I mentioned a while ago that my brother and I broke Borderlands and was seriously unimpressed with the whole thing. Borderlands glitches have been annoying me for a while now and I’m rather touchy about it. Just search for “Borderlands” or “I Live On Pandora” for some of my series of posts about it. Ahem.
Well, my recent bitch-fest about it involved the fact that my brother and I went through everything but Crawermax in the Playthrough 1 version of the General Knoxx DLC and wanted to start levelling up again. Cue: Playthrough 2. Or so we thought. We did the Fyrestone quests easy enough (because, well, they are easy no matter your level), saved, walked away for a few days, and then returned to all hell having broken loose. While we were gone. See, my Siren (my Hunter appears unaffected by all this) went and did more quests entirely on her own while his Soldier went and did even MORE quests solo, including finding Tannis. Wow. It actually took me a while to figure all this out since there’s no ability to sort quests in any reasonable fashion, as excellently noted on that episode of ZP!, and the order they scroll in seems to be in whatever order it feels like since it’s not even in the order I did them on my Hunter. Oy. Anyway, I figured out that my character was now behind his after some old-fashioned pen and paper and barely seething rage at how stupid this all was so we switched to me hosting the game to let me catch up. WELL THAT WAS THE PLAN, ANYWAY.
New issue: I couldn’t do any collection quests since the items would not spawn no matter which of us hosted or even if I played alone. This was bad, mmm’kay. This was while Darren was over and all three of us wanted a less annoying gaming experience so we bailed on Borderlands for the time being and half-heartedly started Batman: Arkham Asylum instead. They made me play because they are lazy meanies. When you want to shoot people in the head and set them on fire, you don’t pick up a Batman game. I love Batman! Let’s make that absolutely clear. My brother has a sweet, sweet comic collection that I frequently steal and it’s made me quite the fan of his work. However, this was not the pace I was hoping to enjoy so I managed to pass it off to someone else after the massively boring long-walk / intro / credits for Arkham and some elevator shaft climbing. Hey, if you have a problem with the upgrades I choose then you can damn well do it yourself ;)
That was pretty much it for a while. Darren left, I helped my brother move farther away so it’s a lot harder for him to come visit to play, and I had work to catch up on. Since I knew a while ago that I was going to give my bro that 360 — ugh. Number 3 or 4 of mine? I used my launch 20GB HD on an HDMI Arcade to replace my 2nd or 3rd dead Elite — and my TV so he could enjoy gaming again. His last system was a PS2. I know. It’s hard to believe someone related to me could basically stop gaming for so many years but, lo, it is true. He also hears me praise, rant, and otherwise go on and on and on and on about gaming a thousand times more than anyone else so he’s pretty well-versed in what’s been going on in the meantime. This meant that I had to get off my fanny and actually get a new 360.
New 360s are expensive, in case you didn’t know. My old unit had taken to grinding any time the disc was accessed so I made sure to install everything to the HD in order to keep it alive longer. Installing stuff was getting tougher and tougher with all the DLC I had! My brother will not have this issue since he didn’t get to leave with my OpenAlpha profile with his soldier on it (neither he nor I wanted people messaging him trying to ask me something) so he can install a couple of games at a time and go to town, woo. I almost settled for the 120GB unit, just to save a few bucks, but I’m a big softie and picked up the Elite bundle with two controllers so that I could give him 2 of my controllers for when he had friends over. This leaves me with 2 black and 1 white controller and 3 charge packs. Everyone wins! Except my bank account! ;)
Before I could surprise him with the system, I had to clean all of my stuff off of it. This wasn’t actually as bad as I had expected it to be. I had one of those memory units that came with the HD-less Arcade and a recent dashboard update lets you use your own USB sticks. It took time to move my zillions of saves and some DLC — I only had 4 gig sticks so I’ll redownload some of the Borderlands DLC again later — but it was really painless, outside of the repetitive 360 sound effects. Presently I have to be online to use some of my stuff but I will deal with the license transfer later.
Now, not only do I have a black console again, but it’s got 250 gigs, a new headset that will hopefully suck less than the original, is still not that quiet so I’ll be installing everything I get my hands on, it has a warranty, and I can finally progress more in Borderlands. Yes, it’s true. After christening my new 360 with Ghostbusters (of course), I took a trip to Pandora and was able to collect gun pieces and crystals again. Huzzah! I still have completed quests that I have not done and he’s still ahead of me, but at least I’m not totally boned on this character. Initially I was worried it was a corrupt save but that is obviously not the case. While I have no idea whether it was a cache issue on that 360 or not, the problem has kind of worked itself out. I have no idea what I would have done otherwise. Maybe just have waited for the sequel since I didn’t really feel like starting another new character!
I sincerely hope this issue (bug? glitch? act of Atlas Corp?) doesn’t happen to anyone else.
{ 1 comment }
It is all quite disconcerting since Borderlands seems (to me anyway) to be a dress rehearsal for a full-blown MMO. This many multiplayer issues does not inspire confidence.
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