Us v. Borderlands

(For reference, this is about the first Borderlands game, not Borderlands 2!)

As may be apparent from my posts, I'm not usually a FPS kind of player. I have a weakness for shooting games in traditional arcades, but on the computer, or a home console? Not so much. Which is why Borderlands is such a surprise for me.

I've played through a good chunk of the game before, with some friends. I did actually enjoy it, though my unfamiliarity with the controls and the general play style meant I wasn't anywhere near as good a player as the others! However, a tech issue meant one of them lost all their character data. We just didn't have the heart to start the game over again at the time, especially since we were waiting for other games to come out that we could play together (Guild Wars 2 anyone?).

Fast forward to now, when I've started playing it again, but this time with the boyfriend. It's been an interesting experience, to say the least. In the beginning, we found it very, very hard. We couldn't seem to find enough jobs that were the right level, the missions themselves had us dying several times, and for me, getting to grip with the controls was really, really difficult (I'm not great with a PS3 controller). Then we came across Bone Head. We spent a total of at least an hour, maybe two, on that one lousy boss. We spent the whole of that time getting killed again and again and again and again and... Well, you get the idea.

Basically, it boiled down to being absolutely no fun at all. We were miserable, annoyed, and about an inch shy of throwing our controllers at the TV (okay, maybe that was just me). So we looked it up online in the hopes of getting some help, and the best thing we found was a way to kill the stupid boss from town, of all places. We jumped up onto a high rock in town, peeked over the wall into Bone Head's compound, and took him down from there. Normally defeating a tough enemy leads to a good feeling of accomplishment. This one just left us angry. How on earth would we make it through the rest of the game, when we couldn't even defeat one boss in the first few hours of gameplay?*

But we didn't stop playing. I'm not really sure why, but the next night, we fired the game up again. We picked up every mission we could get, even if it was far above our level. We started with the lowest, and picked our way through every skagg, every bandit, that dared to walk in front of us. (Having a rocket launcher vehicle helped a great deal in surviving all of that!)

Now, amazingly, after finishing another two sessions of play, we've found that the game has become fun again. While there have been some tough areas, and a handful of times when we both died repeatedly before finally getting through a mission, we are enjoying the game. We've not had another Bone Head incident. As a bonus, we've actually reached the point where we are slightly higher level than the missions recommend, as opposed to much lower. For whatever reason, the game is far more fun once you've actually gotten past level 10. I can't help but wonder if the second Borderlands game has rectified this. Whereas a week ago I wouldn't have dreamed of playing the second one, I now find myself wondering if it will appear in any sales over the holiday season...

* From what I understand, Bone Head is one of two bosses that are seriously overpowered in this game. You'd have thought the beta testers would have picked that up after dying the hundredth time, right?