It feels like 1996 again

This week felt a lot like 1996. There’s been lots of colored loot, lots of mouse clicking and lots of time spent pouring over skill trees.

BORDERLANDS

My mild fury at having to wait a week for a copy of Borderlands where you can actually aim was tempered a bit by knowing that everybody toiling on the console versions got bug-ridden copies of the game. Sure, my game has crashed a few times, but I haven’t lost any specialization points and my phase strike ability worked from the start (well, once I reached the right level).

This skag doesn't like fire very much.

I don’t have much to add to what Benji said about the game. It’s a sick FPS with simple, solid RPG elements. I play an “invisible ninja chick who wields a shotgun” and various machine guns, and I haven’t had this much fun shooting people in the face since Half-Life 2. The randomness of the loot system is a bit annoying, and mediocre guns often have silly level requirements, but I’m willing to look past that.

My biggest problem is that I can’t play as much as I’d like. Benji and I are playing together, and we have to stay the same level or the game gets unbalanced pretty quickly. We played for a while when I was only two levels behind him, and I couldn’t damage the bandits the game threw at us.

But Borderlands has made me happy, both when I’m alone and when someone’s got my back. It’s exactly what I expected, and it is good.

TORCHLIGHT

If, while playing Torchlight, you get a sense that you’ve delved deep underground in search of sweet loot before, don’t be alarmed. A small developer called Blizzard made a very similar game in the 90s called Diablo. In fact, some of the people who worked on that worked on Torchlight, which might explain why it’s so much fun.

Hanging out with my imp, puppy and golem.

Torchlight plays like Diablo, only with better graphics. Not much else has changed. Scrolls still reveal the identity of mystery drops and take you back to town, minibosses still surround themselves with weaker versions of themselves, and there are plenty of gems to fit onto your stuff. The only additions that are new to me are a pet that holds your stuff and basic spells that every character class can use, including your pet.

There are three character classes available. The destroyer hits things, the vanquisher hits things with arrows, and the alchemist has a marketable profession to fall back on if this dungeon crawling gig doesn’t work out. I picked the alchemist because they’re basically a cross between a mage and a summoner, and I like to sit back and cast ember lance while while my imps, wolf and golem engage the dungeon denizens. It’s been a lot of fun, but it’s also been really easy on normal, so I’ll probably start over on hard. I’m not sure if I’ll pick a new class. I like having minions do a large portion of my work, but the other classes have some pretty cool skills.

There’s virtually no story and little quest variety, but if you’re playing this kind of game for that, you’re doing it wrong. This game begs to be played with the TV on.

WIDGET TD

Take control of towers in WidgetTD.

I also played the demo for a pretty simple tower defense game from Graybox Games called WidgetTD. Like any other tower defense game you build and upgrade defensive structures and hope they’re enough to keep wave after wave of attackers under control.

The only mechanic WidgetTD adds to the mix is the ability to take control of any one tower. This brings up a first person cockpit view, and you can aim for the enemies you want. For some towers, this isn’t much use, but from the cockpit, your basic gun tower can hit anything on the map. The difficulty seems a bit out of whack though; creeps’ hit points ramp up far faster than you can upgrade your towers. Otherwise it’s a strong entry for the genre.

NEWS

Here are some of the things we’ll be talking about in this week’s podcast.

Leigh Alexander talks about Demon’s Souls in a Kotaku feature defending hard games. She says hard games aren’t necessarily frustrating, and that a good hard game will explain why you fail and offer a road to mastery. But really, I just want to hear more from Rex about Demon’s Souls, because everything I’ve read and heard about the game makes it very hard to not buy a ps3 right now.

David Carlton at malvasia bianca asks why we divide games into genre by their point of view, and not their content, and suggests we define Beatles Rock Band as a non-fiction game, not a rhythm game.

And finally, I feel bad for gamers who paid real money for legitimate copies of Borderlands before the street date, but couldn’t play until the online verification servers came online Monday. Someday those servers are going to shut down and the only way to play the game will be with a crack. That’s the real problem with licenses.

If you’ve got something else you want us to talk about, comment here or send me a message @gamegnathus