14 DAY TRIAL // You may wonder why the diary starts at day four. Well there's a simple answer to that conundrum, my inquisitive friends. I've been too busy shooting everybody in the hat-mount to take notes. Seriously, since the game came out, Borderlands is the only thing I've been doing. I'm pretty sure somewhere out there, in the stale and unappealing world that is reality, someone must have declared me missing by now. But fret not, I don't really care. As long as I manage to get another piece of the puzzle that will lead me to the Vault, the Blue Planet can rot for all I care.
Something went astray in my endless hours of gameplay and my not so inquisitive nature, but more of an obsessive one, has successfully managed to allow me to get the jump on the bandits of Pandora. So much so that the game's almost too easy now. At one point, as I was standing over the countless corpses of my head-popped enemies and the boos of the level, my ECHO interface received an incoming message. It wasn't some new quest I would've been happy to dive into, but a very polite way of Pandora's army asking me to relinquish my artifacts and crawl under a rock and die. How cute, they wanna play.
I figured that if the half-naked bandits of the planet managed to prove a challenge, an actual army is going to give me hell. Well, bring it on, I'll be ready. So I started paying a little more attention to weapons and items, as well as leveling up as much as possible. The thing about the weapons of Borderlands is that their defining three characteristics, damage, accuracy and rate of fire aren't really enough to assess their potential. How effective their elemental damage is, when present, and their actual real... ah, game world versatility is a bit of a trial and error system. A smaller clip size isn't necessarily a bad thing when it takes just one round to whisk someone away to “fertilizer for the desert cactus” land, while even if a weapon has a huge damage stat, it amounts to nothing if it has a horrible accuracy.
All these fine details led me to have all the side quests marked as “gray,” with an estimated challenge level of effortless. Monsters are as low as 8 levels smaller than me and die from a single round of my assault rifle. Still, even if, as character progression goes, I'm almost reduced to a halt, there is no way I'll stop doing the side quests. They're incredibly fun and better help you understand and become a part of the world that is Pandora. So even if the multiplayer bugs weren't enough to keep me away from logging on, the extra experience I would get from the frantic multiplayer fights is, as weird as it sounds, a more than enough reason for me to steer clear of them.