Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned
Nedtime stories.
Like Monkey Island, Doctor Ned will constantly make you laugh, too. From the brilliantly vicious fairytale opening to the hilarious fake-out ending, Gearbox has been fairly haemorrhaging one-liners, and highlights range from learning the fate of a lab assistant who wouldn't stop making popcorn all the time, to a very nasty business with an escape rocket request that may or may not have become tangled up in the wires of some wretched futuristic bureaucracy.
It's worth bearing in mind that Jakob's Cove is a corporate town, owned by one of the in-game weapons manufacturers, and it handles the zombie outbreak in a very corporate manner, offering plenty of euphemistic instruction on how to interact with the "living impaired" as you head off into the wilds. I imagine Microsoft or Apple will behave in much the same way when the end days finally arrive.
Enemies range from standard zombies (slow-moving melee machines), and Defilers who gob on you, rather winningly, to slow you down and impair your vision, to lumbering beasts like the Loot Goon, which comes with a gun-chest strapped across its back, and - at the absolute top of the scale - the Badass Tankenstein, a monster accompanied with a seemingly endless supply of burning oil barrels.
While most of the nasties you'll meet are hardly that functionally different from those you'll find elsewhere in the wider game, they lurch up out of the ground bringing some truly sweet design touches with them, from flattened Herman Munster heads, to rotting beer-can hats complete with grungy piping.
The quests themselves aren't the most complex affairs - a familiar Borderlands muddle of opening gates and tracking down various multi-part targets - and the game has a limited handful of set-piece ideas, such as asking you to keep the horde at bay while a slow elevator/door/elevator door wheezes to clanking life behind you, but such moments are always handled with smart dialogue and knowing asides, and the arrival of a delightful parade of quirky hick characters, all of whom require their heads punched off.
As for distinctive loot, I didn't pick up anything that beat what I already had with me, but it's hard to see how Gearbox could make something really stand out in a game where almost all the loot is distinctive in one way or another already.
Whatever the time of year, then, Halloween and Borderlands is a great match, and if this is the way the game's DLC is going to unfold, I'd happily have a dozen of these quirky, colourful offshoots to plough through. Zombies were never going to let Gearbox down too badly, of course, but I left Doctor Ned's island with the feeling that somebody had taken real care over the whole experience, crafting the story with love and wit.
If nothing else, it's entirely fitting that a game that's always been brilliantly brainless is now genuinely brain-dead as well. Oh, and I finally got that bloody Mario-themed Achievement. SCORE.