example, if you’re in the middle of invading a regular base in Just Cause 2 and have to leave your game, your “save” will restore you at the nearest regional headquarters, often a good ways away from where you were, and you will have to travel all the way back to your objective and begin all over again.  And it can get even worse than that.  Take FUEL, for example: ostensibly a racing game, but with a huge explorable environment the size of an entire continent.  Problem is, if you do feel like exploring, good luck getting too far – every time you quit, you end up getting bumped back to your base camp location, even if it’s on the opposite side of the map – and unless you’re very good at the racing part, the available base camps are located in only one corner of the map, making exploration beyond that zone limited to the amount of time you can play at a sitting.

If placed properly, in certain games, checkpoints can just be tolerable – you still may have to play a few minutes more before you can quit out without losing any progress, but they can generally keep pace if they are placed well enough.  However, many games place the checkpoints quite poorly – for example, from one checkpoint, there’s a five-minute hike, and then two difficult, pitched battles, before the game saves itself again.  Fail either one of the battles, and you must begin all over again, including that long, monotonous walk.  With a proper save system, you could save after the walk, and before each battle, allowing you to jump back in quickly after each failure – take that away, and the poor checkpoint system can quickly become an exercise in frustration.

Another fault with the checkpoint system is that it is not particularly fault-tolerant.  Generally, only one checkpoint is saved, with the only other option reverting to starting again at the beginning of an entire level, or sometimes even starting from the beginning of the game itself.  Of course, this is a problem if the checkpoint saves at an importune time.  Say you’re playing an FPS, you’ve made it through one battle, but you’re critically low on health and ammo.  The checkpoint saves, and a moment later, an enemy pops out and finishes you off.  You can’t go back to an earlier save and try to conserve your rounds or retry the battle to come out of it in better shape – you just keep respawning at that checkpoint, with no time to recover, and get taken out again and again.  Essentially, the checkpoint save has trapped you in a situation where you are always doomed to failure, and since there are no previous saves to fall back on, you’re stuck at that point, unless you want to start the level or game over again, something that could represent over an hour of additional unenjoyable time just getting back to the point you were at before, with no guarantee of not getting locked into an impossible situation by a badly placed checkpoint once again.

From a PC gaming standpoint, being limited to checkpoints feels very restricting – it feels like a lot of the control you have over how you play the game is stripped away.  A good PC game allows you to play according to how you want, and a save-anywhere system is a linchpin of that flexibility, and when you don’t have it, the game feels much more limiting.  In a strictly linear game, you might not feel this quite as much, unless the checkpoints are poorly placed, but in an open-world game, the problems crop up rapidly.  I mean, imagine if a game like Fallout 3 was a checkpointed console port – you only get to save at each change in the level (entering a building/subway/etc), and if you get killed or have to quit while in transit, you start back at, say, Megaton and have to do the long and perilous hike all over again.  It would make for a much different, much more limiting, and much more frustrating game.

Ideally, the best solution would be to bring proper save systems back to PC games, including console ports.  Unfortunately, this is not always technically feasible, or the teams creating the games are not inclined to add that as a PC “enhancement.”  At the very least, though, gamers should be informed whether the game they are purchasing is restricted to checkpoint saves, so that they can consider for themselves whether the restriction of a checkpoint system, and the possible problems that it brings, is worth the price of the game.  For me, it generally is not – with few exceptions, games with checkpoint systems only garner my interest once they’ve been marked down into the virtual bargain bin.

In the past, I’ve talked about one of the difficulty problems that can result in certain types of games: that of restricting access to game content for players who are unable to play the game at the necessary proficiency.  However, a more recent trend is even more insidious, and affects game consumers regardless of their skill-level: the retailer-specific preorder bonus.

For those who are unfamiliar with this (and consider yourself lucky if you are!), this is where getting the game from any source will get you most of the content – but if you want a certain add-on, you’ll need to pre-order the game, in many cases from a specific retailer – and in some cases, different retailers have different bonuses, and so it’s impossible to get the complete game from any source at all, as each copy will be missing some part of the complete game resources.  Sometimes, those bonuses are released for all players months later, as either free or paid DLC, but in some cases, people buying a game from certain retailers will be left with an incomplete copy.

Now, in some cases, this is not a huge issue – if the exclusive content is, say, something purely aesthetic, like an extra character skin, this is less of an issue, as gameplay is not particularly affected if you get a package without the bonus.  In other cases, the bonus is something that does add to the game, but is relatively minor, so much so that you could play the base game without it and never get the sense that anything was missing.  Mass Effect 2 seems to fall into this category: I didn’t get it on preorder, so I didn’t get an armor set or something, but I never felt deprived for not having it, as there were many other armor parts available with different but comparable bonuses.  For something like that, it’s still irksome, but I wouldn’t consider it completely game-breaking, as aggravating as it is to me personally to not be able to access a fully complete game simply based on my choice of retailer.

However, game companies are getting pretty close to crossing the line – moving from giving out largely aesthetic bonuses to restricting potentially significant game features to preorders or particular retailers.  This post, in fact, is prompted by an email I received from Atari promoting their upcoming racing game, Test Drive Unlimited 2.  Apparently, one of the features, a player-accessible casino that serves as a social hub and offers playable casino games, is only available via preorder from a specific retailer, who I will not mention, because I want to do the opposite of help them make money for agreeing to such an unconscionable deal.  Even though the game is primarily about racing cars, not playing roulette, this seems like a rather significant chunk of game here, especially as it could be an important aspect of the multiplayer parts of the game – because of that, it is greatly concerning that it is restricted to a specific retailer, and will be absent from versions of the game purchased anywhere else, leaving them essentially incomplete.  I mean, think about it: we’re not talking about a sweet hat, or having 51 weapons at your disposal instead of 50, a la DOWII; we’re talking about a peripheral, but still significant, feature that should be in all copies of the game, but isn’t.  Given where this trend is going, imagine what the future could hold in store:  for example, restricting certain online game types to an exclusive preorder (in fact, didn’t this already happen to an extent with certain versions of Battlefield Bad Company 2?), or perhaps restricting multiplayer entirely, or making certain single-player missions exclusive, or…  actually, I’m not sure I want to imagine anything worse, because it’s possible that some publisher might decide it’s a good idea.

Quite frankly, I think the whole thing is a travesty to gamers, retailers, and developers alike, and smacks of the sorts of gimmicks many companies have been on the receiving end of government actions for in the past (see: Intel’s collusion with computer manufacturers to offer processor discounts to those who refused to use their rivals’ components, for one glaring example).  Hopefully, the retailers left out in the cold will eventually come to their senses, and sue the game distributors who trade in this nonsense for unfair competition.  Until that happens, though, people need to speak up, and let these companies know, in no uncertain terms, that selling a game, regardless of channel, means selling the full and complete version, with everything included.

Update: Further browsing of the official site turns up a little more info: the casino is apparently a standalone game that is separate from, but somehow integrated with, the main game, and as the retailer who shall not be named lists it as a bonus with a “$10 value,” this seems to indicate that it might be available as additional paid DLC later on.  However, there’s simply not enough information yet to tell exactly what’s going on with it, and I think my point still stands regardless – no matter how it plays out, it still represents a disappointing trend in game profiteering.

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/04/22/thoughts-on-difficulty-settings/

Some fairly interesting commentary on variability in video game difficulty settings.  I would agree that Half-Life did have some strangeness to its level of difficulty (as I recall, I finally found the balance that I liked by using console codes to specify the exact percentages of damage that my weapons and enemy weapons would do). Personally, so long as you have enough granularity in difficulty settings that people can play the game (through to completion) in whatever mode they want, from easy to challenging, then the game is doing something right.

It’s worth reading the entire article, and the accompanying comment thread, but I especially liked this comment, posted by bit-tech member Bauul:

I used to be one for going at it on hardest possible settings, but over time and with age, I now almost always play it on easy.

Why? Because every time I have to redo a section, that’s a bit of fun gone. Every time I get frustrated and find a part difficult, that’s a bit of stress I tried to avoid by picking up the game in the first place. I know the challenge often can be the fun, but I like to build up to that challenge. If I find a game too difficult too early on, I simply won’t play it any more.

I think this is a good explanation of why I tend to take the same path: I want to have fun with games, and struggling with them takes away from their stated purpose of providing the player with an enjoyable time.

The Difficulty of Difficulty

It’s a very good article, which outlines many of the different types of frustrating difficulty that people encounter in games, and it makes a good point about the difficulty of a game needing to feel fair to the player.  I would add to that the notion that the difficulty should feel fair for the level that the player selects – a player who wants an easy gaming experience shouldn’t be blindsided with a sudden spike in unfair difficulty, while a more hardcore player should be able to select the level of challenge they want, even if that level is intentionally giving the game’s AI an “unfair” advantage because they want a truly daunting challenge.

I would also add that challenge plays different roles in different types of games, and as such, can be far more frustrating in certain types of games than others.  For example, in a role-playing shooter such as Borderlands, some challenge is good to intensify the battles, and if it does get too intense, you can usually level up until it’s more manageable.  So, even with increased difficulty, the frustration that it causes is relatively low.  On the other hand, take a game like GTA4 – based significantly on exploration and sandbox gameplay, but with much of the area to explore locked down until you jump through a number of progressively difficult hoops, and if you get stuck on the difficulty, it denies you the ability to freely explore, one of the game’s major selling points.  To sum up, difficulty can have a place, and can make some games more intense and enjoyable – but only if that difficulty doesn’t lead to game-ending frustration, and only if that difficulty doesn’t penalize players by holding the enjoyable parts of the game hostage.

The most compelling case should be for game-ness

An excellent article, especially in the last two paragraphs.  Overall, I think I agree with most of the points in the article, especially the notion that games should be considered an experience in their own right, rather than having to specifically measure up to already-established art forms.  And while I’ve certainly done the traditional “review” style in the past, I can definitely see the point of evaluating a game based on what it’s like to actually play it, not how all of its different elements can be broken down into a strict numeric score.  In that sense, as much as I do occasionally rely on Metacritic for at-a-glance game ratings, I do appreciate reading reviews by sites such as RPS, where the goal is to explain the experience of playing rather than simply assigning a grade.  While my own reviews do usually have a specific focus, I hope that they also take this into account, that it’s a description not just of what the game is, but what makes it compelling (or not) to play.

RPS pretty much says what needs to be said:

You Maniacs!

Perhaps the biggest, most frustrating flaw a game can have is when it doesn’t allow you to actually play it.  Regardless of the price, I would never purchase a game using Ubisoft’s amazingly draconian new DRM scheme (lose your internet connection, get booted out of the game and lose your current progress).  If you’re looking to buy an Ubisoft game, for any platform, I would encourage you to think about whether you want to be supporting a company that has such contempt for the paying customers that keep it in business.

(Alternate Title: EA is Incompetent, which, unsurprisingly, is already registered as as a username for the Cerberus Network)

After enjoying Mass Effect 1 immensely, I went out and purchased Mass Effect 2.  One initial play session later, here are some of my first thoughts on the game, and how it is to play.

-Not wanting to wait the 15GB download over my less-than-ideal internet connection, I picked this one up on disk.  The install went smoothly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the dialogue archive was one of the largest files.  Activation seems to be serial code on install and disc check thereafter – hardly draconian copy protection.  From what I’ve heard, the digital download copy protection on this one isn’t too bad either.

-Firing up the game, I hit the first snag – EA wanted me to log in to my account to connect to the Cerberus network, download DLC, etc.  Unsurprisingly, my EA account did not log in.  This is unsurprising because my EA account has never logged in properly on the first try to any EA game that required it.  Usually, resetting my password fixes it, but this time, even that doesn’t budge the game.  My credentials log in just fine on EA’s own website, but the exact same credentials will not log in using the game.  As of my first play session, I was not able to log into this part of the game.  Luckily, it is not necessary to play the base game, and so is primarily an inconvenience – were the case otherwise, I would consider that a rather critical flaw.

-The Cerberus Network, as it is, seems to be primarily a news feed, rather than an in-game delivery portal – to actually download any of the DLC, at least as far as I could tell, you are taken to the Bioware Social webpage, outside of the game.  Of course, this site doesn’t synchronize your login well with EA’s site, either, meaning that even getting to a download page for the “included” DLC was a two-hour ordeal including multiple EA accounts and password resets.  The Cerberus Network is hardly a gaming innovation, and is most decidedly not ready for prime time.

-Importing ME1 characters works more or less flawlessly, up to and including my original Shepard’s distinctive mug.  All the other info imports just fine, and having a solid save file gives a decent amount of initial bonuses, including some initial skill points and a decent amount of resources to pick up some of the starting equipment.

-The game starts out mostly with extended cutscenes, but after a while, you are introduced to combat.  As always, I chose to play on “casual” difficulty, to see whether the combat is actually easy on this setting.  Long story short: your mother won’t be beating ME2 anytime soon.

ME2 is no Borderlands, and it wants you to play it more in the style of F.E.A.R., or Rainbow Six Vegas, or (shudder) Gears of War.  That is, combat is mostly all about popping out from behind cover, shooting a guy or two, getting back into cover to let your shields recharge, and doing that until all the bad guys in an area are down.  If, like me, you like charging into the fray, guns blazing, you’ll soon find yourself ducking back out of necessity under a withering barrage of enemy fire.  Played cautiously, it’s more survivable… but slower.

However, that being said, the intensity of combat is increased from ME1.  The enemies are also a bit more aggressive, rather than milling about as in the first game.  Healing is a bit streamlined – like most shooters these days, duck behind cover for a bit, and you’re all better, and medi-gels are exclusively used for reviving your team when they get beat down.  The shield display is much better, and you can tell quite clearly how much is left.  Of course, being a third-person shooter, zoom is limited, and there’s no really solid iron-sights mode for precision attacks – only the sniper rifle has a scope, and only a few classes can actually use it.

All that being said, the difficulty generally isn’t too bad, unless an enemy is allowed to get up close – unless you take immediate action, you’ll usually be cut apart by the time you can react to the enemy’s presence.  Often, your teammates will be able to help with that, but get caught out alone, and you’re in trouble – this is what led to my first “critical mission failure” in one of the earlier missions (and yes, having your character shot to bits is a pretty critical failure).  Luckily, this is somewhat mitigated by being able to save in any non-combat situations, and an autosave feature quick enough to take me back only to the beginning of the battle, instead of earlier on in the level.  This means that even failing a section doesn’t seem, at least at this point, to require significant backtracking.

-It should be noted that there are technically fewer weapons available, but each of the weapons is relatively unique, in that each has its own specific qualities (as opposed to ME1, where everything was just basic variations of stats, but for the most part looked and fired the same).  There are also additional weapons types to use, which makes things feel a bit fresher.  The weapons also pack some punch to them, and they feel less vague than in ME1.  Additionally, upgrades and different weapons are available on a tiered system, and there’s no more nightmarish inventory management that must be completed all the time.  Technically, this makes for less overall variation, but it takes away one of the tedious features of the original.

Of course, not all of the changes are necessarily as good.  Instead of unlimited ammo but with a cooldown and risk of overheating, someone decided that the best way to manage the heat was to create ejectable heat sinks to keep the heat away.  So, no more overheating…  but also no more unlimited ammo.  These weapons, apparently, can’t fire without the heatsink clips, so all weapons have a fairly limited number of shots.  This will mean that you will run out of ammo for your favored weapon in a heated firefight, and will be stuck using a backup weapon.  This change is ridiculous, especially in light of the technology used in the first game, and makes combat a bit more frustrating (on the upside, though, ejecting the heatsinks does look pretty cool).

-Skills are also quite simplified, which is kind of a toss-up: less customization, but an easier-to-use system.  There are also fewer powers available, but those which are are usually a bit more potent than in the original, and certainly more varied.

-Oh, and the minigames.  The original minigame was decent, if a bit frustrating, but the new game has a trio of them.  Two are for hacking locks: one is basically a memory-type game with a countdown timer, the other is a game where you try to find identical images.  Both of them are tolerable, but not particularly fun, and they are at least generally solvable (unlike the pipe-shuffling abomination in the original Bioshock).  However, there’s also no using omnigel to get around them, so you have to do them every time, which can get tedious.  And speaking of tedious…  In the original, to collect resources, all you had to do was go to a planet and hit the “survey” button, and you were done.  Now, all the surveying has to be done by hand, which means scanning your mouse over an entire globe, looking for elusive deposits with a stuttering graph.  While it can be fun for a while, this mechanism has the potential to get tedious quickly (and I’m talking fossil-unearthing in Spectrobes kind of tedious).

Finally, some random gameplay observations:

- All the graphics look good, maybe slightly better than the original, but not by much.
-The new Normandy has a better layout and is a bit more friendly to walk around, and the mapping functions work much better in the “hub” areas (there are no maps in combat zones, only an objective marker, which is generally fine due to the fairly strict linearity of the missions – you’re rarely afforded the opportunity to walk very far off the beaten path).
-Commerce is also easier – the buying interface clearly outlines what each item does, and there’s basically no selling, a side effect of the limited inventory management.
-The codex is back, with way too much information, only this time it’s written with much less attention to grammar, and narrated verbatim – you’d think the guy reading it would kinda catch on, but it doesn’t seem to faze him.
-There’s plenty of plot and dialogue again, and you’ll quickly get tired of reading it all, especially if you try to exhaust all of the conversation options.
-You still can’t bloody jump, the scourge of Bioware games, apparently, since time immemorial.
-I’m not sure if there are grenades any more, besides a grenade launcher, which makes cover combat even more of a pain, although I suppose heavy weapons are supposed to make up for this.  The ammo available for shotguns and sniper rifles is shamefully low, at least at the start.
-Loading times are quite reasonable, with decently animated interstitials.  A few airlock-style doors, but no more slow elevators.

Overall – quite a few improvements, combat is definitely more fluid and exciting, but there are also some things that I miss from the original, and a few gameplay mechanics that frustrate rather than improve gameplay.  So far, so good, and you’ll end up playing far longer than you intend.

Now that I’ve completed one entire playthrough of the game, here are some additional thoughts on Borderlands.

While Borderlands is, to a certain extent, an open-world game, it is much less so than more traditional “streaming” open-world games, for example Fallout 3 or Oblivion.  The game is broken up into various zones, with various tasks to complete in each – newer zones usually only unlock as you complete missions that advance the main storyline.  While there are a handful of missions that go back to earlier areas, once you’ve completed the missions in the area, there is usually little incentive to return – the enemies by then are too low-level to give you much in the way of benefits, and there is nothing else to achieve.  So, in a sense, the game is open-world in the sense that you can do tasks and visit arenas in the order that you want, but on the whole, the progression is mostly linear.  Of course, as the game is based less on exploration and much more on the arenas of combat created throughout the levels, this isn’t entirely a bad thing, but if exploration is more your thing, you’d probably be much better served by choosing a more traditional RPG (I hear Dragon Age is bloody huge, but I’ve been playing too much Borderlands to even consider it – and, of course, if you’d rather just have more story and less guns, Fallout 3 is a good, if slower-paced, choice).

The art style of the game is certainly interesting, and the hand-drawn textures and colorful atmosphere serve as welcome respite from the usual drab color schemes of most downtrodden or post-apocalyptic worlds.  The character designs are all right, and some of the enemies are quite well-done – one particular enemy, the Badass Skag, continues to both awe and terrify me whenever I come across it.  Admittedly, some of the textures aren’t as nice up close, but the simpler style works better than the usual “realistic” textures that degrade far more on close examination.  Also, certain sections can look a bit on the drab side – oh, hey, here’s some more generic canyons – but given how often you’re dragged into combat while moving about, there’s not a lot of time to stop and comment on the scenery.

While the world is colorful, and full of intense battles, the ambience leaves a bit to be desired.  Sure, the world is populated by people, but aside from a few charismatic characters, the only real NPCs who are present at all are the enemies themselves.  The other characters are more or less welded to whatever spot they’re initially standing on, and most rarely move, meaning that a lot of them are indistinguishable from the scenery – and, honestly, from each other.  I can think of perhaps a half-dozen unique characters in the game that you don’t end up shooting in the head.  Of course, being part of the background, none of the non-enemy NPCs take particular notice of you – most barely have any lines, their missives instead listed as static text in a quest-completion window.  (And speaking of the voices, the character voices are generally okay, but sparsely used – Roland is probably the best, sounding like a gung-ho soldier type, Brick sounds sufficiently angry, and Mordecai pleasantly sarcastic; Lilith’s voice, to put it politely, is distinctly unpleasant to listen to.)   They’re also wholly non-interactive – if they don’t have a quest for you, trying to interact with them spits out a canned line of dialogue at best.  Other than that, they’re like a piece of scenery – attempting to loot (i.e. pickpocket) or shoot them has no effect whatsoever.  This is particularly disappointing because, later on in the game, you’ll definitely feel like shooting at least one of them in the face repeatedly – but more on that later.

The quests themselves, as they are, are pretty unremarkable, and require little thought – essentially, they’re simply bait to get you fight hordes of enemies in various arenas and dungeons set up throughout the game, with reward object X either at the end of the arena, scattered along the way, or dropped by the area’s respective boss.  Given that the combat is really the meat of the game, with little else to do beyond it, the quests serve the purpose of vaguely advancing the story and getting you into one fight or another, but that’s about it.  Skill trees, levels, and loot management aside, this game really is FPS first, with a side order of RPG-lite.  If RPG elements are more your thing, again, I’d have to recommend something like Fallout 3 over this (or any other RPG with decent guns, if any recent ones exist) – but if you like shooting things in the head first and foremost, with some RPG added to spice things up a little, you won’t be disappointed.

Honestly, the gunplay – and guns – are where the most fun is.  Vehicle combat is okay, if unimaginative – you get two samey weapons, and most of the time, you can just run over anything you can see on screen for easy XP.  Outside of that, though, the combat is intense, the weapons are generally fun to use, and the AI is smart enough to give you a bit of a challenge, especially in the later levels.  When you’re in combat, making use of everything you have at your disposal to win, it’s easy to lose track of time, and when you’re not in combat, you usually wish you were.  When you’re wandering around a “safe” town, with nothing much to do, you’ll want to spend as little time as you can resupplying and getting new quests so you can get back into the fray.

Of course, the battle is pretty much all about the guns.  While each character has a special skill that they can deploy, the various guns in the game are the main event.  While it’s true that the procedural system can generate all sorts of interesting stuff, many of the guns seem quite similar, with little besides stats to distinguish between them (although this is somewhat ameliorated by the time you get into the later levels).  In fact, in many ways, the system is similar to Mass Effect, but with seven standard weapon types instead of four.  Admittedly, it does go a bit beyond that, but there are only so many base models of weapons, with the occasional cosmetic change and difference in color scheme.  Additionally, instead of being able to add various mods to different weapons, as in Mass Effect, each weapon comes pre-equipped with various features, and so it all depends on what is randomly generated for you.  Most of the common guns in Borderlands are quite similar, albeit with a bit more variation than Mass Effect (which had about two weapon models for each type, and a bunch of color palatte shifts) – different scopes and other design bits, but still, overall may of the models look quite similar.  The real difference is that, unlike in Mass Effect, the stats actually have an impact on how the weapons perform, and you’ll definitely be able to tell the difference between using a mediocre weapon and a high-quality one.  Rarer weapons also have much more in the way of unique qualities and elemental effects, and some – usually recovered from various bosses – have some rather unique shots and capabilities (and, now that the game is patched, you can actually see each weapon’s full collection of characteristics without having to edit config files).

While having some variation is nice, though, the quest is generally to find the best guns you can, and stick with them until something better comes along.  This means that, despite all the variation in weapons, most of the stuff you pick up is going to be used as little more than a chunk of cash that takes up a slot in your inventory until you get to a vending machine to sell it off (thankfully, the game doesn’t bother with any bartering nonsense – the price you see on a loot item is the price you collect, which makes selecting which loot to haul back much easier).  Really, weapons are everywhere – in vending machines at first, mostly, sometimes in crates, but also frequently dropped by enemies as the game progresses.  Sorting through it all can often be overwhelming, especially due to the randomness of the stats – sometimes, I’e come across a “common” (white or green class) weapon that works far better in practical use than a super-rare purple or orange one.

And when something works, you use it, especially in the class of weapons you’re particularly proficient in.  Despite having picked up hundreds of weapons across my first playthrough (as soldier), I could accurately describe the game as “A Tale of Three Rifles.”  Or, I suppose, really a tale of three Cobras – a class of accurate, scoped, hard-hitting, fast-firing rifle that more than gets the job done.  The first, an Air Cobra, was powerful enough to get me most of the way through the Dahl Headlands, only to be replaced by an even better Blast Cobra, which added some explosive damage to the mix.  Then, by level 25, a vending machine pulled up the War Cobra, a non-elemental but high-damage weapon, which I used pretty much singlehandedly to beat the final boss of the game, much later, at level 36, and a gun that still has a permanent place in my active equipment well into my second playthrough – simply because, since that time, nothing has come along that does a better job against absolutely everything.  Sure, there were plenty of other guns that were somewhat useful – later on, I got a static sniper rifle able to quickly put heavily shielded enemies out of their mercy, and a corrosive revolver that, with one shot against any non-badass crimson lance soldier, would virtually guarantee their demise a few seconds later.  While those, and others, were fun to play around with and added some much-needed variety, they were all quite secondary, and I’m convinced that I probably would have been able to beat everything in the game, from level 25 onward, with just that one single rifle and the action skill.  And while that rifle was great, it would have been nice if the game had actually given me some weapons that were capable enough to give it a run for its money.  Having different weapons and effects for different enemies sounds like a good idea to add some tactical complexity, but it becomes less compelling when some other weapon can easily replace all of them in terms of effectiveness, especially across that span of time.  That’s not to say that I don’t love that rifle – and I’d probably kick and scream if you tried to pry it away from my character.  I guess what I’m trying to get at is, randomization or not, you ought to be able to get cool new “the best evar” weapons on a regular basis as the game progresses.  The fact that there was one awesome rifle at a fairly middling level, and nothing nearly as good after that, seems to be a weakness.  A million different gun combinations is all well and good, but when 99% of those combos yield guns that aren’t all that effective or fun to play, that number loses a lot of its punch.  Add into that the notion that most guns are not nearly unique, but rather variations on a theme, and out of all those combinations, you’re desperately looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack that stands out at all from the crowd of near-identical weapons.  (I should note that on playthroughs with other characters, I was able to get a variety of effective weaponry, but there is a consistent pattern of being unable to find accurate, high-damage combat rifles, and when that’s your character’s specialty, it does get a bit frustrating.  Go for a different specialty, though, such as Mordecai’s Sniper and Pistol proficiencies, and all of a sudden you’ve got a veritable feast of effective options – but others, such as the selection of launchers for Brick, are decidedly less useful.)

Again, that being said…  even with a lot of sameness, by and large, most of the weapons are fun to play around with.  Admittedly, the early shotguns, submachineguns, and slow-firing pistols are a bit on the lackluster side, but most of the later weapons are quite fun to use.  The revolvers provide plenty of power, as do most of the assault rifles, and the rocket launchers make quite a boom (although the area effect seems dodgy – a low wall can offer complete protection from enemy rockets, and unless you’re aiming directly for an enemy’s feet, even a shot that’s a bit off provides next to no splash damage).  The sniper rifles are a bit on the variable side, with the clip-fed, faster-firing ones generally turning out to be much more useful (the lag between shots on the slower rifles can quickly become aggravating, something that frustrates on the slower-firing shotguns as well).  Some of the repeater pistols, even later on, can be fairly lackluster, although the TMP-style guns are quite fun and serve as a generally effective backup or alternative to your SMG.  The elemental effects also add quite a bit, especially on the slower-firing weapons, as the continuous effect of a successful hit can make up for the slower firing rate, or allow a charging enemy to effectively take itself down before it reaches you, giving you a precious opportunity to reload.  All in all, variation aside, most of the guns feel like they pack a punch, which is an important thing to have in an FPS-centric game.

So, overall, the combat is quite good, and gets better – and tougher – towards the end of the game.  The plot, on the other hand…  needs some work.  Let me just say, at this point, the next part is going to be full of spoilers, so if you don’t want to see them , you might want to skip this part.

The plot, in summary:  You’re on this planet, Pandora, in order to track down this thing called the Vault, which has all sorts of cool alien weapons and awesome stuff inside it – or so everyone says.  As you go along, an incredibly shrill, incredibly annoying holographic lady shows up on your HUD to tell you a bunch of annoying nonsense that doesn’t tell you anything more useful than what’s already present in the text for the various quests.  So, you go around, doing various random stuff that, nevertheless, moves you steadily forward towards the vault.  Then there are a bunch of plot twists, the bandits give up but a bunch of soldiers come in to claim the vault, and the last levels become quite linear as you fight both the soldiers and alien vault guardians in a slow, grinding process that eventually leads towards the vault.

(As an aside:  along with the normal weaponry present in the game, there are also supposedly Eridian weapons, which are from the various alien defenders.  Up to now, I’ve found just one of these, in the hands of a human level boss.  You’d think that, as you fight the alien guardians, they’d drop some more of these cool weapons, but think again – despite shooting at you with them, when they’re killed, most often they drop nothing at all, or when they do, they drop ultra-common regular weapons like assault rifles!  How does that make any sense at all?  I’ve seen a few more on subsequent playthroughs, but they’re far more rare than they perhaps ought to be, especially given that the main plot of the game is supposedly all about finding them.)

Okay, so you do all of that, and you fight your way to the Vault, where the leader of the soldiers, dick that she is, laughs at you and uses the key to unlock the vault. (I mean, seriously, she can hold you at bay with two Lance soldiers?  By that point, you can pretty much empty an entire base full of them without breaking a sweat…)  The bloody thing finally opens, and what is revealed?  Cool technology?  Big, shiny weapons?  Nope – one giant angry tentacle blob that quickly offs all the soldiers and turns into the final boss.  Honestly, the thing is more like a shmup boss than anything else – the basic idea is to run around like mad, dodging all its attacks, while pumping hundreds of bullets into the thing until it dies.  Now that it’s dead… big, shiny weapons, right?  Nope – even though it’s the final boss, all it drops is a bunch of ammo, a bit of cash, and some super-common weapons.  And, of course, the holographic crazy lady shows up for one final screw-you moment, filling you in on the fact that her whole deal was to con you with promises of loot, just to get you over to the vault in order to ensure that the bicentennial horror was defeated – obviously, the hundreds of other soldiers and vault guardians lurking about weren’t nearly enough to take care of it.  So, deflated, robbed of any decent end-game reward, you slink back to the scientist who helped you out earlier to give her the now-worthless key to the Vault.  And what does she give you?  Something cool?  Some penultimate weapon as a reward for beating the game?  Nope – she just pays you some cash in order to “buy your silence” and blows you off.  So, needless to say, she got to say hello to one high-caliber corrosive revolver round.  Then three more.  Then, most of a clip from a submachinegun.  Of course, since she’s yet another non-interactive NPC, she just stood there, showing absolutely no reaction as acid and explosions sparked across her body.  I would have gotten more reaction if I’d shot one of the ubiquitous explosive barrels.  Even in this last, futile act of revenge against the plot, I was denied.  Finally, I headed back to the Middle of Nowhere (oddly, my favorite location in the game) and quit – there was, literally, nothing else to do.

Of course, soon after that, I began my second playthrough, which really is quite a different beast than the original game.  Right out of the gate, you’re facing high-level enemies – on a supposedly easy early mission, to go and collect some stolen food from some low-level skaggs, I was suddenly facing a huge, badass-style one that could breathe fire – along with a regular badass one and a half-dozen others.  Needless to say, it was one heck of a fight.  The second playthrough also gives you even more new weapons, and some of them are pretty powerful – even so, I think I’ll hold onto that rifle.

I suppose I should also talk about the multiplayer, but honestly, there isn’t very much to say – I’ve never actually been able to play with my friends, because I can’t connect to them.  Some are on console, which apparently can’t play with the PC version, and I can’t seem to figure out how to connect with PC players either.  I’ll certainly give it another try – but so far, all I can say about multiplayer is that it’s a jumbled, confusing mess that doesn’t get the job done.

So, overall, despite all my complaints, I still think that Borderlands is quite the awesome game, and I’ve logged many tens of hours with it since its release.  Is it the best game ever?  Probably not… but then again, I’m not sure if any game I’ve ever played could live up to that.  It has its strengths and weaknesses, but what it does focus on, it does remarkably well.  If you’re looking for an immersive storyline and expansive environment, there are other games out there that better fit the bill.  But if you like guns, lots of guns, and using them on a whole lot of angry things, it’s hard to get much better than this.