Burke's Joystick

[Sorry for disappearing again.  Christmas, New Years, a PC crash, a PC upgrade, and some good ol' fashioned sickness all conspired to cause a pause in this blog.  Well, that stuff, and the post-Christmas gaming drought which seems to be a common occurrence for the past few years - I mean, how do you write about gaming when there are no worthwhile games out there?  Anyway, here's to 2013 being an active year for this blog and for PC gaming!   Seeing how Borderlands 2 is now out, I decided to revisit the original and finally complete the campaign before moving on to the sequel.  Here are my thoughts after doing so.] Wow, a rarity to report: I actually finished another SP campaign, this time from the original Borderlands!  As I mentioned elsewhere, I rarely finish game campaigns because I just hardly ever find the stories to be all that interesting. Generally, I just indulge myself with the game until I get bored with it. Then I eith...

It would seem that my fantastic orgy with Treyarch's superlative Black Ops 2 has come to an end.  All things considered, it was a good run for me - and I will be returning sooner rather than later.  However, it was time to take a break and move on.  Interestingly, instead of switching to a different genre, as I am wont to do after burning out on a title, I continue to remain on a shooter kick.  When I saw an ad for the critically-acclaimed Borderland 2 , I recalled that I really loved the original, but never finished it (as is often the case with me; I eventually lose interest when some other shiny bauble is released).  But now I have returned in a quest to finally find the Vault so I can move on to the sequel.  After spending a few hours in it again, all I can say is:  "Man, I forgot just how great a game this is!"  I love its wonderful (and daring!) shaded-cell art direction (Gearbox will forever have my respect for being the first game de...

Wow...I really need to get back to blogging.  I can't believe it's been almost ten months since my last entry!  To be fair, I've been busy keeping GameSquad.com up to date, though.  Anyway, my resolution for 2011 - is it too late for a New Year's resolution? - is to update Burke's Joystick more frequently. Some time ago, I wrote an editorial for GameSquad.com called Six Shooter Capitalism .  This editorial was about how I believed that Gearbox's super fun (that's better than merely fun) sci-fi shooter was a wonderful tribute to capitalism, which it is.  Ironically, the other day I stumbled across an editorial by an unabashed Marxist about how Borderlands is actually a wonderfully artistic indictment of capitalism.  Go figure. Anyway, I thought I would post the original essay here as well (and if you haven't tried Borderlands yet, what the heck are you waiting for?!?)