Borderlands is an RPG first person shooter from 2K Games and has just been named the Shooter of 2009 by IGN and honestly, it's a great game with a slick artistic style, great AI (pisses all over COD games) and a procedural weapon system the likes of which hasn't been seen before. Fantastic.

Which makes you wonder -- how could they f--k up the multiplayer aspect of this game ? Left 4 Dead made it just too easy for a group of friends to get together online and start enjoying the game. No port forwarding on routers. No need to disable firewalls or allow anything. It just worked. Perhaps Valve should have gotten more kudos for this, but it is the year 2009, so it's not an unlikely scenario for us PC gamers to expect this sort of thing.

However, it seems 2K Games dropped the ball bigtime on this one, relying on GameSpy to look after the network code and so what do we have ? A half baked solution that works some of the time (or sometimes not at all), requiring you to practically sacrifice a goat to the gamer-gods praying that this time you won't get "Connection refused by host".

In November, 2K Games said a patch was being worked on and that was released on 9th December, however, only for people who bought the retail copy, not for people that bought it via Steam or Direct2Drive.

Plot thickens, is Steam now at fault because they haven't delivered the patch or have 2K Games not provided Steam with what they need ? All I know is, us paying customers are left out in the cold.