Borderlands: AKA, October OMG hurries up!!!

Coming into E3 one of the games I was most interested in seeing was Gearbox Software’s latest, Borderlands. A year ago or so ago, I was amazed at the GameInformer article on Borderlands and couldn’t wait to get my hands on the new original IP from the creators of Brothers in Arms. Gearbox had been known for quality ports (Halo for the PC) and their polished first person tactical WWII shooter series, but hadn’t really broken the mold with any new universe or concept. The GameInformer article told of a deserted world, ala Mad Max, a story of the search for an epic loot, a random gun generating engine capable of millions of firearms, and the best implementation of coop in any console game to date. Needless to say, I was intrigued. And then the game went dark.

No new screen shots. No press releases. Rumors of cancellation and major redesigns. And finally as E3 09 approached, confirmation of an entire art style reboot. I was very skeptical, as I quite liked the previous art style, and hoped the game I was so interested in hadn’t lost its appeal. So as much as I kept an open mind when I walked into the behind closed doors demo, I just wasn’t sure what to expect. It was the perfect setup for Gearbox to surprise me. And so they did.

I admit, I have very high standards for my games. I expect a lot and it frequently amazes me when games are sold with glaringly obvious flaws that hold them back from brilliance. If GearBox ships what it showed and can deliver the coop experience they promise, Borderlands is the first true next gen shooter. Let’s face it, most quality developers make smooth controls, smart AI, and pretty graphics. But when it comes to mission variety, HUD, easy to navigate menus, story, humor/serious balance, loot collection, true seemless online coop, and gun play that makes you smile every time the trigger is pulled, I know of none that bring the whole package. Borderlands is that game.

So where to begin with what I saw... The graphic style, which I would describe as cel-shade, meets comic book, meets Ratchet and Clank, meets Mad Max, is perfect. They took what is intentionally a brown deserted world and made it gorgeous and inviting, not the brown on gray crapfest like Fallout 3. The artists have used the hard lines at the edges of surfaces to draw your attention to the important locations and less detailed textures to subconsciously guide you to ignore what isn’t important. The cel shaded style also allows the programmers to save precious bandwidth for draw distance and OMG can you see far.

When it comes to control, the camera motion and zoom ins were buttery smooth. I saw no frame rate hiccups to speak of. The enemies were well animated, as were the gun firing, and reload sequences. It is very obvious that the Gearbox folks love their guns and we will all be the beneficiaries. I literally wanted to rip the controller out of the devs hands and start fragging. The sound effects of the guns and the carnage they create is art in itself. I believe it was Cliff Blizinski that said that all good games are the same 20 seconds of fun over and over again. Well every trigger pull of every gun type we saw was one of those moments. Whether it be a pistol, shottie, or sniper rifle, they all owned and made everyone watching smile as they tore up the baddies in a symphony of stylized gore and secondary explosions.

The game lets you choose from several character types and then spec them how you choose ala World of Warcraft but on a much lighter scale. The dev assured the audience that on a scale from RPG to shooter, Borderlands is much closer to the shooter end, but allows enough specing that the player can tweak their weapons and toon to match their play style. And oh the weapons... Gearbox created an engine that procedurally generates weapons with unique reload times, ammo types, accuracy, firing times, scopes, sites, damage, etc. The result is a Diablo fan’s dream shooter. According to the recent article I read on IGN, loot will be rated by color like WoW, so that you instantly can tell a weapon’s value and bosses will have unique loot tables, so if you learn of a unique gun you want, grind away in the replayable boss instances until you get what you are looking for.

What’s that? Don’t want to play alone? No problem, the game supports four player, jump in anytime coop. That’s right, you can just invite me and my toon will appear in your world, with all my gear, and the game will add enemies and adjust the difficulty so that it remains fun and balanced. Oh and if I have a nice sniper rifle you want and I don’t use, I can give it to you and it is yours to keep. As we play, we split the loot and anything I pick up in your game goes back with me to my game when I leave. In summary, this is coop they way it should always have been. Cough, Fable 2, cough.

Let’s see, did I miss anything? Probably, as the game looks too good for words. Borderlands is the combination of so many classic games and genres, with the combat of Halo, a touch of Ratchet and Clank’s humor, the open world of a WoW continent, the art of a next gen XIII, and the loot and coop of Diablo. The demo ended way too quickly and left me craving for more. Like most gamers with limited time and budget, I pickup very few games on launch day, let alone launch night. Make no doubt, I will be out for this one at midnight and can’t wait to explore the Borderlands universe. Hopefully, many of you will be with me. Damn you Gearbox hurry up, October can’t come fast enough!!!

Has CNN caught the crazy?

Travel Advisory: If you still have any hand sanitizer or painter’s masks available after the swine flu scare and are traveling to Atlanta you may want to deploy them. It seems there has been a recent breakout of BSCD, otherwise known as Bat Shite Crazy Disease, at CNN Headquarters in Atlanta. First the symptoms were minor, like changing Headline News to HLN, then changing the content from serious news to more like a giant game show. Hollywood stories and blowhard talk shows have replaced, well, news of any kind at most times throughout the day. But yesterday, they brought things to a whole new, low, low level.

I happened to stop at their channels twice, searching for news on the DC Metro crash and was literally horrified at what I saw both times. The first example was a 15-20 second clip of cell phone footage of the aftermath of a protestor being shot in Iran. CNN aired the unedited close-up footage, over and over again mind you, of a young woman with a gun shot wound to the chest. First she goes limp, then her head rolls towards the camera as she loses consciousness, her eyes then fix, and then blood erupts from her mouth and nose as she bleeds out and dies on camera. Now look, I know the situation is bad over there and the world should know what Iran is up to and express outrage, but does anyone need to see that in the middle of the day on a news network? I mean last night after nine p.m. the network censored lines from Law and Order as they were deemed offensive, but I can watch a dying human blood fountain at mid day? CNN should be ashamed, if they weren’t already with their normal coverage, to exploit an innocent victim’s gruesome death footage for ratings. Cover the story, not the gore assclowns.

But adding the slice of moldy cheese to the CNN’s crap sandwich was may favorite “reporter,” of the species Ignoramus AntiCristus, Nancy Grace. As if one doesn’t know immediately by the tone of her rantings that humanity should consistently ignore her, one simply has to watch her show for a few seconds. In this case, she looped pictures and video of the murdered little girl in Florida, whose mother has been arrested for months mind you (IE nothing new here), while discussing the gory details of how the girls body was mutilated by animals before it was found. Then she asked some woman, whose expertise, education, and relevance remain unknown, if she was a mother and how she would feel, get this, having her child’s dismembered spine chewed on by animals.

Let me give that a second to soak in....


Okay, WTF?!?! Talk about focusing on intentional gore and disturbing topics for no particular point. We get it. Killing or harming any child is horrific. But the the likely perpetrator is in jail. She’s on trial. They have lots of evidence. The story is old. Other than shock value, why cover this story and the excruciating dismemberment of a child other than simply to generate ratings. I postulate that perhaps the producer’s were happy to find some point that any rational human would agree with Nancy Grace on. “Nancy thinks killing a kid is bad. Brilliant!!! The audience may ignore their hatred of her and actually agree with her on that. Roll it!!!” Assclowns.

Let me be clear, Nancy Grace should not be on TV. She is not intelligent. She does not possess deep thoughts or make insightful points. She is a sensationalist goofass and epitomizes what is wrong with CNN, HLN, and the modern media. Please world, whoever is left watching that horrid network, or whoever tuned to HLN thinking it was the similarly spelled Home Shopping Network (HSN), just stop watching her. In fact, I recommend keeping a sledge hammer in the living room, so in the event your remote runs out of batteries while channel surfing and your television accidentally gets stuck on Nancy Grace or looped footage of someone slowly dying, you can immediately smash your television and help save humanity. This is serious people. ;)

So now that thanks to Nancy we all have a use for that extra sledgehammer, does anyone have any suggestions for a two ounce bottle of hand sanitizer and a painter’s mask?

The Assassination of BluRay by the coward PSP Go.

Okay, so I may have sexed up the title a bit to draw you in, but if I had named the post “How the leader in the current format war may have cost themselves significant future royalties and market share by creating a download only handheld and thus encouraging an industrywide shift to downloadables,” I’m pretty sure I would have run out of consonants and lost most my readership. What, you’re still here? Okay then, here’s the scoop:

At E3, Sony had a very strong showing. In fact, I would argue that their lineup of games seen must play exclusives, God of War III, Ratchet and Clank Future 2, Uncharted 2, and Heavy Rain (which I predict will be a QTE suckfest btw), is as strong as any. Finally, they have given me a reason to own my big black BluRay drive other than movie watching. That being said, they also announced the PSP Go, a new version of their portable PSP, that still amazingly includes only one analog stick. Laudably though, it does NOT include an optical drive and instead will rely totally on downloadable games. In fact, Sony has dictated that all new game for the PSP platform be available in downloadable form. Although I agree, and have predicted for sometime, that this will be the way of the future, it is beyond bizarre to have Sony be the first to market with an all DLC gaming product.

Sony darn near sank the PlayStation brand by forcing in an expensive BluRay drive, in order to ensure that their licensed HD format won. If anyone has a reason to delay or dissuade the inevitable switch to all downloadable games/movies, it is the company who needs their current format to succeed longterm to make the PlayStation financial disaster payoff. So why this company would show consumers and the industry that a download only gaming platform can work, is beyond me.

With the delay in the next generation console to likely 2012 or after, if the PSP Go succeeds, Sony is showing Microsoft how to best hurt them in the future. I believe Microsoft will dabble in downloadable full titles for the 360 near end of life, likely with a big first party release, cough, Halo Reach, cough. If Microsoft likes what it sees with the number of customers who download the game versus buy the disk, thus netting them additional distribution fees, you can bet on the next gen Xbox offering all games as downloadables from day one. In fact, as I have speculated before, if they truly follow the PSP Go model, I expect the next Xbox to come driveless and offer a plugin BluRay drive (like how they tried with HD-DVD) as an optional addon for those who want to buy the disks or don’t have the intarweb.

The bottom line is, the more people Microsoft gets to download games and not buy BluRays, the more money they make, the more gamers get hooked into Xbox Live, and the less royalties Sony makes. As smart as Sony has been lately trying to turnaround the PS3, they may very quickly live to regret the inconsistent marketing strategy that is the PSP Go. We shall all see how the last format war is won or lost, but Sony sure seems to have stumbled on the future, albeit in a one-sticked awkward package, that may cost them more than they know.

You Betta Bring It!!!!

Anyone that has been following my Twitters (maxator) knows that I have fallen for inFamous, the open-world super hero game by Sucker Punch, the creators of Sly Cooper and Uncharted. Is the game perfect? No, as with most games there are a few areas needing a bit of polish, like the side missions getting a bit repetitive, but overall the game is simply a can’t miss experience. However, it is notable how complete inFamous feels at a time when it is rare amazingly rare for a new IP title to deliver gaming magic the first time around.

The more I though about it, I realized that many of the games I am looking forward to the most this Fall are indeed first sequels to new IPs: Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Crackdown 2, etc. I remember not so long ago when sequels to big games were viewed with great skepticism, as they often were nothing but a quick thinly veiled attempt to squeeze more cash out of an established franchise. So why now are first sequels often the definitive game of a series, like, GTA Vice City, Gears of War 2, etc? Sadly, I think it is because most of these games did not live up to their full potential in the first iteration. The question is why?

My theory is that with the massive amount of resources and cash that it takes to invent a new IP, develop the story, create the engine, ratchet down the art style, and build the gaming world, little time is left to fill that world out. Assassin's Creed and Crackdown are the two best examples of this phenomenon, as both had amazing worlds with smooth control/graphics engines, but not a whole helluva lot to do in them. I don’t blame the developers for a lack of creativity, I just think it took so much effort and time to develop their amazing sandboxes, they ran out of time to make a compelling game within them. Now don’t get me wrong, both games were liked by most critics and gamers, but I think it is because we saw the polish and innovation in their engines and knew what a technical feat they were. But can anyone say climbing around a city for 200 orbs is why we play a game?

What excites me is that for the sequels, the developers have an amazing start to create true gaming classics. They already have the background stories and the next gen graphics and control engines done. Now they have a full development cycle just to polish up the visuals/control/inventory management, add more mocap variety, and fill their engines with mission variety galore. For instance, although the original Assassin’s Creed amazed me with the visuals, then put me to sleep with the mission variety, the next iteration looks amazing and has 18 different mission types. This is simply the game I wanted the first one to be. Actually, I could go through the list of games above and easily list the features each lacked and will now be adding that will allow them to truly pursue gaming greatness: Uncharted 2 - integrating platforming with the combat; Crackdown 2 - mission variety; Mass Effect 2 - combat as fun as the story was engrossing; etc.

So as much as I hate to conclude that I spent $60 each for a bunch of engine development and proof of concepts last year, if that’s what it takes to get the flawless gaming gems I know are on the horizon, so be it. Just developers be warned, once you get to $120 of my hard earned monies, I expect you to bring it. With what I recently saw, I expect my demands will be met and as such, Fall can’t get here quickly enough. Now to go collect some more orbs...