Did I forget? Was I discouraged by lack of feedback? No. I wanted to play Borderlands so I had something to say in this blog, and oh boy...
 

Borderlands

Fuck. Gearbox. Fuck. Steam. Fuck. The video game industry. I waited for Borderlands on the PC because it seemed like a good decision in my mind. I also bought Fallout 3 for the PC because I was afraid the controls would be better, and there'd be an easier streamlined system for the game, in addition to the access to mods. I also got Left4Dead on PC because I knew it would look better, have better online support, and again better controls. I've never had a PC game with bad controls, that's always more of a console thing. Games like Modern Warfare or Halo never had these problems, but play something like Far Cry 2 on console and you'll see what I mean. I decided I'd go with PC for borderlands because of the controls, if I couldn't use the controls, I wouldn't be able to play the game, thus money wasted.
 
Big mistake.
 
But I'm not going to attribute the mistake to myself for poor judgment, instead I'm going to say that Gearbox is a totally irresponsible developer. First of all, the PC version was delayed by a week. The pirated version of the game was available day one of release, what the fuck was the hold up? You wanna lower piracy rates? Don't disregard an audience especially one that you complain about stealing your game, when its fucking available day one and you delay it for no reason. In addition to this steam released the game at 4pm EST time the day of release. What the fuck is that bullshit? Not midnight. Not 6am, not "10am because that's when we get to work" 4pm. When the day is nearing an end. This isn't a major complaint, but it made me angry already that I had to wait the whole day that I didn't have classes for virtually no reason. All of this so far, and I haven't even gotten to the game yet.
 
This game was obvious console developed. Which you know, fine. I wasn't expecting that to be the case, it seemed equally developed for sort of like Fallout 3 or Left4Dead, you have to press enter to start the game and what not, so it seems pretty clear the main platform was a console. However that also means the PC optimization is complete shit. My laptop can run Crysis at High setting, Borderlands struggles on Medium/Low. This is unacceptable. The game isn't graphically demanding, or contains a lot of spiffy effects. You might say, "well the cel-shading makes it hard to tell how good the game actually looks" but my point is proven by the fact that the play quality decays as you continue to progress. I've played the game for about four hours now, in 45 minute bursts. The reason for this is because as you keep playing, the frame rate gets worse and worse, it might start off at 40FPS, working fine, but five minutes in itll go back down to 30FPS. And then stay there until about another forty minutes when it gets unplayable.
 
I don't know what lazy way of coding they decided to stick with, but its destroying the play experience. Speaking of which, for a four player co-op game, I've never seen such abysmal support for online play. There's mic chat, cool, but you can't turn off mic chat. So when mic chat begins to make demonic screeching sounds because of the unbearable lag I'd like the option turn off the mic, or at least mute another player. Or turn off my mic, or for fuck's sake, be able to do any audio settings besides music and sound effects volume. Apparently there's no surround sound, mic sensitivity testing, input and output levels. Which is stupid for a PC game not to have that. But it doesn't evne matter, because you can't even join games. Every game times out within seconds (15 to be exact) and its impossible to play with one player, let alone four. The one instance I was able to get into a game after trying eleven or twelve times, the game lagged so badly I could literally press space bar, walk out of the room and back, and then after a few seconds my character would jump. We're talking about six-seven seconds of delay. That's terrible.
 
Yeah its launch day, but you know what? Gearbox isn't a fucking baby developer. They've done launches before, hey, the god damn game has been running on Xbox Live and PSN for a full week, the can't figure out how to handle server loads and bandwidth? What the fuck are they doing? It's 2009, shitty servers on the first day is unacceptable in this day and age. This entire experience makes me want to ask Steam how to get a refund, and just buy the Xbox version, I'd rather not deal with the hassle since it seems obvious that the platform isn't going to have any support for it, and I'd be surprised if a patch comes out to fix any of these problems.
 
As for the game itself? Who cares. I won't speak about a game I can't play. Yeah I've played single player, sure I could say my opinion on that, but if they can't get fucking online to work in 2009, i'm not going to bother. The game might as well not even load.
 

TalkGames 10/26/09 - Bombs and Zingers

Download, RSS, iTunes. Show not  Late show, internet outage delayed it-- sorry. Machinariuam (2:33), Killing Floor New Stuff (7:50), Fallout 3 (14:30), Resident Evil (17:50), Most depressing break music ever (29:00). Break

Previews and games we're looking forward to (29:50), Tekken 6 (31:00), Modern Warfare 2 (33:00), Assassin's Creed II (39:00), Borderlands (45:45), Other Shit (49:00), Ballad of Gay Tony (51:45), Break.

News, Kotaku Addiction Article (57:22), Games That Died at Retail (1:05:00), Molyneux picks five revolutionary games (1:14:15), Things we hate about video games (1:26:15), Origins of Dinosaur Pizza (1:33:00), Do we like Sim games? (1:34:00), Do we think the ESRB has flaws (1:37:10), Violence in vidoe games (1:41:00), Trivia/end (1:46:50). Hidden clip at the end. Trivia this week is: "In the Fallout Universe, the Brotherhood of Steel's mission is to... what?"
 
 
That's all I got for today. This fucking game wore me out.