Borderlands what Fallout3 could have been.

So Fallout3 was one of my most anticipated games, and a great game to boot, except for the fact that you couldn't kill kids, which i don't think would have been as annoying or noticeable if there wasn't a town full of annoying kids that you have to go through to complete the story. I am not an advocate of killing kids, which I think is the reason it got pulled, because no one had the balls to say that it was a bad idea to pull it out of the game. Fallout 1 and 2 let you kill kids, I personally think it should have been an extremely evil thing to do in the game, but the idea of a free roam game as epic in scale putting up invisible walls around certain characters in the game, based on their size is ridiculous. (I say based on size, because its a game, they are polygons, they do not have an age). For further reading on violence in video games check out this sick feature article by Michael Thomsen.

So back to the point, I've completed my first play through of Borderlands this past weekend (11/1/09) and the similarities to Fallout3 are definitely there, but it also pulls good aspects from a bunch of different games (World of Warcraft, Diablo 2, Halo 3, and Call of Duty to name a few). The driving and character movement have a very Halo 3 feel to them. The character layout and skill point resets give off WoW vibes, although in this day and age its hard to be an rpg and not give off WoW vibes. Weapon creation seems like a direct tribute to Diablo 2, and the weapons shooting feels like CoD, although the actual damage system is more reminiscent of Halo again. The co-op is also very Diablo and Halo mashed together. And all of this on a world that seems like the word of Fallout 3 mashed into Metroid style compartments.

Borderlands seems to have found quite the niche for itself, it definitely satisfies the urge for both RPG and FPS very thoroughly, and although the story is a little flimsy, it seems to hardly matter because you will be so absorbed prepping to fight your way through the next area, or back through the area you just went through that by the time you get to a story element, your so happy you have a few seconds breather that you delight in it no matter how straight forward it is. In honesty I have very few complaint I can think of for this game. I was disappointed that there is not a chest somewhere where you can keep the guns you fell in love with early in the game. I had more than a few guns that i hung onto well after I stopped using them, just because they were my goto's for a good 5-6 levels and boy were they good, but once you level up they become useless, due to the giant gap in the damage dealt and life over anything more than 4 levels. I was also definitely a bit miffed by the contents of the vault. I do still hope that the contents will be different on the second play through, and if anyone has completed said play through let me know if it is different >.<.

Overall I was delighted by Borderlands. So much so that I started playing through a second time directly following my first completion of the game. I was happy to find some new variants in the baddies that you fight ("BadMutha" comes to mind here), and that they had knocked the loot up a notch. I re-speced my character at the beginning of the 2cd play through to a different branch of my skillz tree so it was almost like playing with a new dude. That said i'll be pickin up Dragon Age tonight and Borderlands will be relegated to some dust collecting duty, but it will be back at some point, I would like to complete the second play through in the least, or if i have a friend over for more than a minute a nice co-op split screen would be fun.

(Note on Multiplayer in Borderlands: In order to play Borderlands with more than 2 people in the same game you will need more than 2 xbox 360s and more than 2 copies of the game, as you cannot do split screen and on-line or system link play at the same time)

Uncharted Concepts

I saw some rather interesting similarities in the situations that you were put in that I have noticed are a common theme in most climbing action/adventure games these days (aka Uncharted, Uncharted 2, and Prince of Persia[newest]).

So the game play was generally very rhythmically climb, fight, climb, fight, cut-scene.... but while playing through Uncharted 2 I could tell when a gun fight was going to occur in an area I was climbing through based on the population of hip high walls in the area. If your a fan of yahtzee/Zero Punctuation you may know about hip high walls from his review of Gear of War 2. But basically it is a conundrum that 3rd person cover games face, in that they want to provide many places to hide in large area's and therefore end up with semi-blended in hip high walls strewn all over the landscape at exactly the same height as each other. Now GoW is a little more shameless about this than Uncharted was, but Uncharted 2 it is noticeable, especially in the mountain top village. Perhaps different levels of cover some being better than others would have been appropriate, perhaps we as the gaming masses are not ready for that level of variability and are comfortable with knowing that when in cover we won't get shot.... except from the side or back. I eagerly await the day when the enemy model will also not be the same height all the time.

The other thing that I noticed was the consistent trend (except for the last act) to fight to a climbing puzzle, unlock the climbing puzzle, do the climbing puzzle, then fight your way out of the puzzle. The 3 major instances of this that I can think of in Uncharted2 are, the finding of the golden passport, the reveal of the location of Shamballa, and the location of Shafer's expedition which is not exactly the same, but close and equally predictable. I feel I could complain about the predictability of this but I also feel that it is a good manipulation of the intensity of the game, and follows a good intensity curve scheme. It familiarizes you with the area you are about to fight in, while letting you cool down from your previous combat and enjoying the climbing puzzle, then when you are fighting the guys coming to get you after you solved the puzzle your knowledge of the area is good enough that you are comfortable with the high intensity fight that follows, and allows for a frantic pace which emphasis's the "escape" sensation. I think this could have been varied with some instances being the way that it was in Uncharted where your entrance to a puzzle dungeons was not as commonly your exit as well. Perhaps in Uncharted3 they will find a happy medium between these two ideas.

UnCharted2, a giant leap forward and two steps back.

So the weekend before the launch of Uncharted 2 I snagged a copy of Uncharted, and played through it in a 3 day period. Then Uncharted 2 came out and I played 2/3rd the way through that by the time the weekend rolled around at which point I restarted the game and played all the way through it over the weekend. So while I still have both games fresh there are two features that I felt stepped backwards in Uncharted2 and I would like to point them out.

First is the left analog stick click(R3), which in both game makes Drake change the shoulder he aims from. Now this is a great feature that not enough 3rd person games use. It allows you to put your body behind cover and have open area to view whether cover is on your right or left. Yes the cover feature in this game is reasonably superb, although I did run into some odd situations in Uncharted 2 where I could not aim around the side of an object without hitting the object I was aiming around, but this was resolved with a quick shift in position along the same object. In any case in Uncharted when you shifted shoulders the next time you aimed you aimed from the shoulder you were aiming from last time you aimed. In Uncharted 2 you always default to the right shoulder and can switch to the left but the next time you aim it resets to right shoulder. This is kinda annoying, although I can see how this would be in character for a character who is right hand dominant, yet in practice when you are aiming around a wall and shooting then stop aiming for a second to take a quick step, when you then re-aim you throw your whole body out in the open until you re-shift your gun to your other shoulder. Overall this made me lean more toward using the built in cover system rather than my Halo skillz and standing behind an object and shooting around it.

The second issue I had with Uncharted 2 was that my guns did not persist through some cut-scenes/checkpoints but did through others. Now sometimes this seemed appropriate based on story, but sometimes it was just downright mean. Take for example *mild-SPOILER* when I was fighting the tank in the mountain top village *end spoiler* I went into the fight with an M4 and Pistole, and inevitably I died. Now I was re-spawned within the same fight sequence, but with an AK and a 9mm, which is hardly the same firepower as the M4 and a Pistole in this game. There were also a few cut scenes where I would enter the cut scene fully armed (*SPOILER* the cut scene where you are re-united with Chloe for a second right before entering Shamballah, I entered this cut scene with a fully loaded RPG and a 2 clip Desert Eagle, and in the process of jumping into a window, a task our hero does with ease thousands of times before, I lost both weapons *END SPOILER*). Overall it made the game play more variable because I did not become as attached to my good guns as I would have if they persisted across all break points in the game, but I would have liked some more consistency.

Neither of these was an issue in Uncharted, although since these are the biggest complaints I have about Uncharted2 I would say that the game was spectacular. I suggest it for anyone who can competently navigate an FPS, seeing as how I found both the climbing/puzzle sections and the combat sections reasonably tricky, but the checkpoint system was set-up so well that there were only one or two instances where when I died I was not at the last point where I was standing in a non-combat area.