[Let's Play Borderlands 2] The Krieg and Sal Comedy Murder Show

Well, this recent spate of LPs prompted me to finally get off my ass and try my hand at one I’ve wanted to do for a while: Borderlands 2.
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We shall begin, as these things do, with the opening cinematic.

[embed=425,349]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzZ8YtuiVD4[/embed]

That’s the game in a nutshell, really. The music is great, the voice acting superb, the art drenched in blood and style.

Anyway, here we meet the villain of the piece, Handsome Jack, and the four canon characters: the Commando, the Gunzerker, the Assassin, and the Token Chick. I mean, the Siren. Yeah.

You get a decent sense of what they can do in those first five minutes. The Commando drops turrets that cause a whole lotta mess. The Assassin covers both melee and sniper slot, and has the usual dirtbag spy bag of tricks, like holographic decoys. The Siren is basically a Mass Effect Biotic in a sexy package. The Gunzerker goes to the Kenpachi school of protagonist powerups, and gains the coveted ability to use TWO guns at the SAME TIME. The rest is just different skill tricks they pick up along the way.

There’s also two DLC heroes, a sociopathic teenage girl with a mecha and a crazy man with an axe.

Naturally, my friend and I immediately choose the two craziest murderers of the whole group of professional murderhobos (they prefer the term 'Vault Hunters'). He’s playing Salvador, Sal for short – and he is that. You can’t tell from the cinematic but the dude is like four feet tall and solid as a brick shithouse.



Me? I saw the ‘Meet the Psycho’ video, and I fell in love.
[embed=425,349]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chxuovrbCI[/embed]

 

That video is amazing. Are there any others, for the other characters?

 

Nah, other characters gets audio logs strewn across the game.

Amusingly, I' ve been replaying this game as krieg recently. He is, in a nutshell, hilariously broken, just like Gaige. Also hilarious, but that's the entire game.

Looking forward to this.

 

Following the events of the opening cinematic, Krieg and Sal come back to consciousness to see a robot slowly digging a grave for them while passive-aggressively bitching to itself. This is Claptrap, who is either the funniest or most annoying character in the game, depending on who you talk to.

[img width=600 height=337]http://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_migrated/pics/robot1_1_01.jpg[/img]

Claptrap hands them a comm device he ‘totally didn’t just loot from one of these corpses’ and sets off through the ice and snow with our two heroes staggering along behind him. We also meet what we will later come to know as Angel, a mysterious woman that hijacks her way into your HUD display to spout a few mysterious lines. She doesn’t even look like she belongs in this art style.


I suspect she belongs to a whole different genre and got lost here by mistake. Poor thing.

Krieg and Sal eventually make their way to Claptrap’s Place. The first thing you notice is the roaring incinerator taking pride of place here. The rest of Claptrap’s hideyhole combines the clutter of a junkyard with the cheeriness of a morgue. That probably has something to do with all the bodies, human and claptrap units, laying around waiting to go into the incinerator. If you look in the incinerator there’s already some in there. One is propped up on a couch, and two claptrap units are sitting, deactivated, at a poker table.

I’m not sure if that’s a callout to Poker Night at the Inventory 2 or not. Team Fortress 2 completionists will recognize the Night at the Inventory series as mediocre poker games you play to unlock hats. Poker Night 2 is the one where Claptrap plays poker with Brock Samson, Sam of Sam & Max, and Ash Williams, with GlaDOS dealing.

In any case. Claptrap explains that everything Handsome Jack kills he dumps here. Handsome Jack is an enormous bag of dicks that would absolutely dump a bunch of corpses in someone’s house if he thought it was funny. And he would. It is also possible that he gives no thought to Claptrap and just dumps his corpses here because it’s convenient.

I envy Handsome Jack that, sometimes. Because Krieg and Sal will be forced to hang out with Claptrap for the next ten hours or so.

Also, hiding in one of these metal lockers is the Borderlands 2 sigil.
[img width=600 height=371]http://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/borderlands-2/7/7f/Borderlands2_Symbol_7.jpg[/img]

Finding these grants you extra Badass Points, which you can put towards a half-randomized list of character boosts. Speed of refill on your shield, speed of reload, damage to guns and grenades and elemental effects, all kinds of things. Each one gives you less than 1% boost, but you’ll acquire quite a lot over the course of playing the game.

I can never actually find these easter egg things, so this is the only time I’m going to mention them.

Then, before Krieg and Sal can properly settle in to their cozy, corpse-y surroundings, Claptrap mentions that in here we should be pretty safe.

Because the universe exists to prove Claptrap wrong, we immediately hear a monster’s bellowing shriek. The beast, a grotesquely overmuscled four-armed gorilla with a thick winter pelt and horns like black railroad spikes, leaps through the open ceiling. It slides down the incinerator stack – yes, Claptrap’s hidden hideout has been belching smoke 24/7 – grapples the bot and tears out Claptrap’s one eye. Bullymong, away!

… Why does he want a robot eye? Your guess is as good as mine. Still, he maimed Claptrap, which makes him aces in my book.

Krieg and bullymong, BFFs.

 

Ah, this game.

I've had fun times with this game. I think that since I preordered it, I technically should have a handful of DLC items, but I lost the code and haven't given enough fucks about the DLC to actually try to find it beyond a quick search for the reciept.

Also, Turret is best supermove.