Borderlands: get weird

I've played through Borderlands twice now, and I'm messing around with a new character I hacked together (with Gibbed's Borderlands Save Editor). The game is billed as a role playing game, but the story and characterization elements are so thin that it's a bit difficult to take the claim seriously. That's not a problem, mind you: tuning your weird abilities to inflict maximum nut-ball devastation is its own reward. That early realization got me thinking, and I came to another as I started my second playthrough: the four characters you can play aren't the real stars of the show.

Along with the majority of the NPC's in Pandora, the player cast members have almost no personalities to speak of. Most of the voice-overs are repetitive to the point of being tiresome, and the only motivation seems to be "kill things to acquire things to kill more things to acquire even more things." There's so much stuff in the world, though, that the formula kind of works. With upwards of around a bazillion weapons and other kinds of gear, looting takes on a life of its own, and finding that next screwy shotgun that turns bandits into gooey pools of giblets is all the incentive you need to grind out the next mission. The experience point and class customization systems just add layers of beef - and cheese - to the murderous sandwich. The stuff you acquire makes you what you are, and at the end of the day, you're little more than the sum of your gear.

So, the real personalities in Borderlands are the weapons. Some of them set the bad guys on fire, some liquefy them with acid, some fry them with pretty blue static discharges, and some cause the guy next to them to explode, too. Sometimes, your bullets fly off in a spiral pattern, and sometimes, your grenades disappear right after you throw them, only to reappear in a rather inconvenient spot (for the bastards that are trying to ventilate your dome, that is). Quite a few of the weapons have their own pet-names: the "Vicious" this or the "Genocide Stomper" that. One shotgun's description pays homage to Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness. Since that's the greatest movie ever made, you can conclude that the rest of Gearbox's inspirations are equally licentious.

Borderlands is just barely a first person shooter, in the sense that skill at the controls doesn't make much of a difference. Kills are far more a function of pulling the right tool out of the toolbox, and unleashing whatever advantage it brings to the table. Your toys seem to want you to be reckless and inelegant, and more than a bit daft. You really do have more fun that way.

*Tangent Warning*

Although everyone else seems to think that the game is best experienced in the co-op mode, I don't agree. I have a playlist that includes tracks from Tool, the Doors, Thrice, Stevie Wonder, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Radiohead, The Cure, and Elbow, that I cobbled together just for this game. It's a weird mix for a weird game, and the parts fit together with all the logic of a fever dream.