Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Game Night - Love In the Borderlands!

It’s Wednesday night. That means one thing, and one thing only. Guys Night In. I boot up Skype and open my bottle of Seagrams VO. A quarter of it remains from our previous week’s “outing,” a battered soldier bravely awaiting his fate. Skype is similarly barren – Alex hasn’t arrived yet. Only Dan’s name is decorated with a green circle, announcing his presence. I tap the call button and listen to Skype's skull-splitting ring for only a few seconds before cancelling the call in frustration and booting up Dragon Age.

But lo and behold, I haven’t taken a single sip of Seagrams before Dan’s call cuts through the din of Alistair’s witticism and the screams of Logain’s men. I alt tab, grimacing at the wait I’ve set myself up for, and pick up.

“Hey,” I say. He’s silent. My microphone, a damaged $10 mic/headset combination from Best Buy, tends to fail, so I'm a bit worried. “You there?” I ask, urgently. After a few moments Dan’s laconic voice sounds off.

“Yeah,” he replies. He sounds distracted, but that’s not unusual for Dan. If he was enthusiastic and focused I’d be worried. That would mean he’s been drinking for a while now.

“Cool,” I respond, tabbing back into Ferelden. I take another sip and we settle in to our mutual games of Dragon Age, waiting for Alex to arrive. The conversation is scintilating.

“How far are you now?”

“I just got Shale.”

“Oh.”

It seems an hour passes this way before Dan drops out of the call without explanation. I tab to check his status, but nothing has changed. Shrugging, I tab back in to Dragon Age and carry on. Less than a minute passes before Skype’s telltale squawk infoms me that I am being contacted for a conference call by Alex. Sighing, I tab out and accept.

“Yo.”

Alex, as always, is in a hurry. “What’s up?”

I shrug. “Playing Dragon Age.”

“What? Why?” He’s upset. Bordering on hurt.

“Waiting for you.”

“Well, quit already. Let’s get started.”

Sighing, I navigate through the four menus which Dragon Age has decided to build their game around in lieu of a “quit to desktop” button from days of yore. When I arrive at Skype’s menu again Alex and Dan haven’t said much.

“I’m out. What are we playing?”

“I don’t know,” Alex verbally shrugs.

“What would you like to play?” Dan asks. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or genuine. His voice doesn't modulate; it could go either way.

“Borderlands?”

“’Kay.”

We endure the unskippable cavalcade of splash screens proceeding Borderlands together, and I find myself wondering why skippable splash screens went the way of the “quit to desktop” button. Don’t these people realize we’re in a hurry?

After a brief debate about who gets to host, a lengthier session where Alex and Dan race to reset port exceptions, watching Claptrap run through all of his amusing animations at least a dozen times and discussing playing something else, someone finally hosts a working game and we jump through the portal of blue light into the blasted deserts of Pandora. We’re long past the awkward “getting to know you” bus ride now, 14 whole levels into the game. There are some tricks we haven’t learned yet, but not many.

“Your character is hot.” Alex’s character is jumping up and down next to mine, squatting to take in all of my cel-shaded glory. I chose the Siren to balance out the party tactically and aesthetically. I know, I should've seen it coming.

“Thanks. That’s a little gay though. Just FYI.”

“Whatever. You’re the one who picked the girl, homo. What quest do you want to do?” Alex asks. Because of Borderland’s host-centric multiplayer he has to select the quest that will be highlighted on all of our screens. Since I’ve played the game much farther than either of them on my own my opinion on which quest to follow holds a decent amount of weight.

“Let’s build the sniper rifle.”

“Alright.”

I hear some frustrated breathing, then the diamond indicating the location of our next objective shifts position. Alex and I take off running for the go-kart creation-station, hoping to avert disaster, but we’re too late. Dan gets there first, and before the lunar rover has finished materializing he’s already sitting in the driver’s seat and I’m cursing our luck. Motherfucker, I mutter, in my head because the microphone is right next to my mouth and he’d totally hear it.

I sigh and climb in the turret. As bad as Dan is at driving, it’ll still be faster than walking.

“Alriiight!” he coos. I can tell he’s a little bit ahead of me, drinking-wise, because he sounds excited. We speed off and get around twenty feet before he slams into a telephone pole, literally the only item in the vast desert surrounding us. At first I think he’s just being a dick, but his voice returns. “Oops. I think they changed the driving system. A and D aren’t doing anything. It’s just following the mouse.”

They haven’t, but Borderlands driving is frustratingly clunky. I'd say it's worse than anything else I’ve ever played, including Halo, in terms of how the driving controls. Manipulating that car is an art unto itself. “They haven’t,” I tell him. “But the system sucks, so no worries.” I’m trying to be encouraging tonight.

After a few more crashes and an “incident” where I am almost gang raped by scags we arrive at the zone entrance for the Arid Hills.

We breeze through the bandits protecting the various bits of the sniper rifle. From previous experiences I know exactly where the harder to find pieces are, and I leap about with wild abandon grabbing them off rooftops, falling short distances and grabbing whatever items I find on the ground. This is the way of Borderlands – it’s all about taking whatever you can as quickly as you can. Before long we’re surrounded by bandit corpses and we’ve got all the little odds and ends that make up the sniper rifle in our invisible backpacks.

“What now?” Alex asks. I can tell he sort of wants to turn in the sniper rifle quest and get his new Hunter toy, but I also know he wants to get as much done here as he can before we turn in the quest. Backtracking in this game is infuriating, to say the least.

“Marley and Moe. It should be in this area.”

“No it’s... Oh.” Alex flips the switch and suddenly we’re off, hunting down a loveable pair of scags with the ammo we have left over from our brave bandit assault. I burn through it on these nights much faster than I do in single player, by merit of being a lot less accurate than I usually am. It’s part lag and part character. My sniper rifle rounds fall far afield with the Siren, and even my submachine gun rounds don’t seem to go where I want them to. It’s a very different experience, but I’ve found ways to compensate for my ammo dependence.

When we finally reach Marley and Moe it’s immediately apparent that this is a tougher quest than the sniper rifle. We take down some of the outlying scags without issues, but when I spot Marley and fire I immediately realize my mistake in suggesting this quest. The round visibly bounces off his thick carapace. A mocking “12” pops up over his head, the game’s way of letting me know just how great I am at using a sniper rifle.

“Uh oh,” I say, taking another swig off my bottle.

“What?” Alex asks. He knows I don’t rattle easily. In a video game context, I mean.

“I woke up the baby.”

Marley charges at me as Dan and Alex pour bullets into him. He doesn’t even seem to notice. I pop a few melee attacks off at him and do a quick phase step, but it doesn’t really work. He bats me around like a paper doll and hurls me off of a fairly short cliff.

“Fuck,” I say. “He’s tougher than I remember.”

Dan and Alex don’t respond. They’re distracted, pouring ammo into Marley as he beelines for me. I try to make his trip shorter, hopping up to the clifftop fast as I can. I do my best to kite Marley, but he’s a lot faster than me, and he doesn’t have to contend with lag. In a few seconds I’m on the ground, being mauled by a dog with a serious skin condition.

“RES ME! RES ME!” I shout.

Alex and Dan are busy knocking hit points off of Marley with limited success. I hear Alex laughing.

“It totally looks like he’s raping you, dude.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, it does,” Dan chimes in. I sigh and keep tapping v, hoping to slow him down a little with my daze effect before I respawn.

The blue tunnel takes me into its arms like an old lover, guiding me back to the respawn point at the base of the cliff. It takes me a second to run back up there, and I immediately wonder why I came back. I cycle through my empty weapons and watch, biting my lip, as Marley breaks through the turret and savages Dan’s Soldier.

“Ow,” Dan interjects. I imagine he’s taking a shot now, watching Marley’s gaping maw roar in his face. I pop what little ammo I have left and switch my disastrously inaccurate shotgun, which happens to do massive damage whenever it hits. I fire it wildly, hoping to whittle down Marley’s remaining hit points, but before long even my shotgun is running low on ammo.

Dan, respawned, is on his way back up and Alex and I are kiting Marley around the rocks near the side of the cliff. I bite my lip and press f, charging towards Marley. I exit phase step right next to the beast and let loose a flurry of melee attacks. It isn’t long before Marley turns his attention on me, but my daze effect has slowed him down enough that I can effectively kite him now. Alex and Dan both still have enough ammo that they can damage him at range and as I dart in and out as Marley’s attention shifts between us the last few millimeters of his health tick off infinitesimally. When he finally dies I’m not sure who got the final blow, but I’m confident it wasn’t me.

“Let’s go get ammo,” Alex suggests. No one argues, although Dan does ignore him and continue fighting bandits in the surrounding area while Alex and I run as fast as we can to the zone entrance, where we can restock ammo. I watch Dan’s health dwindle, then refill as he respawns. Meanwhile Alex yells at us to help, having restocked his ammo and rushed back into battle before Dan and I have had a chance to sell our trash.

“It’s fucking Moe! Help!” He sounds pretty upset, so I rush over to resurrect him with half a load of SMG ammo. The scag, who he thought was Moe, was just a badass corrosive scag. Child’s play for me, my newly refilled SMG and my dazing melee attacks. Once Alex has been saved and the pipe leading to the ammo shops is secured I go back and finish my with purchases, ignoring Alex’s cries to press forward. After Dan’s done the same we grit our teeth and return to the hunting grounds. The quest is only half over.

Next week: Moe in the Desert of Good and Evil.