Borderlands Anonymous

Hi… My name is Johnny Shortstick and I…uh I am a Borderlands Addict.

I was first exposed to Borderlands about 6 months ago, a friend and I were checking out the demos at the Singapore Games Convention and happened to find the demo stations for Borderlands free. We played the demo.

For three and a half hours.

In retrospect, that should have been a warning of the game’s addictive qualities, but those were more innocent times, oh if only we could turn back time.

Life would continue on, pretty much as usual, after that first taste of that game, it would occasionally come up in some of my conversations, but that was it. Little did I know that the seeds of addiction had already been planted and was quietly taking root.

It began innocuously enough, based on the positive reviews and gameplay videos on the internet, my brother and I decided to buy the game. I do not think that the game had as strong an effect on my brother though, he is a stronger man than I.

That was … maybe four weeks ago now. Four weeks spent, if not playing the game then thinking about it. Little else distracted me from my inebriated stupor, at times I become almost a fixture, sitting statuesque in the middle of the couch, controller in hand, mouth opened slightly in fevered concentration, keeping just enough self awareness to not drool all over my shirt.



The game is insidious in its seduction, it teases the player with just enough to keep him interested at first, a rare gun here, a skill point there. Just when you begin to notice the repetitive MMO like nature of the quests, your character becomes a little more powerful. Maybe you start to gain the ability to regain health or to regenerate ammo for your guns. It is almost superficial but it keeps you from wanting to put that controller down.

I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve said to myself, ‘Just a few more levels and I can get the skill to increase the effectiveness of my Fire Hawk Incendiary Pistol’ or ‘I think I’ll just do another Sledge run to see if I can get a better gun’.

It is not like the game doesn’t have its flaws. The load times between areas are glaringly long, so that’s the time I use to go to the toilet or grab another drink from the fridge. It would not be a stretch of the imagination to believe that that was its intended purpose.

There is a lot of noticeable texture pop-ins, this is particularly evident when you just enter a new area and the game doesn’t even seem to care to hide it. The frame rate also takes a hit every time there is more than three things happening on screen at the same time, it jumps and stutters like a mentally challenged kid trying to recite the alphabet while skipping rope. It even lags in the goddamned start menu! What other console game can get away with that?

The plot is as thin and insubstantial as a disposable undergarment improvised from a couple of plies of Kleenex. There are some genuinely interesting characters but you don’t get to interact with them much at all, they are as approachable as a back alley drug dealer, you know they probably got some really interesting conversation in them but they just want to do their job and be done with you.

I’m not even sure what I’m even Doing in Borderlands, earlier I compared it to an MMO, and it is like that, but the big difference is there isn’t anyone else around. In any MMO the driving motivation is a persistent sense of progression of your avatar and much of this is usually derived from comparing yourself to others. This isn’t the case in Borderlands, sure you gain levels and you can show off your character in online play, but it doesn’t have the same gravity because you are always limited to four players at a time and no real way of distinguishing yourself from other players.

So why can’t I stop playing it?

The short answer is: Loot.



There was a couple of times in those four weeks when I was granted fleeting moments of lucidity, I tried to breakdown what exactly I was doing when I played the game. This is what I scrawled on a piece of tissue with either ketchup or blood, I’m not sure which because I threw it away before I thought to lick it.

“Kill anything that moves that is not a claptrap, get better guns to kill things.
Kill some more things to get better guns… kill”

There is an experiment where a scientist observed animals in a box deprived of stimuli, except for a lever which when pulled would cause a mechanism to give out pellets of food. Interestingly, the animals were observed to pull the levers faster if the mechanism gave out the pellets at random rather than at regular intervals, sometimes the animals would pull the lever even if they didn’t need the food.

Borderlands is like that box only instead of food pellets you get guns and instead of a lever you have Skags. It is also more fun to shoot skags than to pull a lever for food pellets… I think… I’m pretty sure…

You know what I think I’ll go play Borderlands just to make sure.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jumps on girls with his candlestick

Put another notch on the board for Infidelity, no I’m not talking about terrorists or slightly confused customers buying a new TV, it’s that inveterate vice of all penis owning humans, Good Old Lust.


Good Old Lust, because everything is more romantic in French.

So what’s the score then?
Infidelity 9741374674628374628349081 : Men 0.

And who could blame them, after all science has given men the perfect excuse. Survival of the species. Encoded in the male DNA is the instinct to inseminate females so as to pass on genetic code to the next generation. It is only to play the odds that Men cheat, nobody upbraids another for buying multiple lottery tickets for the same draw.

So give the man a break. So he cheated on his wife with someone that is only slightly older than his daughter, so he probably cheated more than once, so what? Need I remind you that Jack Neo is the same man who gave you Liang Po Po? And at the first whiff of a scandal you conveniently closed one eye during his movies (Some even closing two), you bunch of Ingrates.


How can you turn your back on this?

I can’t stand recent media reports casting aspersions on his character based on one mistake, and I’m not too sure about his mistress, did he really have sex with her or did she just hypnotize him into believing that he did. Where’s the Semen? I watch CSI, check her panties, if it’s true her panties will glow like Christmas under a blacklight.

Doesn’t anyone else think the timing of these stories of Jack Neo’s dalliances with Former actresses weird? What are the chances of having recently released a movie, preparing to drop an album in a couple of weeks and having previously been subject to a famous director’s sexual advances at the same that the director’s current mistress decides to be a bitch and announce their affair to his wife. Those are some pretty long odds there.

Well here’s a story about Jack Neo.

I once had a pitbull named Candy, despite her ugliness I still loved her very much. One day while walking Candy at a nearby park, we happened across where Jack Neo was filming a movie. As I have long admired his movies as a very effective cure for insomnia, I stuck around curious to see how the prolific director worked. It wasn’t long before Jack noticed me and my bitch and, quite unexpectedly, came over to say hi.

Jack was very polite, it turned out he was a dog lover and remarked that Candy was one of the prettiest bitches he had ever laid eye on. Candy being a friendly dog by nature, did not object to Jack’s stroking. Jack then explained to me that it just so happened that the scene he was currently shooting would greatly benefit from having a dog in it. I agreed to let Candy do the scene.

Jack then brought Candy into the back of his car for make-up, which I later found takes quite a long time for animals. After the shoot, Jack approached me telling me that this was the best bitch he ever had at the back of his car and that Candy could go on to be as successful as Fann Wong. I had to make the hard decision to let Candy go, but I don’t regret it as Jack Neo has assured me that she is treated well and she has become moderately successful. I think she now goes by another name, what was it? Patricia something…

I can understand how he feels though.

Yes, it’s true I admit that I have cheated.

It has been a difficult time for us but I believe that the relationship can be salvaged. It has been especially trying because I had cheated with my partner’s best friend. I talked it through with the both of them and we have come to an agreement to try out a more progressive and liberal relationship. So lefty will get Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays while righty will get Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, on Sundays we will all get in on the fun.


Best of hands again.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: Review

This review of Infinity Ward’s sequel to the breakout hit Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has turned out to be harder to write than I thought and that’s not just because of the series’ penchant for subtitles.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the game. On one hand, it is a pretty generic FPS game albeit a very polished one, and yet I cannot deny that I had fun with it or at least a strong impression that I did.

Modern Warfare picks up 5 years after the events of the first game, Russia has been taken over by the Ultranationalist Party and Zakhaev the antagonist of the previous game is viewed as a martyr.
As a US Ranger you go deep undercover infiltrating the ranks of a terrorist group.

This is when the controversial massacre of a Russian airport takes place. Much has been said about this chapter but playing through it felt terribly forced. Your character movement slows, ostensibly to allow the gravity of the situation to sink in or even to convey the character’s hesitation in going through with the mission.

The problem is that first person shooters are not the most conducive of genres to good characterization because you mostly play as a faceless, silent protagonist. We are hardly given any information at all about the personality of Pvt Joseph Allen before we suddenly find ourselves in front of civilians with a machine gun and lots of ammo. In that split second, the player either falls back on previous game experience (ie. Shoot first, ask questions later), project ourselves onto the character and (hopefully) try to stop the terrorists by turning on them or stand around fidgeting like an awkward teenager in a school dance.

Regardless of how the player reacts, you find out quickly what the game intends for you to do, however all that doesn’t really matter because SURPRISE! the terrorists knew you were working for the CIA all along and planned to use you to trigger a war between Russia and the US.

The whole sequence leaves you feeling helpless and used, forced into a decision you would not ordinarily make, which is, and this might seem like a bit of a stretch, exactly how Joseph Allen would have felt.

If this is indeed what the developers intended, then it is a masterstroke, exploiting the limitations of the medium to allow the audience to relate to the emotions of the character.

I’ll admit though that it is not something that presents itself, I arrived at this realization long after I played that sequence and it could very well be that I’m grasping at straws here.

Following that, the plot becomes more conventional except with a twist.

America is invaded by a terrestrial force!

Perhaps the invasion of the US of A would carry a greater weight if I felt any sort of emotional attachment to the country, as it is I might as well have been playing a Na’vi defending Pandora from Americans.

Although the depiction of a burning White House did make me think about how a similar scene with the Istana would sit with Singaporeans, personally I found it to be an oddly comical exercise of the imagination.

In what is now a trademark of the series, players switch perspectives moving on to ever increasingly improbable events, but the game keeps up the pace such that any sort of incredulity only sets in after you put down the controller.

Players advance through the game by moving from one checkpoint to the next, making sure to shoot any enemies so they don’t get a chance to obscure your view with strawberry sauce, although every good soldier knows that strawberry sauce is easily removed by hiding behind cover for a few seconds.
Nothing new here. Not that anyone plays a Call of Duty game for innovative gameplay.

After a while, it almost seems as if you are engaged in a sort of line dance with the enemy AI.

Receive objective, sprint in the direction of objective. Get shot from unseen enemies, go prone behind cover until screen is clear of blood. Peek above cover, shoot at the moving human shaped pixels 30 meters away. Get shot from another direction, throw grenade, hide behind cover. Enemy thrown grenade lands near you, panic, run into the open to get shot to death or get blown up by the grenade you were trying to throw back. Reload from last checkpoint, repeat until you have memorized enemy positions and use that knowledge to get to the next checkpoint.

It can get a little trite and at certain spots becomes frustratingly like memory card matching except with bullets and if you don’t match the cards right you get a face full of hot lead.

However this gives rise to some unexpected and probably unintended humourous situations. Characters important to the story seem to have a certain degree of self awareness and would often rush into a firefight with reckless abandon only to be shot or have a grenade explode at their feet, at which they react by lying on the ground for a couple of seconds before picking themselves up as if they had only been hit by a snowball.

Meanwhile the more expendable members of your squad have an inclination to walk into your line of fire only to realise they don’t have the regenerative powers bestowed by having one or more distinctive features. Here’s a tip, try growing a Mohawk.


Hiding your face behind a balaclava doesn't seem to work as well.

On the multiplayer side, you have the expected online multiplayer modes with the progression system which the first game made the standard. Tweaks to individual perks, the addition of death streaks and changes to the UAVs would keep veteran players occupied but wouldn’t mean a lot to someone new to the series.

What anyone can appreciate though is Spec-Ops, short stand-alone missions lasting a couple of minutes that could be played solo or with a friend. These let you replay some of the more memorable sequences in the campaign without having to go through the grind to get to them.

Modern Warfare 2 is a more than competent shooter that may or may not impress you with what it tries to do with its borderline schizophrenic plot. It is like going to Macdonald’s to have a cappuccino because its cheap, only to be pleasantly surprised at the effort the barista put into writing a message in the foam. The coffee still tastes like coffee though.


Coffee is Oscar Mike!