I've Got Bills to Pay I've Got Mouths to Feed and Still Have Time To Review This Game

I don't know what sold me on this game, the graphics on the outside of the game box, the catchy intro song, or the bazillions of guns, but whatever the case was, I am in love. This is coming from a gamer who never thought anything could be better than Bioshock and now is presented with a game that is not only better but takes the cake on being one of the best games to be released this year. The game I speak so highly of is Borderlands.

The game combination of first person shooter and role playing shooter gives each gamer the chance to create a one of a kind character. Borderlands can either be played online or as a single player run through. I choose to play single player so I could get a feel for what I was up against before diving into real game play. From what I've played, the game hold endless potential for online gaming.

The game starts off like a movie, the graphics are stunning. It really does an excellent job at showing the world how far we've come from the pixel characters of the 80s. You find yourself on an apocalyptic style bus traveling to Pandora carrying four characters, Brick the Berserker, Lilith the Siren, Mordecai the Hunter, and Roland the Solider. Each character has their own specialty that is used to enhance game play but to obtain the most of your selected character, online gaming is a must.

You are on a mission to find the Vault which in the begining could be anything, treasure, women, who knows? While on the bus, a vision of a woman appears before you informing on what you need to do to get to the Vault. Throughout the game she will make an appearance, giving hints here and there on what needs to be accomplished. Once off the bus, you find yourself in the town of Fyrestone and being greeted by a friendly Claptrap robot. He will help guide you through the town and certain parts of the game. At times Claptrap becomes a bit annoying with his, "look at me, I'm dancing, I'm dancing," but when it comes time to save him, you feel compassion for the little robot. Keep a heads up, bandits are everywhere and must be destroyed in order to get to your first real mission.

As you progress further into the game, the bazillions of guns become a reality. You are able to pick guns up from dead emenies, find them in Skag piles, and purchase them through vending machines. Every gun has a different feature and should help compliment your characters abilities.

The best part of the game is the possibility of never dying. If you have mastered the skill of running away from gunfire in other games, then playing the single player mode should be a piece of cake. You are able to purchased shields that protect your health and depending on what shield you get depends on what it can do for you. Some shields take ten to twenty seconds without any hits from emenies to regenerate and protect your health while others can take more or less time. I find myself running away or hiding from gunfire at times until my shield is back up to full bars.

If you do end up dying, it is okay. There a points throughout the game that save your progress but can become tiresome when the last save point is on the other side of the Arid Badlands and requires a hike to get back to where you died. Also, every time you come back to life, you are charged a fee so make sure you have an abundance of money on hand.

Picking up ammo and money does not seem to be a problem in Borderlands. Boxes that have green lights on the outside are located throughout the game and contain all kinds of perks. Make sure to search through everything, you never know what you might find.

Enemies vary in difficultly. Skags, the mutant looking dogs are not too hard to kill if you go for a head shot. A melee attack on these creatures usually can prove deadly and saves ammo when on certain missions. Be careful, certain Skag shoot balls of acid on you and can quickly eat up your health. Also watch for Skag wearing aromor. These ones will require a nice critical shot to the head to ensure instant death.

Bandits are everywhere in the game while some can go down quickly, others have shields which can prove to be difficult when trying to take them down. The game will provide you with a bar letting you know where their shield levels are at with their health bar. Once you get the shield level down, go for head shots otherwise you will find yourself wasting ammo trying to take down invincible bandits.

My only complaint about this game are the buttons. Until you get the hang of what button does what, it can get a bit frustrating. Each button has several different functions depending on what is happening in the game. For example, the X button has four uses: you can hit it when you need to pick things up, smash Skag piles, use it to reload, and when held down while dying, will automatically start you back at the last save point. When a lot of action is taking place at once, I find it hard to get the X button to do what I want. If you're hit and dying, the game gives you chance to get your second wind by killing an enemy but if you need to reload and are in the heat of the game, you might find yourself holding the X button down too long and starting back at the last save point instead of getting your second wind. The only problem I found.

Borderlands feels like it combined games like Diablo, Bioshock, Fallout, and World of Warcraft all into one. If any other these games fit your personality than Borderlands is worth your time. I recommend the online game play to increase your loot, character abilities, and of course, the chance to find the bazillions of guns. After playing Borderlands, I give it a 9.5.

Would You Kindly?

"In the end, what separates a man from a slave?" The voice asks. I've spent hours getting to this point. The point where I think I am about to beat the game and destroy the main character. Up until now, Atlas, via his short wave radio, has informed me that it was Andrew Ryan I needed to kill in order to get out of Rapture. This was how I was going to save Atlas's family and return to a Splicer-free world. Here I am, standing before the man as he plays a round of putt-putt in his office. I think to myself, something does not seem right.

"A man chooses, a slave obeys," he tells me. This is the perfect opportunity to kill him but I have no control over my weapons or plasmids. I am only allowed to move around to see the crumbling walls of Andrew Ryan's office falling like a metaphor for his impending doom. I think back on what I did to get to this point. I have saved the Little Sisters from their curse like Tenebaum has asked me to do. I have taken the pictures of dead apprentices for artistic lunatic Sander Cohen. I have invented the Lazarus Vector in order to save the vegetation of Rapture. But I still feel like something is missing. This game should not end like this.

"You think you have memories," Ryan tells me as pictures from my life flash before me. Finally, here comes the twist. Up until now I was under the impression I was on a plane that had crashed into the Atlantic and being the only survivor, I swam to a random city shooting up out of the ocean. Seems plausible, right? But now Andrew Ryan is telling me that these memories are not my own and I was sleepwalking through my life until these so-called memories were activated by there kindly master.

"A man chooses, a slave obeys," he tells me as he walks into the dark with his putter in hand. I am anxiously waiting to have to kill hordes of Splicers or a have a new creature be introduced into the game. One I will have a hard time killing. Something needs to happen. I am on edge.

"Come in," as the doors to his office open and I am no longer separated by a piece of glass. I am now face to face with the person I have been told the entire game I need to kill. I move towards him and wait. Is this a trick?

"Would you kindly?" He asks while telling me how much of a powerful phrase it is. He is pushing me back while holding the putter in his hands, ready to bludgeon me at anytime. I really wish that my weapons and plasmids were available at this moment. Can't I just get this over with now?

Suddenly the phrase is repeated over and over by a familiar, Australian voice. "Would you kindly? Would you kindly? Would you kindly head to Ryan's office and kill the son of a bitch?" Atlas? The man who has helped me get this far in the game. The man who made sure I did not die by the hand of any creature. Now I am questioning the entire game. Have I made a wrong turn and joined the evil side? I don't remember ever having a choice.

"Sit," Ryan orders me to do with "would you kindly?" I am obeying. He tells me to run, to stop, to turn and I obey. I no longer have any control over my player. Something is about to happen.

"Kill!" Ryan shouts at me as he hands me the putter. I swing at his face. He stumbles back, holding his bleeding mouth. I continue to smash the putter into his face and he gurgles out the words, "a man chooses, a slave obeys," until I finally plant the putter firmly in his skull and he falls over dead. Too easy, now what?

"You've been a good sport," Atlas tells me over the short wave radio after I place the key into the self-destruct machine to stop it from killing us all. This is where I find out the truth. Atlas is really Frank Fontaine, a gangster that up until now, was dead. And the best part of all, I just killed my father. I knew this game wasn't going to be this easy. I have a new goal and new challenges ahead of me. No time for mourning, only time to kill Fontaine and save Rapture.

Labels

Hardcore gamer versus causal gamer. In all honesty, what is the difference? There isn't. And besides that, why do we feel we must label everything?

The answer is simple, as a whole, we use labels to define who we are; from what we wear to what we play. Being called a hardcore gamer makes one feel like they are in-touch with videogames. They are the ones who know everything there is to know about this topic. They spend countless hours playing first person shooter games becoming Jedi masters of their domain. In no way am I coming down on hardcore gamers, please do not take this the wrong way. The causal gamer is one who plays a game within ten minutes, just long enough to pass the time. They categorize games like Galaga and Tetris as games for the causal gamer. How are these games causal? How are these any different from a first person shooter game?

They classify Galaga and Tetris as games for the causal gamer but for me, they are just as hardcore as any other game. When I play Tetris, I spend hours trying to get farther and farther into the game, not just ten minutes. If I lose, I slowly become frustrated and before long find myself yelling at the screen as much as I would if I were playing Left 4 Dead. I do not just play these games once, even if I beat them. I feel that classifying these as causal games are stereotypical and stereotypes are bad. Why not label people who play World of Warcraft as stoners because they spend hours staring at a computer screen. They aren't though, be we love those labels. Everything must have a label, clothes, cars, and games are labeled.


Okay, so I may be off on this, but that's fine, it is my opinion.

Cubix Collects My Time Well Spent

What game should I review? I kept asking myself that as I sat at my computer prepping myself for a big review. What games have recently come out that should be worthy of my time and of those, which one do I choose for this review? With the questions in mind, I set forth to newgrounds.com to find recently added flash games. Games here are uploaded by gamers such as ourselves who create fun flash games on their computer and want to share them with the world. There were many to pick from and after playing through a few, found one worthy of my time.

When I first picked the game, it was just another new upload added to the flash portal. The game, Cubix Collect has now been nominated as underdog of the week and I am sure for many reasons.

Upon starting the game, I was asked to choose how I wanted to play, normal or sudden death. This was my first time playing and as with every game that I start, I went with the normal game play. I did not want to be overwhelmed since I was unaware of what the game included. So there I was, starting a new game that resembled a set up of Galaga, the classic arcade game. The controls were fairly easy, move the mouse around and hit the other cubes. The other cubes need to be the same color of the cube you are controlling. Easy enough to follow.

The game did an excellent job at telling me what I needed to do next. My colored cube needed to hit other cubes of the same color. For every one I hit of the same color, the number would be multiplied by how many in a row I had hit without colliding with a cube of another color. Frequently throughout the game I was warned of the many cubes changing direction. Starting from raining down in space to moving from the left or right and then a sudden criss-cross of cubes going in every direction. I had to do my best to keep from colliding with cubes of the other color.

Most of the time the game would warn me that my cube was about to change color but I found that despite the warning, it would still take a few seconds too long for my cube to change. While I was being distracted by when my cube was going to change, I found myself colliding with cubes of the wrong color causing me to lose my streak of high points. One small flaw I found with the game.

The more cubes I hit of the right color, the larger my cube would become. This was both good and bad. While I was being rewarded for my excellent playing skills, the game was becoming increasingly harder. Maneuvering my growing cube through the chaos of other cubes, all while avoiding other colors becomes almost impossible. The game speeds up and good hand-eye coordination is a must but no matter how well I had mastered this skill, was still doomed to collide with the wrong ones.

During the speeding up of the game, it would tell me to feast in which all the cubes would change to the same color and I was able to go hog wild and triple my score.

After a few minutes of play, I started messing up and as I continued hitting the wrong cubes, my cube began to decrease in size. Before too long it was almost too hard to see and then, it was over. I hit the last cube of the wrong color and stared at my score, 263,771. Not too bad I thought until I submitted it and saw hard-core players of the game whose skills exceed mine by hours of hand-eye coordinated games.

Next, I played through sudden death which as the title states, is exactly that. Instead of having a chance to mess up here or there, sudden death let me play until I hit the cube of the wrong color. My first time through, a score of 4276. The second time I did not improve by much so I decided to stick with playing the normal game. Each time trying to get on the leader board of high scores.

I would recommend this game to players who enjoy Tetris or Galaga, and if you were not a fan of that, then this game probably will not be for you. The lack of scene changes and levels may be boring to some gamers but if you are only looking for a game to pass the time, this is for you. Since I cannot give this game the 'buy it' grading scale because you can play it for free, I will recommend to 'play it' and see what you think for yourself.

New York Times Game Reviewers

The Problem with Games Journalism: Part One highly entertained and shocked me.

Of course there are writers out there who think they are above the rest. They are the last to admit that they cannot find a job as a writer, spending months unemployed sharing the cat food with their mangy pet. These are the prentenious writers who think one day they will be writing for the New York Times or having book readings like Truman Capote, drinking Burgundy with socialites, to realize that the only returned phone calls for a job is working as a game reviewer. Stuck on themselves thinking that they are much too qualified for this job, take it and will show up their editor. So they sit down with absolutely no clue on what steps they need to take in order to review a game. Has this person ever picked up a game controller? Probably not but they are intellectual enough, no need to worry.

As a result of these, I suppose over-qualified writers is the reviews are too much for gamers to understand. I am not saying that gamers are dumb by any means, it is the writers for their usage of language no one would use to describe game play who are the dumb ones. Not only that, but the article, I, Gamer by Leigh Alexander was beyond horrible. I was shocked by how she built herself up as this all-knowing person. Everything she writes is more important than what the Bible has to say. I think I may have thrown up a little bit in my mouth.

"Ladies and gentlemen, there is a world in which people do not know that Kotaku exists. And for the record, the GameStop employee, while he seemed perfectly knowledgeable about the titles in his store, doesn't know what GameSpot, IGN ,Edge or anything else of their ilk are, either." Alexander needs to be slapped in the face. A comment like this should cause an up-roar in the gaming world. I am someone who plays a lot of videogames and I do not even know of these sites. Just because you do sweetheart doesn't mean we should lower our standards. Yes I said that because you are not above any other game reviewer. They are all equal in their domain. But this woman needs to have a rude awakening and discover she will lose her following coming down on people like that.

Videogames: A Form of Art

The definition of art: the products of human creativity, the creation of beautiful or significant things. Artwork: photographs or other visual representations. These are a few definitions of what art could be while everyone is entitled to their own personal opinions. I might see a stick lying in the middle of street and be moved by its position and could call it art. Another person may see the same stick and with one glance kick it into a ditch. There was no art in that stick lying in the middle of the street to them. But as Clive Barker would say, "we can debate what art is, we can debate it forever. If the experience moves you in some way or another ... even if it moves your bowels ... I think it is worthy of some serious study". With this in mind, why not consider videogames as a form of art?

I understand that not everyone is into the gaming world. It is sort of an acquired taste, like sushi. A person who never picked up a controller in their life my find it awkward and hard to hold. Not only that, but playing a game that requires hours of your time almost seems silly. It is just a game, right? Well maybe so but should we be so quick to dismiss the idea that this 'game' is some form of art? I would like to ask that everyone who has never played a videogame in their life to try it. Not spending hours upon hours engaged in the storyline, but just enough to see what it is all about. At that point, the judgment call could be made if videogames are a form of art. What would you say? I say yes.

I say yes because no matter what game I am playing, there are visuals all around that help bring the game closer to me as a player. When playing Bioshock, it revolves around art in the background. No matter where you are in the game there is something, from dead corpses hanging on the wall to shattered pictures of Andrew Ryan, that are a form of art within the videogame. Without this art, the game would lose most of it's meaning. I find myself moved by the visuals as well as the sounds of Rapture. As a whole the game itself is a form of art. It is a beautifully written story that unfolds before you as you move throughout the game. If I'm not mistaken, written stories are a form of art.

I was always told, if something inflicts an emotional response, that the artist has done their job correctly. How many times has a player found themselves emotionally moved in a videogame? Now when I say emotionally moved, I do not mean tears, but any sort of emotions such as anger or joy. I know I have felt all of these at some point when playing a videogame and the end result, the artist has created art because this art has inflicted an emotional response.

But what games should be considered art? All games. It does not matter how old the game is or how absolutely horrible it was, it was created for a purpose and that purpose is art. Pong, even though lacking color, graphics, and a storyline is art. Duck Hunt, even though the player finds themselves killing innocent birds is art. Sonic, even though annoying to beat, is a form of art. Each game was created by an artist for the consumer to enjoy in a form of art. There are indie films out there that people consider art that I would rather choke down a handful of glass than watch but even those awful movies, that were created for the purpose of art, are considered art by certain people. If we can understand that, why can't we see the same thing with videogames?

My only reasoning why it seems outrageous to consider videogames as a form of art is the stigmatization they hold. Videogames are bad, they make kids kill each other, they rot their brains, they cause them to drop out of school, and so forth. One, this is entirely not true and two, how many great artists were a little whacked in the head? Look at Van Goethe, he cut his own ear off and we have our children look up to him. He was an amazing artist although some would say his art, well is not art. Again, everyone is entitled to their own personal opinions. So should we be so quick to stigmatize videogames some more and not give them a chance to be art because of the so-called violence they hold? No.

Maybe like all great artists, when the games have been long dead and no one remembers what a Nintendo was, will videogames be considered a work of art. Someone will find a lost gaming system one hundred years from now and put it on display in an art museum. Or maybe they will make slide shows of difference action sequences and show them at an indie film show. Maybe people will come to their senses and realize that this medium is a form of art, hopefully in our life time.

Free Speech Does Not Mean This...

I read the article "Bow, Nigger" and was not only saddened by what I read, but disgusted by the fact there are people out there who think they can act like this. You could replace the words with a variety of derogatory phrases and have the same reaction but this goes too far.

When I play a videogame online, there are a lot of words exchanged between players, not always best words, but in the context they are being used, dammit and shit are not out of the ordinary. I find myself cursing away at the screen not remembering that I have a headset attached to me and players on the other end can hear me. It's okay though, they are saying the same thing and if it were brought to my attention that a curse word I said was offending someone, I would immediately stop and apologize. I would never say something like the player did in JKII.

You never know who you are going to come across when playing online. There are thousands of players waiting and no two are the same. Playing videogames online is a sort of escape from reality, not a place where hurtful things should be said. It is a low blow in order to win a game. It is a low blow no matter what.

I like how the author of the article does not shun the game for allowing bad words and phases but shows how bad behavior from others can result in good behavior, especially in a game where you are playing a Jedi. In the end, the good wins. Didn't this guy watch the Star Wars movies? The Sith always lost a limb, well many, and yeah they never get the girl. Bummer.