Xbox One Gaming: Tiny Tina and High on Life

So I “broke down” and finally got myself an Xbox Series X console and an extra terabyte of storage and I’m not regretting buying it because, as Microsoft advertised, the difference in the graphics has been “startling” in most of my games and like I wasn’t really “seeing” them before.

I also broke down and bought Tiny Tina’s Wonderland (and all the extra stuff offered) but I wasn’t going to buy it even though the game was being seriously hyped on Twitter and what few preview clips being offered just didn’t wow me. For those who may not know, Tiny Tina is a Borderlands character, and she appears in a few of the games and she is, as one game described her, “Nuttier than squirrel shit.” Tina is the Bunker Master for the game, “Bunkers and Badasses” and it’s set in… medieval times and I play the role of the “Fatemaster” and get to go through a lot of shit so that I can defeat the Dragon Lord and in “typical” Borderlands’ style.

I didn’t think that I’d like the game but let’s say that I’m not jumping for joy over it and the one real shortcoming in the game is that you can only level your character up to Level 40. Once you defeat the Dragon Lord, there’s no playthrough and like the other Borderlands games has but I hope that Gearbox decides to add this at some point. One of the key things about playing any Borderlands game is… legendary weapons and this game is quite bereft of them – but I’m spoiled because the other games were updated to drop legendaries like flies on shit and to the point where in other games, I actually roll my eyes to get a stockpile of legendaries and more so when I have most of them already and rarely run across one that I don’t have.

And also typical for a Borderlands game, you have to do more with less. I had a rough time figuring out the Wards (aka shields) and the other enhancements still kinda confuse me because I often have to stop what I’m doing to look at which character attributes I’m playing with and more so when you can level up and add a second character attribute. It’s a good thing that I long ago adopted the habit of wiping out all of the bad guys before checking out the loot. And it’s kinda rare to say, have a decent Ward and find one that’s better and buying stuff from one of the four available machines is (a) sometimes confusing and (b) not better than the item you already have – and that includes the “Item of the Day.”

Still, it’s Borderlands. I get to kill shit. The game is better than I thought it would be but it could be better. As I also tend to do, I’m playing with all the characters available and just like when I play the other games, I keep finding stuff that I didn’t find, see, or even know about when playing it the very first time – then feeling kinda silly because I’m finding stuff that I just walked past the first time. Because I have three Xbox profiles, I am, of course, playing on all three of them… because why not? I try to take what I’ve learned from my primary profile and apply it to the other profiles and, often, with mixed results but, for me, that’s what makes playing a game like this fun.

Now the other game, “High on Life.” Xbox announced this game “a long time ago” and allowed GamePass subscribers to preload the game and… made us wait until a couple of days ago to download the rest of the game and play it. One of the highlights of this game are the weapons that… talk to you and, really, do all the talking for your character. I was telling one of my granddaughters, who I’ve been playing other games with, that I have never heard so much cursing in a game like I’m hearing in this one – and it’s not just the various characters you can run into. There’s this one weapon that cussed me out right after I acquired it! While the controls were rather intuitive, the “bad part” was loading the game and… trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing which, in this case, I was looking for a famous bounty hunter and I roamed around the “starting area” for a good forty-five minutes before the game told me that the bounty hunter I was looking for was on a bench. Wait, what? I mean, one of the reasons I had a hard time finding him was that I didn’t know what he looked like and – wait for it – it took a good part of that forty-five minutes before I happened to look up and there’s his ugly mug on a huge billboard.

Oh. But what bench is this motherfucker on? I know that before the bench was mentioned, I saw every bench in the area and at least five or six times but, okay, I’m running around and rechecking all the benches and, yep, there he is, camped out on a bench like a homeless person – and a bench I know I checked before.

SMH.

Once I find him and get outfitted to do some bounty hunting, I’m off and running to different places, facing a lot of dastardly enemies while on the hunt for loot chests so I can stab them with the knife I acquired and a knife that… has issues. I decided that the knife isn’t just bloodthirsty, it’s a homicidal sociopath, too. I know that when I play such shooting games, I enjoy the killing, but this knife makes me look like I don’t like killing shit. When I kill the character for which the bounty is on, the knife goes to work to acquire the now-dead bad guy’s DNA and I can understand why the game doesn’t show what the knife is doing but my “vision” gets blurry with all the blood and gore the knife is producing.

I’ve spend some time standing in a place and asking myself, “Where am I supposed to be going?” or “How the hell am I supposed to get up there?” and other such things. The game has a pitiful radar and its scanner is more than pitiful because while it will let you know what direction your objective is, I’ve found myself turning in circles while triggering the scanner and not seeing shit or I’ll see it and it doesn’t “stay put,” which makes me move and scan and… it sucks.

Despite these things, I really got into playing it because these deficiencies were challenging to work through. You don’t get much in the way of “loot” from killing characters and not all of them will drop something that’ll recharge your shield and/or health and just as I learned playing “Journey to a Strange Planet,” I wind up dying. A lot. And “stupidly” most of the time. Like, in the early parts of the game, there’s not the expected “double jump” that a lot of games have – and the game tells you that there is one but, nope, there isn’t one so I spent a lot of time dying while trying to jump to the places I had to be until I finally was able to buy the jetpack and, well, that suffices for the double jump but it’s seriously limited in duration and how high you can go and having it run out of fuel while trying to reach a place resulted in me dying. A lot.

SMH. The game has one segment where there’s the one thing I can’t stand in a game: Puzzles. A couple of them had me just standing in place trying to make sense of it. But I figured them out just the same. The one part that gave me the most trouble was trying slow down time so that I could slow down an aircar enough for me to jump on it and, from there, to the platform I needed to be on. Timing it was a bitch and, yep, died a few times and being cussed out by the weapon I’d just gotten that does the slowing down of time. By the time I got it figured out, shit, I must’ve died five or six times and not because I missed the jump: A couple of times, the slowing down effect “wore off” before I could make the jump and the aircar just sped away from under me.

I made it but, damn. This game really makes you work for it. It’s fun. It’s delightfully raunchy and to the point where if I had young children, I wouldn’t allow them to play this game or be around when I’m playing it because I wouldn’t want them asking me, “Dad, what’s a bagful of dicks and why was she helping him to get them in his mouth?” Or seeing the battle with the final boss and in order to kill it, I had to stuff a bomb… way up its ass. Twice. The dialog in the game alone makes this an adult kind of game despite the “cartoony” nature of things.

I’d gone into the store to see if there was anything I could buy but didn’t see anything and the “kid” running the store told me to get the fuck out since I wasn’t buying anything. I had a great urge to shoot him in the face – and couldn’t.

If you like Borderlands, yeah, I’d recommend Tiny Tina’s Wonderland and despite my difficulties with High on Life, if you can get it, do so and give it a try – and I hope you do better at it than I did.

I almost forgot the one thing in TTW that still drives me nuts: Actually being in the Wonderlands. Why? Because you can’t look around in the Wonderlands. There’s a bit of a targeting problem in the game and I find myself moving around a whole lot trying to find the thingy that says “hit X” so I can open a chest or interact with one of the characters. For me, it’s annoying because I’m running to places and I can’t see where I’m going and there are spots when a bad guy will appear and if you don’t kill it with a punch fast enough, it’ll grab you and now you have a battle on your hands. Normally, I’d not say that this is a problem, but the problem is trying to turn your character in the right direction before you get snatched into a fight.

And these “side fights” are intense. Last night, I was going after an item I needed and the battle to get it was so intense that it took me almost twenty minutes of fighting – and almost dying – before I won and could get the item I needed. I was getting seriously swarmed by the “sub-bad guys” that I couldn’t keep my attention on the boss I had to kill – and one that kept hitting me with its “transfusion” weapon that stole energy from me to increase its own triple level of energy. It was so bad that I had to put it on pause for a moment to get the kinks out of my hands and fingers, drink some water, eat a piece of chocolate, and right back to the fight.

Oh, and when you’re going for the piece that I needed, if you die, you have to start over from the beginning and make it through all of the fights again. Good thing I like killing shit.

When Microsoft announced the Series X, they said it was going to be a beast… and they weren’t lying.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Watch That Next Step!

I’ve been in another of those gaming funks where I’m not playing one game “exclusively”, but I’ve played all of the active games I have and it’s like being “bored” but not really but lemme tell you about what I was thinking about and experiencing while playing Minecraft.

I’m not afraid of heights. Where am I going with this? Stay with me. Way back in the day, I’m on my Xbox 360 and I see a demo for a game called Crackdown. Okay, it’s free so let’s check it out but I didn’t have a lot of hope for it because some game demos back then were just shitty. I download it and get to playing it and, holy shit: This game is fucking amazing! I was hyped! I called my son-in-law and told him about it and that he had to download the demo. He did – and I can tell by the way he said that he would that he was just humoring me but he calls me back maybe an hour later and he’s as hyped about this game as I am and now neither of us can wait for the full game to come out.

It does and I’m having a grand time running around this open world game, killing bad guys, sometimes having to deal with the police because I “accidently” shot or blew up an innocent bystander or nine or fifteen. Since we could play the game together – pretty much unheard of at the time – we’d wreak havoc in the game and on each other – he loved to sneak up on me and shoot me or blow me up and thought it was funny until I’d get my revenge. One day, we’re doing something crazy. The game has a lot of ways to collect achievements, from racing games to jumping vehicles through targets that can be found in a lot of places.

Some of those are easy while others are like, “How the fuck do they expect me to get that one?” But my son-in-law figured it out: Spawn a vehicle and drive to one of these targets and pick up the car and throw the car – and me – through the target. Genius. We’re laughing our asses off as we’re taking turns chucking each other at and through the various targets and often with hilarious results when he asks, “Dad, did you get the Agency achievement?”

The Agency is the headquarters for the crimefighters, and I tell him that I didn’t know of any achievements in there; he tells me that you can get an achievement by climbing the Agency building to the very top… and jumping off – but don’t die. It’s the tallest building in the game but I tell him that I didn’t know about it so I hadn’t done it and, well, who cares?

He says, “I did it.”

I’m competitive. So was he. Those three words and the snarky tone they were delivered with had me thinking, “Oh, it’s on, motherfucker!” because there is no fucking way in that I’m not going to do something he’s bragging about having already done! Indeed, we’d been taking turns one-upping each other in the game but in this, he didn’t as much throw down the gauntlet than he had punched me in the face with it and, oh, fuck no, I can’t let him clown me like that!

All I had to do was figure out how to do it. It took me almost two weeks to accomplish this because of two things. One, I had to work and the other was me discovering that my character wasn’t powerful enough to make some of the jumps which meant having to run around the city looking for the powerup orbs so that I could reach the places I needed to and, um, dealing with falling off the building in places, dying, and having to start the climb all over again. What I had noticed in one attempt was I was up really high on the building and I looked down… and do you know that feeling you get in your guts when you’re up high and look down and it makes you think, “Oh, shit – what the fuck am I doing up here!”?

Well, I had that feeling and it was weird because I know that I’m sitting on the sofa in my living room with my feet on the fucking floor but I am… afraid of being up this high in a damned video game! Let’s not talk about experiencing that feeling of falling; one time, I’m like three-quarters up the building and I misjudged a jump and I fell off the building and as I’m watching the ground approaching, I’ve got that “I’m falling” feeling in my body… but I’m not really falling, of course. This weirded me out big time and was about to think that maybe there’s something wrong with me but my son-in-law had mentioned the exact same sensations when playing the game and messing around on the tall buildings.

What the fuck? Man, talk about being immersed in a game? I finally make it to the very top of the Agency building; I’m standing on the tip of the tallest spire and looking out over the city as a master of all I survey and I look down because I have to jump in a way that’ll land me in some water way down there – and I learned that I had to hit the water to get the achievement because I’d jumped off the building and from the wrong place – and I had a great urge to run to the bathroom – and missed the water, died, and didn’t get the fucking achievement. Back up the building – but now, I’ve mastered climbing this motherfucker. I look down to aim my jump and… vertigo. That sinking feeling in my stomach because my mind is telling me that I have no fucking business being up here but, again, I’m sitting on the sofa.

And now, I’m afraid to jump off of the building’s highest spire. I actually put the controller down and walked around to calm myself before going back to the game, saying “Fuck it!” to myself, and jumped off the building… and I wanted to jump out of my skin as my character dropped like a rock and… into the water.

Achievement achieved. I tell my son-in-law that I got it and he was telling me how afraid he was when he’d done it and… he’s not afraid of heights, either. This game fucked with both of us in ways that, honestly, I never thought was possible and no matter how many times I’d been up way high in the game, that feeling would always show up and I’d just ignore it and tell my mind that, no, we’re 100% safe and not in any danger.

So, last night, I started a new world – the forty-eighth one this year, by the way – and digging my usual mineshaft and as I always do every time I start a new world. Ever since Mojang – the creators of Minecraft – gave us the Cliffs and Caves update, I learned that you have to be careful when digging because you can’t know that if you take out a block there might not be another one beneath it and, yeah, found that out the hard way when I’d took out a block but it was kinda dark in that corner, I stepped down and… dropped like a lead weight – and feeling that sensation of falling – and the only reason I didn’t fall to my death was I landed in some water.

What the fucking fuck? So I learned to look before taking another step while digging a mineshaft. I’m doing this and removed the last block and… there’s a black hole under that block and I thought, “Okay, here we go with this again…” I put a torch on the wall in front of me so I can see how far down this goes and… I get that damned feeling of being up “too high” and something I hadn’t felt in years! I shake it off and change the setting from Survival to Creative and, yes, I know that Minecraft purists (like my daughter) would give me some shit about “cheating” like this but as I say, this is my game and I’ll play it any damned way I want to. While playing with my grandson and one of his friends, I learned what has to be the coolest trick I’d ever seen in Minecraft: Making an elevator out of bamboo scaffolding.

Normally and when you wanted to, say, get to the bottom of a ravine, you had to have a bucket of water on hand, make a waterfall, then ride down it and hope that you don’t drown before you get to the bottom. It’s a technique that I employed when discovering all of the amazing caves that can be found in the game but the scaffold elevator trick literally blew my mind and I have no shame in changing over to Creative, grabbing a block of scaffold, and creating an elevator so I can have a nice, smooth and relatively safe trip to the bottom… because I did learn what happens if you move from where you have to stand in order to make the elevator trick work and, yeah, sometimes, it’s a very long way to that sudden stop at the end.

And having to ignore that sensation of falling. So, after dropping an “oh shit” amount of scaffold blocks, I step on the top of the last block placed, hit the “A” button and one express elevator, going straight down! I get to the bottom and now it’s exploring time… and dealing with another disturbing feeling that only Minecraft seems to give me. I’m roaming around and dropping torches to light up the place but doing it in a way that will allow me to get back to the place where I started my exploration and feeling scared of getting lost and not being able to find my way back.

I’m feeling this and laughing to myself as I remember the many times my now late son-in-law would go exploring and getting lost because he refused to adopt my “way” of marking an area, which is placing torches on the left so that, on the way out, they’re on the right and if you’re on your way out and there’s a torch on your left, you’re going the wrong way. But, as I said, this dude was as competitive and hard-headed like no one else I’ve ever known, and I’d spend a lot of time laughing my ass off at him for getting lost in his own mine or cavern and laughing even more because I knew he couldn’t stand me laughing at him for this.

But here I am in yet another magnificent cavern and feeling afraid of getting lost and thinking about Crackdown and how… irrational this fear is since if I do fuck up and get lost – and I have done that a few times (but not as much as my son-in-law made it a habit of doing) – well, I’m in Creative mode and I can fly and it’s a no-brainer to fly straight up and dig my way to the surface. Duh. I’m not lost, though, and I usually don’t get lost because I have a good sense of direction, or I always know where I am relative to where I started… but I still put down torches in my way just in case. I know I can get back to where I started… but that fear of getting lost is fucking with me just the same, which got me thinking about being “afraid of heights and falling” in Crackdown. It gets better. I have Crackdown 3 and, yeah, it’s got some stupidly tall buildings and other structures that have to be climbed and, yeah, that feeling of not wanting to be up that high and let’s not fall but, sure, I’ve climbed to the top of these things, done what I’ve had to do, and have jumped right off the top of them but that sensation of falling is still there.

Weird shit. It doesn’t happen in any of the other games I play, like, I can jump off a cliff in Borderlands and not get that sense of “fear” being up high or falling even though it’s rare that you fall out of bounds in the game and wind up dying – and I’ve done that, said, “Oops!” and kept right on playing. I have yet to figure out how and why these two games… fuck with me like this. I’d had a summer job working on a construction site and tasked to work on the top floor of a pretty tall building and being up that high – and sometimes, going to the edge of the unfinished floor and looking down at the “ants” going about their business didn’t bother me one bit. I’m just not afraid of heights… except when I’m playing these two games.

And I’ll be damned if I know why other than to say that game designers are really good at making you feel like you’re in the game and not “just playing” it. I left the cavern to empty my inventory, which was full of the coal and iron I desperately needed and, yeah, I know that I can switch back to Creative and make all of this stuff but I don’t do that; it just feels… fairer to collect this stuff without being in Creative and, yeah, that’s just me. I’m back in the cavern and finding out that this bitch is deeper than I thought it was. I’m flying around the place, placing torches and putting scaffold elevators in and I’m doing this not so much for myself but for when someone else, like my grandson, comes into my world and wants to explore the cavern and now they can get down there without having to worry about getting killed and losing all of their stuff – and then having to hustle back to get it.

And something in the back of my mind is telling me to turn around and go back before I fuck around and get lost. I get to the very bottom of this cavern and look around to see that there are lot of places that are still cloaked in darkness which means I have a lot of work to do to light things up and thinking about doing it and making sure I don’t get lost… and, fuck, I don’t know why this is “bothering” me since I obviously know that I’m sitting on the sofa in the living room. Duh.

It’s just weird. I’m not concerned about it, mind you, but, yeah, it’s just weird.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Bioshock 1 and 2

I’ve been playing the remastered versions of these games and I remember when they first came out for Xbox 360… and how it frustrated the shit out of me.

I couldn’t figure out how to play the game; the pamphlet that came with the disc wasn’t helpful at all and I remember tossing my controller aside in frustration and disgust just a few minutes into playing the game. My son-in-law had had a good time laughing his ass off at me and telling me that he was playing it and how much he liked it and how easy it was.

Bullshit! Then I got the second game… and realized that it didn’t make sense because I hadn’t even gotten into playing the first game. I had set both of them aside to play other games and when I traded in my 360 for my first Xbox One, I also traded both games in, too… and forgot about them.

Until, one day, I was in the store and looking for something new and different to play… and saw the remastered games, including the third one which I had owned… and didn’t like because it was really not like the first two games at all. Both were $9.99 and I said, “What the hell – lemme get them again and really play them this time!”

Bioshock is a “weird game.” It’s dark and gritty. Set in an underworld city that’s seen better days and filled with a lot of corpses and people who’d gone batshit crazy after being hooked on a series of differing “plasmids” that not only gave them amazing abilities but, yeah, made them lose their minds, too. As I got into playing Bioshock 1, man, because I hadn’t played the game before, everything was a surprise for me. It’s an FPS – first person shooter – and it was… easier to play since I’d gotten used to playing this type of game playing Borderlands. I don’t know how many times I got killed but, eh, you learn to expect this. Being able to acquire weapons and my own set of “plasmids” so I could do battle with the crazies took some getting used to. Being worried about running out of cash to buy stuff and ammunition with and, yeah, running low on “Eve,” which powers the various plasmids to be found and used.

Getting deep into which weapon would work in a certain situation and being able to quickly switch weapons when the one I thought would work wasn’t working… and then doing that without getting killed in the process. One of the things the game calls for is for the player to either rescue a “Little Sister” for her ADAM… or to harvest it from her. Rescuing her frees here from the effects of the ADAM she’s been collecting and consuming… and harvesting it from her kills her.

You get more ADAM when you harvest it, and you need all you can get. But first, you have to defeat the Big Daddy that is protecting her, and they are no joke. I would defeat one – and, sometimes, after he killed the shit out of me – and if I had to harvest her ADAM – because I needed it to update my stuff or get new stuff – I felt… bad about having to kill her. Silly, huh? I’ve played the game twice and I got an achievement (which I didn’t really care about) for going through the whole game without harvesting a Little Girl the first time around.

In a time where a lot of games are all about multiplaying with other users – and even across the many platforms now out there – both Bioshocks are about you against this murky, gritter, underwater city while being taunted and hunted by, in the first game, the guy who built it and, in the second, by some ditzy chick who had taken it over and, I guess, after I killed not one but two guys who wanted the city all to themselves… and me dead. While part of the end game for Bioshock 1 is for you to become a Big Daddy – which is well into the game – Bioshock 2 starts you out as a Big Daddy and as I played it, I realized that, yeah, if you don’t play the first game, just playing the second one doesn’t makes sense as far as the story line goes and because Bioshock 2 is a continuance of Bioshock 1 – you’ve just changed characters.

I’d played both the first time and it was worth what I’d paid for them. I’m done with them and looking at my other games and trying to decide which of them I wanted to play… and went back to play both of them again and as is my habit, trying to play them better than I did the first time. And I did. And not so much. Discovering a lot of stuff the second time that I hadn’t been aware of the first time. I’ve played both games three times now… and all three times have been different. And since I have three Xbox profiles, yeah, I get to play them on my other profiles, and you’d think that I’d have them down pat…

And you’d be wrong about that. The many times I screwed up and said to myself, “You know better! You knew what was coming!” And still fucked it up in some way. Incredible. I’m having fun playing a very old game and, yeah, I’m wondering why I got frustrated when I tried to play it so many years ago. When I finish writing this, I’m going to finish the games I have in progress; I’ve found that because both are set in an underwater world, it… gets to me. Gives me that closed-in feeling that, I think, speaks to how well the game designers did their job because I’m playing the game and feeling… wet. Damp and moldy. I’m not just playing the game – I’m in the game.

Maybe I’ll buy the third game again and give it a serious try. I remember playing it and it was… confusing but it didn’t really hold my interest because, as I said, it’s nothing like the first two games and it’s more aboveground than being anywhere near the water. I dunno. What I do know is how silly I feel not being able to play the first game when it came out.

But I’m making up for that!

 

Xbox One Gaming: Minecraft – The Supersized Building

The other day I wrote about my project to double the size of a building I had created and the work I had to look forward to and especially making a mountain go away. The good news is that the supersized building has been built… and it is amazing.

It looks the same as all the normal-sized ones do… just way bigger. I’d had a problem lighting it up until I realized, duh, this one is twice the size of the others so making it all nice and bright inside wasn’t going to happen and I still don’t know how I’m going to do with without cluttering things up… and I might not even try to bring more light to it… because it looks amazing being lit up as much as it is.

It has a cathedral-like look to it. My daughter had dropped in to see it and noticed that between the way I have the ceiling designed and the lighting, the ceiling looks just like Starfleet’s insignia and I hadn’t noticed this until she mentioned it but the moment she did, I also realized that the normal-sized buildings “didn’t have this look” because I can easily light them up so that there are no shadows anywhere.

Hmm. Still, the work to build it was harder than I thought it would be in that it took much longer to build the ceiling and, sometimes, it got to be so repetitive that it actually had me nodding out a few times. Creating the floor’s pattern was… a bitch. I’ve made it a point that when I build one of these to make sure that no two floors are the same and, really, to make every floor unique and this one really had me talking and cussing to myself because of the sheer size of it and then, once I had the “feel” of it, making sure that I didn’t screw it up… which I almost did a few times. Normally and once I get one side of the floor created, it’s easy to fly back and forth to make sure I’m duplicating the pattern faithfully and accurately… but this building is twice the size and jetting back and forth just “complicated” things and so much that when I finally got it finished, I found that I’d missed putting in some blocks here and there – and when my daughter visited, she found a few more I had missed.

But that wasn’t the bad part… and this part of it was pretty bad. No – that would be sticking to my original plan to make that mountain go away. I’d “take a break” from the monotony of working on the actual building to work on the mountain that was blocking the view from the building’s windows… and I was regretting the decision to make it all go away. I did try using TNT and in the hope that it would make this very boring and monotonous task easier but, nope – all that did was make more of a mess than anything else so I spend a lot of near mindless hours whittling away at it, one row of blocks at a time.

I am happy to report that it’s all gone. In whittling it all down, I even found the “entrance” to an underwater cavern that I’m now thinking about what I’ll have to do to it so it can be explored in Survival mode and without drowning in the process. It was hidden under the mountain and had I not removed it, I wouldn’t have known it was there. Still, there were moments during its removal that I just wanted to stop fucking with it; on top of building the supersized version of my building, it was too much. Not only did I have to remove all the dirt and other stuff, there was also a lot of trees that had to be removed and some of them were those damned double oak trees that, if you don’t get all of the blocks of wood out of them, the tree won’t go away until you find and get rid of them

I do not like the double oak trees one bit. Those who play Minecraft knows that once you chop down a tree, the leaves can drop stuff like sticks, apples, and saplings of the tree that got chopped down and I did my best to collect as much of those things as I could and store them in a couple of chests I had stashed in another but close-by location… because I might “make my daughter happy” and replant all of the saplings I’ve collected. Maybe. I love my daughter… but I might not love her that much as far as this project goes.

The building is done. The mountain is gone. I still have work to do. I still have to create rooms that players who may visit can call their home base as they explore things. I have to start and finish the landscaping that I do for every building. So as to not spoil the beauty of the building’s interior, I’ve opted to create rooms in the center section of the building by digging into – and down – the sides of the center section, something I’ve done before but this time it’s different.

I usually create a “stairwell” in the center of the building so that the floor’s pattern flows from one side to the other but for this build, well, I did that… but not as deep as I’d normally do it – it’s only three levels deep which (1) makes the floor’s pattern flow amazingly but (2) creates a bit of a problem creating side rooms because the “ground” is the “ceiling” so there’s grass above and that’s just not going to cut it. I was “running out of gas” after having removed the last huge chunks of the mountain so I only got as far as creating the entryway to the space where I am figuring out how to create the number of rooms I have in mind… and with the understanding that I can’t see what I’m doing.

Normally, I would build these rooms aboveground and I can see what I’m doing and all that; building them underground isn’t going to be easy but it’s on my list of things to do and, officially, the building won’t be “certified for occupation” until I get them built and outfitted to my liking.

Why go through all of this? It’s… therapy. Kinda. I have to remember how to build the damned things; I have to think about where I’m building it and not just on the surface but under it, too. I have to make myself “stick to the plan” at all times and not take shortcuts or let stuff like huge, mountain-like hills/structures stop me from the building. If it’s in my way, it’s got to go. It’s about focus. Attention to detail. Just putting my head down and doing all that has to be done so that the build gets completed the way I always want them to be.

It keeps my mind active. It takes my mind off of the neuropathic pain I continue to have to deal with and especially in my right hand. It makes me “sit still” and not be fidgeting all over the place and like I normally tend to do. As much as building one of these “gets on my last good nerve,” it is… calming and relaxing which, during this build, had my heart rate coasting along in the low 70s.

The supersized project isn’t at 100% but it has been… interesting. I am telling myself that I’m not going to build another one of this size and that’s just me bullshitting myself because I probably will because I do have fun doing it and, yeah, it’s therapy for me. I’m going to try to get some pics of it so I can show it to you and especially what I did with the floor this time around.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Minecraft

Those of you who Minecraft might understand what I’m about to say and those of you who don’t, well, you might be able to relate to this because there are some things in life that can happen in the way I’m about to speak to.

So… there’s a building that I created and took from a simple structure – and it wasn’t what I had wanted to build in the first place – to something that whenever I build one, I have a “hard time” believing that I created and built it.

This is the building I’m talking about. Building it required me to do some “math” because this game is… weird in that doing stuff with an even number of blocks – like ten, for example – might not “work” the way you want it to… but eleven blocks will. I know why this is but I can’t explain it but, to continue. I had to figure out how many blocks I needed to create the “foundation” that the rest of what you see was going to be built upon… then I had to build it and that started with clearing out that whole area you see where the building is sitting and “fenced in” with bushes.

Sometimes, that’s easy depending on the seed that’s randomly generated… and sometimes, it’s just not feasible to build one because there’s not a place I’d find suitable. It has to be built on flat land; I tried to build one without “terraforming” the area and, well, let’s just say that I’m not going to try that again. From finding the right place and landscape to actually building one of these can take a couple of days or more and depending on what I have to do before I can start building and if I feel like messing with it. I keep telling myself that I’m not going to build another one because it is labor-intensive but when you look at the picture, yeah, it’s worth it… sometimes.

I was playing with my grandson the other day… and building yet another one of these because, well, I don’t really know why I did but I was doing it and he thought it was cool (but he thinks almost everything I do is cool) and he said that he didn’t know how I could make it better and I said something like the only way to make it better would be to make it bigger… and like these building aren’t big enough already – but you might not be able to see that from the provided picture but it’s so big that bats hang out in there – and if you know about Minecraft’s bats, you get an idea of things.

As I’m watching my grandson working on something he was building and giving him the occasional hint or pointing out that he missed something, I was thinking about how I could make my building bigger and with the understanding that just doubling the number of blocks used to create the foundation wasn’t going to work… because that would make all of the blocks even-numbered ones. Like, to create the front of the building – and after creating a column-like thingy, there has to be 23 blocks between the two columns… but doubling them would make it 46 blocks… and 46 won’t work… but 47 will. I “did the math” and since I know how many blocks are needed just to create one side of the foundation, well, that was easier than the next problem:

Where to build it. I created a few worlds that didn’t fit the bill, like being in a frozen wasteland or in a desert which both had wide open spaces – and read this as meaning no trees – but the terrain was just too uneven and would required way too much work to make it totally flat and as I need it to be. I did use those worlds to test my “math” and I just had to build three parts of it to know that I got it right because I have learned that if I screw it up – and I have screwed it up – it will always happen with those first three sections because the fourth section won’t line up properly.

Hang in here with me, okay?

I found a world that would work for me. Kinda. Lemme start the front-side of the building because that will tell me how much “terraforming” I will have to do. I did that and realized that there’s, um, not quite a mountain smack-dab in the middle of where I can build this… which means that if I want to build this giant-sized version of the building in the picture, I’m gonna have to make that almost a mountain go away. I thought about using the game’s TNT to do some blasting except I’ve found that, um, I’m not all that good at figuring out how much TNT I need and not enough or too much will make sure that I’ll have to work harder than I have to so it’s take that bitch down to the ground one block at a time, one section of a time and while building the foundation as I go along.

There’s just no easy way to do this. I am determined to do this and I didn’t even get to completing the second section of the foundation before I started asking myself, “What are you doing… and why are you doing it?” So far, I’ve been working on this for three days (today will be day number four) and I only have two final sections to complete for the foundation and then the harder work can commence… but I gotta get rid of that damned mountain first. Not just part of it: All of it. Why? Because I like building these things and without having obstructions blocking the views from the many windows in the joint. Now, I have left some stuff “blocking” the view because I didn’t feel like obliterating whatever the blockage was but for some damned reason, I’m going to remove that mountain and as much as I’m not liking having to do it, I’m also having fun doing it.

I’ve been destroying all of the trees and smiling to think about my daughter reading me the riot act for (a) destroying all those trees and not using them and (b) having little or no intention on replanting them. Out of a kind of respect for my Minecraft teacher, I have been avoiding killing the cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs that have been getting in my way all along. Yeah, some of them died… but not at my hand; it’s not my fault they jumped off the ledge that I wound up creating as I take the mountain apart a section at a time! When they’ve done that, I have collected the meat and other stuff they left behind and stored it in a chest I have stashed somewhere out of my way.

It’s not exactly “fun” doing a project like this but I find it to be relaxing as much as it gets on my nerves. Removing a mountain is a ridiculous thing to do and no matter its size. I know this because I’ve done it before and I don’t wanna talk about that any more than this. I’m relaxed. Focused. My Fitbit is happy because my resting pulse is in the low 70s. It is driving me fucking crazy because the more I hack at the stuff I need to go away, it doesn’t feel like I’m really making a lot of progress and, yep, I’m still asking myself, “What are you doing?” I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m doing it. It just doesn’t really make sense to do all of the shit I’ve been doing so that I can get to doing something that I know is going to be a bitch doing… because building the building in the above picture was a bitch… and now I’m making one twice its size.

Why? Because I can. I have the willpower and determination to do it. I actually like having to figure out what needs to go and what needs to be built up or even created to support the building… and it also gets on my nerves. Those of you who don’t play Minecraft might not see or understand why doing something like this is, indeed, a lot of fun since it doesn’t sound like it is… and that’s because it isn’t. But I’m going to do it because, yeah, it’s fun and even therapeutic in a way because I have to build this place from memory and from the ground up; I have to give some very serious thought about the floor and letting the “artistic” side of me come forth to create a pattern on the floor that doesn’t exist in any of the other buildings I’ve built so that while the shape of this building will always be the same, all of the floor are different. I have to… feel the floor then figure out how to do what I’m feeling… and working around the critters the game keeps spawning.

I’ve got a lot of hard work to do before I can get to the hard work of building this giant-sized place. It requires calm patience to keep hacking away at the mountain and being insanely determined to wipe it out. I could work around it and a few times last night, I was gonna do just that but this is also a lesson in if you start something, finish it and no matter how much shit you gotta go through to finish it.

You tear down a mountain to the ground… because it can be done. My daughter would shit a couple of gold bricks and I thought that my late son-in-law – and who was a better builder – would have dived in with me to do something I know that both of us didn’t like doing… because why the hell not? It can be done… so let’s do it. He would have broke out lots of TNT and, against my advice, blown shit up big time and that, too, is fun… if you’re not going to be the one who has to clean it up.

I just had to add this because, well, I was thinking about it as I shut down the work site for the night and looking at what I have left to do… and I’ve only gotten rid of maybe half of the mountain. Half. The nearly completed foundation is… mocking me and reminding me that I’m not finished with it and the longer it takes for me to get to finishing it, the “harder” building it is going to be but, yeah, are we having fun or what?

I am. And not. I don’t have to do this but I’m going to. I started it and I will see it through because I’m not a quitter and this mountain isn’t going to defeat me… well, this time.

Time to go to work. There’s still some mountain to be moved and while I can’t move a lot of the mountains that life can put in my way, I can move and remove this one.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Some Messed Up Stuff

It’s not all that uncommon that when you have a wireless Xbox controller, it’ll lose it’s connection to the console for a moment even though Microsoft doesn’t really offer an explanation of why it’ll do that. It’s annoying and depending on the game you’re playing, a disconnected controller can get you “killed.”

I was playing Elite Dangerous and getting back into playing the game after having decided to take a break from it back in October. As I was hauling some goods from one sector of space to another, my controller would suddenly disconnect and it was a pain in the ass because the game doesn’t stop when paused and given the cargo I was carrying, I knew there was a chance I could be attacked at any moment and with a disconnected controller – and one that refused to reconnect – I could get dead in a hurry.

Fortunately, I could plug my controller into the cable I’d connected to my console and everything went back to normal but I’m baffled and miffed as to why it kept disconnecting. Was it the battery and, as such, not enough power going to the Bluetooth radio in the controller? I even noticed that when I changed batteries, the controller wouldn’t reconnect. I know that it got updated a few days before and noted that since that update, my controller, which has faithfully worked for the years I’ve had it, is just fucking up. I don’t know what was in that update but what I do know is that there’s no way for me to back it out so I can ignore the console’s attempts to update it again.

I don’t mind using the controller when it’s wired… except I have to sit somewhere else because the frigging cable ain’t long enough to reach where I normally sit… and it’s even more “messed up” because having to sit closer changes my perspective when looking at the TV; instead of me looking straight at it, I’m looking at it from an angle or, if I sit on the futon, I’m seriously close to whatever’s going on and for Elite Dangerous, it takes some getting used to and why I don’t sit on the futon.

Maybe I need to replace that controller but, damn, it was working as expected before it got updated and while I could get an aftermarket controller, I don’t have much faith in them. I’ve gotten them before and they’ve broken too easily or just stopped working so I’ve bitten the bullet and paid for a genuine Xbox controller… and those puppies aren’t cheap and more so being on a fixed income.

I have a second controller but the only game I can play with it is… Minecraft because I fucked up and dropped it and broke the left “bumper” and my attempts to super glue it back together failed so until this bullshit started happening with my “main” controller, the second one sits in the charging station and when I need to change batteries, well, there it is and I can keep playing and recharge the spent battery… and I know they’re old and in need of replacing because they’re running out of juice faster than normal and, yeah, maybe they’re the reason why my main controller keeps losing its fucking mind in its wireless mode.

Now I’m playing Elite Dangerous wired to the console but playing Minecraft with my second and busted controller because I don’t need the broken bumper to play the game and, oh, yeah: It’s staying connected and it is to note that the second controller hasn’t been updated since I got it… a few years ago and I’m not going to allow it to be updated should that really be the problem. Microsoft’s solution to this is to either go wired… or buy a new controller. The less-expensive option might be to see if I can find a cable that’s longer than the long one I already have so that I can sit where I normally do and comfortably so. I have kept putting off replacing the broken second controller and I very much regret doing that so, in a way, this crap is the price to be paid for not replacing it when I could do it.

Mea culpa… but, perhaps, not my fault that my main controller doesn’t want to reconnect; it’s like the console and the controller aren’t talking to each other but my attempts to pair it again hasn’t worked; there’s a button on the controller for this and, when pressed should put the controller into pairing mode and I have to push the same button on the console. They both do some blinking and connect but, shit, it’s not happening. I’d suspect that the issue is with the console except the second controller connects and stays connected so that’s not it.

This sucks and it’s inconvenient at the worst. Like most gamers, I have everything I might need right there next to me when I’m playing and, yeah, if I have to go into the kitchen, I sometimes take it with me so I can do something if/when I have to, like playing Elite Dangerous. Until I can either find out why my main controller is acting stupid or find a longer connecting cable, I’ve been relegated to having to move to play any game with my main controller because I learned that if I sit back where I normally sit, I get unplugged. Nothing sucks more than a wireless controller that doesn’t want to work wirelessly.

Big-assed sigh. If it’s truly an issue of my main controller being too old to work with the current console software, I’m just gonna have to find it in my limited budget to replace it and, shit, to replace the broken one and both sets of rechargeable batteries. Today, I’m going to replace the main controller’s rechargeable batteries with AAs and see if that makes a difference and if it doesn’t disconnect – or it does but reconnects – then I know what the real problem is and those batteries are way cheaper than buying a new controller… but I still need to replace the broken one.

Crap. I had a thought of starting one of those funding things so I can get new stuff and, nah, I don’t feel right doing that and for this reason but having this thought took my mind off of scraping around in my head and thinking about how the wireless controller works and, yeah, I do know how it works and it made my head hurt when I was learning this stuff back when I was working. I’ll figure it out but until I do, I just gotta work with what I have to work with.

Okay. I got this out of my head and it’s time to test my battery theory while looking for an extra-long connecting cable… and figuring out when I can afford to replace everything.

While still waiting to see how bad this snowstorm is really going to be.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Halo Infinite

I sat and waited with some impatience for Xbox to release this game and more so when it is free for me to play. But I have a… history with Halo.

My now-late son-in-law, when the first Halo game came out, implored me to play this game so much that I relented; he lent me his copy of Halo (that’s back when that could be done) and I loaded and started the game and without a single clue how to play it. Well, um, the first time I ran into the bad guys, I never got past them because they kept killing me over and over; not only did I not know how to play the game, it was one of the first first-person games and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to move my character and as if, you know, the character was me which, in a way, it was.

My first exposure to the Halo gaming franchise was a disaster. I vowed to never play a first-person game again… and wound up breaking that vow but even when I finally got the hang of playing a first-person game, I still wouldn’t go anywhere near Halo until, many years after that first horrible experience, my son-in-law convinced me – again – to play the game. So I did… and felt kinda stupid because Halo is, indeed, a great game to play… now that I knew how to do the first-person thing.

I’ve played almost all of the Halo games and being the Master Chief has been “annoyingly good fun” because there are aspects of the game that just makes me insane and, specifically, not having dedicated weaponry to play with and having to rely on picking up weapons wherever and whenever I could and, oh, yeah, still getting the shit killed out of me.

And my experiences so far with Halo Infinite aren’t any different. Now, I do know how to run around and kill things and blow them up – and thanks to the Borderlands game I once refused to play. I expect to get killed and this game hasn’t disappointed in this; I’ve run into situations in the game where I’ve gotten killed so much that I don’t even react to it unless I did something stupid which, um, I tend to do playing any Halo game. The storyline picks up where the last game left off and that’s a good thing because I don’t have to figure out why I’m doing what I’m gonna have to do – and this is important.

Started the game and got the campaign part loaded, which had me scratching my head and wondering why it was loaded when Microsoft/Xbox finally made the game available to those of us who have GamePass but, okay, I loaded it and got to playing. A moment to refamiliarize myself with the controller functions – moving, looking around, aiming and shooting – and let’s get into it. I have a lot of missions to do and as I started doing them, I was quickly reminded why Halo and I don’t get along with each other all that much. Don’t get me wrong – I think the game is a very good one but, damn… it’s still Halo and I think I might be suffering from some “PTSD” due to my first failed attempt to play the game.

I’ve had a lot of moments where I’ve gotten so frustrated over some situations that I’ve just put the game on pause, set the controller down, and then spend a few moments talking to myself about how fucked up the situation is and saying shit like, “How am I supposed to get in there (or up there in some cases)?” I’ve figured it out but not before getting the shit killed out of me and most of the time by something I didn’t see or expect. Like, there’s this one spot I ran into after completing a mission that had not one but two bad guys I blundered into… and I didn’t know they were there or that I’d be made to deal with them before getting back to my ship and moving on.

Well, folks, I spent maybe an hour and a half of getting demolished by the bad guys and specifically the “chopper” machine they were riding and just running me over with and, again, I never saw them coming because there were “the usual” bad guys I had to get rid of. Man, was I pissed! I finally figured out that I could hijack their ride and like I could do with other enemy ride and now it was about using their own weapon against them… and it was easier said than done because another thing I “hate” about Halo is how squirrely the vehicle are; going in a straight line is a bitch and driving the “chopper” was even worse; I’m trying to get to the bad guy and he wound up killing me because I had a bitch of a time getting the machine to go in the direction I wanted to go in.

By the time I figured it out and killed both guys – by running them over and using the chopper blades that defines the machine, I was emotionally worn out and my hands were tired and sore from having to work the joysticks in ways I’m not used to – and I’ve driven or flown a lot of machines in the many games I’ve played. Shit. Fucking Halo. The one good thing is that once I kill bad guys, they don’t respawn; it’s a blessing because I’ve spent a lot of time being killed before wiping them out… and just standing there to take a much-needed break and to figure out where the hell I’m supposed to go… and how I’m going to get there.

Like the one time I was on one side of a ravine and my objective was on the other side… and it wasn’t obvious how I was supposed to get over there. I thought I could use my grappler – a familiar Master Chief tool – to get across but, yeah, good old MC still can’t jump worth a damn and my attempt to grapple over resulted in me dying. I wound up going around Robin Hood’s barn to get to the other side and not without getting killed a few times… then proceeded to get killed even more before I finished the mission. I think I “hate” Halo because it makes me feel like I never learned how to play it… or any other similar game.

But I will not be defeated by this game. I am, if nothing else, persistent because I know the game can be beaten but, damn. And this is playing it on the easy setting because I know better to play it right away in the harder settings and I am not going to play it with a bunch of other people because I know I won’t be able to “trust” them since everyone plays Halo differently. I don’t have the patience for this and I don’t particularly like how a lot of games want to “force” players to form teams in order to play; it’s not that I don’t play well with others but they’ve proven not to play well with me.

Fuck them. Here’s another reason why I’m playing a game that has, historically, given me fits: My son-in-law, the guy I’ve played so many games with, is no longer with us and I feel very sad to be playing a game I know he would have been very hyped to play… and hyped to get me to play it with him. So far and giving my progress so far, he would have loved this new Halo game. I could, at times, “hear” him saying, “Dad, watch your back!” or, “Dad – you go left and I’ll take care of the right side!” or even having something to say about how the game is playing or how amazing the graphics are… or being grouchy when I start busting his ass for doing something “dumb” and dying because he just charged right on in there which, yeah, he loved doing in such games.

Or giving me a raft of shit about getting my ass killed a lot. Or agreeing with me about how “impossible” the task before us appears to be but he would have figured it out way before I would have. In a way, I’m playing this game in his memory more than anything else. He got in my case big time about failing to get past the first part of the first Halo game and, yeah, I don’t want to “hear” him busting my ass over not playing and finishing this new game… because I know he would and that made playing games with him a fun thing to do.

If you have an Xbox and GamePass, go play Halo Infinite and have fun with the challenges it presents and, um, don’t get killed a lot.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Minecraft

I’ve been playing around with the game’s Cliff and Caves experimental mode and I don’t know about the cliffs – because I haven’t seen many of them – but the caves are freaking amazing!

I just wish that my late son-in-law had lived to see this. I’m puttering around in my third experimental world and got to thinking about the many times I’d play with my daughter and her husband – and sometimes their children would join in – and we’d have one hell of a good and hilarious time doing stuff.

They taught me how to play Minecraft and a game when I first saw it, I wasn’t feeling at all. I had purchased it but it would be many months before they corralled me into playing. They were hard taskmasters and especially my daughter. Now when I create a new world and start putting stuff together, I can still hear her getting in my case about cutting down trees and not replanting them or giving me grief about the “wholesale slaughter” of cows, sheep, chickens, and pigs.

Her forte – her Minecraft superpower – is creating gardens for food and fishing, along with great organizational skills when it comes to putting things in their proper place so that items can be easily found and, of course, if you took something out, you’d better restock that item… or else.

My late son-in-law was the explorer. He wouldn’t think twice about going off in a direction and far, far away from the established base, often without good weapons and food. Listening to my daughter get in his ass about eating before he died was better than watching TV; or we’d have no idea where he was… then I’d hear him curse, the followed by a message saying that he’d died in some way, like falling off a cliff or running headlong into a mob of skeleton archers and, something he used to laugh at me about, falling into lava and getting deep fried.

He could find… stuff. He’d come back from exploring with his inventory filled with goodies that we couldn’t find a lot of at the base. He was also good at getting lost in his own mine system, too, something that never failed to get me laughing at him and more so when he had taught me how not to get lost. Oh, and he was an amazing builder and preferred working with wood and, wow, he was just seriously good at it – who knew?

My superpowers are building and mining although neither of my teachers were often thrilled about my way of digging. I dig down to bedrock then carve out huge areas to expose iron, coal, and the most prized item, diamonds. Like my son-in-law, I learned how “play in the lava,” something my daughter isn’t fond of; he and I found it to be quite relaxing and necessary because as my daughter had learned, where there’s lava, there’s diamonds… well, most of the time.

I felt quite sad because I’ll never play Minecraft with him again. It feels weird to play and not see him pop in to see what’s going on in my world and helping me get stuff squared away or sometimes running off somewhere to do some building, exploring, or gathering… or just being a pain in my ass “messing” up my carefully crafted stuff. I learned the hard way not to leave a world open but not playing the game… because there was no telling what mischief he’d foist upon me in my absence, like building a wall around my character or like the time he filled my home base with… live chickens.

Playing with my grandson is… an adventure and when he’d play with the three of us, man, he would push their buttons something fierce or we’d be talking about something and in my headset I’d hear one do the yell for my grandson to watch out – then I’d hear the telltale sound of a creeper exploding, followed by the message that his character had died.

Again. He’d sometimes drop by my world and give me a hand with stuff or try his hand at building places and has a fondness for treehouses and something that I’ve never tried to build… but probably because falling out of the tree and dying ain’t my idea of a good day playing Minecraft.

Sometime their youngest daughter would be playing with them and I’d join their world… and just get a kick of listening to them interacting with each other and, as you might guess, my son-in-law getting da bizness from his wife and daughter over either his annoying antics or reminding him to eat or get back to doing whatever he had been tasked to and not what he was currently doing.

As a team, we could get some stuff done. My daughter came to check out my second experimental world that has an amazing system of caves that, after exploring and almost getting lost, I discovered were actually connected. After I stopped her from trying to redo the stairs leading down to the main cave area – and something her husband used to do – when she saw the main area, the first thing she said was, “He would have loved this!”

Then pointed out that he would have gotten lost and I laughed because it was the same things I thought when I discovered the area and started working and exploring it. She gave me a little grief about having done some stuff in Creative mode but I guess she forgave me when I explained that I was a few seconds from falling to my death and losing all of my stuff and stuff I wouldn’t have been able to recover so, yeah, I hustled into Creative mode and saved my ass and since I was in it, used those abilities to build some stuff and explore a lot more stuff.

But I think she liked what I’d done even though she wasn’t happy that I had employed her late hubby’s method of putting torches down haphazardly to light the large, open areas – that can make it hard to find your way out and as she reminded me when she kinda got lost but eventually got back to where I was.

So much fun. In the current world, I’m having a hard time finding coal and I’m sure that being in this experimental mode has something to do with that; it got me thinking about him because he would have joined in, took a look around, and then gone off somewhere and returned with more coal than I’d know what to do with. Or he’d give me the coordinates for a village he found and we would have robbed the village of anything we could put them use. Or he’d probably find a deep-assed ravine – we both liked exploring them and beginning with figuring out how to reach the bottom without getting killed.

Playing the game ain’t the same without him…

 

Xbox One Gaming: Borderlands 3 – The Handsome Jackpot DLC

I’ve been playing “catch up” with this game to get all created characters to the same level and as I was working on my lowest level character through the game’s main story items (that character was below level 30 while all others are in the high 60s), it was time to take a break from the main story to hit Handsome Jack’s casino for some loot and mayhem.

Okay, so… Handsome Jack. We didn’t see him in Borderlands 1 and I don’t readily remember if there were even whispers of his presence at this point. We do get introduced to him in Borderlands 2 and, wow: What an evil asshole he turned out to be! Gearbox and 2K kinda “backtracked” to point out some stuff that Jack may have been involved in where Borderlands 1 went but the “man in the mask” really made his presence felt throughout Borderlands 2 and to the point where the guy who “played” and voiced the character won an Emmy. It was a stellar performance and to the point where the only other character you wanted dead more than Handsome Jack was… Claptrap, who is, hands down, the most annoying character I’ve ever had to deal with in any video game I’ve ever played.

The Pre-Sequel backs up big time to tell the story of how Handsome Jack got to be the power-mad lunatic we met in Borderlands 2. This game, strangely, wasn’t entitled as “Borderlands 3” and there were a lot of players who didn’t like the great departure from the first two games but, yeah, I liked it a lot even though Jack wasn’t the antagonist, well, not until the game’s really big boss gets defeated and, okay, now you know why Handsome Jack is the most feared entity we saw in Borderlands 2.

Good to know. Things get a little weird, though: To beat Borderlands 2, you gotta kill the shit out of Handsome Jack and I don’t know about anyone else who played the game but I took a great deal of pleasure killing the shit out him time and time again in both playable modes and with every character I could do it with and true to how the games are played, often with inadequate weaponry which just makes you get creative and tasks your ability to be that creative trying to off Jack first and then defeat The Destroyer… but you want to blow his ass away since while you’re battling him in the final phase of the game, he’s talking more trash and as he does throughout the game and you just want to make him go away.

Good fun. So Borderlands 3 comes out and during its development, a lot of players were wondering if we’d get to see Handsome Jack get reincarnated but there are a lot of references to Lilith ending Jack (and she didn’t, actually) but, okay, Jack’s gone and you don’t see a whole lot of Hyperion’s presence in the game, either – that’s the company Jack worked for then eventually took over. So Gearbox and 2K figured out how to get the handsome bastard back in the game by introducing the Handsome Jackpot DLC and kinda reintroducing Timothy, a poor slob who got conscripted to be one of Jack’s doubles who got trapped on the space-borne casino when it went into lockdown mode upon Jack’s demise and now the mission is to get in there and do what you gotta do so that Mad Moxxi can take over the dilapidated casino and because Jack stole it from her to begin with.

The Borderlands franchise has always been… gritty. Dirty. Many locations have seen better times and the first time I played the Handsome Jackpot DLC, it gave me the creeps because it was. well, trashed to be nice about it. It still gives me the creeps and as i played yesterday, I could feel how running around the place was making me feel at a subliminal level while feeling a certain kind of “joy” and irritation to be dealing with the ghost of Handsome Jack and how, even in death, he’s still being the ultimate asshole by reminding me that he took great joy fleecing those who came there to seek fortune only to find themselves buried under tons of unpayable debt to the handsome bastard. I like the storyline of the DLC but one of the reasons why I like playing it so much is that it’s one of the opportunities in the game to make money and more so when, in true Borderlands fashion, early into initial gameplay, you don’t have a lot of money to play with but, yeah, you kinda get used to this but the other games provided a way to “farm” money (and other loot) and this DLC, I supposed, was the answer to this since there’s no places in the main story where you can keep coming back to clean the place out of whatever money is lying around.

As I do whenever I play the game, I slipped into “stone cold killer mode” and methodically went through the main story as differently as I could; different tactics and approaches and, to my surprise, finding places that I’d never been in or even knew existed… and I’ve been playing this game for a long time. I got through the early main story items and particularly the ones I don’t care much for; every Borderlands game has parts, missions, etc., that I just hate doing but since they’re main story items, ya can’t progress through the game without doing them. I’d just defeated the one boss – Graveward – who, at least for me, is the toughest boss to defeat and I needed a break and… money. My character wasn’t even at level 30 at this point and I had so little money that I was basically in the Borderlands poor house but I knew how to take care of that: Do the Heist on the casino. I knew that by the time I got to the end and defeated the final boss, I’d have a million dollars or so and enough so that I wouldn’t have to worry about buying improved weapons or paying the stupidly high prices attached to respawning when you get killed.

I anticipated leveling up my character closer to level 40 which is in the neighborhood I want to be in as I continue on with the main story stuff… but after I do my best to clean out the casino for as much money as I can get my hands on. Almost every ammo case in the casino has money in it; in some areas, there are busted up slot machines that you can get money from… including the ones who come to life and tries to blow you away. You’d think that with as many times as I’ve played this DLC, the animated killer slot machines wouldn’t surprise me since I know they’re there but, yeah, they still do and, besides, the Borderlands franchise never fails to be able to keep players on their toes in some way and even when you know what’s going to happen.

Other than my low cash levels, I had an even bigger problem and one the game just throws at you. I’d gotten my hands on a legendary corrosive assault rifle made by Vladof (one of the many manufacturers in the game) but one that, normally, I don’t play with but the games are good at making each character an expert with a certain type of weapon and legendaries are, well, they’re the shit and often quite powerful. The one I had found was a level 18 weapon which, if it hadn’t been a legendary one, would have – should have – stopped being effective, oh, maybe somewhere around level 23 or 24. I get past level 30… and I’m still using this particular weapon because none of the other ones I have are doing that good of a job of taking out the bad guys and, well, I’m “worried” because at some point, this level 18 weapon will stop being effective and, as it tends to be my bad luck, during a battle where I need it to be effective. I’m running around the casino killing shit and I’ve never been so aware of my weapon deficiency like I am now and I’m cursing Gearbox and 2K – and not for the first time – because I know that, again, at some point, this low-level legendary will become as useless as the other 30 or so items I’m carrying in my backpack.

Those of you who have played Borderlands knows exactly what I’m talking about and those of you who haven’t, well, you don’t have to take my word for it – play any of the games and find out for yourself. Then, if I didn’t have enough to worry about as far as my weaponry was concerned, I’m making rookie mistakes and of the kind no seasoned Borderlands veteran should be making like how I somehow managed to walk right off the edge of a platform and went out of bounds and died and, yep, taking a good chunk out of my limited funds; it had me laughing to myself to be reminded that while you can respawn in the game, it’s never without putting a dent in your wallet. I remembered trying to figure out how the game decides how much money it costs… and gave up trying to figure it out and, well, I never liked doing math to begin with. Stepping off that platform – and something I had never done before playing the DLC – cost me about twenty grand that I couldn’t afford at the time all that much… but I guess it was okay because I was having an unusually hard time finding weapons that were effective and making me rely on that level 18 legendary that, at this point, had pretty much outlived its usefulness.

The main thing, though, is that I’m having fun dealing with this. This particular DLC isn’t exactly hard or difficult, not like much of the main story stuff can be or like some of the other DLCs really are, well, at least for me. I’m going from place to place, shooting bad guys, blowing shit up, etc., and I’m constantly being reminded that the weaponry is character specific and that some of the weapons aren’t ones that I would normally use or prefer… but that’s the beauty of any of the Borderlands games and DLCs: Being able to do more with less. Finding the right combination of items even when some of them aren’t the “best weapon” available in the game. Or that weird thing where I actually found a weapon that one of my other characters just kicks major ass with but for the current character? Not even close. In one of those rare moments, this DLC is pissing me off because I’m making progress… and not making progress… and I’m still relying on a weapon that, as I got down to the final moments of the DLC, wasn’t doing a whole lot of good or damage.

I defeated the final boss of the DLC… with a pistol. I don’t particularly like the Jakobs weapons. They’re “antiquated” items that often require a lot of trigger pulls or don’t hold a lot of ammo and other things that I’ve learned just annoys the shit out of me but, yep, I defeated the final boss of the DLC with a Jakobs pistol. A six-shooter. Not even a legendary one. I’m running around the final battle area switching weapons as fast as I can and came close to dying way too many times which, given the level of the character and the mode it was in, shouldn’t have happened, well, not the way it was. Nothing is working against the final boss; my grenades are pretty much useless, the legendary that had, up to that point, served me well wasn’t doing shit and I was more than glad that I could hit the button to look at my inventory without getting killed but frustrated because of the thirty or so weapons I had on hand, I’d tried them all… except for this Jakobs pistol that, normally, I would have sold for cash given my dislike of them.

I equip it and I’m already thinking about what else I can do to defeat the final boss and knowing that I don’t have a damned thing in my backpack that’s gonna get the job done once and for all; I’m going to get killed and respawn… and start the level all over again… with a bunch of weapons that have been proven to be woefully inadequate. I hate this game… and I love the shit out of it. I take a deep breath, make myself comfortable, and resume the battle with this “crappy” six-shot pistol that has the saving grace of reloading very quickly and the next thing I know, the final boss is defeated, the gun in my hand is trailing smoke out of its barrel and all I could do was shake my head over how things can wind up working and when, “normally,” they usually don’t.

Those of you who’ve played Borderlands knows how… improbable it is to take out a boss with a pistol. During my main story play, I took out a boss… with a shotgun. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a Jakobs pistol offed the final DLC boss but, yep, I was. It’s stuff like this that, to me, makes playing Borderlands so much fun while being pretty annoying at the same time. So I finished the DLC and went back to the next main story task facing me, got to one of the remaining “big bosses…” and took him out… with that same Jakobs pistol because despite getting more weapons and nice legendary ones, they didn’t do shit against this particular boss but yet another weapon I’m not fond of got the job done. Again.

 

Xbox One Gaming: Borderlands 3

I’ve stepped away from playing Elite Dangerous for the moment and went back to a game that gives me both fits and a lot of… pleasure. I remember the resistance I had about playing this game because I’d tried to play first-person shooters before and I sucked badly at them so when my son-in-law and daughter kept leaning on me to play this game – and made sure I’d play it because they bought it for me – I was like, well, shit – might as well see what all the fuss is about and they did spend their money so I could play it with them.

And I found that, um, I like killing shit and blowing shit up. A lot. So I was playing yesterday and caught myself thinking about how much fun I was having methodically and efficiently killing and destroying everything that was getting between me and the goal of taking on the boss… and then doing a number on it. I could have activated one of my established profiles/characters and it would have been fun… but not as fun as starting a new game and, well, there’s something… gratifying about having to start from scratch and turning the new character into a stone-cold killer and, um, reflecting the way playing this game makes me feel.

Not that I’d really go out and start a killing spree but those of you who play games like this knows what I’m talking about and the harder the game makes it to kill shit, the more satisfying it is to do some very serious killing. The Borderlands games go out of their way to not make playing them all that easy by not making it easy to find the weapons and other stuff that would make it easy. Like, yesterday, my character got to level 60 and I got there primarily using a level 45 weapon which you’d think wouldn’t work against higher level bad guys… but that’s the thing about Borderlands because it can work… and not so much. Ah, but the thrill of playing this game is also learning to make the best of the stuff you have because there’s no telling if you’ll ever get your hands on the stuff you really need.

And while this can be frustrating at times, oh, yeah – just being able to kill shit and blow shit up is so… relaxing even if, um, even if I wind up having to respawn because they managed to kill the shit out of me, which was happening at the moment my character got to level 60. I was mowing them down with my “usual” methodical way, clearing section after section and even differently as I’ve done with the other established characters when the level 45 weapon that had served me surprisingly well all this time failed me and, ultimately, got me killed.

Oh, I was “pissed” – and I always get “pissed” when I get killed and more so when I know I did something stupid… which is pretty much what I did to get offed at that point in the game. On the real, I chided myself because I know better; it’s not like way back when I was learning how to play Borderlands 3 and I have to give it to Gearbox because the game plays almost in the same way across all four of the games – no one counts the pre-sequel game as “Borderlands 3” even though it came out before Borderlands 3. There is a bit of a learning curve to go from playing Borderlands 2 and 3 but, yeah, you learn that there’s some shit you shouldn’t do because it’s gonna get you killed.

Ah, but the fun part is getting killed, respawning, and coming back with a vengeance and as I went about exacting that vengeance, oh, man, was I feeling all nice as I did it! There’s a critter in this game called “Tinks” and, well, they’re midgets – and I do not use that word to offend anyone – that are fun to kill… and a pain in the ass because they’re not only small but those fuckers are fast, too. I’d gone into an area that I knew would be chock full of these annoying motherfuckers and with the thought that since I’d been leaving a high body count of bandits, this wasn’t going to be any different so I dived right on in… and the game picked that moment for the weapon that had served me so well to stop serving me well and when I got surrounded by no less than eight Tinks, well, I got offed. And I was pissed because I knew better; again, it’s not like I’ve never played any iteration of this game before.

But, okay – my bad and my mistake… and one they were going to pay for once I respawned… and the devastation I wreaked upon them was… glorious and close to making my dick hard to be so focused and methodically about making them have to respawn and the messier I made that for them, the better it felt. Yeah, I had to switch to another weapon in my backpack but, man, I really did like the one that decided to “quit” on me! It delivered brutal deaths to the bandits that dared to face me even when they were a level higher than I was or had weaponry that shouldn’t have depleted my shields but, yeah, they did… and it meant nothing as I shrugged off their attempts to make me have to respawn again and just killed the shit out of them and no quarter given.

Those of you who have played the game – or any game like it – knows what I’m talking about. You know the game is going to do everything possible to defeat you… and you’re not having any of that even when you accept that, yep, it’s gonna hand your ass to you and not because you screwed up. And that’s okay… because paybacks is a bitch and revenge is a motherfucker when you can come back and perform a wholesale slaughter with every means at your disposal to do so.

I was having such a hell of time slaughtering bandits that I actually got tired of slaughtering them and had to put the game on pause for a few to catch my breath, as it were… and went on to that level’s boss… and killed the shit out of it and in near record time for me. And, yeah… it felt good. So relaxing. If you could have watched me playing, you might have thought that I wasn’t really into the game and that I might have been… somewhat bored but looks can be deceiving because I was having a fun good time being a cold-blooded, stone-cold killer of bandits.

It’s just that every now and then, I actually catch myself having fun; I’ve played this game so many times that I no longer have to think about how to play it and to the point where I’m pretty much on autopilot and thinking about other stuff but, yeah, sometimes, I become rather aware of my… killing sprees. That “thrill” of selecting a sniper rifle and placing a perfect headshot on a bandit or knowing that I jumped into the middle of mess and got to spraying and praying and when the dust cleared, I’m the only one standing there and looking for more bandits to kill. Or getting in the midst of them without them knowing I’m there… and raining death and devastation upon them and knowing that there’s nothing they can do about it…

Well, until they actually do and usually because whatever weapon I’ve been using just stops getting the job done. It always gives me one of those “oh, shit” moments to empty a whole clip of ammo on a bad guy… and he’s still standing there shooting back and now I gotta think if there’s something in my backpack that’s gonna make him – and his friends – go away. Sometimes there is and sometimes I just gotta work with what I have and I’m often very thankful that I made it through the situation and have it firmly in mind that I need better shit to kill these fuckers with. I took out one boss… with a pistol. If you’ve played Borderlands 3, you probably now how… unlikely it is to take out any of the bosses with… a pistol. Why? Because nothing else I had at the time did shit against the boss and the only gun I hadn’t tried was… a pistol. Once I switched to it, yeah, I was… amazed that it even worked… but the game can be like that because, when playing with a different character, I took that same boss out… with a shotgun. And another time… with a sniper rifle.

And besides all that killing and destruction, this is what makes playing Borderlands 3 so much fun to play because you never know what’s going to work even when you know what should work. My weapon of choice is any flavor of submachine guns… but I’ve played where the weapon that works is an assault rifle and, yeah, even the less favored pistol or shotgun. The game has grenades… but you can’t count on them working once you get past whatever level the grenade happens to be but it’s so much fun to carpet bomb their asses by using every grenade I’m carrying… because it’s so much fun to blow shit up and so very relaxing even if, say, unloading all 14 grenades at my disposal doesn’t kill many bandit. Shit… if throwing one doesn’t work, throw all of them… and let’s see what happen. I’m currently using the Firestorm grenade and, man, talk about raining fire down? Throwing one and seeing the devastation can get me to giggling… but throwing all 14 of them all at once?

Oh, hell, yeah! What a rush! And to think that I once resisted playing this game way back when it first came out!