"Borderlands" seems to have a much more straightforward plot

Tag : gearbox
"Too Human" tried a similar fusion (albeit with a third-personview) and felt incomplete, overwhelming players with a hugecollection of armor and weapons and puzzling them with anincomprehensible plot. "Borderlands" seems like an upgrade on bothcounts.

While the weapon collection is, if anything, even more gigantic(Gearbox boasts the game will feature as many as 1 milliondifferent weapon combos in the final version), there's a fairlyeasy way to tell whether the weapons you find are upgrades overyour current gear. Basically, if the weapon is highlighted ingreen, it's fairly powerful, while yellow outlines signify a weakergun. You can see the distinction as soon as the weapon falls on theground, so you don't have to open a separate inventory screen toscroll through your collection and examine statistics, like somekind of actuarial commando.

Plus, "Borderlands" seems to have a much more straightforward plot:It's a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and you have to kill all the badguys/mutants. No bizarre cybernetic Viking gods or virtual realitylandscapes populated by Shakespearean witches.

And, "Borderlands" looks amazing.

Further down the road, though, it's the title I'm really pumpedabout: "Aliens: Colonial Marines." This is the game based on thesci-fi movie that almost every first-person shooter has stolen fromin one form or another.

"We've been stealing from that game since our careers started,"Pitchford says. "The head crabs in Half-Life and the drop ships inHalo and even in Call of Duty, the soldiers are lifting linesstraight out of the movie: 'I like to keep this for closeencounters,' and he pulls out a shotgun.

"We've all been stealing from it. To finally get the actual brandand be able to live in the canon rather than rob it and apply it indifferent ways is really an honor and kind of a dream come true."

If that wasn't enough to convince you these guys love thatfranchise, they also got Syd Mead, the artist who dreamed up muchof the look of the Aliens movie, to come in and help sketch outsome art for the game.

I got to see some of his art at Gearbox, and I've got to admit,I've never been so emotional over a picture of a giant spaceship.

Oh, yeah, and there's that big secret game that the company hastalked about. I'm afraid you'll have to wait a bit longer to hearabout that one, but stay tuned.

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