Welcome to NLU "WheneverIfeellikewriting" #82... okay, this is actually NLU Weekly #82 and I have a few things to discuss with you today. Until last week (week of Oct 11) there really a lack of anything new to write about, but now we are fully in the holiday rush of games, with at least one game worth buying every week until nearly December. So on the agenda today are two of those releases so far: Brutal Legend and Borderlands. We'll end with Closing Out as usual and discuss the remaining schedule of wallet / bank balance breaking proportions. Go!

Impressions: Brutal Legend
I don't really have much to say about Brutal Legend... I really wanted to give Tim Schafer's newest game a shot, I didn't like Psychonauts' gameplay, but I did enjoy the story, dialog and world/characters... it really is the same here, Tim Schafer should write/direct animated cartoons... I'm serious I'd be a HUGE Tim Schafer fan if I didn't have to play his games to enjoy the stories/worlds he creates. He's a funny guy with a great sense of humor, but when I have to play a mishmash of mediocrity to enjoy that, well, it blows.

Brutal Legend is a big fat tease, a big fat mean tease... you think you are going to play a 3rd-Person hack and slash action adventure game and then slowly it starts changing... squad commands... then before you know it holy **** it's a ****ing RTS!!! I hate RTS and turn based strategy games, it's probably the only genre I don't really like playing and when I found out it was part of Brutal Legend (as simplified as the RTS element is) I was turned off instantly. I haven't really played it since October 13 when it was released. Sorry Tim, I respect your efforts, but you gotta start making animated films... for reals. RTS is NOT metal.

Impressions: Borderlands
Now here is a mixed genre game that is completely legit. Borderlands takes the precision twitch skill based shooting from Call of Duty and combines it with RPG-like questing, loot collecting and skill trees to make something quite excellent. I am almost 30 hours in and am still collecting all kinds of crazy guns, fighting tons of bandits and solving many quests... it is super addicting and holy crap Borderlands contains the some of the most exciting treasure chests in gaming you can't help but be riveted as they fold open revealing your next haul of loot.

I'm going to save my full thoughts for when I complete the game and maybe try the co-op and some different characters, but from what I played the outlook for long term play is great.

Closing Out
I've got a lot of games on tap for the next few weeks, I don't think I can handle them all really but I'll give it a shot. Next week (Oct 27) Forza Motorsport 3 is out; Nov 3 is Dragon Age Origins and finally Nov 10 is Modern Warfare 2. That's a lot of stuff; all of which have large potentials to be time sucking... It took over 50 hours to finish Forza 2, I can't imagine Dragon Age being anything less than a 40 hour game and the original Modern Warfare sucked up over 16 days (384 hours) of play time over 2 years, add in Borderlands and my life is over... lock me in a vault and I will see you some time in 2010. I'll do my best to write timely impressions on each of these titles as they are released. Talk to you later. Loading Complete!