Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40k setting needs no introduction. Surprisingly Relic’s Space Marine is the first action videogame allows player to control the most famous soldiers of that setting (well, apart from the 1993 Space Hulk which isn’t a shooter). It’s also Relic’s first action game, which likely explains why it isn’t as polished as you might expect a game as high-profile as this to be.

• This is a third-person shooter. In most such games, the third-person view is needed to facilitate cover. But Space Marines don’t take cover so in this game, the third-person view is used to allow for melee combat. Both shooting and melee are required in the game. Most of them you’ll find yourself shooting at enemies to soften them up or thin their ranks before shifting to melee to finish the job. Since the shooty parts of the game are bog standard, only the melee combat helps the game to stand out some.

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Batman: Arkham Asylum was one of the favorite games of 2009. As I mentioned then, it was the first superhero game that made you feel truly like a superhero. This made the sequel a no-brainer to buy. I actually bought this one not long after release, which explains why the version I have isn’t the Game of the Year edition, but have only just recently gotten around to playing it.

Arkham City switches the action from the confines of Arkham Island to the newly opened Arkham City. The crime in Gotham has gotten so bad that the authorities have been persuaded to cordon off a section of the city and use it as a large prison. Think Escape from New York. What this means for the game is that this time you get to do all the things that only Batman can do in an open-world environment and it is glorious.

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So we’re at the last of the Borderlands DLC. This one is about fighting the robot claptraps that have been annoying you since the beginning of the base game. I guess that’s one good thing it has going for it. Otherwise it just average. Not horrible like the second DLC, just somewhat middling.

• It’s a lot humbler in scope than the third DLC. The only truly new enemies are the claptraps themselves and they come in only three varieties, a kamikaze type, a close-range samurai type and a long-range soldier type. Only the kamikaze claptrap is much of a threat and that only if you don’t see them coming. The other enemies are claptrapped versions of the usual mobs. The Hyperion Recon Team is new, but they behave just like the Crimson Lance and have less variety as well.

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This is the third of the four DLC for the original Borderlands and yes, this is a very good DLC! The wiki claims that it is the largest of the DLC which is probably why there’s a ton of content in it.

• For starters, you get three new vehicles including the ultra-fast Racer, the heavily-armored Lancer and my favorite the Monster which is armed with homing missiles. The Lancer in particular has seats for four players, though I doubt anyone would be content with having control of nothing but laying land mines.

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So I futzed around in the second Borderlands DLC for a while, discovered that it consists of literally nothing more than a series of deathmatches in one of three arenas and bailed. Seriously, I don’t see what’s the point of this DLC at all, even for multiplayer mode. For single-player mode you need to complete each arena in a single session, no saving between rounds. That’s another reason to skip it. I think the only good thing about this is that you finally get a bank. But you do need to travel to the Underdome to use it. This thing is as bad as horse armor…

I’ve been spending most of my time playing the puzzler SpaceChem but that game is incredibly stressful to me. I get a headache if I spend too much time on it, so I’ve been playing through the first DLC for Borderlands in fits and starts. This is one of those DLC that relies entirely on one single theme and it aptly demonstrates that one can never go wrong with zombies.

• It’s shocking how the simple change of zombifying everything makes the game new again. Most of the zombies in the game are the slow, lumbering variety, just as it should be. One by one they are no threat, especially since they lack ranged attacks, except for spewing bile when they’re close. But then zombies never attack as singletons and this game handles hordes of them pretty well. Note: if you need the headshot achievements in Borderlands, this is the place to do them in.

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Yeah, yeah, I know that the sequel was released not too long ago. One of the professors of the Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python class I’m taking on Coursera.org bragged about he bought the game on the very first day that the class opened to the public. But I bought the complete pack of the first game during the Summer Sales I think and only just now got around to playing it. I know it’s a mainly multiplayer game and I play mainly single-player so I toned down my expectations accordingly.

• I was surprised by the low level of polish all around, especially with regards to the user interface and information screens. The UI paradigm feels inconsistent and not properly thought out. The map is unhelpful, not even labeling the names of outposts and exits from the current map. The fast travel system is a pain to use because it is just a list of names of places, with no map to show how each place relates to each other or where your active quest wants you to head to. Very messy and unprofessional.

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As with movies, I like to go into games cold these days. I pay attention to the word on the street about whether they’re good or not but I stay away from reviews until after I’m done with the game. I knew that this was a detective game made in the vein of the Grand Theft Auto series but not much else. Boy, was I surprised by what it really is.

• This is not an open world game in any way, shape or form. It just pretends to be. Instead, it’s an adventure game in which you need to drive around a lot to get from one point of interest to the next. Yes, there are car chase and shooting sequences but they’re not the point at all. In fact, by default the game allows you to skip them if you’ve failed them a certain number of times. The real meat of the gameplay is in combing an area for clues and choosing just the right thing to say to people.

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