I finished Borderlands. That game's level scaling is really bad. The quests don't scale properly to your level. I did too many easy sidequests and then just ran through the final maps, putting bullets in the enemies and immolating everything.

Speaking of which, there's not much to speak of in the way of tactics. I built my Siren for close-quarters elemental AoE damage. That translates to setting oneself on fire and running around to spread the flames. Basically, a viable Leeroy Jenkins, or "enemies can't melee me if I'm on fire!"



The most memorable moments and locations were from early on in the game - when I was a bit underlevelled, ran out of bullets and had to kill a pair of mutant dogs with my undeveloped melee and unevolved action skill.

Anyways the moral of this story is that I'm not sure if I want to play Borderlands 2.

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Oh and the open source software I had in mind? IT DOESN'T WORK FOR THE APPLICATION I HAD IN MIND. And I have a meeting in thirty minutes with the govt and an industry partner, but I don't even remember why we called for the meeting. The end.

In light of Amy's newest post, about bandwagoners.... This speaks for itself. I had no idea that Julie was so interested in what her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend was up to nowadays!

(Edit - it was Charles.

)

Moving on to our regularly scheduled programming. I bought pH test strips today. I might have found an open-source program for feature tracking, but I don't know enough about computers to do the command line things right. Tomorrow, I'm going to go geocaching and eat noodles with Ting.

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Borderlands is fun. I actually thought it was a straight-up shooter with light RPG elements. Well, it is, in the same way that Diablo is a dungeon-crawling hack-n-slash. The point isn't to slaughter waves of mutant dogs that aren't called dogs, sexy mcsex demons, and/or defenseless herbivores. No. The enemies don't have much in the way of tactics, anyways. Many just kinda run at you screaming.


<masturbation joke>

Borderlands is a loot game. Loot is a strange little word. Loot loot loot. You find guns in enemy chests (either metal or meaty), compare them to your existing guns, and angst briefly about which one is better while making mental DPS calculations. Then you realize that your backpack is full and you can't carry any more guns. You drop the cheapest guns and resume adventuring, or you do a U-turn and sell your excess guns to the nearest vendor, who is at the entry of the map, so you can get some better guns. This leaves a warm and fuzzy feeling in your brain most frequently experienced by addicts.

This probably won't be a problem. Borderlands is fun, but not that much fun. You have to drive a vehicle to get around large maps, which are always crawling with respawned enemies. The vehicle handles like a soaped turd. Worse than Mass Effect 1's Mako. Mowing down enemies is fine but there's not much strategy to Borderlands. Also, the art style is very interesting but turning on anti-aliasing is not an option in the menu. WTF?

Um. It's also said to be a near-perfect co-op game but I'm playing it solo... ergo, doing it wrong.

I don't mean to be so hard on Borderlands, though. It nails surreal humour. The desert is literally full of "midget shotgunners." A placard for an early boss introduces him as "9 Toes (Also, he has three balls.)" The enemies have lines like "time to pound some meat puppets!" I like meat.