RECENT THINGS

Alright, things to talk about...

Borderlands 2 - I burned out fairly quickly on the first Borderlands, honestly.  The story dragged for a few too many hours, taking forever to get anywhere interesting, and the sense of humor it was trying to push on me had very few redeeming moments.  ("Also he has three balls" is priceless.)   The core gameplay concept I found very interesting: a shooter-rpg (fairly rare) with randomly generated weapons numbering in the millions (literally) and a heavy emphasis on co-op play.  A great mix, though maybe not executed as well as one could have hoped.  Seeing the same 3 or 4 areas over and over again covering almost a dozen hours pushed my patience to the limits, and I eventually dropped it.  A crappy PC interface didn't help things.  So, when a sequel was announced, I held my breath until I saw who was writing it: none other than Anthony Burch, former game journalist, comedy writer, web show creator, and all around smart guy, particularly when it comes to storytelling.  As soon as he said he took a lot of influence, tone-wise, from Firefly, I knew the story was in good hands, so I kept a look out for changes to gameplay.  Again, good things flooded my ear-holes: more varied designs for areas and enemies, better checkpoints for fast travel, even more guns, and PC options and interfaces that didn't suck.  All seemed well.  And it is.  BL2 is a great time, both online and off, with some interesting characters, great (but smart) humor, and lots and lots of explosions of various kinds, it's taking about half of my free time.  Which leads me to...

XCOM: Enemy Unknown -I must confess, I had very little experience with the X-COM series prior to this game.  I had played a little bit of one of them, and was turned off by the "complexity for the sake of complexity because challenge" mentality of it.  I like turn based strategy, as long as it's done well, a la Civilization.  Seeing the videos of this new game (alongside the troubled 2K shooter) intrigued me, and the way they marketed it (basically having the devs just flat-out play the game with folks) was a good move.  After sinking many hours and a couple attempted playthroughs, I can say that it's among the best games of this year.  It's deep without being offensive to the brain.  It's challenging and terrifying in subtle ways, and the unique experience of having a whole squad (named after friends and family) decimated is a mix of emotions one needs to experience.