Mongo Nation

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 →