Rock, Paper, Shotgun

One Emcee Slick brings us Borderlands: the rap. “When you’ve got seventy million guns / why use swords and knives? / I chose the hunter Mordecai / and now I’m level 45.” He knows it.

The second piece of Borderlands DLC is now available. Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot introduces a new “riot” mode, in which you face “endless hordes of menacing antagonists, thirsting for carnage in tournaments where the rules of warfare are constantly changing.” It seems that the add-on provides a series of tournament matches in the new “Underdome” arena, which is presided over by the titular Moxxi, a sarcastic lady. The battles will drop lots of high spec weapons, but not allow you to grind XP.

You can get the DLC for $10 at the Gearbox Store, or on Steam, but I can’t say I’m that interested in this one. Trailer below.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve not even had time to starting playing the first bit of expansionising DLC for Borderlands and another one has been announced. Titled “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot” it will apparently feature “an intense single-player or cooperative experience that expands the mayhem by adding three new Riot Mode arenas where players will endure an onslaught of Pandora’s baddest enemies.” Hmm. Additionally: “Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot also adds a new bank feature, which allows players extra storage capacity for when they encounter one of the more than 16 million weapons that Borderlands has to offer; and the ability to acquire two additional skill points as quest rewards, making their characters even more powerful than before.” So that’s good, but shouldn’t a bank or locker system have been patched it anyway? Wasn’t it one of the most obvious oversights in the basic game?

It’s hitting consoles on the 7th of January, and the PC release date is, naturally enough, undisclosed.

The Zombie Island Of Dr Ned, Borderlands’ first piece of downloadable content, is now available. You can get it here (link dead at time of writing, which is a lot of use…) for retail versions of the game, and here for the Steam version. I’m not sure about other digi-download versions, but I’d assume the retail patch will work? Any ideas about that, comment below. I’ll have a play and report back if it’s worth paying the $10/£6.30. Trailer below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week you’ll have noticed young Mr Rossignol doffing his hat and offering you some footage of the forthcoming Borderlands DLC, The Zombie Island Of Doctor Ned. Which is a very splendid name, and released this very day. Now you can enjoy the official trailer for the new content should you be so bold as to look below.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: Patch ahoy!

Zombies, zombies, zombies. We might as well rename the PC the Personal Zombie Slayer. Borderlands‘ zombie island DLC expansion, The Zombie Island Of Dr Ned, is out on consoles on the 24th of this month, and should be available for PC shortly thereafter. We’re still chasing the exact PC details from 2K. It features some freaky-looking zombies, Borderlands style, as well as “were-skags” (?) and promises to add another “six to ten hours” of game time.
Read the rest of this entry »

Borderlands 2 is probably going to happen, if comments made in this interview are to be believed. Mike Neumann told the award-looting VG247.com that “Everyone here loves the franchise, and it seems like the public is really coming back with praise and love. So yeah, if everything makes sense, Borderlands 2 seems like a no-brainer to me.”

The downloadable content, Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, will reportedly cost $10 and is out on the 24th of November (not clear if that’s for the PC). Still no patch addressing voice and connection issues though, eh? Or did I miss that? Anyway, what do you want to see in a sequel?

I’ve been meaning to put up some Borderlands tweaking instructions all week, but I don’t think I could have done it better than this thread on the Gearbox forums. Thanks to Mr Berry for pointing that out to us. Crucially, one of the commands in there allows you disable the voice-comms for the game, so you can use something more sensible. We’ve had no word back from 2K/Gearbox on whether there will be a patch for that stuff, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough. If you are tweaking, don’t forget to back up the relevant files before you start editing, as there might be some problems with loss of keybinds and such. The other issue is port forwarding, the instructions for which are in this thread. If you’re having trouble hosting/connecting to co-op games then you probably need to get busy with that stuff. Sigh.

We’ve played Gearbox’s fancy-lookin’ “role-playing shooter”, Borderlands, and we’re ready for a verdict. What will we have to say?

Jim: Who wants to try to define the game in a single sentence then, eh?
Kieron: Hellgate in a desert, but not shit.
Alec: There’s some sort definition involving the words “Diablo” and “guns”, but I can’t work out how to stick them together.
Read the rest of this entry »

There’s still a week until the thing goes on sale, but seems Gearbox/2K are confident enough in their impending shooty-bang-bang/looty-grab-grab game that they’ve already confirmed its first DLC.

You’ll never guess what it’s about. I mean, it’s not like it could be zombies – that undead horse has already had a brutal flogging everywhere else.

It’s zombies.
Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of people asking questions about Borderland’s intricacies over in the Co-op impressions thread yesterday. Specifically, how much of an RPG it actually is. Well, the what-is-an-RPG always opens a particular can of debate, but in terms of character development, that they’ve lobbed the character skill tress online can give you a handle of the whole action/RPG mix. Here’s sneaky-lady Lilith , heavy-frenzied mouthbreather Brick, camping-bastard Mordecai and the hilariously inappropriately named Roland. And some further explanation follows…
Read the rest of this entry »