The Cheapest Victory Is The Best Victory

(NOTE: Based on time elapsed since the posting of this entry, the BS-o-meter calculates this is 15.678% likely to be something that Ferrett now regrets.)

So I’d determined to beat the final quest in Borderlands 2 yesterday.  And I cheated.
I’m still proud.
See, the final boss involves going up against a huge dragon in a lava pit, who in the traditional of all final bosses has a zillion ways of killing you, a zillion hit points, and a zillion smaller minions to distract and whittle you down.  Plus, there’s an ugly one-hit kill where he can knock you into the lava and you die.
I died.
Then I went back, thinking I’d find a good place to snipe from and take him out from a distance – but of course, there was a big blue barrier to prevent such shenanigans.  You had to get into the pit with him and go head-to-gigantic-dragon-head.
Except as I watched, I noticed when he did a certain move, his horns stuck up over the barrier.  Hey, can I hit that?  Sure enough, I could pop it for 70 points of damage – not too much when he had 10,000 hit points, but it was a start.
So yes.  I sat there for forty-five minutes with a rifle, waiting for him to do that move, clipping the top of his horns, reloading.  My wife and daughter razzed me.  “Are you killing him or giving him a haircut?”
Eventually, the dragon stopped moving.  I figured, “Great, this is the developers’ finger in the face to me.  I’ve spammed this cheesy move as much as possible, which they foresaw, and now they’ll make me go into the pit and face an even angrier dragon.”
Except he wasn’t.  He was motionless.  After forty-five minutes of running amuck, he must have run out of moves.  So I just emptied my rocket launcher at him, and dead dragon.
The weird thing is, I feel proud.  I beat both the game and the developers with an exploit.  It was a stupid exploit, sure, but I figure I’m owed; for every time I died in Borderlands 2 because clipping errors got me stuck on a rock while I was retreating, I now paid in full thanks to their logic.  I was preening by the end of it.
Such are the silly ways of videogames.

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