Feels like I’m going to lose my mind
So I’m playing this Borderlands game, right? I’ve kind of had my eye on it since it came out, and Steam decided to sell it to me for cheap. So I bought it.
It’s pretty good, even if it’s had this goddamn song stuck in my head since I got it. That video doesn’t even make any sense by cheesy pop video standards. But do you remember when she was hot? So does this guy.
What was I talking about again? Ah yes — the Borderlands. So the game opens with an unskippable transport-riding sequence, as has been the rule since 1998 or so. This time there’s a big damn song playing in the background, and I have to admit it’s refreshing to play a game that opens with a music video that isn’t some awful J-pop. Apparently in the future we’ll still have the 90’s, since this song is pretty much a paint-by-numbers 90’s indie rock bit. But, hey, I’ve heard worse songs at the beginning of video games before.
Once you’re actually playing the game — and you’re out of the painfully slow tutorial — you’ll find that it’s like a wacky combination of World of Warcraft and Serious Sam. You get a bunch of different guns, and you fight waves of crazy dudes and like futuristic space dogs, but also you level up and have talent trees and collect loot. The loot is colour-coded exactly the way you’d expect if you’ve played a game since World of Warcraft came out, since all the games now use the exact same colours. Here’s my current assault weapon. Notice how the name’s in purple? HEPIX, fool! And it comes with double the anarchy. That’s fucking twice as much. No fooling.
So the game’s pretty fun. You go on quests and get loots and it’s all good. It doesn’t talk at you altogether that often, which is good, since it tends to make a fool of itself whenever it does. The voice acting’s tolerable but not particularly good; the dialogue is the problem. It’s frequently supposed to be funny, but it has no confidence in itself and ends up announcing the jokes and underscoring them in an attempt to make really sure you didn’t miss them. It’s enough to ruin the jokes even if they were good in the first place, which, really, they’re not. Example: you’ll meet this blind guy named… something or other. It’s really not important. The key is that he’s blind. And one of the things he can say when you leave is "I’ll see you later. I’ll see you — see you later." And I’m like, game, you had him say "see" three fucking times, the last time around with totally absurd emphasis on it. This is not how you use comical dialogue.
So there’s that. The other thing that bugs me so far is that the zones don’t seem to be terribly varied. To run down the list of places I’ve been so far: desert, desert, desert, cave in the desert, desert, fort in the desert. I’m led to believe that I’m in the fort looking for a key so I can get into the mine in the desert. And my long term goal? To find a vault! In… probably the desert. We’ll see.
