Be Excellent To Each Other

you wouldn't be interested in this then Zio; http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/511927/xbox-360-elite-console-with-120gb-h

Xbox Elite with FM3 and Borderlands, sub £200

Not sure if it's the cheapest/best deal around I just saw it this morning and thought it looked good.

I'll just leave that on the table for you to ponder.

Traded in 8 games, (8! count them) for £46 and they didnt even have it in stock. Nowhere did actually.

Arrrrrgggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

That's not a bad deal though... and it is nearly my birthday...

(in two months time)

Right then, I'll do a Lilith first and do a medicy Roland later.

Is there a character that sneers at other characters that use guns, runs into the enemy, punches a few of them to death and then gets killed?

Brick, pretty much.

it is 29.38 at the hut. cheapest I have found so far.

Eurogamer has a news piece on the online skill-loss bug...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/borde ... -of-skills

Gearbox are aware but no fix has been released yet.

I'm starting to think my addiction to FM3 might be saving me some headaches with this game.

Ooh, i picked this up this afternoon and thus far it is indeed ace.

If anyone fancies some online co-op shenanigans in the daytime, i'm at home waiting on deliveries the next two days......

Erm... my finger slipped on that Amazon page and... well... looks like I'll be back in the Xbox fold tomorrow.

Crivens!

How daft was he to sell it instead of the PS3, children? Very daft.

But... but... but...

Yes Mr. Dimrill, I was daft Mr. Dimrill.

Tell me, did we mention that it was perhaps a little daft at the time? I can't remember now.

Your signature is an affront to God Almighty.

How much is a flippin' Gold subscription nowadays? I'll need one of those bastard wireless dooberries too now, since I've got New and Improved (tm) broadband since my Xbox-owning days of old.

Am I dragging this all a little OT? I am getting Borderlands with it!

I got mine for 24 quid from a fake Scotch man.

Eek, that wasn't intentional (on my end at least! ) I'll send you an invite if thats ok? Though to be fair, I feel a bit like craster and I'm enjoying it solo at the minute, because i'm wandering around it like a tourist rather than actuallyg etting anything done most of the time. That and I think the sniper is a bit rubbish to co-op with.

Well our levels last night were 20 18 16 when we started the Lost Cave, and it was a good challenge for all of us. It seems to throw more Badasses at you in co-op, rather than try to level all the enemies to match your levels.

The Badass Corrosive Alpha Skag was a bastard though.

Oh, managed to get a crit of 11000(!) with my sniper rifle too.



I'm afraid that I'm Roland, and I was Roland first!

Seriously, I don't think classes matter at all... It just a special ability and some skills. I'm sure that 4 Hunters or 4 Sirens could kick as much ass as a balanced team.

Roland seems to be the only one that really matters, as he has skills that boost other people's healing/ammo/damage.

Yes he does... of course!

But he can also make his turret shoot homing missiles.. of course, I went straight for the boom. Fuck healing, thats what healing items are for, and if you're running out of ammo then you're doing it wrong. Moar damage!

I will make a healing Roland eventually for those times when your mere healing items don't compare with a healing freakin' turret (or indeed, healing BULLETS)

who's up for co-op?

Well when I dragged Dave online he was 2-3 levels below my secondary Brick character, which wasn't so much of a problem. It did become a problem when Lave joined in at 2-3 levels above my Brick and Dave started dying every 10-20 seconds

I'm having an early night

No problems, I'll friend anyone who lets me know where they know me from so friend away all.

As for single player - the thing is others can join you in your game, at your level. Beasties will be a tad harder but that scales to the people playing. Last night Pundabaya and Sir Morte got me from a point where I was slightly boredly bimbling along grinding until I could beat a level 18 boss, then the lads came in and I did a couple of side things, was able to choose the jobs from the board that were most helpful/fun (someone will always have done it before and be all the more useful for it) and then we did go and do him in, I got a few levels up, learned a thing or two, had some quality firefights, got to use my Siren in tandem with other classes to build a little teamwork and it was fun. I think a nice 70/30 balabnce in favour f single player will work for me, as that's probably still going to be many hours of multifun.

Thems quite persuasive words GovernmentYard thems are. Sounds like a plan.

Sorry, Pundabaya agreed to watch the Wire with the GF when she gets back, so only really snuck on to spend a few minutes sorting through my presents and working out what to sell. Talking of which:

PROTIP for other idiots like me: When you get backpack upgrades thingys DON'T just leave them in your backpack (like I did). You have to 'use' them from your inventory to get your bonus space.

Dimrill: It's hard being a sniper when everyone else is charging head first in/it was late I was tired *


* aka, I'm rubbisho me.

3 spaces per upgrade, isn't it?

Sounds about right, You start at 12 and I've picked up two and now I'm on 18.

Mad Mel is this: a cunt.

Skagzilla is piss easy though...

I got skanked by that arse four time in a row before I realised that you don't have to go into the arena once you've died, so I then just picked him off with a rifle until I could jump up and down on his fat effing face.

Dabbled in some co-op for the first time with Dave last night, as I had a character that was the same level as one of his (and it was below my max level, so I knew there wouldn't be any spoilers).

We ended up tackling things that were a bit too tough for us, and I had serious ammo-management problems and also died lots. It was a tremendous amount of fun though.

I wonder whether it's worth having a dedicated co-op character, that you only play in co-op with a set group, so you can all keep at the same level. Problem with that, of course, is that you can only play as the same group, and only when everyone is available. Maybe having a load of characters all at different levels would be a better idea, though that would mean doing the same missions over and over again with different chars.

I dunno.

I still haven't loaded this. Played Forza last night instead.

The co-op thing seems slightly badly thought out.

The spunkage in here persuaded me so I went to get it from Gamestation today with some credit I had left and a couple of trade ins.

Fucking thing was out of stock. I resisted the urge to spend my credit on anything else though so shall try again at the weekend.

You're badly thought out.



I guess it's no different from any other co-op game where characters have levels. The only other idea I could think of would be, for example, if a lvl 10 char is playing with a lvl 15 char, give the level 10 char a 50% damage increase and a 50% damage taken decrease.

Touche.

There's the Fable II "you're a random assistant" idea but that's a bit shit. How do MMORPGs handle it? Do they just rely on you grouping up with people of the same level? That's not practical in a non-M environment.

Start this last night. And it's bloody good. Minor spoilers.

It reminds me a bit of Face of Mankind (an obscure MMO that was basically an FPS with added RPG stats and systems) and a bit of Bioshock.

The combat is incredibly fast, fluid and deadly - even the crappy skags are a pretty serious threat. The weapons feel nice and meaty, and it's like an MMO only without the 'HOW I MINE 4 FISH?'

There seems to be rather a lot of running around, especially to and from Fyrestone or TK Baha's farm. It was irritating at points, especially as three bandits ALWAYS spawn along the road leading from Fyrestone towards Heaven's Gate and I'm inevitably showered with bullets every time I come back to Fyrestone or TK's to turn in.

Likewise, every time you pass some skag nests you'll inevitably have a bunch of them to fight.

The levelling is EXTREME - I wasted several attempts (and entire loads of ammo) trying to kill Bonehead but barely scratched his shield. So I went and did a few other quests, came back a level or two higher and suddenly he just fell over dead with almost no problems at all. A bit jarring. Sniping is fun, scoring crits on the skags and bandits and watching their heads pop is challenging without being frustrating.

I was heartened that when I killed Ninetoes but then succumbed to his two pet Skags, it still counted as having beaten the quest when I respawned. After years of games with shitty checkpoints, this is a pleasant change.

The voices are great and clever, though I do wonder how long it'll be before you've seen them all a billion times. Certainly I'm already sick of Zed saying 'I maintain these here medical machines, yup', and hearing Lilith cackle with delight or make some comment about how good she is at this is disconcerting. It's quite cute that this is a redneck planet, and some of the comments from the enemies (Bonehead's deranged giggling and claims that he'll eat you after he kills you especially) are marvellous.

The world doesn't really feel 'alive' enough yet. Indeed, it feels rather claustrophobic. There's just Fyrestone (which has one guy living in it) and a stone's throw away is TK's farm (again with one guy) and there's nobody else around except bandits until several hours of play later. Maybe things open up later, but I'm slightly worried, especially when it comes to the vehicles. The trailers and such showed big wide salt flats with the vehicles zooming along fighting, but so far it's just narrow canyon roads which, given the speed of the vehicles, leads to pinballing. There's clearly loads more to come so I reserve judgement for now.

Anyway, I am a level 11 siren assassin, let us co-op!

In Neocron you'd tag along with pretty much any group, granted if you went to a high level area as a noob you'd have to hide at the back and just leech some XP from the rest of the team. Often you'd have groups with a noob or two tagging along to get some loot and XP they couldn't have otherwise gotten.

However, MMORPGs also have a much more developed set of buffs for these situations. I was hoping that the support character (who it turns out is Roland) would have more abilities than just 'heal teammates' and 'give ammo to teammates'. In an MMORPG you'd have things to boost your maximum health, damage resistance, armour class, etc etc etc so you could make a weak character much stronger so they'd stand a better chance in a situation where they're out of their depth.

Oh, and can someone tell me if I'm phasewalking properly? There's a shockwave when you come back out of it, but you can also seemingly do a strong melee attack while in it?

EDIT: Should also mention that the dedicated support class in Neocron (PPU) had a resurrection ability. Not sure how such a thing would work in Borderlands, though I suppose you could always weaken a foe so your downed friend can then kill it and get Second Wind.

City Of Heroes has the rather excellent 'sidekick' option, where a powerful character can take you on as a sidekick (ie. Robin or Barnacle Boy) and you temporarily level up to their level - 1, gain all the XP on your 'old' level, and drop down again when you finish the quest.

MA, just run up to someone while in phasewalk and perform a melee attack, you'll immediately come out of phase walk and do some serious damage.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Just not sure if that's how you're meant to do it or not. It seemed to be working. I find phasewalk is also good for those long trudges back to turn in, as you run pretty fast while doing it.

You're missing out on the evil Gaywoods, who run around all over the place either throwing axes at you or shooting at you with shotguns and knocking themselves over backwards from the recoil.

So they're both more evil and smarter than me?

Yeah, I was quite impressed by that. Pandora appears to have thriving axe AND exploding barrel industries.

Does this have split screen? If so I'll buy it tonight.

It says 'two player split screen' on the back of the box. Haven't tried it myself.

Found the missing pieces for my quest. You were all right and I take back my slandererous buginess comments Mr. Borderlands.

It does indeed. I've used it to whore many an points out of the an game.