Yes, I know I’m late to the party (borrowed it from a friend) and yes, I know it’s been said before, and yes, I know the game is really a vehicle for months of online player vs player gun toting action, and finally, yes I know that I could repeat the single player campaign on different difficulty settings, but, all that said, just over 7 hours of gameplay for the single player campaign at the selling price is shockingly bad value.

We’ve had Guitar Hero for a few years on a couple of platforms (Wii and PS3, the PS3 version is better, the Wii version made a horrible noise when you missed a note and was very distracting).  We also recently bought Band Hero despite the fact that there’s only two of us in the house.  We love the games, we keep trying to find a copy of Rock Band (and Rock Band 2) second hand although they’re still expensive, because they’re still popular.

It amuses me when I hear people talking about how ’sad it is’ to play Guitar Hero and how they feel it’s not good for kids in case ‘they think they’re playing a real instrument’ and it puts them off playing a proper guitar or learning the drums or whatever.

In fact, it’s worse than amusing, it’s annoying.  Firstly, we know it’s not a real guitar folks.  In fact, if you try and treat it like a guitar you’ll not do very well in the game.  You have to treat it like a game controller (which, amazingly it is) and treat winning like playing a game of hitting the colours.  It helps to have good manual dexterity and it helps to have a good sense of rhythm and it can be useful to know the song, but these aren’t critical.  It’s entirely possible to ace songs with the sound muted, because it’s about pressing the right colour at the right time.

It feels to me that it’s only some part time musicians who feel a little threatened by the fun that people can have playing Guitar Hero and similar games.  Those of us having fun playing them know they’re games, know they don’t make us musicians and know that it’s only a controller.

I never, even as a kid, truly thought I could fly a jet fighter just because I played T.L.L. on the Spectrum for hours on end.  I suspect kids playing Guitar Hero or Band Hero or Rock Band know even better than their parents that it’s a game controller they’re handling and not a real instrument.  But you know what?  If it gets them interested in music and being musical and if it encourages cooperative gaming rather than purely competitive gaming then how can that be a bad thing?

If you are deluded enough to think the little plastic thing in your hands is a real golf club and that you learned to play golf in front of your Wii, maybe you’re better off not playing Guitar Hero, but for the rest of us, we know it’s a game, we know it’s a game controller and we don’t care.  It’s fun.

I still don’t buy many games for the PS3, but after finishing up the ones we had in the house I was looking for something fun and engaging.  I saw the following quote for Borderlands and thought I’d give it a shot (no pun intended),

87 bazillion guns

I’d also read a couple of comments about it being much like Fallout 3 but with more emphasis on the first person shooter element, and since I really loved Fallout 3 I was sold.  After the obligatory patch and system update, I was up and running.  I own a PS3, so my comments reflect that platform, although the game is available on most major gaming platforms.

The Setting

The first thing that struck me about the game setting is that it’s not only similar to Fallout 3, it could be Fallout 3.  The game takes place on Pandora, an apparently post-apocalyptic world full of bandits, small outposts of humanity and strange creatures.  There’s clearly plenty of advanced technology around including robots, satellites, big satellite uplinks, transport systems, etc., but the world has basically gone to shit and is overrun by gun wielding bandits of all shapes and sizes.  The human settlements have a distinctly movie-wild-west feel and although there aren’t any cowboy hats in view you get the feeling this is the Wild West by any other name.

The world is broken up into zones or distinct maps of various sizes.  Most of them are large, open areas but there are a few underground cavernous locations and one or two extensive indoor/industrial locations.  As you progress in power the story naturally progresses you through these different places.  I felt some of them were underused with only a few quests while others were heavily packed with content.   Some major locations contain quest centres (and so, friendly NPC’s) and you return to those often to pick up new quest or hand-in completed quests, while the other areas have mostly unfriendly NPC’s and are there for you to quest in.

The artwork is pretty impressive (although somewhat repetitive), and the game has a pretty big sense of scale.  Despite the size of some locations however, they still manage to feel very claustrophobic when required which is nice.

The Characters

Since it’s a roleplaying game (with FPS elements), there are a number of classes you can choose from.  There are four main characters, each representing a single class.

• Soldier: A mercenary style character who favours combat rifles and shotguns.
• Siren: The only female character, a wielder of elemental powers and sub-machine guns.
• Hunter: A scrawny individual who likes sniper rifles.
• Berserker: A huge brick of a man, preferring exploding devices and hitting things with his fists.

Each of the characters has a little bit of back-story, and the game intro presents them to you to give you an idea what they’re about.  The characters vary based on the skills they can spend points in when they level up along with a single unique skill each of them gets.  Soldiers have a deployable auto-gun, the Siren can turn invisible, the Hunter can summon a flying pet and the Berserker can go into a rage.  The additional skills support the class in various ways.  For example, Soldiers can improve their deployed gun, can give themselves ammo regeneration, increase their resistance to bullets, etc.  I completed the game with Soldier and have messed around briefly with the others.  On the assumption that the game boils down to ’shooting everything you can find before it kills you’, the choice of class really only affects how you kill stuff and where you spend your money.

In the multi-player game, the class choices can support each other (for example, Soldiers can heal other characters with gunfire if they spend points in the right skill).

The Game-play

Borderlands boils down to ‘complete quests to gain levels and better gear and follow the main quest to complete the story’.  Not much different to Fallout 3 in that respect, although Borderlands makes it even easier to find side quests because they pop up in central locations and a little friendly robot shouts at you when there are new quests available.

Completing quests can involve killing enemies, locating objects or people and even buying equipment.  You are rewarded with experience points (so that you can level) and cash (so you can buy new equipment).  When you gain a new level you earn a skill point which you can use to customise your character.  It’s not possible to purchase all the skills so you’re going to end up specialised in some areas.

Equipment can be bought from some locations, found on dead enemies and looted from chests.  New equipment takes the following forms,

• Guns – there probably are 87 bazillion guns, but if you’re being cynical it’s because most of them are randomly generated and vary only in minor ways.  There are 8 classes of gun (combat rifle, repeater (automatic pistol), revolver, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, sub-machine gun, alien weapons) and your character improves in their skill for each as they kill things with them.  Guns have varying amounts of damage, recoil, elemental damage (e.g. fire or acid), clip size, zoom, etc., etc.  Those attributes are generally randomly generated to result in the huge range of choice.  A lot of game time can be spent trying to find the ‘best’ gun in each of the categories you care about.
• Grenades and grenade mods – grenades are carried around like ammunition, and you can equip a single grenade mod.  Grenade mods change how your grenades work and how much damage they do.  For example, turning them into proximity mines, bouncing bombs or even devices which transfer health from your enemies to you.
• Class mods – a device which improves the effectiveness of your class skills (one equipped at a time at most).
• Shields – again, your character can equip a single shield which provides defences against incoming damage, increases health, and other benefits.
• Other – there are some other items in the game which I won’t go into, the above four are the ones you spend most time working out what to do with.

The quests are generally enjoyable and the mechanics usually engaging.  However, they do get repetitive.  It’s great killing 8 bandits, until you realise that just about any quest you complete needs you to kill 15-20 bandits and get into their camp to find something.  I guess it’s the nature of the FPS element, which brings me to …

The main difference between this RPG and others, is that combat is purely based on FPS tactics.  You have a gun, a cross-hair and the bad guys are shooting at you.  So you will need your regular FPS skill-set.  However, because it’s an RPG you can scale the game to your own skill level.  If you’re struggling, you can hang around an area killing stuff and getting a level or two and then retry a quest with your new found power.  I like that aspect, and when I found the quests getting too hard, I put in a bit of work and levelled and found the level at which I was more comfortable.

The Storyline

Borderlands has you chasing down a secret, hidden, mysterious vault (Fallout 3 much?) on Pandora.  You’re dumped from a bus outside a little settlement (so little it only has one person in it), which you immediately have to rescue from bandits.  Along the way you meet a robot (Claptrap) who shows you around, and are visited by a mysterious voice in your head (your guardian angel) who tells you to trust the robot.  From there, it’s all about the quests.  You start earning the trust of the locals while also trying to find out more about the vault.  As you progress through the storyline you learn small bits about the aliens who inhabited the planet and the corporations who are fighting over the vault.  However, it’s a pretty minimalist storyline to be fair, and most of the time is spent hunting down bad guys, terminating them with extreme prejudice and looting more stuff to sell.

The major quest line is pretty easy to spot and follow, although you’ll need to do the side quests to increase in power enough to achieve anything.  In many cases, the side quests are more entertaining.  The only issue is that they do get repetitive, there are only so many ways to say ‘travel to here, through these bad guys who you will need to kill, and collect something’.  I was a little disappointed with the end sequence of the game but won’t spoil it here for you.

Multi-Player

The multi-player element of Borderlands is probably pretty good.  However, I’ve never played it so I can’t comment.  You can play two-player split screen on one console, on-line, or LAN based.  It’s co-operative multi-player, I believe, with no PvP element.  Having said that, there is a duel option, so during the game you can duel your opponents.  This is outside of the main scope of the multi-player game though, in my view.

Closing Comments

Borderlands was good fun in general.  I did get a little bored a couple of times after a long session, doing very similar missions over and over, but a break from the game helped, and coming back with fresh eyes made it enjoyable again.  I loved being able to scale the game myself, I’m not a huge FPS lover and I don’t have the skills of the average 8 year old, so being able to outlevel the bad guys when required really did make the game more enjoyable.  Another feature which helped avoid the repetition was that bad guys don’t chase you for ever.  If you’ve cleared a camp, and the bad guys are back and you can’t face killing them all again – just run through.  If you survive, they give up after a while, you just need to find a place you can get to which is safe.  Some people might hate those two features, saying they make the game too easy, but they allowed me to enjoy the content, play at my own pace, and complete the game without getting too frustrated.

The boss encounters were a little underwhelming, but I guess they match most FPS bosses (scoot-and-shoot the glowing bits), the cinematic style and boss info made them worthwhile in the end.

There’s definite replay value in the game, either as one of the other classes, or the same class with different skill choices.  Once you’ve completed the game on Walkthrough 1 you can start again on Walkthrough 2 with the same character, level and equipment.  All the enemies are boosted to your level, so the little dog-like beasts you killed at level 1 are now level 33 and ready to chew your face off.  I can see myself trying to beat it a second time before even trying another class.

Borderlands held my attention for the 5 or 6 days it took to finish it, provided something like 20+ hours of game-play on one run through, and had plenty of humour to keep me amused.  Well worth the asking price, in my view (if you accept that games cost what games cost), and I’ll probably hold onto it to see if there’s any downloadable content I want to see.

I recently completed this game on the PS3 and wanted to write a short post about it.  It’s such an unusual game, and yet I enjoyed it a huge amount.  The game is a mixture of anime, first-person shooter, turn-based strategy and roleplaying game, without really being any of those things fully.  The game story unfolds through the use of animated stories about a bunch of central characters who have become involved in a war.  Various chapters open up as the story develops, and each of those chapters has a number of battles.   The stories aren’t interactive, you watch and listen.  But the characters are interesting and the plot engaging.

When you get to a battle, you take control of a squad of troops who you can equip (and you can research new equipment), and train (to improve levels and gain new abilities) and then run through the fight.  The battle itself is a mix of first-person and turn based.  You pick a character to control from a turn-like map, you then control that character directly in first-person mode, running them through the battle dodging bullets.  When you want to engage the enemy you switch to a control system that stops time and lets you aim at a single target, at which point you fire your weapon and then return to real time.  You cycle through your squad, moving them and engaging the enemy over a number of rounds to achieve your objective.  When you do, you’re rewarded with more story and more chapters.

That’s an ugly description of a beautiful game.  The artwork is superb, the characters quirky and amusing and the game play truly engaging.  If you have a PS3 this is a must buy – and it’s been out long enough now that you should be able to pick it up quite cheaply.

I’m really enjoying games on the PlayStation.  I have to say that it’s a much more engaging activity than playing similar games on a PC with the keyboard.  I didn’t realise how much I disliked playing things like Bioshock with the keyboard vs the PS3 controller (only the demo, but it still stands true).  After enjoying Resident Evil 5 (and still going back to it now and then to play through on a harder setting), I thought I’d give Dead Space a go.  I really wanted to play Left 4 Dead after hearing good things but it’s not available on the PS3 and due to my comments a second ago I won’t be getting it for the PC.  On a side note, this is one area where Microsoft and all the major console manufacturers really piss me off, but I may save that for another post (unless I already moaned about it in the past).

So anyway, saw Dead Space second hand and had seen a review on TV which looked cool, and some clips on the web so picked it up.  It’s superb.  The gameplay is engaging and the graphics are well done, but what really sets this game apart as an experience is the sound and music.  Oh. My. God.  The sound drags you in and sticks you in the middle of the game, ramping the tension and excitement levels through the roof.  We’ve got an as-cheap-as-you-can-get surround sound system, with badly located speakers, but the game still managed to freak me out completely.  The range of ambient sounds is huge, and they really fit the locations down to a tee.  When you’re walking down a badly lit corridor and you hear something scuttle overhead in the air ducts, you really, really, want to look up in the real world.

You can hear things bumping into others things, items being dropped, canisters being knocked over, foot steps, squelches and any number of ambient noises which really make you feel like the experience is that much more real.  The music is excellent and the non-ambient sound effects are pretty impressive too.   The most accomplished element of the sound though for me is when you’re character is in a vacuum.  Ok, vacuum’s should transfer no sound, but total silence wouldn’t be much fun.  The quiet whump whump whump of the pulse rifle instead of the regular gun noise was just so excellent.  The vacuum noises just increased the sense of claustrophobia that the rest of the game imposes.

Overall it was really enjoyable, and although the actual story is weak in places the action was engaging and the slightly different approach to combat made it more interesting (headshots are not your friend in Dead Space).  The sound made sure the game went from ‘fun’ to ‘adrenaline fuelled fun’.  If you like survival horror, sci-fi horror, survival sci-fi horror, shooting dead things, and being scared to go to the toilet on your own, Dead Space is for you.

Is Aliens one of the most quotable movies of all time, or is it just my imagination?  What makes it so quotable?  Is it that I spend a lot of my time moving around in tight spaces armed with a pulse rifle?  Is it because I long to join the Space Marines and wake up in my underwear after an extended sleep?  Probably not.  But the film does have lots of excellent short quotes for nearly every occasion (that involves shooting things).

I played Dead Space on the PS3 today, it’s fun (in a scary OMG what’s that moving over there OMG it’s going to eat my face) kind of way.  One of the weapons is a Pulse Rifle.  I said today at least three times, short controlled bursts, to remind myself how best to use the weapon.

As if,

1. it’s a real weapon
2. I actually know how to use one
3. I was shooting real aliens

It’s funny really.  The funniest moment of course was 10 seconds after reminding myself to use short controlled bursts, a necromorph jumped out of an overhead vent and landed on me and I unloaded a full 50 round clip into it in one continuous long uncontrolled burst.

Despite not being very good at ’shooters’, I picked up a second hand copy of Resident Evil 5 for the PS3.  I’m playing it on the easiest level it has and it’s fun, certainly engaging.  I was frustrated by the first ‘boss’ encounter which seemed to auto-kill me every time I tried until I worked out I had to get out of the room, but after that it’s been entertaining.

The only major downside is probably because I’m playing it on easy, which means my inventory gets full quickly because I don’t chew through healing stuff (don’t get me wrong, I suck enough that I die and I still need to use the healing things, but I’m not using them so quickly that they don’t sit in my inventory for ages).  Also, I know I’m not making effective use of grenades, which is why I usually end up selling them by the bucket load.

One thing I do like a lot, even though it’s not entirely visible to me, is that the game adapts the difficulty even withing the set difficulty levels, based on how well you’re doing.  So if you die a lot, the enemies get a little easier and if you’re doing really well and not getting hit, they get a little tougher.

There are enough checkpoints to avoid too much frustration of re-doing stages, and there’s a checkpoint before any moment which can lead to sudden death.  There’s also a good range of different styles of game play.  A lot of it is moving around carefully and killing the bad guys, there’s some out-right grenade your way out of a mess, some cut scenes which rely on you hitting the right buttons when prompted to avoid deadly danger, different kinds of boss fights and some nice tactical elements.  My favourite moment so far, was entering an area filled with zombie-soliders in tactical gear, and watching them come into the room in single file like you see SWAT / military types in movies do.  You have to hide behind crates and pop around while they reload to take them out, moving your way through the room.  It was such a different style to the early crazy-zombie encounters and very refreshing.  I really enjoyed that.

I also like the way you can stop at any point, restart the game, but keep your gear.  For someone as inept as me, this gives me the chance to build up some decent weapons (by upgrading them), and then trying the game on a harder setting (like, normal) without getting immediately wasted.

All-in-all, I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying it, I was looking for something with a more roleplaying element, and when the shop didn’t have anything I sort of picked up RE5 expecting to be frustrated.  But it’s proven to be engaging, entertaining and fun.

That’s me on the right and Grete on the left!  Sorry we’re not smiling

We bought a second controller for the PS3 today (took back some games we had for the Wii, got £24 for them, and used that to aid in the purchase of the controller, and bought our Tesco groceries with the £25 we had in Tesco vouchers, and used the £25 we saved on the controller, and Lego Indiana Jones).  We’ve spent about 4 hours playing LittleBigPlanet two player and I’ve not laughed and cried so hard in years.

Lego Indiana Jones is fun two player, but it’s also more high-stress than LBP – which is just fun and crazy and stomach-achingly funny at times.