Lisa: I really feel like playing the game.

That’s right; my wife is so hooked on Borderlands, she refers to it as “the game.”

Jack: Why don’t we wait for the new DLC?  I don’t want to be burned out on it when there’s finally something new to play.

Lisa:  (sighs) Yeah.  Fine.  You’re right.  (Pouting ensues.)

I never wrote reviews for Borderlands or any of its subsequent downloadable content.  Here’s the quick take.  The original game is fantastic.  It’s a good time solo, and a blast in two-player co-op and multiplayer.  The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is one of the best DLC packages I’ve played; buy it.  Mad Moxxi’s Underdome is mostly a waste (all that arena fighting, no XP).  The bank where you can stash some extra loot is handy, but not worth 12 bucks.  General Knoxx’s Secret Armory is huge, loaded with loot, and can be challenging depending on your character’s level, but it is also very repetitive.  Buy it, if only for the increased level cap; from 50 to 61.

Last week, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution was finally released.  Lisa was out of town most of the week, but half an hour after we arrived home from the airport Friday afternoon, we were parked in front of the 360, looking for bandits to blast and new guns to blast ‘em with.

It is immediately striking how little is new in New Robot Revolution.  Patricia Tannis, a core character from the original game, is the first person you meet when you arrive at Tartarus Station.  The only thing different about her shack is its location.  The next stop is a garbage dump that looks quite a bit like Crazy Earl’s Junkyard… and the Trash Coast… and Treacher’s Landing.  Next is a town that looks like someone piled two or three New Havens and one or two Old Havens on top of one another.  After that… more familiar people and places.

The enemies are familiar too.  Bandits, beasts and bosses have been converted into robotic versions… Claptrapped, if you will… but the changes are superficial only.  There is a variety of traditional Claptraps to fight, but mostly they serve to replace the midgets (hold your comments please, that’s what Gearbox calls them) that are so prevalent in other areas of the game.  Still, after a year of impotently watching one-eyed waste baskets dance and beg for attention, there is joy to be had in blowing the gears out of a few of the noisy bastards instead of repairing them so that they might live to irritate again.

Claptrap: I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  I’m over here!  Look at me!  I’m dancin’, I’m dancin’!

There is a scene in Zombie Island… one Claptrap kills another… I will admit to having had envy in my heart while watching it.

Here’s the thing; while most of what goes on in New Robot Revolution is a rehash, it is a rehash of a great game; entertaining missions, scads of villains, buckets of loot and even a few scavenger hunts.  You won’t be disappointed.  I wouldn’t have been disappointed either, except, again, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Borderlands; I was hoping for something other than more of the same.  But more of the same is probably a great way for you—you, who aren’t married to my wife– to burn a slow weekend.

Ok.  Time to feed the falcon… have fun.  Don’t waste money on grenade mods, you’ll scav better than you can buy… and don’t sell lower level weapons just because they’re old.  My level 61 Hunter doesn’t carry a gun higher than level 45, and his best pistol is level 20 something.

One last thing; Gearbox has promised a patch that will allow characters to advance another eight levels, to a max of 69 (always going for a laugh, those Gearbox lads) but it hasn’t been released yet (October 4).  Don’t make the mistake I made; wait until the patch is in place before using level 61 characters.

See you out there.  Say hello if you like.  I’ll be the skinny guy with the pistols and the flaming raptor.  Lisa is the sexy redhead with the incendiary SMG and the dangerous gleam in her eye.

The argument for video game companies refusing to serve the owners of second hand games is simple.  Developers and distributers don’t profit from second hand games.  Therefore, the owner of a used game is neither their customer nor their concern.  This argument is fallacious.  More than that, it is terrible business.

All customers, and particularly all gamers, have the potential to become repeat customers.  They develop loyalties (and boy, is that an understatement).  They talk.  That has a name… what’s it called… oh yeah, word of mouth… buzz.  Buzz moves product like nothing else.  Buzz sells DLC.  Buzz sells sequels.  Buzz is priceless.  The more people playing and the more people talking… or posting or tweeting or putting up gamerscore… the better, no matter how they got their hands on the game.

People buy second hand games for a reason.  Maybe they aren’t sure if they’re going to like a game and don’t want to gamble the full retail price.  Maybe they just don’t have the cash for retail.  Most kids and college students don’t.  Maybe they missed the game when it was new a couple of years ago and want to see what they missed before the “hotly anticipated” sequel hits.  But guess what happens if they like their secondhand purchase?  They buy the DLC.  They ask for the sequel for Christmas or their birthday (which is exactly what happened at my house last winter with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2).  They grow up, graduate from college, get a job, stick a few bucks in their pockets and remember how much they liked playing John Q. Gamecompany’s game with all of their buddies in school and maybe the guys can get together again online for the sequel… and the DLC… and the next sequel… and the next sequel.  Oh, and they can’t forget to renew their Xbox Live membership either.  What’s that?  The next-gen console is coming?  Someone has a new peripheral?  There’s a guide?  A toy?  A t-shirt?  A movie?  I need a new video card for my PC?  Forget that, I need a new PC and make it the biggest, baddest, ballsiest PC any wonder-nerd has ever had the audacity to construct.  Bill Gates will be jealous of my PC.  I’ma have Skynet on my side when I’m kicking your ass in Modern Warfare 8.  And so the marketplace rumbles on.

Companies that refuse to service used games are short sighted, probably poorly managed, almost certainly cash-strapped, and are likely trying to sell bad games at a premium.  These are companies that have no confidence in their product. They have no interest in your satisfaction.  They don’t want your loyalty.

If a company doesn’t believe you are a customer, don’t be.  Buy someone else’s game.  When you do, Microsoft will notice.  Sony will notice.  Apple will notice.  Amazon and Best Buy… even GameStop will notice.  That company’s displays will be moved to the backs of stores.  Its games won’t make the front pages of web sites, or the newspaper filers or the email ads.  Its booths will be set at the backs of convention showrooms, far, far away from the mothership brands…. removed from the traffic, from the customers, from the people who got their start, who fell in love with gaming, playing a used copy of a great game.

How many years will it be until all of this is moot anyway?  An all download digital marketplace will be the end of second hand games; maybe the end of retail software sales as we know it.  Amazon and Best Buy and GameStop will notice that too.  At the beginning of this piece, I jokingly asked if you remembered video stores.  How about record stores? What else are we going to laughingly reminisce about in a decade or two?  Oh… one last thing… do you think the price point will drop when games are download only?  No, neither do I.

Mass Effect, released for the Xbox 360 in the autumn of 2007, is widely regarded as a triumph for developer BioWare. It offers a long, non-linear, action RPG campaign full of quirky if familiar characters, unusual environments (sci-fi tropical?) and a serviceable space-opera plotline.  The game features a unique interpretation of the now common RPG morality mechanic.  Character alignment ranges not from good to evil but from paragon to renegade.  More importantly, player decisions form an aggregate alignment that ensures no decision is negated.  In other words, if you perform a renegade act it stays on your permanent record.  Mass Effect also offers a customizable protagonist (though always some version of human Commander Shepard), several specialized combat classes, and the possibility of romance… well, sex anyway

Mass Effect takes for-Han Soloing-ever to finally get started. After a short introductory action sequence, you wander for hours around the most boring city environment since Shenmue (Did you see what happened that day? Ugh.), while receiving instruction on the Mass Effect universe, which is both Star Wars quality and quantity… be prepared to do a lot of reading your first time through.

Eventually you will navigate through the preamble and get to the heart of the game.  Your character is given command of a starship and is granted a level of autonomy that allows you to explore the galaxy at leisure.   You can sprint straight through the core missions if you like, but I suggest you ignore them, at least for a while.  It really is a Star Wars quality universe (no surprise from longtime LucasArts partner BioWare) and if you get hung up on the plot you’ll miss a lot of it.

Combat can be challenging, particularly if you choose the wrong party members for the mission.  That won’t happen often though.  It won’t take long before you are relying on two or three complimentary party members to keep you healthy.

My only other complaint is about the car.   Planet exploration in the combat truckster can be  tedious.  Why create extraordinarily difficult terrain and then give the player a tank that can, and will, cross it if the player simply pushes the thumb stick forward long enough?  Flying over the terrain in a helicopter type vehicle, finding a place to land near a map marker, and then exploring smaller areas of terrain on foot might have been more fun.  The other use for the vee-hickle, navigating through gauntlets of cannon fodder, is more entertaining.  By the way… the car doesn’t float… at all.  Stick one inch of tread in dark blue water and sleep with the fishes you will.

Oh… the best thing about Mass Effect… I paid less than fifteen bucks for it used at GameStop.  If you haven’t played it, go get it.  Or, go get it once you burn out on Modern Warfare 2 with three weeks to go until you pull Assassin’s Creed 2 out from under the tree.  When you’re done backstabbing Italian Renaissance power brokers as Ezio, Mass Effect 2, which I imagine will be less UMass-Effect-centric, arrives January, 2010.

The DLC itself (I’ve played four of the five… I’m waiting for my blood pressure to go back down before I attempt Mothership Zeta), particularly the vast Point Lookout, is fantastic.

Broken Steel offers a more traditional but still satisfying ending to the main storyline while allowing players to bring an already existing character to level 30.  The new perks offered at the higher levels aren’t spectacular, but it’s good to be able to go back and get some of the original perks.  I hated having to choose between Grim Reaper’s Sprint and Explorer at level 20.  Now you can use VATS until your weapon crumbles and find Agatha’s House (and Tacoma and the Clifftop Shacks and…) without a guidebook.

Operation Anchorage is short but satisfying and includes an entirely extraneous squad mechanic that I eventually abandoned… probably because I was at level 30 and could have handled the entire Chinese invading force myself by then.  If nothing else, it was unusual to play Fallout with bright blue skies.  When I go through the DLC again (with baby aspirin close at hand) I’ll do Anchorage first, if only because it offers as a reward the some of the best, and best-looking, gear in the game.

The Pitt is the only one of the four that I might call disappointing.  Unusually linear, the game creators tried to create Fallout-Kobayashi Maru.  What they’ve done is to prove that the way to win the no-win situation is to maintain a high level of ignorance.  The shoot first, loot the body, never ask anybody anything player will entirely bypass the no-win decision that is meant to be the chapter’s central theme.  The Pitt also replaces the feral ghoul with a new mindless enemy; a reinvention of the ghoul called a trog.  I can’t imagine why they did this.  The episode would have had more gravity and been more cohesive with the core game if they’d stayed with the ghouls. What redeems The Pitt is the Steelyard, which, with it’s catwalks, rooftops, and extreme verticality, is as much fun to explore and scav as any environment in Fallout 3.

Point Lookout is the best of the four I’ve played.  It includes several separate, multi-part missions that can be played one at a time or concurrently.  Most of the missions are meaty and satisfying; if you’re really into scavenger hunts you’ll love them all.  The environment is filthy, creepy, massive, and overpopulated with evil, mutated in-breeders and ignoble savages designed to put up a fight before you turn them into a fine red mist.  Best of all, unlike Operation Anchorage or The Pitt, you can leave and return as often as you like.  This effectively makes Point Lookout a part of the core game (if not the central plot), not just an ancillary component.  It even has a puzzle.  Well… it isn’t much of a puzzle.  Remember the Witchwood Stones puzzle in Fable?  It’s kind of like that only with X-Ray specs.

I’ll update this post when I finally play Mothership Zeta.  Until then, I wouldn’t hesitate to grab the Fallout 3 DLC or the GotY edition… as long as you are willing give the boys in Redmond their cut.