Borderlanding

A couple of years ago I got a copy of Borderlands as a gift. The makers called it a Role Playing Shooter and just about everyone else dubbed it "Diablo with guns". Oh well, I once tried the first Diablo for almost fifteen minutes and didn't like it, so that description didn't really help me understand what was going on. But when the teaser had a huge guy punching a leg off a midget, I was getting quite interested in the game already. I know I'm sick, so what? :)

"Strip the flesh, salt the wound!"

Pandora's landscapes are neat, immense and the machinery is insane - just like everyone on the planet with the ex corporate employees, indigenous life forms and what have you. Not that there was a lot of time to observe the sceneries, but a bit anyway. Of course there was even less time to take screenshots and I only started doing that in the last places, but that's how it goes sometimes.

"I'm gonna rip your arm off and beat your baby with it!"

I'm not going to try to write a deep or specific story about the game this long after I finished the game for the first time, but I'll mention that the first playthrough of the base game took a bit over one hundred joyous hours. So what next, as I didn't feel like starting the second playthrough straight away? To the wonderful world of ripoffs, someone would say - but not me!

DLC 

Of course I did some research about the three DLC packs that were available at that point. I don't have the habit of blindly throwing my hard-earned monies away. Usually.
The first one, a zombie island thingie, promised more shooting in the spirit of B-class zombie movies. Moxxi's riot offered multiplayer-friendly arena fighting (I wasn't interested in the least) and General Knoxx's set was described as a long new story with more vehicles and a higher level cap, to begin with. Not that the LC was important to me, my character wasn't even at 40 at that point if my memory serves. So I chose the zombies, even if no one guaranteed chainsaws or flamethrowers.

Dr Ned's type B Zombie Island

Zombies. An insane amount of zombies and werethings and other thematically appropriate enemies attacked like a tidal wave of evil. Limbs flew around, brains fell on the ground by the dozens and they still kept coming. Every once in a while the going just got hysterical and damn difficult when there were just way too many zombies. Just like in the greatest classics of the genre, those buggers just aren't even the classic slow zombies... Lucky me had an awesome machine gun with explosive x4 bullets, bwahahahhahaa!

On the story side dr Ned has been working on a cure to the undead problem, but so far all he's achieved is a couple of more or less voluntary test subjects turned into wereskags and other abominations. Of course I had to help my fellow man with his problems but maybe not that surprisingly I had to mow him down a few times, too, in the end. Oh my, I'd never guessed! But that's how it has to go in these stories 8)

The legs were left behind but still it goes on... tenacious bastard!

Knoxx's gun locker

The Secret Armory promised more of the story (hohoo!), more vehicles (at last!), rarer and better guns (wohoo!), more loot (yay!) and eviler enemies (errr...). General Knoxx of the Atlas Corporation's Crimson Lance arrived to Pandora on an unclear mission after the Vault was opened and the guy called every once in a while to chat a bit. He was a jolly chap, until he had to start working himself.
To get to the gun storage I had to solve a good bunch of quests, running errands following the greatest traditions of RPGs and drive around narrow roads. All this while being hunted by a team of assassins who struck either out of the blue or obviously - depending on how busy I happened to be at the moment... No matter what, it was always when I maybe didn't quite need that sort of extra entertainment.

"Oh, hey, I sent Gamma team over to kill you. No hard feelings. Love!"

The foulest enemy in the whole game, Crawmerax the Invincible, was found in the end of this pack. I've heard that this megaworm could be slayed even by a single player Mordecai, as long as you're on level 69 and the maggot is 72, but but but... I'll squash it one day. Of course I could give in and go for a multiplayer session against Crawmerax, but those few I know to play Borderlands haven't been of company in those ultrarare moments when I could've spent the time.

But wait, that's not all!

At some point Gearbox declared a fourth DLC pack: Claptrap's Robot Revolution, obviously with extra goodies and who knows what. Of course I got it, too. If the story was taken to the mad path in Knoxx, CRR kept on it and went further. INAC and its minions / victims have installed modchips into the heads of just about everyone dead or alive on Pandora, so I had a sea of weirdoes from Skagtraps and Psychotraps to the trap-versions of previous bosses - some of them repeatedly. Oh, and waves after waves of different sorts  of Claptraps. I really enjoyed destroying those at last. The story? "Wade through blood, oil and bodyparts, find INAC and end the revolution quickly and preferably violently". That is exactly what I did, oh yes.

This looks sane

"I heard that your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die... that’s a load of crap…no wait…okay, there it goes."

If there's something I'd complain about the DLC sets, it's the lack of FTN nodes. You get to the startpoint of the hub via the Fast Travel Network but from that on you need to walk, run or drive to wherever you are going. At least in tSAoGK it gets a bit old sometimes, because the map is so large. A simple jump point in the opposing edges of the map would've been awesome, especially after all the roads are opened and there's no story-based reason to make you drive from one extreme end to another - repeatedly.

Why am I mumbling about this game now?

Because...

Yes, indeed. I pre-ordered that over eagerly in last month when my internal calendar was a bit off. At least I won't forget it!
Because of this I took it as my business to get my Mordecai to the level cap before my vacation and to roam around just for the fun of it before succumbing to the sequel. I had finished the main game's second playthrough (there's no way around it: the Destroyer is an anticlimax if there ever was one) a couple of months ago, so I suddendly noticed that I'm playing the playthrough 2.5 (being rewarded with tougher monsters, mostly at my level +2), so after running up and down the Eridian Promontory a few times I was done.
Why on earth did I keep playing that same level a handful times instead of advancing to the DLC maps for more variety?  Those buggers got too difficult and especially too slow compared to the amount of XP and entertainment they provided :p Sorry, I'm lazy and comfy sometimes :)

That's it, what next?