Yep – the above image was pretty much me at 6:30am this morning. (Image credit Whirlpool forums)

Having done lots of study the previous day to make up for what I had hoped was going to be an excellent day of FPS/RPG fun, I was greeted with the words “Pre-load complete; unreleased” when I looked at Borderlands in my Steam Games.

Shock turned to horror as I visited the Steam page for Borderlands, which happily, even casually, informed me that the unlock date had been pushed back a little over three days.

Horror turned to pure anger (much like the ragetoon above) when I realised what Steam had actually done – screwed Australian gamers over once again.

The official Steam comment is nothing short of abysmal:

Sorry for the confusion, guys. There was a slight mix-up with the release dates. North America will be releasing in an hour or so while Europe, Australia, etc. will be releasing 12:01am GMT on the 30th.

The count-down you see on the page now should be accurate.

A SLIGHT MIX UP is the understatement of the year.

Here’s a quick recap as to what’s happened in relation to Borderlands so far:

1. Firstly, it wasn’t available for preorder in Australia, when it was in the US.
   Steam later said this was an issue with their store, which they then rectified by adding a new item to the store: “Borderlands Australia”.
2. This, combined with the fact that there’s a “borderlands_low_violence.ncf” file somewhere among the Borderlands files, lead people to assume that Borderlands is censored for Australia. However – this isn’t the case.
3. Internode then broke the news that there was a wrong version of Borderlands that Australian Steam users received. They managed to confirm with 2K Games that the Australian version was indeed censored. This was then wrong, however – “The full violence version of Borderlands was successfully rated by the Classification Board. […] Just to reiterate, Aussies will be playing the full violence version of the game, complete with gibs and all.” This was further confirmed by the fact that new Borderlands installs on Australian Steam accounts contain no such “borderlands_low_violence.gcf” file.

So. Here we are – 3 days out of the official Borderlands release in Australia, all while our US counterparts are playing the game.

That’s not the real issue here, though – it’s the fact that, up until ONE HOUR before the game unlocked (that is, 5am this morning), the countdown on an Australian Steam client showed the US countdown. This just doesn’t make sense, especially when you take into account that there was a separate “Borderlands Australia” store item created in the first place.

Don’t kid yourself if you think that Steam don’t have the technology to have two separate countdown timers, oh no – when they can clearly differentiate between different regions based on IP address, remember things like credit card details, account passwords – don’t tell me they can’t have two separate countdown timers.

Sigh.

Enough about that, though.

I’ve played Borderlands for a good 3 hours now, and can say it’s completely awesome, and deserves all the credit it gets.

This post part of Blogtober 2009 (where, I think you’ll know by now, I post a blog post every day of October 2009) – Borderlands is one of the best games of 2009 (that I’ve played).