Borderlands. I'm an SMG Bulletstorm

Borderlands is a pretty old game, but if you're not familiar with it I'll preface this with the basic idea.

Kill things. Get Loot. Be a Badass.

I've been playing it on and off since the GOTY Steam sale back during the beginning of 2012. You could say, it's been my go to game when I need a quick fix of brutal satisfying carnage. Initially I didn't buy it when it came out because I was too busy with Starcraft 2, and other things, but since Borderlands had always been on my list of games to play when you add in the sale price it was pretty much a no brainer. I love future apocalypse landscapes and Gearbox's marketing is simply genius.

A Gazillion guns? Oh yes please. Don't mind if I do.

So here's the situation. I've been playing for a while and building up an SMG Siren. I don't typically go to wikis or walkthroughs unless I really find something impossible, so little to my knowledge a SMG Siren is really quite good. I've been seeing my fair share of good drops, orange pistols, 'holy crap it shoots rockets' shotguns, and various elemental SMGs but nothing really spectacular. The loot was good enough to get me through my first playthrough, including all the DLC, without much trouble, so I wasn't really complaining much.

Then at the end of my second playthrough of the normal story, just before you finally get to the Vault, BAMMO!

This crap is bananas! And that's putting it lightly. If you don't quite understand what's going on here let me break it down for you:

It's an SMG. My Siren uses SMGs.

It has an 82 round clip. Yay bullets.

It shoots HELL OF A FAST. Yay more bullets!

It shoots 4 BULLETS EVERY TIME A NORMAL GUN ONLY SHOOTS ONE

Essentially. A HX 4 Double Anarchy SMG is capable of unloading its entire 82 round clip in roughly 2 seconds. That maths out to one bullet every .024 seconds.

Here's a video. I think that describes it best.

Borderlands just got fun again.

GW2 The BWE Downtime Game

As many of you have already read this morning ArenaNet announced that the next BWE will be from June 8th-11th and there's some interesting bits in there that should be of interest to you. Particularly all your characters will be kept.

I find this to be great news because after spending 30+ hrs building up a Mesmer over the course of the last BWE and Stress Test I would hate to have to do it all over again. Of course I totally would do it all over again, and probably take the opportunity to explore some different options starting out. Maybe go through the Charr story instead. I really fell in love with their starting area when I was exploring around and just having fun. Their dynamic events have a particular flavor to them that's really fun and unique. You're definitely not going to find little human kids running around commenting on how badass they are when you kill ghosts for them.

With that in mind, I can't wait to see what the Asura and Sylvari zones have to offer. I've been gripped by the Sylvari lore since they were first announced and was planning on making one even before they became even more awesome. I just hope we don't have to wait too long to get a chance to see what they have to offer. And all this waiting has really gotten me thinking what to do in all this GW2 downtime? I'm not going to pony up for Diablo 3 right now because, well frankly I don't have the money, but that's besides the point. I know that once GW2 launches I'm just going to shelve everything else anyway so I don't really think it's a great idea to go and buy a bunch of stuff potentially months before you stop playing it entirely.

So I've been picking up hobbies, like blogging, for example, and I've been watching SC2 streams over at TeamLiquid. As well as chugging through the Brutal campaign in SC2. Sometimes that campaign just feels like you're smashing your head into a brick wall. It's like a test in how much of a masochist you are. Honestly, I don't think it's really worth it, but it's something to keep me entertained in the meantime. I'm also going through and finishing up Playthrough #2 of Borderlands. I've built up a SMG Siren to the point that almost nothing poses much of a threat though, so it's really more to get some kind of FPS kick than anything else. There's a few Achievements I have left to get, but the Underdome is retarded and I don't really feel like spending 16hrs of arena grinding to get 4 more achievements.

Vanilla GuildWars has always had a special interest for me so I log back in there from time to time, but given that I've already gotten 40/50 in my HoM I've almost entirely retired my character to playing dollhouse with all the armor sets I've collected and screwing around in Random Arenas from time to time. And with the gargantuan time commitment I'd have to invest in order to get another 5 HoM points it's one of those things that I'm really not interested in anymore.

What have you been doing in this downtime? Are you still working on finishing up your HoM? Or is there something entirely different that's been keeping your attention? I hear a lot of people have been logging back into old favorites to pass the time.

RNG Achievements. A rant

Achievements for me are a love hate thing. I love them because it's a fun way to know how much of a game I've finished. I hate them because it's a terrible way to remind me how much of a game I haven't finished. Thanks Xbox for eternally changing (ruining?) the way people play games.

Why do I bring this up? And what's the significance of RNGs here? Well it's taken me quite some time to get around to it, but I've finally queued up Borderlands in my wait for my next Guild Wars 2 hit (tip of the hat to Ravious over at Killtenrats for helping me realize I'm a GW2 drug addict), and generally Borderlands is 100% superfun. I grew up on Diablo so dungeon grinding and loot whoring is familiar territory for me. Also I sure do love me some good ol fashioned FPS frag fests. Borderlands delivers on that end, completely. So combined all that together and you've got yourself a recipe for one awesome game, and it is awesome. The killing, murdering, exploding, hilarious vulgar humor, and spectacularly great gun design.

But then they just had to go in and add totally retarded achievements. I've probably killed the entire Claptrap population twenty times over and I have yet to get all my goldfish, or panties, or pizza, or oil cans, or .... whatever. Heck I'm certain I've made the Hyperion corporation mine out an entire sector of space to build, and rebuild, all the Claptraps I've blown to bits over my search for stupid robot fish. The worst part is that even after you've collected all your pointless 3D glasses they continue to drop. It's like the Claptraps, even in their death, continue to taunt me, "Look, here's some more 3D glasses! Too bad what you really need is our panties!" The worst part is, naturally, that there's no Achievement tracker. I don't even know, for certain, if I've already collected all the panties I need and since they keep dropping I keep picking them up because maybe with the next one I'll finally ding the achievement over and be done with this torment in RNG robot hell.

Oh yeah, on a final note, I hate you stupid robots in Portal 2. Why can't you be better at rock-paper-scissors. I swear from now on I'm sticking to fantasy titles. It's obvious robots aren't good for my health.