Dusting off Pandora - Borderlands Review

The scorching sun shines over the arid landscape. The great cliffs in the background stands defiantly against the elements and on a weathered road sign the text "Welcome to Pandora!"is shown. From behind it an alien dog-like creature hops out and lets out a ferocious shriek. It runs away onto the road and looks back just in time to see the bus running it over. Welcome to Gearbox's Borderlands.

Borderlands is a RPG/FPS in a postapocalyptic sci-fi setting that in many way are reminiscent of Mad Max. But less serious and with more aliens and robots. The type called "Claptrap" will especially leave no one without an opinion about them, as most will either love or hate these spunky little bit characters.

You play as one out of four different treasure hunters in search of riches on the next to abandoned planet Pandora, each of them with their own class set of abilities. There's the hunter, a sniper based class with the ability to send out a bird of prey to attack it's enemies, and the soldier, a class centered around assault rifles and shotguns with a portable turret. Then there's also Brick which is the big beefy guy you want to pick if you want to pound someone to dust with your knuckles or use big explosions, and the more lithe class the siren who can temporarily make themselves invisible and specialises in elemental damage.

Why no test drive?

Some games I can spend waiting for years to come, the expectation of some sweet deliverance of exuberant proportions digital joy being part of the appeal. Other games I merely stumble upon and for some reason decide to buy.

Fortunately I seem to have a lucky track record of buying games I know little of with only one of them being a disappointment. A few of the games I bought on a whim are Super Smash Bros. and Banjo Kazooie for the Nintendo 64, as well as a small game called Fallout, the latter of which I recently re-bought soundtrack alone. More on that later.

Then there's the middle child of these categories. The games I kinda know of but isn't sure if it's something for me. I've read some reviews and seen some footage, but is still not convince. Usually a great demo will be enough to sway me to buy it, but unfortunately that kind of software becoming something of a rarity these days. If I'm lucky I will be able to try them out some other way, maybe trying it on a platform at a friends or something of the like. There are still titles where I feel I'm flinging myself into them, not really sure if I'll like the game or not. Again, I'm usually in luck here as Prototype, a game which I had tons of fun with, and Borderlands are both fairly recent purchases which I've enjoyed. I plan on writing a bit more about Borderlands a bit later.

Driving Mr. Beldak

So Beldak arrived by flight yesterday. Yay for that! However, not so much yay for the late flight traffic.

We had disscussed earlier about how he was supposed to get from Arlanda to our place, and the bus seemed a good way to go. It was cheap and reliable, and I wouldn't have to dare the Swedish winter roads. The downside was that there was only one fare that he would be able to take, and if he missed it he would have to wait until the next day before being able to go anywhere. We agreed he should buy it anyway and in the worst case scenario I would come and get him by car.

Thus the day came when he was going to arrive, so or course the flight was delayed. It didn't really come as a surpsrise, given it being Christmas, winter and all that jazz, but we were still hoping he'd be there in time for the bus. We kept contacting eachother with text messages and after a while we got to the point where with the expected flight time he wouldn't make it on to the bus.

So I got ready to get to the car for the nearly two hour drive to Arlanda when Celend graciously offered to come along and keep me company. We then went into the night with music pumping on the stereo and managed to arrive at Arlanda just when Beldak got off the plane it seems, and we got a nice parking spot to boot. It turned out however that the flight was a bit quicker than expected. After we had greeted the flying Dutchman and his lugage we continued to walk past the bus hewas supposed to have taken in the first place. We felt a bit silly.

But we returned safely and probably got home earlier than we would have otherwise, and it also meant that we got to meet up with Beldak a few hours earlier. So it was really worth the trip. I mostly feel sorry for Celend who had to stay up a lot longer than planned, but at least she got a bit of shut eye on the way back.

Torchlight shining light over a neglected genre

Since everyone and their dog seems to have been talking about Torchlight at some point or another, I finally caved in to the peer pressure and managed to snag it when Steam put it up on their holiday sale.

If this game's attention somehow has eluded you, let me give you a short introduction: Torchlight is a point-and-click RPG action game where you explore endless dungeons, kill monsters and get loot. Make no mistake, this is about as close to Diablo you can get without getting sued for copyright infringement. It's quite understandable, seeing how several of the senior staff from said Blizzard franchise have moved over to Runic Games to create this.

I'm not going into too detail about this game as many already have already put up various reviews and thoughts on this game and how it plays, so I'll just post some thoughts that have struck me personally as I've played through the game.

Killing streak

The first one is of course how easy on the eyes the game is. The vibrant colour doesn't exactly instil the gloomy setting Diablo is known for if that's your thing, but it does make the hacking and slashing more light-hearted and fun. Fun in the way only gratuitous amounts of vibrantly coloured blood after destroying several of your weaker enemies can imbue.

There's no real plot to speak of though. There's the mention of ember several time, the mysterious material known both for it harmful energies as well as it's potent properties, and the very reason for building a small mining village on top of the dungeon. But this game doesn't really need a story other than to give you a reason to slay a ridiculous amount of monsters.

One of my favourite parts about this game is how easy it is to pick up, play for a short while and then put down again. When you log back on to your character you'll be exactly where you left, making this game ideal for when you need a quick fix. The streamlined experience of the game also makes sure that you'll feel as if you've accomplished something during this short while, and not just spent 10 minutes trekking to the place where you can find all the monsters.

The game's netbook mode looks interesting as well, even though I've yet to do any deeper studies or tests of it. It's basicly a single option that seems configured to preserve power for your laptop of choice. It's a handy feature for those who wants to get mobile with the game but doesn't have the resources to pay for a top-of-the-line computer.

One of my favourite parts of the game is also it's moddability. There's at least two different modding sites out there dedicated for the game, and being a huge fan of game customization I've been delving through the archives and found a few gems. What I found interesting is the fact that not only does the game ship with an editor, but there's also achievements tied to installing and using mods on the Steam version. An interesting way to put people's attention on the mod community.

On a final note I'll mention the plans for Torchlight to become something bigger. The idea with this game is to get the brand name out there as well as finance making a MMO later on. So seeing how well recieved this game has been I wouldn't be surprised to find a Torchlight MMO within next two coming years.

Casual RAID with GRUB

Unexpected hardware complications yields underwhelming results for the server.

dinner's served
Originally uploaded by limaoscarjuliet

So I got to installing Ubuntu Server the other day. Most of the installation went on smoothly and the OS is now fully installed. Only one catch though. There's no way to start it.

So it turns out that the server I got was equipped with two harddrives configured for a RAID 1 type of setup. That's pretty sweet and unexpected in itself as I've never had RAID before. And what better place to start using it than on a server?

The only problem is that the standard boot loader for Ubuntu called "GRUB" doesn't seem to like RAID, at least not the hardware version. In fact, it refused to install with it, and thus I'm left with an unbootable OS.

At the time it was getting late and I just left it for later, but hopefully I'll be able to get a fix for this before the end of the week. I have an idea to solve it and if that doesn't work I'll just have to ask my Ubuntu guru later on.