Telltale has dusted off its green, felt battlefield of chips and difficult-to-remember card combinations for Poker Night 2, and it's calling up another quirky cast hailing from games and TV/film to humorously overreact whenever you're dealt a superior hand. You'll practice your poker face against Borderlands' Clatrap, Brock Samson from The Venture Bros. show, the beady-eyed Sam from Sam & Max, and the always-groovy Ash Williams from Army of Darkness.

Telltale explains the stakes: "Poker Night 2 will offer the chance to win Bounty Unlocks: rewards for use within other games when special goals are achieved. With cunning and skill, players will unlock prizes, including exclusive skins and heads for use within Borderlands 2 and character accessories for Team Fortress 2."

I'd also advise against any shady movements, because Portal's very own GLaDOS is Poker Night 2's dealer, and she has a tendency to fire up a flamethrower or two for dishonesty. And for possessing flesh. In any case, you'll be able to grab the game near the end of this month.

The off-the-wall Borderlands games wouldn't feel out of place as part of some alternate-reality, sadistic, Saturday-morning cartoon lineup, but both Gearbox and 2K want to make that scenario a reality. Partnering up with the Academy of Art University, the companies are launching a Borderlands Cooperative to invite the school's animation students to storyboard and produce an animated Borderlands short film for release later this year.

Teams of students will submit story ideas for the consideration of a judge panel made up by 2K, Gearbox, and university faculty. The winning group gets to work on the film as part of an internship at 2K, so it isn't quite the "get cracking, crowdsourced content slaves" scenario that I initially thought.

It'll be interesting to see what zany plot the students will think up in the already zany Borderlands universe—perhaps a Mr. Bean-style comedic adventure entitled "Salvador goes out for a haircut," except with lots of screaming Psychos instead of a befuddled Englishman. You're welcome, students.

Borderlands 2 looks like it will receive a piratically-themed expansion, if the sleuthing of PS3Trophies is anything to go by. The PS3 version of the game received a title update yesterday, and eagle-eyed members of the community quickly spotted a number of extra trophies (otherwise known as "achievements" to me and thee) which made reference to an expansion titled "Captain Scarlett and her Pirate's Booty".

Pseudo-spoilery details beyond the jump.

The achievements are Treasure Hunter, for completing the mission "X Marks the Spot"; Gadabout, for discovering all named locations in Oasis and the surrounding Pirate's Booty areas; and Completionist, for completing all Pirate's Booty side missions.

This all points to an expansion which introduces substantial new areas - as does the digging among some Steam files by members of the Gearbox forums. They've turfed up further details of what we might expect from the DLC, though it's stressed that this is not representative of whatever final release Gearbox puts out. The additions have been interpreted as follows: a new head for each class, a new rarity level, new items and weapons, a bunch of new bosses, multiple raids and more.

Hopefully, Gearbox will announce something concrete in the future, not that they really need to hurry - we're still busy happily stomping around with the Mechromancer.

Spotted via Joystiq.

A bug affecting all versions of Borderlands 2 has been resetting players' account-wide Badass Rank to zero and wiping associated bonuses, including unlocked skins and upgrades.

The issue is "fairly rare" according to Gearbox Community Manager Chris Faylor and the developers are working on a resolution.

An unfortunate aspect of the bug is that it leaves the game's various challenges marked as complete - making it impossible re-earn your Badass Rank the long way. If you've been affected, the only thing you can do at the moment is wait for an official fix, though the community has been mulling over a range of potential causes and ways to avoid the problem in this thread on the Gearbox forums.

Speedrunner Matt 'BLiTZ' Siegfried was the first in the world to reach level 50 in Borderlands 2, as we reported yesterday - smashing into the level cap in a bug-free 43 hours, 15 minutes and 23 seconds. Check out our Borderlands 2 review for Tom's verdict on the game.

Thanks to Kotaku for the tip-off.

Borderlands 2 won't be running low on DLC anytime soon according to Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, who has confirmed that there will be a plethora of content available for download after the four Season Pass releases that were announced in August.

Responding to a reader on Kotaku, Pitchford said: "The stuff we're planning and working on for the Campaign DLC Season Pass is big DLC stuff," before promising there's more in the works: "We will have other, non-Season Pass related DLC. The additional character (Mechromancer) is one kind of example."

The Mechromancer class will be available from October 16, but Pitchford says we should also keep an eye out for new modes of transportation: "Some new vehicle types are on-deck."

Borderlands 2 is one of our favourite shooters of the year. To find out why you should be excited for more content check out our Borderlands 2 review.

A Borderlands 2 expansion codenamed 'Torque' could be on its way from The Workshop - the developer behind PS Move game Sorcery.

Kotaku report that games industry super sleuth Superannuation has dug up a number of CV's from The Workshop employees past and present referencing the project. The resumes of an animator and level designer, which have since been removed, mentioned work on Borderlands 2 and specifically the 'Torque' expansion.

Another level designer's resume listed work on an unnamed "expansion of a highly successful triple-A FPS". The mystery project is described as featuring "10+ hours of gameplay".

If you're yet to play it, have a look at our Borderlands 2 review. In short, it's rather good, but also huge, which makes the idea of another ten hours of gun gathering kinda daunting. There are plenty of secrets hidden about Pandora as well, take this Minecraft easter egg as an example.

Borderlands 2 is a first-person shooter that randomly generates the guns you find, varying damage values, clip sizes, accuracy, and even how many bullets they fire at once. It’s built like an RPG: you level up by killing things, improve your character’s abilities, and find higher-level guns to kill higher-level beasts and bandits on a rocky, backwater planet.

That was already compulsive in Borderlands 1, but here the formula’s been tweaked to ridiculously addictive effect. I think I had one or two guns I really liked in Borderlands, and the rest were necessary but uninspiring situational alternatives. In 2, I have a full loadout of weird, powerful and satisfying weapons I love, and an entire ‘alternate’ set in my backpack that I switch in and out to compare potency.

I’ve become a gun scientist. Sometimes I fill all four weapon slots with different types of shotgun and throw myself into a nest of Skags – as one does – to take notes.

The Jakobs has the numbers – 24 pellets at 600 damage each – but it’s an ammo hog, and the Hyperion’s bigger clip makes it better against mobs. But it’s hard to bench the Tediore, because when it’s out of shells, you can throw it at someone and it explodes and a new one teleports into your hands. And goddamn it, I’ve run out of Skags.



This is the game, and it makes Borderlands persistently fresh in a way other shooters never are. So it’s weird that they kick it off with a painfully slow introductory segment that strips the game of everything that makes it good. It’s ages before the first randomised gun even drops, and for ages after that, it’s all useless inaccurate trash. And although the quests later become a highlight, in the first hour they’re a maddening drag. You spend most of your time trying to figure out why your robot guide Claptrap has stopped following you, and backtracking to unstick his sloppy scripting.

It matters more than most shitty intros, because you’ll probably go through it more than once. Even if you stick to one class, you can start the game again after you complete it, taking your levelled character into a mode with new high-level enemies and loot. And if you don’t, of course, there are three more classes to try.



The Commando can throw down a turret, a play style that needs some planning: you can execute satisfying pincer movements, but it doesn’t help you escape if you screw up.

The new Siren can temporarily suspend a single enemy in the air, and her skill recharges rapidly enough to be used in every fight. It’s spectacularly cool to leap into the air to get a perfect shotgun critical on your hovering victim.

The Gunzerker can enter a rage that lets him use two guns at once, regenerating health and ammo as he goes. It’s fun, but the perks he can unlock as he levels up are less interesting: mostly percentage increases to this or that.

The Assassin can cloak, leaving a hologram of himself to keep enemies focused on his former location. I stuck with him for my main character, upgrading to give myself lots of buffs shortly after every kill. The ultimate skill in that tree let me maintain stealth if my melee attack killed someone in one hit. I could prey on groups by taking out the weakest first, invisibly eliminating each until only the toughest was left.



More than in the first game, those abilities fit together nicely in co-op: the Gunzerker can be more reckless with friends around to revive him, the Assassin benefits hugely from distracted enemies, and it’s a relief for everyone when the toughest enemy in a fight is suddenly plucked into the air by the Siren.

The interface for joining a co-op game is much nicer this time, and it’s better at handling how quests are shared. But we still couldn’t connect to each other without some port-forwarding faffery, and we still had to argue among ourselves about who got what loot.

More than the class abilities, it’s the enemy design that keeps the combat fresh. The Goliath might be my favourite. Facing two of them in a bandit camp, I shot one in the head. At first he just seemed surprised. Then he got angry – angry enough to turn on his friends. He turned to the other Goliath and screamed: “Ever been strangled with your own intestines?” then projectile vomited a stream of caustic acid into his face.

His victim was baffled. “Why are you so mean?” he said, dripping in acidic sick, before fighting back.

This is already sterling entertainment. But there’s a twist: if the Goliath kills his friend, he levels up, getting stronger still with every kill. If you just want a distraction while you slip by, that’s perfect. If you actually need to kill him, you have to be strategic about how much damage you let him do first.



Then there are the robots. I was dubious about how much fun it’d be to shoot metal instead of flesh, which now that I write that down doesn’t make me sound like a particularly great person. But I needn’t have worried. You can’t headshot robots, but their joints are weakspots. If you’re taking a lot of damage from a particular droid’s weapon, you can aim and blow that arm off.

Flying repair droids try to fix the others in the field. Jet Loaders transform from humanoids into fighter jets, and bombard you with missiles. Bull Loaders can drop their shield to the ground and ram you like a bulldozer. And Constructors churn out a slow but endless stream of new bots until they’re killed.

Best of all, the robots, the bandits and all of the world’s gargantuan wildlife hate each other. Luring a giant stealth bat into a battle with a squadron of killbots is exactly what I want to be doing with my life.



The robots belong to Hyperion, whose CEO Handsome Jack is the main quest’s verbose antagonist. The dialogue in that is mostly funny, but sometimes clangingly misjudged: every time it tries to properly demonise Jack or glamorise your friends, it resorts to being needlessly cruel or gratingly smug.

The sidequests are a different story. Because they’re not about saving the world, they have room to have fun with the whims of the characters, who are always the strong point in Borderlands.

I set up a tea party for a 13-year-old girl. I took photos to inspire a garage mechanic’s terrible poetry. I had a mission objective to endure a boring party. I had a three-way shootout with two other bounty hunters looking for the same long lost gun stash. I helped a malfunctioning robot delude himself into believing he was human. I tried to solve a murder, and shot the wrong guy. I was chased by Skag-riding cops five levels too high for me as I hunted for a cursed gun. And I took an assassination contract to kill myself – and completed it.

The effort and invention that’s gone into this stuff is a constant pleasure, and the sheer amount of it is overwhelming. The majority of the game is tied up in these side quests, and it’s mind-bogglingly huge. I probably found half of them, and the game took me 30 hours to complete.



The main quest takes you to some cool places, but it’s often marred by disproportionately tough bosses. Dying in a boss fight also undoes all the damage you’ve dealt, wasting all that time and ammo. I once made the mistake of using the nearby fast-travel station to get to a shop to restock. Turns out you can’t travel back to that particular beacon, so I had to do the whole mission again, with all enemies respawned.

Luckily, you can level up by doing side missions first, where these problems generally don’t come up.

It’s generally well-adapted to the PC: graphics options, an FoV slider, some sensible control tweaks, and most importantly smooth and responsive mouse movement. My only issue is that levels load before the textures are ready, so everything’s hideously blurry for a moment.

I’ve been playing Borderlands 2 all day, every day, for five days – and I’m probably going to play it again when I finish this. It’s not the most consistently brilliant game, but I can’t think of another singleplayer shooter that’s given me more hours of fun. My Assassin’s second playthrough is as interesting as starting fresh with a new class, and I plan to do both.

It seems crass to judge a game by quantity, but this is quantity of quality. So if the amount of money you spend on games is a practical concern, it’s worth saying that this one is freakishly good value. Even if it’s not a concern, it’s worth saying that this one is freakishly good.

The Borderlands 2 website has launched this handy little skill picker, allowing you to explore the skill trees of the game’s four complex classes: Commando, Assassin, Siren or Gunzerker.

The problem with so many RPG-inspired games is you don’t know which class you want to be until you’ve played them, but using this app lets you dig right into their high level powers, spending points as you would in the game, to get a sense of the tantalising unlocks that await.

Being a sneaky, dishonest sort more suited to the shadows of this world, I rather like the idea of the Assassin class with a focus on the Bloodshed skill-set, which replenishes health for melee kills and, at its highest level, lets you chain kills to remain cloaked indefinitely.

Then again, the Gunzerker does have a skill called “Sexual Tyrannosaurus”...

Count on Gearbox for a clever remedy to pre-release Borderlands 2 anxiety. The developer whipped up an official browser-based demake of the upcoming sequel complete with piles of guns, a narcissistic Claptrap, and a coat of 16-bit glory. Head here if you want to play, but note that the website is currently under a heavy load.

STEAM
The magic of QuakeCon has cut a modest 25% off of Steam's Bethesda/id Software catalog for the weekend, with bigger deals rotating daily. At the time of writing, RAGE is 50% off. (Note: see below for possibly better deals.)


50% off RAGE - $9.99
25% off The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - $44.99
25% off Hunted: The Demon’s Forge - $14.99
25% off Fallout: New Vegas - $14.99
25% off Fallout 3: GOTY Edition - $14.99
25% off The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY Edition - $14.99
25% off The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition - $14.99
75% off Titan Quest - $3.74
More Steam deals



GAMEFLY
GameFly's QuakeCon sale is just like Steam's, except -- what's this? RAGE is cheaper on GameFly. And so is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Huh! Keep an eye on it.

GAMESTOP
Again with the QuakeCon deals, and again with a couple better prices than Steam. (What's going on? I'm scared.) GameStop currently has RAGE for $6.79 and Skyrim for $40.19 (same as last week for that one). I've listed a few unrelated deals below:


75% off Orcs Must Die! GOTY - $3.24
50% off Quantum Conundrum - $7.49
66% off Supreme Commander 2 - $4.99
50% off Borderlands - $9.99



GET GAMES
A new challenger! Instead of riding along on the QuakeCon bandwagon, Get Games is offering discounts on Take 2 and Batman games.


30% off Civilization V: Gods & Kings - $20.99
70% off Civilization V - $8.99
75% off Civilization III Complete - $1.25
75% off Civilization IV Complete - $7.49
70% off Mafia II - $8.99
60% off Bioshock 2 - $7.99
65% off Batman Arkham City - $6.99
45% off Batman Arkham Asylum GOTY - $10.99
50% off LEGO Batman - $9.99
75% off Stronghold 3 Gold - $9.99



AMAZON
Though Amazon is usually a discount powerhouse, it's way down here this week because it's got a pretty stagnant rotation of deals lately. The only major new addition I could find this week is The Darkness II, and that's not very major.

Checking hardware, I did see that most GeForce GTX 670s and GTX 680s are at least a little discounted. Newegg's prices look to be about the same, though, so cross-reference.


75% off The Darkness II - $12.49
25% off Empire: Total War - $15.05
72% off Mount & Blade - $4.17
50% off Mount & Blade: Warband - $10.03
26% off Dragon Age 2 - $14.74
25% off Mass Effect 2 - $14.92
71% off Trine - $5.83
50% off Mount & Blade: Warband - $9.95
27% off Dungeon Siege 3 - $14.68
50% off Tropico 4 - $19.99
26% off Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 - $14.84
More Amazon PC game downloads


GOG
This week's alliterative sale takes 50% off Tremendous TopWare Titles.

If you find any great deals I missed, please do share them in the comments. Additionally, I thought this might be a good space to start sharing what we'll be playing this weekend. I plan to leave Civilization V: Gods & Kings on the ground to conquer the stars in Endless Space. Probably some EVE Online too. Space: it's really, really great. What are you up to?