notallarelost's posterous

Game Review: Borderlands

If you've been keeping up with my tweets lately, you've probably heard me talk a lot about the new game Borderlands by Gearbox Software. It was released for PC on Monday, October 26, and I have the good fortune of having a wonderful boyfriend who decided to buy it for me as an early birthday present. (Thank you, Haley!) I'm not usually a first-person shooter type of gal, because generally I suck at them, but Gearbox has been advertising this game as a "role-playing shooter," a sort of hybrid FPS and RPG. This idea in itself seems pretty unremarkable and gimmicky at first, but admittedly it got me to step outside of my little RPG box and give it a try. Another big draw for me was the style of the game. As you can see from the cover art and some of the screen shots I've included, the artwork is a wonderful blend of sketchy, grunge, and punk, with a heavy amount of gore thrown in for good measure. I'm not usually big on lots of blood and guts, but somehow this game makes it seem like it's all part of the lovely picture they've painted, as though a madman street tagger raided the city morgue and decorated the subway with bloody graffiti and body parts. Except instead of the New York subway, it's the desolate, forsaken planet of Pandora, and instead of a crazy Banksy, it's you--with enough guns and munitions to sponsor your very own war.

Like I mentioned before, I'm generally terrible at shooters. I either panic and hide in a corner until I get mobbed to death, or run in Leroy Jenkins style and get my ass handed to me. I would say that I have bad aim, but I usually die so fast that I really can't tell. It's not as though I haven't tried, either. Many a night have I spent attempting to play Halo with my boyfriend as he tries not to scream at me for getting us killed again, and yet I have shown no improvement. I had given it up as a lost cause. God did not put me on this earth to shoot at things. I knew this as I began to play Borderlands, but I bravely soldiered on because I didn't have anything better to do.

As the game began I was treated to a short cutscene explaining that this is the story of the search for the Vault, some legendary and very mysterious object of great mystery and legend located somewhere on Pandora. The opening credits are then ushered in by the image a skag, a sort of zergling-slash-split-head creature about the size of a dog, sniffing around by a roadside. Just as I was thinking "Aw, he's kinda cute"--really, I think pretty much anything with four legs is cute--he unexpectedly becomes the new hood ornament of a speeding bus. The steel guitar chords of Cage the Elephant fill my headphones, and I know at that moment that this is going to be good. (If you click on that link you may want to close your eyes and just listen. The video is... awkward.)

As I began to actually play, I was faced with my first task: choose a character. There were four. Roland the Soldier, Mordecai the Hunter, Lilith the Siren, and Brick the, um, Brick. Of course I chose Lilith, because we girls have to stick together, you know. Although Gearbox boasted "customizable" characters, I found that this in fact consists of some choices of different colors for three parts of each model. (I felt as though this was the FPS in them telling my RPG-ness to go eat dirt.) Then I was dropped off the bus in the middle of nowhere and was greeted by a Claptrap, the sometimes cute and most of the time annoying helper robot. (Okay... I think he's actually cute all of the time. I can't help it. I'm told this "everything is cute" disease is a girl thing and I just have to live with it.) Claptrap led me through a basic tutorial and pointed out the various, fairly intuitive controls. Even as someone who hardly ever plays shooters I caught on to that part pretty fast. It was the learning to aim and not dying parts that took me a little longer.

For the first five levels or so I got frustrated by my own lack of skill and had to put it down often. Luckily the game has a forgiving learning curve, and by some miracle I managed to actually improve. Once I was consistently killing the things I pointed my gun at and not holding down the trigger until I was completely out of ammo, things got a lot more fun. While reading all of the side quests isn't really necessary, they were short enough that it was no great challenge, and I found myself enjoying the humorous text. As a solo game it was so far so good. The next challenge was co-op mode.

I enlisted Haley's help for this part. We spent the majority of our first evening trying to get our connections to work out. We ended up having to mess with some port settings and I had to turn off Windows Firewall (which I had forgotten to do after I installed Windows 7) and do some finagling in-game with hosting and whatnot, but eventually we got it down so that we could connect reliably. Success! That only left us about an hour of play time, but since we had both gotten to about level five on our own we breezed through the quests with no problem. I chose Lilith again, and he played Brick. We had a lot of fun, and it was time for bed too soon. But the next night (I guess that would be last night) we had about four hours to play and we got to about level 15. It was a blast --pun very much intended.

As far as gameplay goes, Borderlands successfully combines elements of both an FPS and an RPG, though it leans more heavily on the FPS side. The only real RPG-like elements I've encountered so far are the quest system (there is a main quest line and several side quests to help you get loot and experience), the weapon proficiency system (the more you fire a certain gun the better your accuracy and damage with that type of weapon), and the character skill tree (there are three different paths for each character type and most of the skills offered are passive buffs). Yet even these are simple and streamlined, so the player never loses the core FPS experience. I've heard the game compared a lot to a first-person Diablo, though since I never played it (gasp!) I can't say for sure. To me it feels a lot like World of Warcraft meshed with Halo (or any other classic shooter). The WoW elements include the quest system, in which, as I mentioned before, reading the quest is totally optional, and the loot quality system, which follows the white-green-blue-purple-orange scheme that WoW has made standard. There is also the four-member party system in multiplayer, although I have yet to experience this personally. I would imagine, however, it would be advantageous to have a balanced group, just as in an MMO.

One thing I love about this game is the weapon system. There are probably hundreds of different weapons. They drop off monsters or spawn in chests, and it's relatively rare to find repeats (except for the trash). Each weapon has different damage, accuracy, speed, and clip size, so it's easy to match your gun to your play style and situation. I tend to like either a spray of low damage bullets or one-shot kills, so I lean toward SMGs with fast fire rates and revolvers with high damage, though I have to sacrifice other stats like clip size. Because of these weapon stats, you can also get a large variation of behavior within the same weapon class. For example, your shotgun can have a large number of projectiles in order to hit multiple enemies or increase damage to a single enemy, or a smaller number for more damage per shot and better accuracy. As any gamer knows, different situations call for different weapons, so you have to be familiar enough with your guns to be able to make a judgment call and switch on the fly, often in the middle of the same fight. Borderlands makes swapping weapons as easy as a scroll on the mouse wheel, which I love. Players start out being able equip only two weapons at a time, but can unlock two more slots as they level.

One very Halo-esque feature of the game is the shield. Shields work just like Halo shields, absorbing damage that would otherwise eat away at a player's health, and then recharging after a few moments of taking no damage. But Gearbox improves upon Bungie's theme by making shields equippable, just like guns. Players can customize their shield behavior to their own tastes, varying both damage absorbing capacity and recharge rate. The behavior of grenades can similarly be customized, and grenade mods are also equippable.

My verdict: 9/10, and the only reason it's not a 10 is because we had to spend a good 2 hours trying to connect when one of the major features of the game is supposedly its online play. Pick this game up if you can. It'll be well worth your money.

A Farewell To Arms

(Please be warned that the following review contains spoilers, inasmuch as one can spoil a novel that is already 60 years old.)

As perhaps some of you know, last Saturday was Dewey's 24-Hour Read-A-Thon. I participated in an unofficial sort of way, and the book I chose to begin with was Ernest Hemingway's classic A Farewell To Arms. It's a bit odd for someone like me, who is used to paperback fantasy novels and bestselling page-turners, to select such a heavy piece of literature without having some ulterior motive. (High school English assignments come to mind.) Yet, the only other book I have read recently was dissatisfyingly shallow, and here I sit at a time in my life when I find myself craving substance. Perhaps I'm searching for guidance. Maybe I just crave experience. I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, but I was hoping to find something philosophically satisfying in a piece of classic fiction. Of course one book can't answer all my unasked questions, but I feel as though after reading A Farewell To Arms, one more puzzle piece of my ever growing worldview is in place.

I'll begin with a grotesque oversimplification for its own sake, as most of my reviews tend to do. (Forgive me, Mrs. Bristow!) A Farewell To Arms is about war, and war is bad. Of course, you say, war is terrible. Everyone knows this. I would argue, however, that most people -- myself included -- simply cannot fully grasp this concept. Very few of us have been thrust into the fray, felt the terror and the adrenaline and the exhiliration of battle. Ernest Hemingway is somewhat unique among those classic literary giants in that he has, indeed, been to war. While I tried to read as little as possible about the novel before beginning it, I did happen to notice a brief biography on the back flap of the dust jacket. The story of the main character, Lieutenant Frederick Henry, closely parallels the story of the author himself. Both were Americans who found themselves working as ambulance drivers on the Italian front during the first World War, and both were severely wounded in battle. That one small piece of information entirely changed the way I experienced the book. This is not someone who sits at his writing desk each afternoon with a glass of sherry and imagines what it might have been like. This is someone who has been there, and it's made very clear in the pace and style of dialogue, the gut-wrenching imagery, the circumstances surrounding events that most can only witness second-hand. Oh, I could go on! But we all know what a masterful writer Hemingway is, so I'll try to save my effusiveness for the subject matter of the novel instead.

When we're introduced to Lt. Henry, he's by all accounts what we would imagine a young GI stationed overseas to be. He loves his comrades, his liquor, and his women. Although an American, he is fluent enough in Italian to lead a small corps of ambulance drivers in the Italian army. We are introduced to Lt. Henry's friend Rinaldi, a surgeon, and Rinaldi introduces Henry to the lovely Miss Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. The two begin a courtship that, at first, Lt. Henry seems to take lightly. Then, only a few days after their first meeting, an offensive begins that requires the Tenente to be present in the trenches in order to transport the anticipated wounded. During the fight an enemy mortar lands nearly on top of him, killing one of his corps, fracturing his skull, and severely mangling his feet and right knee. He is transported away from the lines to a new hospital in Milan, where, as luck would have it, Miss Catherine Barkley has just been transfered. As Lt. Henry sees her for the first time after the event, he realizes then and there that he is deeply, madly in love with her, and she with him.

For the remainder of the novel the two manage to keep their love alive even through Lt. Henry's return to the front, the unspeakable horrors of the war, and the near death of our hero at the hands of his own officers. Henry manages to escape  and make his way back to his dear Cat, and the two sneak across the Swiss border in a rowboat in the middle of the night. (It is during this event that perhaps my favorite scene of the book occurs. The couple had been given an umbrella by the hotel clerk before they made their escape, and Henry decides to try to use it as a sail in the strong wind. It only works briefly before turning inside out, and Cat laughs at Henry's futile efforts and the desperate image he paints as he struggles with the contraption. Even in the midst of all her troubles, pregnant and fleeing for her life, she still manages to smile.) In Switzerland their romance continues, and it seems that all is well with the world. The war is completely forgotten, and the two look forward to welcoming a child into their lives.

Yet tragedy strikes seemingly out of the blue. There are complications with the birth. Even with the best medical care, the baby is stillborn. Cat hemorrhages after the Caesarean and dies, and the novel ends with this passage:

"But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain."

As readers we are left grief-stricken and confused. How could this happen? They had already escaped the war! How did the death and tragedy they thought they had left behind manage to follow them so far?

After I finished the book there was a period of about two days when I refused to think about it. I just wanted it to sit in my brain and percolate. I enjoy that feeling and I like to savor it a bit before I pick it apart. Then today I lit some candles, took a long bath, and thought about it. My conclusions are thus:

In a war, men lose all sense of themselves. They lose their individuality and become just another soldier, another cog in the wheel, another number. They lose their ambitions and dreams and replace them with the all-consuming, desperate hope that they will survive another day. They lose their humanity as they may find themselves doing the unspeakable, committing atrocities against fellow man that in times of peace they would reject and condemn. And for what? Perhaps if ten thousand men march in this direction and fire this many rounds and kill this many enemies, they may claim an isolated, arbitrary patch of land for a few months, at least until the enemy does the same and reclaims it. But what difference does one man truly make? When Lt. Henry returns to the front after recovering from his injury, he remarks that everything is in perfect working order just as though he had never been gone. He realizes then that his effort means absolutely nothing to the war and he might as well not even exist. What is one man on either side of a conflict in the face of the inevitable mass of an army? And what do words such as courage, bravery, and sacrifice mean?

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it."

Lt. Henry thought he had escaped the war and had escaped his fate. He had made his "separate peace." But war itself doesn't understand peace, and so it haunts every last one of us until it breaks us, and those who stand up to it, it kills.

"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially."

One man cannot change a war, but a war changes every man. None are left untouched.

As an aside, the latter passage opens up other possibilities about fate and tragedy in those lucky lives that are untouched by war. Perhaps war itself is the analogy here. War simply represents tragedy, the downward turn on Fortune's wheel. The futility of resisting it is self-evident, and yet to the last one of us we still try. Tragedy and the struggle against it is therefore inseparably human, as much so as war is likewise unique to man.

This leaves us to reflect. What tragedies in our lives do we fight against, bravely or otherwise? Where are the broken places where we have become stronger?

Life is weird.

You know how sometimes you do things, even though you know what's going to happen next, but you do them anyway? Then you shake your head and say, "Damn, I knew that was going to happen"? That just happened to me.

I was getting up to go to the bathroom. Our dog sleeps in there at night because the floor is cool. I walked in and pushed the door shut behind me, but didn't latch it because I didn't want to bother latching it quietly so I wouldn't wake up my mom. As I was doing this, I thought, "You know, Molly's probably just going to lie down against the door and slam it shut anyway." But I left it like it was and did my business. She immediately flopped down against the door and slammed it. It was very loud and probably woke my mom up anyway. I knew it was going to happen, but I still did it. For some reason this event made me wax philosophical.

People are weird. Life is weird.

Twitter Is Dead!

Whatever shall we do!?

I know! BLOG ABOUT IT!

You know, I think I only made one tweet yesterday. This could have happened then and I never would have noticed. But when Twitter goes down and I want to say something, it's like opening the fridge and finding it empty. Or trying to start your car and finding the battery is dead. Very anticlimactic.

The fridge analogy has made me hungry. Maybe after I eat my world will be back to normal.

The world is just awesome!

Read-A-Thon Wrap Up

Well, yesterday was Dewey's 24-Hour Read-A-Thon! I woke up around 10, had some breakfast, and logged on to check Twitter, only to see several posts about this event. I had no idea what it was, but it sounded interesting. Like I wrote before, I had several books from the library that I wanted to read and this seemed like the perfect venue. I read up on it and realized I needed to have signed up, and that the books I chose were not ideal for it, but I wanted to get reading so I just sort of pretended and then had my own unofficial Read-A-Thon. I had been reading Dracula, but decided that would be rather difficult for an event where the goal is to devour as many books as possible, so I switched to Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms. I read from 11 AM to 2 PM, then fell asleep. (I know, terrible!) I woke up around 6 PM, then finished that book around 2 AM. It was only 350 pages, but it was pretty heavy and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything, so it took me a while to finish. After that I started on John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven, of which I read about 200 pages. Between that and cheering, the next thing I knew it was 8 AM! Then I passed out and slept until 3 PM today.

Although I didn't even get through two whole books, I had a great time. And for me, it wasn't about how much I could read and how fast, but about finding other book lovers like me to share a great experience with. And I did! I had a great time, met some awesome people with awesome blogs (of which there are so many, and all so interesting!), and hopefully made some new friends.

P.S. I'll post a review of A Farewell To Arms as soon as I can get my thoughts on it together. Books like that take a while to sink in!

Foo Fighters - Wheels

Yahoo vs. Google Experiment

The experiment: Type the start of a phrase into the search box. Compare what each search engine fills in. Laugh. Repeat.

I started off by typing "i hope i". Both engines came back with pretty generic responses, except way at the bottom of Google's list was "i hope i cut myself shaving tomorrow." (You win this round, Google.) Then...

"i love it when"
Yahoo: i love it when you call
Google: i love it when you rough-house (winner)

"windows 7 is"
Yahoo: windows 7 is awesome
Google: windows 7 is vista (tie, only because windows 7 is indeed awesome)

"how can i"
Yahoo: how can i fall lyrics
Google: how can i make my hair grow faster (winner)

"do babies"
Yahoo: when do babies start teething
Google: do babies poop in the womb (winner)

"is there a"
("is there a god" was first for both. Second:)
Yahoo: is there a heaven
Google: is there anyway i can get this popular guy to get me pregnant (winner of 1 internet)

Mute Math - Spotlight

Pennywise - The Western World