Game 51! Woo hoo! It had a very Chinese New Year 2017 theme running through it. I hope you all enjoyed the game! Odd numbers by Rabbit Town Art and even numbers by Kookylane!
In October 2009 I ordered a new PC just in time to play Borderlands, a game I knew nothing about, but my friends were hyped for it (*said PC actually didn't quite come together in time due to a faulty part or two, but Roy saved the day by lending me his notebook, setting a handy precedent). Roy bought us a 4-pack of Borderlands - the AU price point was relatively low for a new release (from memory something like $35pp), supposedly due to some sort of miscommunication between Steam and 2K, and it ended up going up shortly afterwards. As uni semester was coming to a close, four of us romped through it over the course of a weekend, staying up until 4 or 5am for consecutive nights. Looking back, I can remember little but a haze of emotional numbness, from grinding away at quests that I had very little context for through the veil of extreme tiredness. In the background were essays and exams, increasing disillusionment with my workplace at the time (I would quit a month or so later) and the near dislocation of relationship that had been part of my entire adult life to that point (we would break up three months later).
Seven years on and we've come full spiral. One Friday night Roy, DT and K put their hands up to play Borderlands with me again. L was meant to be playing, but she's away for the weekend. I was away for the previous week, but over the past month it seems like whenever we've been together, we've been fighting. Things feel precipitous. I am ready to get write-off drunk, even if it's in the company of whispers from across the country.
There's a long pause while we try and iron out some voice chat echoes between the game and Discord. I never really fix mine, apparently, but the others gallantly put up with it. We all used to play Dota together but DT and K rarely ever got on voice, which makes this foray into the OG Borderlands seem a little more of an occasion than it might otherwise.
At some point Borderlands migrated from Gamespy to Steamworks, and in the process we all seem to have lost whatever character levels and builds we had from way back when (with the exception of K, who has apparently never played Borderlands 1 before). We all begin with new characters, which we probably would have done anyway I guess, but it does seem to rule out checking out the DLC for the time being.
We load in and there's Claptrap, the iconic/familiar robot host and guide of Borderlands. "Isn't there some kind of intro movie?" I ask. DT thinks there is - maybe we don't get it in multi-player. Claptrap leads us around while we get the early tutorial shit out of the way, get some rudimentary gear on, kill some early creeps. "It holds up pretty well" DT says about the graphics. "Cel shading" agrees Roy.
If the graphics have aged well, the UI certainly hasn't. It's atrocious - clearly designed for consoles and remarkably never patched over. The menu navigation is particularly bad, with a lot doubling up of button presses, selecting an item then hitting enter again, making the whole process slow and unwieldy. As a game where half the fun theoretically lies in picking up randomly generated loot, Borderlands requires a lot of inventory management, so the shitty menu UI is a real thorn. "I can't believe there's no good way to compare guns" sighs Roy.
Perhaps because we don't want to deal with the UI, or perhaps because we aren't getting good loot drops, Borderlands unexpectedly becomes quickly difficult. We end up grinding away at an early mini boss fight that we are definitely under-equipped or under-levelled for, continually reviving each other or, when that fails, each walking the long way back from the respawn point. Victory (as is often the case here) is inevitable but tedious. All up it takes a good fifteen minutes or more. I don't remember it being like this the first time, but then, I don't really remember the first time at all.
At some point we hit the vehicle unlocks. Again, they're strangely awkward to drive and they take a while to get a handle of. The four of us take turns smashing into each other and giggling as we're sent flying all over the map. Roy manages to flip one of the cars on top of the other, rendering them both unusable and making us all walk the long way back to cash in an objective.
There are few cinematic cuts or voice-overs. Quests seem to appear without context - anyone can turn in quests and get new ones for the whole team, which is great for game flow but not so good for delivering story fragments equally to every player, and all the time there's this constant rush, this feeling that you can't stop and get everything together because you'll slow everyone else down, despite it also being a game where not much happens a lot of the time. I remember now that this is why I never had much idea about what Borderlands, the first one anyway, was actually about. It's a shame, because Gearbox have a pretty fun sense of humour, which we're reminded of only occasionally here. There's a quest that has us looking for lost audio diaries by a stranded researcher, which play back as we find them, and they're hilarious. "Her character is great", says DT, remembering how she has another role in BL2, and I wonder why more of the game isn't like this.
We grind away, numbers flying everywhere. It's like Diablo, the FPS, or maybe a clicker game. The numbness starts to set in. We still don't seem to get any worthwhile gear, and it's continually difficult trying to be efficient about which missions to do next, due to long travel distances between quests but also because some are so much more difficult than others that turn up at the same time. Eventually, after a few hours, K says she’s gonna call it a night, and despite myself I'm still mostly sober and this seems like a wholly sensible idea, and we’re all pretty quick to agree. The game is the same, I’m sure, but I’m not a 21 y.o. this time, and no matter how sad I feel right now I don’t really want to play Borderlands all night. We all log off; we don't come back.
