Second Verse, Same as the First

Pick Your Poison

It's an exciting week to be a fan of RPGs. Tuesday will see the release of Borderlands 2, Gearbox's follow-up to their first-person looter from 2009. Somehow Gearbox managed to smash together the addictive gear grinding of the Diablo franchise with the frantic frag-fest gameplay of Halo, (or Call of Duty, or any other first person shooter you'd be willing to name). The end result was nothing short of digital crack; you could practically hear GPAs dropping all over the country as dorm room after dorm room sat filled with bleary-eyed gamers staying awake until dawn, not to write a paper or study for an exam, but to try and crank out one more level before the sun came up. They were the bodies that inhabited the Borderlands. And now the siren's song is calling again.

See, the Siren is actually a class in Borderlands. So that was like a metaphor or something.

Maybe you're not a fan of first-person shooters. That's okay; admittedly I wasn't too big on the genre until BioShock took me by the hand and asked if I could kindly find a crowbar or something. Not everyone is a fan of shooters, and that's okay. Just know that Borderlands doesn't play like most shooters. Of course you still aim and shoot in a first person view at targets, but the RPG elements are woven into the game quite heavily. At least, they were in the first one, but I'm sure they'll remain more or less the same. Pick from a variety of classes (I think there's a new class), kill monsters, gain experience, level up, pick new powers, and complete quests.Even people that aren't normally fans of shooters can find themselves lost in Borderlands. While gameplay might have been a turn off for some, some people simply weren't fans of the art style. Personally, I think cell-shaded games look sexy. Like Jessica Rabbit sexy.

She's not bad; she's just digitally rendered that way.

Still, some of my friends have a staunch loathing for all things FPS. If that's the case for you, then perhaps Torchlight 2 is the right title for you and your friends. If Borderlands took a page or two out of Diablo's playbook, then one might say that Torchlight developer Runic Games took the whole thing. Of course, many of their staff worked on both the first Diablo and its sequel. Torchlight 2 comes out Thursday 9/20. More on the title itself later this week, but for now, let's look at this tasty infographic Runic whipped up to show the amount of content Torchlight 2 has over its predecessor.

Yes, infographics can be tasty. But not as tasty as pie charts.