Quite a lot of progress through this on Friday night, mainly because of the extended length of time we had to play.  The first five minutes or so were spent trying to work out which missions we'd completed, and this finally managed to introduce Kieron to the mission log.  He still doesn't know how to turn a mission in, though.

Then we had a look at the missions we had queued up, and compared them to our progress.  We are all still relatively low level, around 13 or 14, and so our choices of what to achieve were slightly limited.  There were a few scavenging missions which seemed appropriate, and finding the safe house with Sledge, so we set off to do those, killing lots of things on our way in an effort to build up our experience levels.

While running down a path we heard Kieron shouting that he was being attacked.  We ran to him, and started to fire at the skags that were responsible.  They were pretty tough; even after setting them on fire multiple times they weren't dead.  It was only when we were all crowded around my turret regaining health that we realised that these were Marley and Moe, who we had to kill for a mission that was recommended for characters several levels above us.

We still managed to kill them, after a long draw-out battle.  We're becoming a little better at team work.

We've nearly finished the missions in the Arid Badlands now.  Maybe one more session and we can finally move on.

I never did complete Borderlands with the UGVM crew.  We were doing quite well, having travelled through the Arid Badlands and the Dahl Headlands.  But then Nicholas arrived and I couldn't commit to a regular time to play, and it all fell apart.  We kept a spreadsheet to keep note of who had passed which mission, and this informed us who should host each time - since the host defines the story progression.

I've started again with John and Kieron.  It's not the ideal game to play with our group.  The potential for Kieron to wander off and get lost is huge, and there are often times when a specific action is needed which doesn't get done because nobody is actually paying any attention.  After six hours play, Kieron still hasn't bothered to understand how you pick up and turn in missions, and John doesn't know what his special skill does.

But it's great fun.  There are frequent breaks in action while the two newbies faff around in the shop trying to work out how to buy new weapons, but once we're on the road it's very amusing watching Kieron pummel enemies into the ground as a berserker.  At the end of our first play session we had levelled up to 8, and had been repeatedly killed by Bone Head who seemed to be able to one-hit kill us.  Our constant individual running into the same arena didn't help.  In our second session, we completed a couple more side-missions, levelled up a bit more, then actually hatched a plan before taking him on.  I threw a turret and shield down and helped to regenerate health; John had a weapon which set Bone Head on fire; we set up at opposite ends of the arena so he couldn't shoot us all at the same time.  Despite this, it was still a bit tense, and it was almost a disaster as after he died a couple of his henchmen were still running around to kill us.

But now we have vehicles.  The first vehicle mission was to jump the creek and open the gate so that we could access the rest of the Arid Badlands.  Somehow Kieron and I glitched through the gate, meaning that the game told us we'd passed the mission when we hadn't.  John didn't actually open the gate, and we were left in limbo for a while until we did it all properly.

We've got a fair few missions on the go at the moment, but we finished with the Circle of Death arena round 2 - a hard fight, but made easier with incendiary weapons.  We may need to level up a bit before going further though ...