In Third Person

With the release of Bioshock 2 only days away, I thought I would take a minute to reflect back on my time with the original Bioshock.

I vividly remember reading video game sites and listening to podcasts who were hyping up how amazing this game was. I didn't care. The screenshots looked pretty, but I didn't care that it came from the guy who made the System Shock games cause I'd never played them before. I didn't care about the Little Sister dynamic. I didn't care that you could add elemental powers to yourself to add variety to the combat.

Then I played the demo. Oh, my, God.

The way that game starts has to be one of the greatest openings in video game history. When your plane crashes and you find the pod that leads you to this incredible looking underwater city, it's mind-blowing. Then you get in there, and the world is equal parts beautiful and creepy. Without spoiling the demo (which if you haven't already tried, you really should), it's wonderfully paced to a climactic end that left me saying, "I need this game. Now."

So within the span of 45-minute demo, I went from indifferent to "zOMG!!!111". I bought that game the moment my local Best Buy opened and hunkered down on the sofa to explore the world of Rapture.


Throughout the game, the atmosphere of the game was always my favourite part of the Bioshock experience. I loved exploring the fantastically-designed world that was part futuristic, part historical and part apocalyptic art deco. Each of the different zones brought something slightly different to the table, which made the game wonderful to look at. To add to the experience, the music was spot-on for the environments, as they went with old-time music from the era the world of Rapture existed in before everything crumbled to crap. At the time, the tapes that were left behind added an extra layer of depth to the world by narrating to you what happened before you got there. This idea has been done to death since, but Bioshock really made that popular.

Character design was also a big win for Bioshock. Save for the last boss, everything you encounter in that game from the splicers to the Little Sisters are wonderfully designed to fit that world. The Big Daddy's themselves have become so iconic, that it's hard not to talk about this generation of gaming without mentioning them.

Speaking of the Big Daddy's, these were arguably the best and one of the weaker parts of the game. As a player, I was always intimidated by them initially due to their size and arsenal. But thanks to the chambers where you were brought back to life with little penalty, it took a lot of wind out of fighting a Big Daddy. Knowing that you could die and come back with the Big Daddy at the same health you left him took away a lot of tension once you figured that out. I also did not like the Little Sister choice system. On a base level, I get the concept of either saving a Little Sister to revert her to human or killing a little sister to harvest her energy. However, the game doesn't really reward you for going down the middle, or harvesting all the Little Sisters. The moment you harvest one little sister, you automatically get the "bad" ending and lose out on the achievement points you would have gotten if you saved them all. Maybe I would have ended up a stronger character in the end if I harvested all the girls, but I beat that game just fine.

I don't know if it was just me, but actually playing the game wasn't as great as the world they gave you to play in. I thought it played fine and the combat was fun, but it's not as good as the top first-person shooters on a mechanical level.

One other thing I wanted to say before I wrap this up: the plot and pacing of Bioshock was incredible...to a point. There is a very distinct point in the game where the plot peaks and slowly devolves from there.

At the time of its release, Bioshock to many was game of the year, and to some the best game of this generation. I'm not sure if I could go that far in stating my love for the game, but the overall product was (and still is) excellent. Here's to hoping that they did not ruin the Bioshock reputation with the (in my opinion) unnecessary sequel.

As I write this, I'm trying to shake the glaze off of my eyes. In the last two days, I've put in a good 15 hours into Borderlands. I played for about 7 hours today; only stopping because my brother and I felt physically sick from the non-stop Borderlands marathon.

This game has been a huge surprise to me. Nothing about the game's pre-launch hype grabbed me at all. I didn't care that there were 17 million guns in it. I didn't care that it was sort of a mix of Fallout 3 and Diablo. I didn't care much for the cell-shaded art style either. It's pretty, but it doesn't make my jaw drop or anything like that.

But then the reviews came in and were pretty impressive. Then the game at launch sold out everywhere. I found myself talking a lot about a game I had no interest in trying just because the game was so hot at the time. What ultimately pushed me over the edge were my old co-worker and brother committing to playing this game co-op with me should I choose to join.

I received the game as a Christmas present. At first, I wasn't so high on it due to the game starting out kind of slow. It was also a bit jarring making the transition to this after beating Modern Warfare 2, as Borderlands is a completely different experience. However, the moment I hit Sledge's hideout, the game grabbed me tight and has ceased to let me go.


What was it about Sledge's hideout that made the difference? Not much, really. It was though at this point where the game all came together for me. My initial indifference towards the vast arsenal of guns in the game quelled when I found myself in Sledge's hideout, finding awesome gun after awesome gun. I wanted to take them all with me while keeping my current stash, but my backpack size wouldn't allow for it. From then on, the game becomes a constant hunt for bigger and better weaponry. You'll pour over stats and constantly think about which guns to keep, which to sell, and which to ditch in order to make room for the next thing.

It was also here where I told my brother about how the game came together for me at this moment. He too was cool on the game until we went back and played through Sledge's hideout. From then on, I've played most of the game along with my brother. Having split-screen co-op has made the experience so much better for us. With many games foregoing split-screen completely, it is awesome that my brother and I can play through this game together. For those who don't have the luxury of couch co-op, there is four-player online co-op you can take part in as well.

Since then, my brother and I have become completely absorbed in the world of Pandora. We're having a lot of fun playing through all of the main quests and side quests. There are so many many different quests and quest types that I don't see this experience ending anytime soon. Having spent about 20 hours on this game thus far, I'm only about half way through the main quest. On top of that and all the side stuff, the game includes a "playthrough 2", which lets you play through the game again which things changed up. To get through all of that could take you easily 100 hours of play time. Should you want to get really deep into the game and beat it with all four character classes, you could easily drop a few hundred more hours into the game.


There are a lot of different elements to Borderlands that make the game so fun and engaging. I almost feel like if they had nailed this execution perfectly, this game has the potential to be one of the best games of all-time. I'm not even into this style of game, but I can see a ton of potential in this game. Before I drown myself in hyperbole though, I can't talk about Borderlands without bringing up some of its glaring and fundamental faults.

A few days ago, I posted an entry about some of the glitchy elements of Borderlands. After spending a lot more time with it, I still feel like the whole game is kind of janky. The shooting mechanics don't feel quite right. You never really get a sense of impact when you shoot at anything. There have been a number of spots where my character gets weirdly stuck. Twice in the same day I was completely immobile and had to quit the game in order to get out of it. Since then, there have been a few more instances where my character will be stuck for a few moments and I don't understand why.

Speaking of glitchy, there was one point in the first Circle of Death mission where the final skag ended up clipping through a wall into an area he couldn't attack me from. I could shoot it with bullets through the wall, but explosives did nothing to it.

The AI of the enemies also leaves a lot to be desired. Most enemies will simply run at you or attack you with very basic patterns. Sometimes, enemies won't move at all, which allows you to just stand still and shoot them until they die. The level scaling of the enemies does cover up some of the AI's faults, but in a lot of games this level of AI is inexcusable.

While I am thankful for the inclusion of split-screen co-op, the way the menus work out in co-op are awful. Instead of scaling the menus down to fit the split-screens, they keep all the menus at original size and force both players to manually adjust their view to see whatever part of the menu they need. It's an embarrassing oversight in my opinion, especially for a game where navigating menus is such an important part of the experience.

The frame-rate during intense moments does dip below 30 frames per second, which leads to brief moments of choppiness. It never really gets in the way when you play by yourself. In split-screen, intense moments of action make the game chug more. At one point specifically, we thought the game crashed because everything just froze. In fact, it was just the frame-rate dropping to single digits.

Way-points are another sore-spot for Borderlands. For most of the game, following the way-points will lead you exactly where you need to go. However, a number of quests don't work this way. Instead, the way-point will just lead you to a general area where you'll then have to figure the rest out for yourself. Not knowing this can leave a player annoyed to no end. I've had items I need to find end up upwards of 100 yards away from the way-point. Next time around, way-points should always lead you exactly to where you need to go or give you a general idea of where to go. Never both.


Traversing across different zones is also problematic. While the game does give you the option to spawn vehicles and warp from certain points, the game does a poor job of telling you how each of the worlds are connected. When you pull up your map, it only indicates "transitions" from one zone to another without telling you which transition leads to which zone. If you don't memorize what each transition is for every zone and don't know exactly where you need to teleport to get to your destination, you could find yourself needlessly walking or driving through three or four different zones while wasting 15 to 20 minutes of your time in the process.

Reading this, you're probably wondering how I could one minute call this a game with the potential to be the best game of all-time and then immediately follow-up with a number of faults with it. Does my initial sentiment still stand? Yes. In spite of its flaws, Borderlands succeeds where it matters most: fun-factor. The feeling I get from playing this game is a feeling that only comes out when I play something really special. You can easily drop dozens or hundreds of hours into this game and have a blast the entire time. With over 2 million copies of the game sold, it's almost inevitable that a sequel to Borderlands will emerge at some point. If Gearbox can match the game's fun-factor with equally awesome production values, the sequel has the potential to be phenomenal.

Until then, my brother and I are going to be spending a lot more time in the world of Pandora.

Before I vent my frustrations towards Borderlands, let me say that overall, I'm pretty impressed with the game. It's a style of game that I'm really unfamiliar with, yet it has grabbed me enough to want to keep leveling up my guy and find the next awesome gun.

I've been playing it for a few hours today, when I came across a side quest where I had to find pieces of a sniper rifle. I went through a few intense battles fighting high-level skags and a whole whack of bandits before I was able to scavenge for the parts. However, the final piece eluded me. I followed the way-point to the exact location and searched high and low around it with no luck. I searched so hard, that I actually jumped into a place I wasn't supposed to be in apparently. I got pinned between a building and a fence, causing my character to be completely stuck. The only way out was to save and quit the game.

Unfortunately, it also saved my lack of ammo. This, combined with all of the bad guys I beat re-spawning into the world made the game 10 times more frustrating than it should have.


I hate when video games break. While I don't work in video game development, I do work in development and understand that its impossible to test and fix everything before launch. But as a gamer, bugs that get in the way of gameplay totally take you out of the experience and sometimes can ruin the game completely. The act of me being stuck where I was could have been dumb luck. However, inaccurate way-points are inexcusable. I did a search on Google for "borderlands sniper rifle quest" and immediately found others who experienced the same problem. Researching this one problem also shows that the inaccurate way-point thing happens more than once, which kind of makes me not want to continue with side quests at all.

When a game breaks really bad, I have no qualms about getting rid of it. I don't see myself doing that with Borderlands (yet) and I hope I don't have to. At the very least, I won't be playing that game until I can come back with a cooler head.