I probably added around 12-15 hours to my Borderlands 2 campaign after Saturday’s post. I have a lot more to say about it. But before I do, there’s a couple other things to talk about:
– Firstly, one can’t talk about cel-shaded graphics without talking about Jet Set Radio, and when I needed a break from Borderlands 2 this weekend I remembered that I’d downloaded the XBL demo of Jet Set Radio HD. I’m thrilled that a lot of beloved old games are getting HD remasters, but I’m also noticing a recurring problem – the games always played better in my memories than in my hands. (The Tony Hawk HD thing from earlier this summer also comes to mind.) JSR looks absolutely fantastic – after all these years, that art style is still brilliant – but it also feels incredibly stiff in my hands, and I found myself making the exact same mistakes in maneuvering that I did 10 years ago (or however long ago it was). That being said, I still love the HD remastering treatment, and I can’t say it enough – I would LOVE to see a Skies of Arcadia remaster. FACT: JRPGs don’t have the same control problems that 3D action games do. Let’s make this happen!
– Speaking of demos, I also played a tiny taste of the demo for Resident Evil 6. There are three different chapters in the demo, and I played around 10 minutes of the first one on the list. (I’m not a big enough fan of the franchise to really care about it one way or the other; I’m well aware that I’m one of the only people on the planet that thinks that RE5 is a much better game than RE4.) So, the biggest thing, obviously, is that you can move while aiming! Welcome to 2012! And yet, it’s still incredibly awkward-looking! I sometimes feel that the developers of these Japanese mega-franchises – RE, MGS, FF, etc. – live in a hermetically-sealed bubble, unaware of the advancements in animation, storytelling, and general gameplay conventions that have transpired over the last 20 years. I appreciate their slavish devotion to keeping each game true to its roots, but, I mean, Jesus Christ. Have they never seen people walking around and carrying guns in other games or films or TV shows? Besides that, it should also be noted that the graphics look a little rough – RE6 is nowhere near as nice and clean and crisp as RE5, though this may be because the demo is an early build. In any event, I didn’t really have RE6 very high on my priority list, and this demo didn’t really do anything to change that. It’s still on the GameFly queue, for whatever that’s worth.
– At some point this weekend I received an email that included a code for the first DLC for Darksiders 2 – Argul’s Tomb. As much as I love that game, I’ve gotta say that this little self-contained mini-adventure was a little… meh, actually. I hate using that word unless I have to, but that’s pretty much the best way of putting it. It’s around 2 hours long, there’s no achievements, it’s very combat heavy, and none of the loot I picked up was particularly good. It’s free, though, so it has that going for it, which is nice.
– I am an idiot. I wanted to try out Steam’s Big Picture Mode on my HDTV this weekend, but it wasn’t until I’d moved everything around that I realized that my PC didn’t have an HDMI out, and that I didn’t have an adapter. Oh well.
– It’s just as well, anyway, because had I gotten it to work, I would’ve ended up playing Torchlight 2, but with a keyboard and mouse on my couch, which would be weird. I did spend 5 minutes with T2, actually, but the honest truth is that I think I’m still recovering from my Diablo 3 overdose, and left- and right-clicking for hours and hours just doesn’t seem all that enticing. I will get to it eventually, though.
_________________________
OK. Let’s get back to Borderlands 2. I’m now around 24 hours in, and my commando is probably level 23 or 24. (I really ought to write that stuff down before I begin a post.)
For the first dozen hours or so, I only had around 3-4 quests in my to-do list at a time – a main story quest, and then some optional side stuff. Then a major story event happened (you’ll know it when you see it), and when I shook the dust off and got back to the main city, I’d found that the game suddenly opened wide up, and 20 new side-quests appeared in my quest log. And so, now, I’m tackling all the side stuff, because the side stuff is, quite frequently, absolutely brilliant.
I have come to appreciate that the game does not take itself seriously. At first, a lot of the dialogue came off as silly and adolescent (there literally is a “Bonerfart” joke – or is it “Fartboner”?) but as I’ve delved deeper into the side quests and gotten to know the characters a bit more thoroughly, I’ve seen that the game’s got some serious depth in its writing – even if, as I said on Saturday, the overall narrative lacks any real weight. There are 2 moments that stand out in particular, and I’ll try to keep them spoiler-free (while at least alerting you as to where they are):
1. Mission: The Overlooked: “This Is Only A Test.” The end of this mission was the first time that I’ve literally laughed out loud during a game since Portal 2, probably. It’s a totally unexpected, expertly delivered, and deeply satisfying punchline, all of which comes after a very tough firefight and (at least for me) a reluctance to even do the thing I was asked to do, being that I didn’t think it was going to work. (Fuckin’ Dave.)
2. I can’t remember the mission name, but it was a side mission I was doing in the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, which ultimately resulted in discovering the true nature of the relationship between Tiny Tina and Flesh-Stick (two characters that I’d met under completely different circumstances, 10 hours previously). I normally hate how games use tape recordings to tell stories – it feels lazy and contrived and has become almost as ubiquitous as crates – but in this particular case the final reveal was shocking and very, very dark, and when I think about it now I’m not sure there’s a better way to tell that particular story. Especially since there was no real reason to even include it, and especially since I very nearly walked right over it without even knowing it was there. This made its discovery hit surprisingly hard, and caused me to think about my last interaction with those two characters in a much different light. (It called to mind a similar hidden, optional thing I discovered in Psychonauts – during Milla’s psychedelic training level, there’s a hidden room where you discover a rather horrible truth about Milla’s past. It’s a moment that rings true, though – it’s not manipulative or hollow – and so it carries a great weight.)
* * *
I find that even as I’ve improved a great many of my skills (including dramatic (and very necessary) reductions in my reloading time), I still get fatigued with the game’s core action. This is not the game’s fault, of course – I’ve had a long-standing fatigue problem with the entire shooter genre, and it’s a tribute to everything else that Borderlands 2 does so well that I’m still as heavily invested in the game as I am. I have no problem fighting my way to an objective, but once I’m done, I run like hell all the way back – I’ll throw down a turret if I have to, to thin out the crowd, but my overriding attitude is “fuck it, I’m done shooting.” I’ve killed so many goddamned things already, and I’m not even sure that I’m halfway through the game, which makes me shudder at the thought of how many more goddamned things I have to kill. (Especially if there are Threshers. Oh, how I hate threshers. Relentless bullet-sponging bastards, all of them.)
It would be nice if there were other things to do besides shooting, I guess. (Well, there is a quasi-murder mystery in Sanctuary, but it plays out quite a bit differently than the one in Skyrim.) I’m not saying this game needs box-pushing puzzles or crafting or anything, and I know I’ve not even come close to seeing everything there is to see and so it’s entirely possible that I’ll run into something that doesn’t involve heavy pressings of the trigger buttons over extended periods of time. But. The game’s relentless action can be a bit exhausting, is all I’m saying.
Shouts From The Couch 