STG's

The quest Breaking the Bank, on  Borderlands 2 , broke on me when I tried it. At a certain point, a skag had to eat the explosives. But instead it attacked me, and I killed it. There were a bunch of suggestions around, but just using Quit, going to the main title screen and returning with Continue solved it right away for me.

Today the Mechromancer pack for Borderlands 2 was released. Fortunately (and because of the bonuses), I got Borderlands 2 on pre-order, so I got it for free. I have to say that I was a bit bored after a few hours playing as the siren. The power is simply too lame before upgrades - you freeze a single enemy for a few seconds. That is it. Now, the Mechromancer Deathtrap robot is just devastating. I'm not sure if they did it on purpose, to sell the DLC, but it can take several enemies by itself, using a combination of melee and ranged electrical attacks. The whole game seems a lot easier. And some of the skills seem to reflect that - some of the first options on the left skill screen (Best Friends Forever) include health recharge on full gun magazine and bullets reflecting on walls having a chance to hit an enemy (with reduced damage). Overall, a great addition to the game, and I recommend using it. BTW, if after you get to level 5 you could start new characters at level 5...

I just finished Borderlands and so I bought the DLC pack. When fast traveling to Jacob's Cove to access Zombie Island, the loading screen went on and on without disk activity. How do you get it to continue? Well, what happened is that an activation window for the content popped up in the background, where there was no chance of me seeing it. You have to alt-tab to it (and for some reason I couldn't get the mouse to go there, but it works with just the keyboard), and then enter the serial for Zombie Island. After that it will go online to activate the DLC, and after a while it will be able to finish loading. Overall, a horribly implemented idea. All other DLC I ever bought just appeared in the game without further work in my part. AFAIK it is trivial for the program to use the Steam API to do it. No idea why they did it this way in this case... Amazon.com Widgets

The start up movies in Borderlands! are quite annoying. OK, the Nvidia logo with the Claptrap is cute - but not after a few times. You can easily remove them by editing some INI files . Go to "USER NAME\Documents\My Games\Borderlands\WillowGame\Config" and find the file named WillowEngine.ini Comment out (//) all entries on [FullScreenMovie]. Go to this page for more details and tweaks.

Borderlands calls itself a RPS - Role Playing Shooter. They say it as if it was new, but I'd say that it has been done many many times, with varying results. The one thing that is fairly unique about Borderlands is the visual, cartoonish style, which looks great and at the same time seems to bother my eyes after playing for a while. The characters are pretty well made too, with very different looks. The gameplay reminds me of Fallout 3 - you go around and talk to people, get missions and fulfill them, while getting stuff you can find around you and getting attacked by the local monsters and bandits. It also has plenty of different weapons, and seem to go on even more about their uniqueness - they all seem to have different bonus on accuracy, damage or recoil, or special stuff such as explosive, fire or lightning damage. Meanwhile you accumulate experience points. Some guns, shields or class mods require minimum levels, plus you can get improvements to your special action. ...