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.

Although I no longer play Team Fortress 2, I follow Valve’s updates to the game with a passing interest. The most recent of these is a spy/sniper update, and the hilarity of the update makes the previous comedy of the sandvich look like nothing. In the Meet the Spy video, we got porn featuring your enemy’s mother. Now, there’s Jarate. That’s like karate, but using a jar. Full of urine. Check it out.

I just read an article in Ars Technica about Microsoft’s newly granted patent for real-time censoring of audio streams. I’ve got some mixed feelings on the subject. On one hand, I’m a firm believer in John Gabriel’s Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory, but on the other hand, I’m fairly wary of censorship.

I don’t play a lot of online games. In fact, I think my online gaming has been limited exclusively to Team Fortress 2, which I played only because it came with the package of pure awesomeness that is The Orange Box. As a single-player gamer, I’ve not had to endure the profane put-downs of poorly-parented puerile punks, but I can sympathize with those who’ve had to listen to the likes of chocolate milk boy. If it were implemented as an optional filter on XBox live, I’d fully embrace this technology. If it doesn’t work well for you, simply turn it off and you’ve got the same thing that exists right now.
But there’s no guarantee that such a thing will be optional, and as Ars Technica points out, online gaming isn’t the only area we’re likely to see this technology implemented. Someone smart once said that newly introduced technology will always run its course and have its effect, although there’s generally no way to predict what that effect might be. This technology could have a real impact on free speech. I’m not going to flip if TV networks start using this type of real-time filter for live programming, but the minute somebody tries to filter anything out of my phone conversations, I’m gonna lose my shit.