Well as per usual I am coming late to the video game party. As I have mentioned here I have recently upgraded my computer and as part of that I have been checking out some new games (as well as some old ones that never played very well on my old system.) This last weekend I discovered a game called Borderlands (on Steam). Borderlands originally hit store shelves in October of 2009, and it was created by the same people who brought us the awesome Bioshock. Borderlands is one impressive game.

Borderlands is a FPS (First Person Shooter) RPG (Role Playing Game). So the point of view is usually down the sights of a gun, and your character develops over time. The game is set on a distant world called Pandora (not relation to the movie Avatar’s Pandora) which is basic a human colony in which Mad Max style bandits and crazed midgets reign supreme. It has a very Mad Max meets the old west meets Trigun feel to it. You play a mercenary (one of four characters, each with there own special abilities: Brick, Lilith, Mordecai, and Roland) who goes on various missions to earn money and help out the “good” colonists on Pandora. The world of Pandora is wide and fairly open wild west filled with monsters, bandits, and adventure. The landscape is littered with vending machines at which you can buy weapons, ammo, and healing kits as well as stations where you can pick up a car and get resurrected when the action gets a little to deadly for you. The action is fast. The graphics are great. The story and characters are interesting and fun. The missions are challenging (some a little too challenging). And it offers bazillions of different guns to use. (This is an official selling point of the game.) On top of all that it offers up to four play Co-op play over the internet (which I have not tried yet) as well as single player play.

I am about ten hours in and I am still having a blast. I highly recommend this game, but be warned, this game is very graphically violent and gory.

The downside to it is it is like crack for me. The combined story tell (but visual and audio elements) and participatory actions, make Borderlands hard for me to walk away from and a distraction from other important stuff. And much like Bioshock, the game immerses you in the story and in the world setting. This is the future of story telling. A future I would love to participate in (as more than just a consumer). So if you are reading this and you own a game company and need a creative software engineer with a desire to tell stories let me know.

So yes in the end, Borderlands ate my weekend, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

Thanks,

T

P.S. If you own <a href="http://www.Borderlands and would like to play online, or want to buy it now and want to play online, drop me a line and we can set something up. I really want to try out the online play option.