I’m playing the Steam version of Borderlands on a PC, which means that I’ve been playing about a week less than the XBox and PS3 folks. It also means that I’m not playing on a platform for which the game was designed. The menus in Borderlands were obviously put together for a console, and it shows. I’ve got to hit ‘E’ to compare weapons and the space bar to drop a weapon. It would have been so easy for them to create a mouse-based GUI with right-click options had they only decided to spend the time.

Even more frustrating is the flaky online connectivity. Rather than using Steamworks to connect players, they went with Gamespy. I’m still not exactly sure what my initial issue was, but the first day I tried, I was completely unable to connect to a multiplayer game. I suspect that setting up port forwarding (how to) is what fixed the problem, but that type of router wizardry is beyond many people. The game’s online functionality should have been designed to be as easy on the PC as it is on consoles. I swear – the PC doesn’t have achievements, but there really should be a fifty-pointer for successfully connecting to a private game.

On Tuesday night, I played the game for a few hours with my cousin Paul in Connecticut. Once we got the game successfully running, we gave Steam’s built-in voice chat a try. It worked, but only in the same sense that an overnight security guard “works”. That is to say, the push-to-talk was broken, voices cut out mid-sentence, and Paul observed that speaking at all on loading screens made me sound like Max Headroom. Next time we’ll probably use Skype.

After the ordeal of starting a multiplayer game was complete, it actually became kind of fun. I was playing Brick, the tank, and Paul was playing as Lilith, the siren. You get no skill points for the first five levels, but they whizzed by and I reached 5th level and got my berserk ability before I knew it. Berserking turned out to be far more fun than I’d expected. Brick screams like an enraged mental patient who missed his antipsychotic meds, sprinting around and throwing punches at the rate of a machine gun. Except the punches do way more damage than any machine gun I’ve found in the game so far. I ain’t kidding.

As it turns out, Brick and Lilith work really well together. He absorbs the damage and gets in close for punches while she keeps her distance. If need be, she can get in close too, and then escape with her phase ability. I end up using Brick’s rage a lot of times just to heal myself, since he heals continuously while raging.

Managing quests in multiplayer can be a bit annoying. Since Paul has played through a decent bit of the game before, he runs up and gets quests, then switches active quests from the log screen all the time. At first, I didn’t even realize there was a log screen, since I hadn’t gotten that far along in the tutorial in my single-player game. Honestly, I suppose there’s really no good way to handle this, short of making the player hosting the game a kind of “party leader”. And although I’ve heard that the game doesn’t have much plot, I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on what little story there is.

Other annoyances:

• If your inventory is full and you try to pick something up, you’ll drop a random item. Could be really bad if you’re in a public multiplayer game and you accidentally drop that ultra-rare sniper rifle. Some unscrupulous bozo could snatch it up before you have a chance to recover.
• Vehicles are a pain in the ass to steer. You accelerate and brake with ‘W’ and ‘S’ and steer with the mouse. Boo.
• There’s too little story. The game feels like an endless series of fetch quests. I could sure do with some more variety.

But all in all, I’m still playing the game. I’m actually playing it a bit more than I’m playing Trine. I won’t recommend the game, but I also won’t suggest that you not buy it. Just read some reviews and make up your own mind.

Like Greg, I find myself assaulted by a rich library of games this season, many of which I can not play.  Well, that’s entirely not true.  I choose not to play them because I can’t spend enough time with them.  Well, that’s also not true.  I can spend enough time with them if I weren’t driven by the need to get achievements.

When Microsoft first announced the achievement system, I scoffed at it.  Now I spend equal times devoted to it and loathing it.  Achievements are my abusive boyfriend.

But I digress.  For a month now I have played almost nothing but Saints Row 2 during the prime time gaming hours.  I did manage to finish up my Insane run in Mass Effect as well as get to level 60 and get my last two biotic ability achievements when working out, but other than that, and the occasional Rock Band 2 session, I’ve been spending all of my time in Stilwater.  Some of this is so that I can get as many achievements as possible, but a lot of it is because I genuinely enjoy playing co-op and Saints has so much co-op that it hurts your brain.  It literally pains your cortex.  Oh, I know, you’re saying that the brain has no nerve endings so that it can’t feel pain, but I ask you, have you ever been stabbed in the brain?  No?  I thought so.  Who are you going to believe about brain pain, qualified neurosurgeons, or me, a guy who has trouble spelling “neurosurgeon”?

Because the co-op in Saints Row 2 is so deliciously compelling, I am on my second story run through and am working on getting all of the activities completed.  Once my time in Stilwater is through, me and my co-op partner will be boarding the first transport to Sera where we will take up arms against the Locust horde in Gears of War 2.  This too has co-op, and not just two person co-op but a five person Horde mode where you spend hours upon hours blasting things to hell, pausing only to scrape the gore from your goggles and maybe have a juice box and some cookies.  We will do this game on one difficulty level, via co-op and then, undoubtedly, we will do it again on Insane.  When he and I are not doing it in co-op, I’ll be playing it, again in co-op, with one of the four other coworkers I have that’s buying the game.

Now, all of this co-op is great, and is enjoyable as all get out to take part in, but at the same time, I have limited gaming time, and if it’s all spent doing co-op, that leaves no time for single player.  This is why Mercenaries 2 sits unfinished.  And yes, I know that the game has co-op but most my friends that have played the game have already finished it and I don’t want to bother them to jump into my game and help out.  Rock Band 2 sits similarly unused.  Oh sure, my kids enjoy watching their dad drum, but that’s not exactly helping Saving Throw in their quest for rock greatness.  Fallout 3, venerable Fallout, one of my most beloved gaming franchises sits unopened.  And not just unopened, but still sealed.  What kind of a world are we living in where the sequel to the series that got me into role playing games in the first place sits entombed in plastic?

Oh sure, eventually I’ll be finished with the campaigns in Gears, and can go back to single player games.  The band will tour again, the vault doors will open and I’ll get around to downloading the next Penny Arcade game, but for now, the call to play co-op is just too hard to resist.  I’m glad that there isn’t anything coming out for the rest of the year that I’m really, truly interested in, because if there were, it would only add to the list of things I’m actively ignoring.

On that note, is it me or is there nothing out for handhelds this holiday season?  My word.  The only time I boot up my DS or PSP of late is to review things.  Those games I have all sorts of time for, but there’s nothing to play.  Maybe I can convince someone to convert Fallout 3 to the DS.  Greg seems like a technical fellow.

Hmmm….

Here in sunny Lungfishopolis, we like to encourage gaming togetherness. Why spend a Saturday locked in the basement with your 360 when you could be sitting in front of the 52″ plasma screen in the living room with your spouse playing Boom Blox?

So we racked our brains and came up with some of the games we’ve had the most fun playing with our girlfriends and wives.

When I think of couple gaming, the first game that comes to mind for me is Mariokart. Before playing Mariokart Wii, my wife had never tried Kart racing. She took to it immediately, and MarioKart Wii has become the only non-cooperative game we play together. There’s even a “team mode” for when you want to be sure that blue shell won’t take out your spouse. When we play online, we tend to notice a lot of other couples playing together too. Oddly enough, we end up cheering these other couples on, even when we have no hard evidence that “Alex” and “Britney” aren’t actually two convicts named Jorge and Bubba playing from inside the maximum security prison a mile from where we live.

Mario Kart 64 is probably one of the best, if not THE best, game to play with significant others, friends or even enemies. The game is simple enough for novices to pick up and play, while including just enough depth with attack items and turbo boosts to let your racing skills shine through. Despite having colorful graphics and a do-gooder mascot in Mario, the gameplay can end up being downright cutthroat. I chose the Nintendo 64 version of this game mainly due to superior controls and ease of play. Mario Kart Wii is definitely fun but the controls are lacking, and the elastic AI is more obnoxious than usual. Truly a great multi-player game. Nothing says “I love you” like lobbing a perfectly timed Spiny Shell at your significant other.

The notion of monkeys having to traverse various obstacle courses while trapped in plastic spheres is an absurd one, but man does it make for some fun games. The joy of Super Monkey Ball is that the stages scale nicely in difficulty so that non-gamers can compete evenly with those that are in the chair every single night. Plus, as the stages get more difficult, they tax different parts of your brain, allowing for success for one where the other has failed. Plus, it’s just fun. When the puzzle stages are proving to be too much, the mini-games are a hoot and the Monkey Glide from the original game is hands down the best game I’ve ever played with my wife. If you have a Wii, see if you can find the original and some GC controllers. You won’t regret it.

Super Mario Galaxy is a great game even in its single-player mode, but the co-op is interesting in that the two players have entirely different roles. While one person controls Mario, the other has just a cursor on screen, and can do various helpful things, such as collecting star bits, freezing enemies, and pointing out the 1up that you just ran past. It takes some getting used to, but the mechanic works well. During the game’s later stages, you may find that you really need the second player’s help.

Guitar Hero is pretty much a no-brainer for anyone that wants to play video games with their spouse. Everyone loves music, everyone secretly wants to be a rockstar, and for some reason no one feels like a dork while pretending to play guitar with an oversized controller. My entire family plays this game, specifically Guitar Hero III for the Wii, and it was my 9 year old daughter that actually made the purchase. I think we spent a good three hours playing it together on the first day. My wife is great at Barracuda and Black Sunshine, while my daughter has learned the love of Pat Benatar and Metallica. Personally, I enjoy busting out Guns ‘n Roses and Smashing Pumpkins. You don’t really feel like you’re playing a video game while jamming with Guitar Hero, which I think is what makes it so universally fun to play. Watching your wife become obsessed with a video game is pretty fun too.

Our most recent discovery has been the PSN game Pixeljunk Monsters, and I’ll tell you – we’ve spent a LOT of time playing this game over the past few weeks. It’s got all the tower defense goodness of Desktop Tower Defense, with better graphics and co-op goodness. And the somewhat cutesy graphics might even entice your girlfriend to play. In Pixeljunk Monsters, you actually have to run around, build the towers yourself, and collect the gold from fallen monsters in order to build more. The two players have separate gold pools, which is both good and bad. You can’t spend the other person’s gold, but you have to watch out that one person isn’t a gold hog. You could probably write a thesis on relationship dynamics by watching different couples play.

When my brother introduced me to Virtua Tennis, my first thought was “this looks as boring as watching real tennis on TV.” But once I picked up the controller and returned a few serves, I was hooked. Virtua Tennis was originally a Dreamcast game, and since has been released as the Tennis2K series on several different systems.
Anyone can play this game, all you do is run to the ball and hit a button to return it. Although you can go deeper and learn ball spin and different types of shots, it’s not necessary to enjoy the game. Where the game really shines is in two or four player mode, where you can play singles or doubles. The singles gameplay is great, with controls that are so natural it’s easy to step into some epic rallies against your significant other almost immediately. Doubles matches against the computer or friends are especially fun, since you can play as a team and shout out shots to each other. It’s been a while since we’ve played Virtua Tennis, but now I’m tempted to dig out my extra controllers and force my wife to endure more of my old obsession with this game.

Before we had kids, Tiger Woods PGA Tour never left the GameCube. For a sports game, it’s tremendously accessible to non sports people, and the controls are all very simple. Best of all, we could each create a golfer that looked as much or as little like us as we wanted to, and progress through the game together by playing against each other. Along the way, a huge competitive streak emerged that exists to this day. The latest version (Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09) for the Wii finally has a motion swing that is as intuitive as the old, traditional swing, so we are, pardon the pun, back in the swing of things. Plus, it’s a game that you can play in front of your kids and not have to worry about anything worse than Daddy’s colorful language when Mommy chips in for an Eagle. Again.

Despite the fact that some folks on this site *cough Greg cough* don’t fully appreciate MMO’s, you just can’t ignore the fun that can be had playing World of Warcraft with your partner. However, to truly appreciate the fun in World of Warcraft you really need to play in the beginning areas of a game. Endgame raiding and four-hour dungeon crawls aren’t really fun when you’re sitting next to your wife and kids. The newbie zones have just the right amount of quests, mobs and sense of accomplishment to make the game very enjoyable as a couple. Completing the early quests as a team makes leveling much faster and if you don’t like the current zone or race you are playing, you can simply re-roll a new character with very little time lost. My wife and I had four different lowbie teams in WoW, and each one was a completely different experience. As a hidden bonus, you have the advantage of yelling across the room at each other rather than chatting over Ventrilo.

The original Baldur’s Gate is a decade old now, but it’s still one of my favorite games. All the Infinity Engine games (the Baldurs Gates, the Icewind Dales) have excellent multiplayer support. I’ll admit that not every girl will be into collecting magic swords and lining up lightning bolts – I guess I just got lucky. Before we were married, my wife and I played through Icewind Dale 2 together. When you’re each controlling three characters who have to work together to fight a battle strategically, communication is key. If you play with your significant other, I’ve got a tip: decide ahead of time which person is going to control to pause key.

You don’t usually think about co-op when playing a Lord of the Rings game. They seem to lend themselves better to solo hack-and-slashing than team-ups. But much to the surprise of my wife and I, the co-op play in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was very good. You can each pick one of the main characters and battle side by side through the entire campaign. The interesting thing is that the game actually ramps up the difficulty during co-op play so you can’t just plow through. This really forces you to choose characters wisely and cover each other’s backsides or else you’ll quickly be overwhelmed by enemies. While this game isn’t typically what I’d choose to play with my wife, it worked out very well. It also didn’t hurt we are both LotR nerds. And to my un-surprise, my wife chose to play as Legolas EVERY time.