Mongo Nation

You asked for a challenge, and you got one.

By Jeremy Azevedo

Borderlands was easily one of my favorite titles of the year, if not ever. Combining the loot collecting, RPG elements of Diablo with the shooter Gameplay of Halo has resulted in one of the most refreshing titles in ages. But as much as I loved “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned”, this second DLC, “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot poses a couple of problems for me.

The arena based combat that makes up the entirety of this add-on is nothing entirely new to Borderlands veterans. There are several instances in which you have had the opportunity to compete against waves of wasteland baddies throughout the main narrative. These have always served as a fun diversion, and it would make sense to have a chance to revisit them for one very simple reason: After a certain amount of time, your character and weapons will become too strong to be properly challenged.

Borderlands’ new leading lady, Mad Moxxi.

It’s too bad then, that The Underdome is just a little too goddamn hard. I hadn’t played Borderlands in a few weeks and was surprised at how rusty I had become. So that was my first problem. My second problem, and one that many people will experience, is that there wasn’t really anyone else playing it at the same time as I was.

With five rounds of five waves of enemies, there is absolutely no way in hell that a single person could make their way through it without playing in the first playthrough (in which the enemies are significantly less hardcore) with a full set of super-orange weapons and gear. And even then, you probably wouldn’t survive long, what with the rule changes that pop up between rounds. These could range from specific weapon damage bonuses to low gravity, spastic enemies, a health sapping vampire mode (which will be none too familiar to Soulcalibur vets) or playing “naked” (with no shields). Co-op play is not just encouraged here, it’s pretty much required.

Gearbox appears to have learned a little somethin’ from Dragon Age’s infamous “Warden’s Keep” DLC…

Once you get a team together, things get a lot more interesting. Instead of being shit out of luck when you die, you instead go to a “penalty box” for the duration of the round. From here, you can still snipe enemies and participate in a limited fashion, which is sorta fun. It reminds me of Super Bomberman back on the Super SNES. The difficulty on later playthroughs really tests your ability to play well and work as a team, which is something a lot of players wanted. Plus you get a “bank” to store your favorite gear, which is awesome, especially if you do a lot of trading with other players. And you can get a couple of skill points for your trouble, which gives you a very specific edge in PvP arenas and that. Read the rest of this entry →

New arenas and a “bank” feature to be included

By Jeremy Azevedo

Not that there was ever any question that Borderlands was directly influenced by the Mad Max series, but this new DLC, “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” sounds like the video game version of “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”. And that’s a very good thing. But it’s not the only good thing about it!

The new DLC, like last month’s “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned’, will retail for about 800 Microsoft points (or 10 earth dollars). And although the level cap will not be raised, there will be a couple extra skill points that you can acquire for your character, which may give you a bit of an edge in the arena. (Unless you’re playing as Brick or Roland, in which case, all the skill points in the world aren’t going to help you against Mordecai’s cheap-ass bird.) But best of all is the inclusion of a “bank”, in which you can store some of the 1337 gear you’ve been hoarding all this time! Sweetness!

“Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” will challenge players to fight in three “Riot Mode” arenas against waves of Pandora’s most badass monsters and raiders. It probably goes without saying that this will be a nearly impossible undertaking as a single player, so you’d probably better gather a team for this one.

Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot will be available for download on XBLA and PSN December 29th, 2009.

Will it re-animate your interest in Borderlands?

By Jeremy Azevedo

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is the perfect example of how DLC should be done. Right around the time that you may be feeling the urge to dive into some of the other games stacking up on your shelf, an excellent new mission pack appears to suck you right back into the world of Borderlands.

Zombie Island is more than just a new area to explore, it’s a stand-alone narrative that may even be stronger than the over-arching narrative of the game that it supplements. Obviously, the emphasis is still on the action, but the various characters that populate Jacob’s Cove are especially entertaining (despite the fact that most of them are dead by the time you get there). Additionally, all of the enemies you will meet are unique, and represent a cross section of the known zombie population. You’ve got your slow, shambling zombies, your crazed, fast running zombies, your giant, lumbering Frankenstein’s monsters, your acid barfing spitters, and your dragging, dismembered torso zombies. This isn’t even taking into account the handful of animal and boss enemies that exist on the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned.

I didn’t necessarily find any new weapons that I hadn’t already seen some variation of, not even after defeating the (awesome) final boss. But then I am a huge dork that’s playing with a level 50 hunter packing some serious orange (super rare) weapons so your experience may be different. I can tell you one thing though: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned poses a particularly difficult challenge to even the most badass character build if by nothing else, throwing a metric shit-ton of zombies at you nearly everywhere you go. The bastards pop up out of the ground at any time and in any place, surrounding you, blinding you with poisonous zombie barf, hanging on you and basically overwhelming you with sheer numbers. The traditional zombie M.O.

If you’ve been playing and enjoying Borderlands near as much as I have, than I strongly recommend you download this DLC at your earliest convenience. (I guarantee you, there are few thrills in Borderlands that are equal to taking down a giant Frankenstein with a weapons crate strapped to his back and then looting his corpse.) I also recommend that you play with at least one partner to watch your back, and that you consider investing in some fire-based weaponry. As we all know, the undead hate fire. You can leave your acid weapons at home though, because they do just about f**k-all to an already poisonous undead monster.

Are there more yet to be discovered?

By Jeremy Azevedo

After spending the last few weeks playing the hell out of Borderlands, I thought that I’d seen everything the game had to offer. Turns out, I was wrong.

I was playing Borderlands online the other day when two dudes popped into my game and dragged my ass off to Treacher’s Landing to “check out something awesome”. This probably doesn’t mean anything to those of you that haven’t played the game yet, but those of you that have should tune in for this.

In the southeastern tip of the level, there is a secret dock with a party boat on it. Jumping on the boat gives you an achievement, “I’m On A Boat”. This is common knowledge. What isn’t generally known, at least it wasn’t to me, is that shooting the nearby barrels in a particular order unlocks an Easter egg that may be one of the weirdest that I have even seen in a video game.

Pic is totally unrelated.

Here’s how to do it:

Facing the boat, turn around and face the opposite direction. Shoot the yellow barrel in the distance ahead of you. Next, look for a green barrel in the trash heap off to your right. Shoot that one next. Third, shoot either of the two blue barrels on the boat. Lastly, shoot the red barrel in the trash heap to the front of the boat. Enjoy the show.

I don’t know what the meaning or significance of this is, but it’s certainly worth checking out nevertheless, that’s for goddamn sure.

But wait there’s more!

Another Easter egg that I’ve been made aware of is the Hidden Basement in New Haven. During the mission “Another Piece of the Puzzle”, where you’re supposed to go to the Trash Coast and kill the Rakk Hive, is the only time that this is open. The basement is located behind a door in a shack out back of Helena Pierce’s shop. Inside you are sure to find a few enemies, a couple of weapons chest, a leg lamp and a pretty bitchen’, unique rare gun called the “Rider” (both references to “A Christmas Story”, no doubt.)

Other cool things to do and see in Borderlands:

Did you know that you can stand in front of a moving vehicle and travel at high speeds without being ran over? Use this technique to move quickly through larger levels in a multiplayer game when one of your vehicles gets wasted!

On occasion, a secret vending machine will open up in a garage across from Marcus’ shop. It appears to be totally random when and why it opens, but it always seems to have better gear than any of the shops in town. Read the rest of this entry →

Your new favorite online obsession?

By Jeremy Azevedo

Borderlands is a strange sort of game. Of all the shooters and all the RPGs I’ve ever played, I never really thought that the two flavors would ever meet in such a complimentary manner.

It’s tempting to compare Borderlands to Fallout 3 right away, on account of it being an FPS/RPG hybrid set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But to be fair to both games, that’s where the similarities begin and end. Where Fallout is deeply rooted in dialogue trees and story, Borderlands is all action. It’s really more like Halo than it is like Fallout. There’s no mysterious underlying “Dungeons and Dragons” system of chance that dictates whether you hit or miss, or whether your shot was critical or not. You have to relay on your old school run and gun FPS skills to get ahead in Borderlands. Which is not to say that said skills are not fully customizable… There are dozens of different skills that can be attributed to any of your four different character classes, some of which really change the way you play. Not to mention the millions (not an exaggeration) of different guns that you might find as you blaze through the game.

Yipee-kay-yay motherf**ker!

The first thing you’ll notice when you boot up the game is how great it looks. The graphical presentation is incredibly stylish, reminding me a bit of the Dreamcast classic Jet Grind Radio, though the cel-shading is not nearly as overbearing. In motion it looks very fluid, though I sort of wish that there were a 3rd person view option so that I could see my character in the space and have a wider field of view. Most wouldn’t agree with me, but I always feel like 1st person games always have too narrow of a visual focus for my liking. Also, I just spent all this time agonizing over which colors to make my clothes, and now I can’t even see them. WTF, at least put some mirrors in the game or something. Aside from that one minor complaint, Gearbox has constructed am incredibly detailed world in which you genuinely feel like a lone mercenary scavenger, living off of loot to survive the harsh and lonely wasteland.

The enemies, of which there are many different sizes and shapes, look crazy as hell and act equally so. In the first few missions alone, you’ll encounter warthog type creatures with mouths that look like a vagina dentate, various pissed-off midgets, fully-grown mongoloid flipper babies, and a metric shit-ton of dudes wearing hockey masks. (Apparently, hockey mask are like the cockroach of the sporting goods world.) As Mordecai the hunter, I initially found it frustrating that my sniper rifle didn’t do jack to most of these enemies, that it took forever to reload, and that after one or two shots they were all over me like a Kardashian on an NFL superstar. But after leveling up a bit and upgrading my weapons, I found myself performing better and better, softening up “skags” from a mile away with my scoped rifle and finishing them off up close with my fire bullet spewing machine pistol. Although I’m still pretty sure that the retarded bird special attack is the worst of the four. Why have a health and ammo restoring shielded turret, turn invisible, or “hulk out” in a nigh-invulnerable frenzy when you can have a goddamn bird flap around doing absolutely f**k all, so far as I can tell? Why indeed.

Mordecai and Lilith defeat the legendary “Montauk Monster”.

After playing the single player campaign and leveling up a bit so as not to come off as a total n00b, I joined an online party where I was almost immediately exposed as a n00b anyway. I don’t play games online very much, so it took me a little while to get up to speed. But by 1AM in the morning, I had a group of new friends playing as a well-balanced team, sharing loot and picking our way through hordes of over-leveled enemies in places that we most likely had no business being. I also had a sorta pissed off wifey. Invariably, some asshole always snagged the really l33t loot before anyone else could, but then, you’re constantly finding randomly generated weapons that are significantly more awesome than the one you had before so it’s not that big of an issue. I’d imagine that Borderlands is probably very similar to WOW or Diablo in it’s reward and loot sharing system, though I wouldn’t really be the one to comment on that. I’m about as likely to play WOW as I am to try heroine; I’m sure it’s probably awesome, I really just don’t need another debilitating addiction in my life. Read the rest of this entry →