Trailer Tuesdays: Tales From the Borderlands

If there’s one good thing that spawned from the travesty that is the VGAs (Spike’s Video Game Awards), it’s the opportunity for different companies to interact with each other. And while Spike themselves seems like a channel that has absolutely no clue how to handle their demographic, this last year—in between the terrible hosting and the inept jokes—the audience was finally rewarded with a trailer to a game that could be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Tales From the Borderlands combines two of my current favorites of the video game industry, Gearbox’s Borderlands IP and Telltale Games, into one delectable game series a la The Walking Dead. Expanding upon the huge, multi-planet universe, the game is focusing on two new characters: Fiona, who’s wanted for fraud, and a mystery dude who’s decked out in Hyperion gear—I don’t know if he’s half robot/loader or what, but he looks cool.

As with the theme of Borderlands, the obvious thing to think is that the pair is after one of the many treasures that’s said to lay hidden in Pandora’s wastelands. However,  I can’t see Telltale taking that route. Especially with the appearance of Handsome Jack, the big bad of Borderlands 2 who is also currently very dead, it seems like there’s much more to this side-project than meets the eye.

Fanfiction Fridays: Becoming Pandora

[Spoilers for Borderlands 2 Below]

When playing a game, there’s nothing more satisfying to me then when I can start to sympathize with the main antagonist. And there’s no character in the past couple of years that I can think of that has encapsulated this as perfectly as Borderlands’ Handsome Jack. When I began my new journey on Pandora, I hated him. I hated him so much, him and his stupid crystal pony and stupid surveyors. (GAH! Could there even be a more annoying enemy?!) I loved to hate him. Then I made it to the BNK3R and it all went to shit. And after going to the Arid Nexus it went even more to shit and I actually began to like him.

The shift from over-the-top despicable to 3-dimensional character who is still awful, but has motives that one can empathize with was amazing. One aspect that really helped propel Jack’s character was his relationship with his daughter, Angel. Fraught with power struggles on both sides and a general feeling of helplessness, it was something that so strongly motivated the now Hyperion CEO, but in ways that weren’t, and still aren’t fully known to the audience.There just wasn’t enough on their past together for me to be satiated. More. I wanted more. Luckily, Cybertronic Purgatory has taken up the slack with their fic, Becoming Pandora.