RPI has, as always, sucked me into a vortex of working long hours without much time for breaks. However, some critical work has been done on OGUR with some of my free time. Although I do love working on OGUR, sometimes creating simply isn’t the therapy I need after a tough week.

Thankfully, a wide-world of games exist for me to explore and di-sect when I need something different to expend some brain power. Yesterday, I found a spare hour to spend finishing up my first playthrough of Borderlands. I picked it up the GOTY edition during a recent steam sale for next to nothing, and have played it in short increments since the beginning of the semester. After 27 hours of cumulative play-time, I feel as though there are a handful of small notes worth recording on the experience.

To begin, Borderlands is more than a FPS game. It really is the most fun I’ve had with a modern FPS. Not since some other FPS, but more fun than every other modern FPS. That includes Halo, Modern Warfare 2, etc. I’ve heard from a number of sources that Borderlands falls somewhat flat if you are playing by yourself, but I did not find myself within that group of whiners.

There are a ton of places that rave about what makes the game so great, and I concur with many of those points. I rather want to focus on the negative here. A common mistep I’ve seen in a majority of big budget titles these days is a lack luster ending. Be warned, spoilers ahead.

A story not ending well isn’t so much something that concerns me, with the exception of games like Red Dead Redemption where story is used as a tool for immersion. Rather, the gameplay of Borderlands changes drastically in the last hour or so of the game. For the first 25-26 hours, I found the pacing to be nearly perfect. Driving never felt boring once the waypoints opened up. Useful new weapons appear just frequently enough that I never got too comfortable with any loadout. Furthermore, the game keeps the action tight and frantic without dishing out too much punishment for failure.

Sadly, the final approach towards the Vault places your character into a long winding mountainside trail where guardian after guardian needs to be taken down. This process spans over more than three entire maps. I’d already mastered the different guardian types by the second map, which made getting through the back two a chore. To top it all off, the final boss could be brought down by standing in a single spot and shotgunning a tentacle that was strapped to a rock, while all of the enemy’s attacks failed to connect.

This left a really sour taste in my mouth about Borderlands, but like Indigo Prophecy, this didn’t take away from all the great moments up until that point. Its merely a lackluster tip of a spectacular iceberg.

In stark contrast, I have The Binding of Isaac from Ed McMillen and Florian Himsl. I’ve been loosely following this game since I first heard news of it some time ago. The story was a completely original direction to me, and the gameplay looked to be that perfect balance of new, but not too new.

I’ve spent a little over two hours with it now, and have collected two major complaints. Firstly, the game started for me in a windowed mode. There was no indication of how to get it into full-screen. This may have been a Steam issue, but none-the-less a quick google revealed that the ‘F’ key would get me into full-screen. I had hoped that would solve my second issue with the game, but it did not.

That second issue, has to do with what’s going on with the game logic behind the scenes. The game’s performance ranges from highly reactive to sluggish depending on the number of enemies in a given chamber. We aren’t talking hundreds or even dozens of enemies. If more than three appear for me on screen, then the game lags nearly to the point of making it impossible to play.

To top it off, the game has crashed for me three times now. Once when I was one dungeon away from what appears to be the final dungeon. The game prevents any game state save mechanism, so that programming error resulted in me losing a possible first completion of the game.

I bring this up not to tarnish anyone’s reputation. I don’t even bring it up to complain. Rather, I mention this because I understand how difficult it can be to debug a game that is heavily grounded in randomly generated content and game play. Its a challenging task, but after my frustration with The Binding of Isaac it is a top priority that no one playing OGUR will walk away annoyed simply because I forgot a test-case.

With that said, it appears as though Ed McMillen is currently shooting out a plethora of Tweets to early buyers that are having similar complaints. Its great to see a developer who cares enough about the project’s he puts out (even the one’s that come from a game jam) to interface with annoyed players.