Apparently there are some of you out there who haven’t heard of Borderlands. Apparently there are some of you out there who are skeptical of Borderlands. Well let me give you the scoop, because this game is freaking awesome!
You know me, though, I love me some Role Playing Games and I love me some First Person Shooters, and Borderlands is the beautiful love child of the two. Thank you 2K Games for providing me with a copy of this wonderful game. Released on October 20th for the 360, PS3 and PC by Gearbox Software and 2K Games, here’s my thoughts on Borderlands.
Whether you’re shooting zombies, terrorists, aliens, or Nazis it seems that most first person shooters all follow the same simple formula.
Pit a player in an epic environment with a desperate conflict in which his/her faction or side is losing. Then have their respective faction enlist their help to somehow turn the tides of war.
The player then must slaughter their way through countless armies and foes in order to achieve victory and save the world. Now throw in some explosions and engaging firefights throughout the game and you got yourself a FPS.
Predictable? Yes, and many have complained as a result, but will the FPS genre change anytime soon?
For my first non-introductory rant, I really wanted to write an obsolete review. You see, for Christmas this year I received a laptop that has some pretty solid horsepower (compared to my old college desktop that could hardly run Age of Empires II) and in my haste to celebrate my brand new PC I decided to pick up Crysis.
And what is the first thing that all game journalists do after they get a new game? They review it; even if it’s too old to be news but too new to be retro.
Anyway, I kind of figured that there might be other people in similar boats who are finally upgrading their computers who might want to know if this ocular feast is actually worth playing. To those of you out there, I just want to say that the on board Vista game Chess Titans is entertaining me better than Crysis is right now.
I remember back in 2000 when I was living in my dorm at Florida State University, about ten of us would prop our doors open and load up Quake III and play hours of deathmatch. Now id Software is releasing it in a browser-based form called Quake Live. Poor college students should read up and prepare to lose days playing this free, but complete version of the game.
With Doom 4 announced last May, many fans are anxious to find out exactly what id Software has in store. Besides a brief Quakecon preview, things are sill very much under wraps. So, it’s nice to hear that Graham Joyce, the well-known English fiction writer, has been chosen to help drive the story and lore behind Doom 4.
With Blizzard’s highly successful (not to mention ingenious) marketing scheme of including free game discs with all purchases of World of Warcraft, alongside Valve’s “Free Weekends,” many game companies are taking the power of the free trial-offer seriously.
Walk into any cybercafe and take note of your surroundings: rows of bright monitors projecting an eclectic display of PC favorites. Though, somewhere in all of this, you are bound to see at least a few gamers playing the original Counter-Strike, their fingers rapidly navigating keyboard and mouse while managing a score of 30-0 on de_dust. So, what makes this old shooter still popular amidst so many other great titles of its genre?
Call of Duty emerged in 2003, bringing another WWII FPS into our hands. The tight narrative was a prominent feature, enveloping players into the story of the game. With Activision using a “leapfrog strategy,” alternating between Infinity Ward and Treyarch, and now finishing development on CoD5: World at War, what’s expected for the future?