What a Gamer Wants: Borderlands

Yeah, I’ve got the game, and I like it, but here’s the deal: it could have been WAY better, and it wouldn’t have been very hard to drastically improve the PC version. Here to school Gearbox on what PC gamers want in their role-playing shooters is the entire community of RockPaperShotgun, a gaming website devoted entirely to the PC. Check it out: what begins as a short post mentioning that a Borderlands 2 is very likely quickly turned into a very intelligent and thought-out list of the improvements Gearbox should make on the next game. I think they’ve pretty much nailed it, but see for yourself.

CoD Modern Warfare 2: I’ll pass, thanks

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 came out today. Hordes of fans stampeded stores at midnight, grabbed their own copy, and ran home to play the damn thing. Gamers have proclaimed it their favorite shooter ever, a generic shooter, an excellent story, and a practically non-existent one. Worldwide, it’s retailing for more than most AAA games do. From the US to the UK to Australia and everywhere in between, gamers are grumbling and kicking and generally raising hell. Right before, you know, they eagerly swipe their credit cards at the checkout line.

Me? I haven’t bought it.

Borderlands: Claptrap

This is equal parts funny and painful to watch. Enjoy the poetic justice at the end.

October 22, I can’t wait for you to arrive.

Canabalt

Sometimes online games are too complicated. That’s why I only ever play games that have one input – the space bar. If you’re like me, you don’t want to waste time learning things like how to play. You just want to push the freaking buttons, and when there’s only one button, that gets a lot easier. Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to present Canabalt: because there’s only one button. Oh, and it’s actually a good bit of fun, as well.

IT IS ALIVE!

No, really. After a relatively uneventful assembly process, half an hour of cursing Dell for using non-standard parts in my old rig, an overly-eventful fighting-with-software process, and a bit of testing for stability, my rig is up and running. In fact, I’m typing on it right now. Fun, right? That’s what I thought.

In all honesty, I’m not particularly inclined to write up a large computer-building post about the assembly and install process, so I won’t. Instead, I’ll just post a few pictures I took during the build. Please forgive the image quality, my DSLR’s battery was dead and I had to use my phone.

Ahem:

Borderlands Box Art Released

It remains to be seen how the game itself will turn out, but if the recently-released box art for upcoming game Borderlands is any indication, it will be absolutely fantastic.

Because really, how can you resist a game like this? It’s dystopian mayhem that just begs me to play it. The game should drop in late October, if I recall correctly.

Weekly Shenanigans #8

Shenanigans remind me of cliched Irish terminology and the movie Office Space. Surely, neither of those are bad things. If they are, I don’t want to be right. Anyhow, I present to you the eighth iteration of Weekly Shenanigans, that once-every-seven-days feature that you all know and love. Bastion of all things geek and nerd, purveyor of tech-news… how would you ever live without this stuff? And with that, away we go:

• First up is an interesting (if somewhat cerebral) look at gaming terms posted onto Gamasutra entitled, “Mapping Gamer Dialect.” Intriguing, no? Click through and read up.

• 

  This is the POWERHAT.

  If you haven’t been reading these, you should absolutely, definitely, without any shred of doubt head over to Rock Paper Shotgun and read their newest ongoing feature – “A Fool In Morrowind,” in which Alec Meer re-discovers The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and all the wonderful things therein. He recounts his experiences with… things… like the hat pictured at right. Hilarity ensues. GO.

• Anandtech recently reviewed the ASRock X-58 Extreme motherboard, priced at the sweet, sweet amount of $169. It performed around 1% lower than other boards, but such a difference is hardly noticeable to most users. Given that this is a fully-featured ATX motherboard, that price is excellent, and only matched by the micro-ATX MSI X-58M previously mentioned on Weekly Shenanigans.

• Most weeks – not every week, but most weeks – I post something about Apple. This week is no exception. It’s almost like a mini-feature within the feature. What’s going on this week, you ask? I’ll tell you – three times over! Oh, and I’m naming this sub-feature Super-Happy-Apple-Fun-Time. It just seems appropriate. Read below, fool! Also: Don’t ask why this is two separate bullets. I don’t know.

Weekly Shenanigans #7

Ah, the ritual posting of Weekly Shenanigans. Shamelessly copying the format of RPS’ Sunday Papers since, well, seven Weekly Shenanigans ago. Enough with the reminiscing, it’s making me all weepy. Read this stuff:

• These people should be shot for blasphemy and willful mockery of the star wars we all know and love. I don’t know what else to say on the subject. ***Update*** When I just tried to access the site for a pic, it was down for maintenance. Courage, fair reader.

• There’s craziness afoot in the gaming world. Bethesda’s mother ship Zenimax has purchased id Software, the developer of such priceless treasures as Doom and Castle Wolfenstein. Here’s hoping that Bethesda’s next release makes use of John Carmack’s technical prowess to up the ante a little from the aged Gamebryo graphics engine employed in Fallout 3. Also, EA has made the… interesting decision to merge Mythic and Bioware into, “a giant RPG robot,” as Kotaku so eloquently described the situation. Personally, I’m trying to stay positive and naively assume that these mergers will produce good things instead of misshapen monster-things.

I Bought Windows 7 Today, or I Am Victorious: Return of the Victorious

Pre-ordering: it's what all the cool kids do.

Before we get into any of this, note the title. Yeah, that’s witty; it even references an earlier post, which is always fun.

Okay, down to business.

I pre-ordered Windows 7 today for $49.99. Fine, $55.97 if you want to get technical and include shipping.

It was good. It was lovely. And for a few hair-raising minutes, it looked like it wasn’t even going to happen.

Newegg didn’t officially show it as in stock, and just had the auto-notify button up. Office Depot was out of stock. Microsoft’s online store crashed every time I tried to access it. Enter my hero: Amazon. Ordered, confirmed, and scheduled to arrive on the day Windows 7 officially releases.

Before any of you go off into some sort of anti-Windows / anti-early adopter / anti-other stuff rage, let me make a few points:

Weekly Shenanigans #6

Hmmm. This is going up a bit later than usual today. Then again, I got up a bit later than usual, if that’s any excuse. Anyway, I’ve got a few more links for you than usual, from all over the internet (which, as I understand it, is actually a series of tubes). Topics cover a range of things, from the funny, to the nerdgasmic, the the outrageous. It’s a carefully formulated balance of content designed to… who am I kidding. It’s a bunch of random crap I find interesting. Down the rabbit-hole with you:

• For starters, I’m gonna go all dealicious/slickdeals/cheapass gamer on you. For reasons unknown and not entirely understood, Bioshock and Oblivion are being bundled together into a package that’s $39.99 on Xbox 360 and $29.99 on PC. Words cannot describe how wonderful a deal this is. If I didn’t already own both games, I’d be out buying right now. You, though… maybe you don’t have them yet. That’s a problem. Fix it!

• This story is old, but (sickly) fascinating, and its title, “The Adventure of the Camera Shy Computer” really doesn’t do it justice. I would’ve preferred, “The Epileptic Computer,” or “The Big Computer That Couldn’t.” Sometimes it’s nice to know how far we’ve come.

• Traditional Media is Dead and Dying: The RIAA has once again succeeded in making the little guy (or woman, in this case) suffer for the presumed, collective sins of the entire file-sharing community. The court handling the Jammie Thomas file-sharing case has ordered her to pay $1.92 million dollars for downloading and sharing music using the Kazaa file-sharing service. That’s $80,000 per song. Want another metric? The idiot judge on this case just ordered her to pay 240 Kias, or 1,600 new 13-inch Macbook Pros, or 38,400 new PC games, all for something that’s barely worth money in the first place – poor-quality music. You know all those gamers that were planning on attacking Valve for making them buy Left4Dead 2 as a standalone game? They should take all that energy and put it into something positive, like burying all the dinosaurs over at the RIAA.