What: I played The Bureau: XCOM Declassified for a couple of hours in December, and the residual impression of it is such that even the thought of re-launching it to give myself a refresher before writing a bit on it for this blog is making me grimmace inwardly, let alone facing the idea of having a whole ‘nother go at it, putting in a good stint, seeing if it comes good after a while and so on. We can safely put such ideas aside, for now, I think. The thing is that The Bureau seems perfunctorily fine, so far as these things go – a true 7 out of 10 squad shooter, as I’d read some time in the past. But dear lord, this isn’t what I want right now. If I’m going to be procrastinating at the moment, it isn’t going to be with something this mediocre.

I’d add a bit of adding distaste/resentment at how The Bureau quickly manages to mince what seems to be a pretty promising premise, which is peak cold war suits responding to an alien invasion. I mean, cool! But no. Too much killing of the mystery, too quickly. Too many clichés, too many nothing lines of dialogue, too much forced bombast. How quick the milk sours here.

I might also caveat that the squad shooter gimmick just doesn’t feel like it’s for me, or at least me at this present point in time. Soz, I just don’t have the patience to micro-manage my AI buddies when I’m trying to gun down goopy alien invaders! That part’s prob not the game’s fault, true.

At this point I can hear you exclaiming “look, Connor, it’s been over a month. You’re telling me you haven’t even finished the fucking game?”

Well hypothetical reader, I’m glad you mentioned it, as the story of not playing Borderlands 2 has more to it than the story of playing Borderlands 2. This doesn’t make it interesting, of course, but for the sake of filling the blanks I’m going to tell you about it anyway. It goes something like:

1)     I wanted to try and play Borderlands 2 with Lauren.

2)     I figured that if I replaced the broken graphics card on my desktop, we’d perhaps be able to use that as our second PC for this exercise. Replacing the graphics card/fixing the PC is something I’d been meaning to do for like, seven months.

3)     Not being 100% sure that the graphics card was the issue, I didn’t want to spend money on a new one in case it turned out not to help the problem.

4)     I had a few leads from friends willing to part with old-but-still-functioning-but-no-longer-in-use cards, but all were taking a while to arrange due to like, life, and my own lack of urgency on this issue. Eventually I picked up one GTX200andsomething from Roy (L.O.’s long-suffering unofficial patron/hardware lender), who in turn had supposedly salvaged it from one of his family’s disused computers. So it goes.

5)     Despite indeed now having the functioning second computer on which to play Borderlands 2, the often-tumultuous nature of Lauren & I’s relationship of late has, among other things like work schedules etc., deprived us of opportunities to play Borderlands together. So for instance there was like a good 2 or 3 week gap between our first three hour session and our second, the latter of which was on a weary Thursday night just gone and indeed lead to the above conversation about whether or not we could keep playing the game (wherein we decided we couldn’t).

Oh my glob, details! Of course, part of what informed this decision is that I’ve finished Borderlands 2 before, back when it launched in 2012, with some combination of friends at the time (*probably Roy, AJ & Adrian, whose names I mention here only to reinforce some kind of life/blog narrative continuity). Roy organised a 4-pack for us (again); I don’t know how much it cost. Meanwhile, I haven’t yet played 2015’s Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, hence why when it comes to choosing one of the two to finish properly, given the constraints of life and time that make such a choice necessary, I’m hedging on trying to finish that one and not this one.

I’ll admit, this doesn’t quite match my imagined projection of how re/playing the Borderlands series would go. I fantasised that I would finish each game with a different combination of friends in tow, and that I would record a lot of funny co-op anecdotes and incisive perspectives on longish, rambly games, to impart to you, dearest hypothetical reader. But sometimes I gotta take the easy road to keep things moving along, else this steam list completion blog will be eaten by dustmites.

What else can I say about our six hours back in Borderlands 2? Lauren played Maya the Siren and murdered many bandits while freezing them still in the air. I played Paige the Mechromancer, a character who has been added since I last played. The Mechromancer’s active ability is to simply summon a large robot to do all the killing – kind of like the Hunter’s owl in the first Borderlands but way more obvious and effective/kind of OP. I’m not complaining. 

We got through most of the early game without much difficulty, aside from occasionally getting lost en route to quests, and eventually tiring due to the nature of the game and needing to sleep IRL. Borderlands 2 isn’t entirely without problems, but it’s just that much more cohesive and polished than the first one. In different circumstances I’d happily play the whole thing again.