The second installment of Borderlands DLC ditches the exploration found in The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned in favor of strengthening the ties between the game and the Mad Max series of post-apocalyptic action movies. Stealing a premise from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot sees players fighting for fame and fortune in a series of new Riot Mode arenas, facing wave after wave of enemies in either single player or co-op battles.

It sounds intriguing, but it's got to be more than three new arenas to warrant a $9.99 price tag, right? Read on.

What Is It?
Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot is the second set of downloadable content for Borderlands. Rather than a new area to play in, which we got in the first downloadable content, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi delivers a new gameplay mode, Riot, which is almost like a game show version of Gears of War's Horde Mode. The titular Mad Moxxi, a widow several times over seeking to relieve her boredom with carnage, entertains a cheering crowd as you and your teams take on five different waves of enemies in three new arenas - Hell-burbia, the Angelic Ruins, and The Gully. These aren't simply pits that fill with enemies - they are relatively sprawling yet contained battlegrounds, ready to be soaked with the vital fluids of your prey.

What We Saw
I played through each of the three new arenas multiple times, using a pre-made level 30 soldier graciously supplied by the folks at Gearbox. Okay, I attempted to play through all three arenas several different times, dying frequently. I unfortunately only got to play single player, but it's easy to imagine having a blast with a couple of close total strangers on Xbox Live.

How Far Along Is It?
The new DLC releases next week on the Xbox 360, so the build I was playing is damn near close to the finished product.

What Needs Improvement?

No Experience Necessary: You don't gain experience while battling through wave after wave of enemies in the Underdome, which quite frankly feels odd. I understand the draw here is new weapons and the glory of triumphing over seemingly impossible odds, but when I spend an entire game on a steady climb towards max level, spending several hours tooling around a plateau just feels like a slight waste of time.

What Should Stay The Same?

Riding The Waves: The enemies in Mad Moxxi's Underdome come at you in different waves, each consisting of different types of enemies. One visit to an arena might start you off with an Easy Wave, with powered-down enemies that are easier to dispatch, before moving on to a Gun Wave, in which all enemies have guns (duh), or a Horde Wave, where swarms of melee enemies come at you mindlessly. There's a variety, but it's not so much that you can't anticipate what's coming next after you're done scrambling for the health and ammo Moxxi tosses into the stadium between rounds.

Moxxi's Got Talent: Black widow Mad Moxxi is a constant presence in the DLC, shouting out taunts to you as you struggle to survive, egging on the crowd, and just basically being the consummate showman, adding to the feeling that you are a contestant in some sort of twisted game show birthed in the mind of a violent husband-killer. Good times.

The Penalty Box: If you die during a wave, you're warped into the penalty box, an area overlooking the arena where you can shoot from, but cannot leave. Once again, I only played single player, where its mission failed if you wind up in the box, but I can easily imagine the fun that will come of having 2-3 other players in the box, urging the survivors on while desperately searching for targets to take out long range.

Final Thoughts
Gearbox's Randy Pitchford has said that Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot is "like Smash TV in coop FPS, but in the Borderlands." I'd have to say he hit the nail on the head. There might not be piles of cash spawning at the end of every round, and the enemies aren't quite as numerous, but once you step into the Underdome you're the star of a game show where your life is on the line. I'd like to think that if the world had body replicating technology, this is the sort of thing we'd find on every street corner.

And if they can take the "Th" out of Thunderdome, I can take the "B" out of Beyond.

What do you get for your hard-won dough? Well, about eight hours of gameplay and new missions! Easy-to-critical shambling zombies! (And crawling torsos). New annoying Claptrap dialogue! And squishy, squishy brains.

Ten bucks too much? Come on. Just sell a ZR-15/2 Deathly Stomping Revolver or something. Skags barf those things up more than Mighty Skag, uh, skag food. So do the flaming psychos. The skag food I mean, not the weapons.

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned [Gearbox Store]
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned [Steam]

Here's what we got. Haven't seen these on Xbox Live (the version I play) yet. Take that for what you will:

Bronze
• Small Tournament - Completed the lesser challenge in all 3 coliseums

Silver
• Hell-Burbia - Completed the larger challenge in the Hell-Burbia coliseum
• The Angelic Ruins - Completed the larger challenge in The Angelic Ruins coliseum
• The Gully - Completed the larger challenge in The Gully coliseum

Gold
•Big Tournament - Completed each of the larger challenges in all 3 coliseums

"Challenges" obviously point to the in-game-only achievements that reward beaucoup XP, so who knows what the exact parameters are.

Yesterday morning, Neumann got giddy and said "some little birdies might sing in or around an hour," but apparently jumped the gun. Two hours later, he pulled back the announcement, and proceeded to take shit for it. So your cover's blown, might as well spill the beans @mikeyface!

DLC Added: Borderlands [PS3Trophies.org via Destructoid]

"One of my partners, Brian Martell, had Blade Runner on the list [of IPs we wanted to use]," he told the Official Xbox Magazine. "We chased it down and we coulda had it. But that one failed on the business side, because the way we wanted to do it we wanted to spend 25 million dollars. And when you do the math on that, we weren't going to make it back."

Shame. Then again, the world already has a Blade Runner game and, advanced years or not, it's fantastic. So it's not a total loss.

And what is it with Gearbox and movie adaptations? Blade Runner, Aliens, Heat...what's next, Robot Jox? Because that would be awesome.

Gearbox: Blade Runner canned because it wouldn't sell [OXM]

These shambling, staggering, crawling bastards look like outstanding cannon fodder, and I've got just the toolset for dealing with them - level 39 incendiary revolver and a level 37 shock SMG with a 10.9 fire rate. Should be like feeding mannequins into a woodchipper. Oh, wait, they've got wereskags in this, don't they ...

Borderlands Zombie DLC Video [Hot Blooded Gaming]

Speaking with VG247, Gearbox's Mike Neumann said "Everyone here loves the franchise, and it seems like the public is really coming back with praise and love. So yeah, if everything makes sense, Borderlands 2 seems like a no-brainer to me".

Hardly an official announcement, but then, it's hardly surprising, either. Game sells -> game is popular -> game gets sequel isn't exactly a revolutionary turn of events.

Interview: Gearbox on Borderlands 2, Pitchford's Valve remarks and tons more [VG247]

Many have made the comparison of Gearbox's Borderlands to Diablo. Cliffy B certifies it with this unsolicited Tweet: "Borderlands, I adore you. You're Diablo for a generation raised on first person shooters. I want a Claptrap statue."

That can be arranged, Cliff.

Cliff Bleszinski's Twitter [via Hot Blooded Gaming]

Pitchford, speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine, called Valve's posture toward Sony - specifically as expressed by Doug Lombardi - similar to that of fanboys'.

"Doug Lombardi had to take a swipe at the PS3 again, and I thought it was foolish," Pitchford told OPM, according to AnalogHype.

I read it the same way I read fanboys," he added. "Like there's a guy who bought the Sony platform and he's a Sony guy, so he decides he's going to spend a certain percentage of his time bashing Microsoft. And there's a guy on Microsoft doing the same thing. Those guys are childish and narrow minded; It's the same kind of thing.

Pitchford wasn't done there. He also spoke of an "underlying sleaziness" in how Valve has treated the PS3 version of The Orange Box, relative to its support for the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2.

I'm actually kind of mad at Doug because with the Orange Box, he said the 360 and PC versions are the good ones and the PS3 version is like the stepchild because some other developer made it. Well you Valve don't really think that, because look what you've done on the PC side. You've supported that, you've added all this content to Team Fortress 2, and you've left us hanging. It's hard to accept that genuinely, because I know the business, I know you guys make half the money on the PS3 version because you've got other fingers in the pie, and other developers getting a cut. It benefits you if nobody buys that, and only buys the PC version, because you make the most money. There's this underlying sleaziness.

Not that this settles anything but, there you go, equal time for PS3, albeit from a surrogate, in a great three-way Valve/Gearbox/Sony pissing contest.

For the record, we have inquiries into Gearbox regarding the accuracy of these quotes, and any clarification the studio might want to make.

President of Gearbox Questions Valve's Lack of PS3 Support [AnalogHype via Destructoid]

Here are the PS3 fixes, from the Gearbox official forums (fora?)

• Load times have been improved
• Lilith's Phase Strike ability now works as intended
• The introductory quests with CL4P-TP should now always progress properly
• Fixed a bug that caused the digger elevator to be unusable after completing the Find Tannis mission
• Weapon mapping to the D-pad should no longer reverse left and right
• Fixed a crash when ejecting the disc during the autosave warning splash screen
• Players in a lobby should no longer experience long loading when starting a game after one player leaves
• A bug which caused players and other things in the world to appear incorrectly on clients in networked games has been fixed
• Fixed a bug in which players gibbed in arena combat disappeared
• Changed how space required for saves is calculated
• Fixed a bug which caused the dollars counter to spin continuously
• Various localization and other text and tooltip corrections

And on the Xbox 360, tell 'em what they've won, Don Pardo:

• Fixed a bug which caused players and other things in the world to appear incorrectly on clients in networked games
• Fixed a bug in which players gibbed in arena combat disappeared
• Fixed a bug which caused the dollars counter to spin continuously
• Fixed a bug that caused the digger elevator to be unusable after completing the Find Tannis mission
• Weapon mapping to the D-pad should no longer reverse left and right
• Various localization and other text and tooltip corrections
• The introductory quests with CL4P-TP should now always progress properly all the time
• Lilith's Phase Strike ability now works as intended
• Load times have been improved

360 Patch 10/30 and PS3 Patch, 10/30 [Gearbox forums, via VG247]

Neumann, you might recall, promised three weeks ago to "play BLs with you and give you loot" if you preordered Borderlands and showed him proof. I and somewhere north of 200 people took him up on the offer. Thursday, Neumann found me - just a level 7 hunter out trying to retrieve some guy's missing fake leg in Skag Gully - and proceeded to deliver on his commitment to all Borderlands day-one buyers, myself included.

"Here you go, dude," said Neumann, who plays as a Level 50 Hunter - the maximum. And suddenly the Pandoran's Guns & Ammo fantasy came to life at my feet. The DVL Pearl Sniper (Level 28); an LB U Blast Wrath sniper rifle (level 25). Plus a Ranger class mod that I can't use until I hit level 22. Right now I'm wondering whether to sell or hoard them. They do carry a serious price tag.

"Nah, don't worry," Neumann said when I shamefacedly asked if there was anything I could offer in return. "I have so much stuff. I've got like $1.5 million in cash already. It costs me $220,000 at the New U station when I respawn."

As of 3 p.m. U.S. Central time (the timezone for Gearbox's Plano, Texas headquarters) on Thursday, Neumann estimated he'd logged 72 hours in Borderlands. That would be more hours than have passed since Borderlands' release on Tuesday. Of course he'd been playing it pre-release, but still, it's a lot of time spent on a game - especially since this week, like mine, is Neumann's vacation.

"Thanks for your patience guys. I need to stand up and do something for like 20 minutes so my ass doesn't cave into my body," he tweeted about 16 hours into Borderlands' official first day.

"I'm like Santa Claus, man," he told me.

"A Truxican wrestler Santa Claus," I added, referencing Borderlands' title sequence, and the bus driver's description of Mordecai's look. "What the fuck is a Truxican wrestler anyway?"

"Oh, that," Neumann said. "Originally, the script had ‘Mexican wrestler,' but Randy [Pitchford, the Gearbox CEO] was like, ‘This game takes place not on Earth, so why would he say, ‘Mexican'? Come up with something else.' That's what we got."

Neumann and I set off on a very routine mission for him, barbecuing some Skags, the Pandoran dawgs with the venus-flytrap heads. "I've been through Skag Gully so much," Neumann said.

Neumann went to work on a couple beasts, not noticing the spitter Skag nipping at him from behind. I opened up with my incendiary submachine gun and proudly awaited a compliment.

"Ah, The Clipper!" Neumann said, naming the gun I picked up from Nine Toes, the game's first boss battle. "Everyone remembers their first unique weapon!"

And as we shot the breeze about Borderlands, the early reviews (Gearbox is fired up), and DLC (no specific details, on the record anyway, but stay tuned) somehow I managed to complete two quests and level up twice.

"Oh, that's a nice rifle," Neumann said as I opened a weapons cache and found the GGN40 Sniper, one of the few new weapons I could use at my level. It's kind of gun that, in the reverent words of Insidious Tuna, "will light shit the fuck on fire."

"Oh, you- you don't want it?" I asked, deferring to the ranking player as usual. But of course Neumann didn't want it. Not when he has a weapon that regenerates ammo, plus a goddamn falcon than can take down seven foes at once.

He hasn't completely outclassed everyone in his user-friendly trips through the wastes so far. Neumann came across a day one user who had logged some serious time in Borderlands, to the point that the loot was almost moot.

"Somehow I ended up with this guy who was, like, a Level 30 Brick with like a level 3 lightning punch," Neumann said. "We were on a serious loot run and he'd go in to use it and there would be a cloud of electricity and shit flying everywhere - I was laughing so hard ..."

Despite the time he's spent in game - and, of course, preceding it as the Gearbox team worked on Borderlands over the past two years - Neumann has not seen it all. Borderlands boasts some three million different weapons, and while many are slight modifications, in color, appearance and/or attributes, of a basic configuration, some have completely eye-popping properties.

"God, so many weapons - there was one, a name weapon, I had no idea it was in this game," Neumann said, "but it shoots out these mini-mushroom clouds, like a nuclear weapon." Neumann said there are about a dozen unique weapons named in the game that are named for Gearbox developers.

Just be careful what you do with them.

"One guy, he'd gotten one of the legendary weapons, which are like orange in your storage deck," Neumann said, "and he said, ‘OK, I'm gonna drop it,' and the way he was standing, he tossed it off a cliff. I was like, ‘You did not just do that. There's no getting that back.' "

Toward the end of our run, having thoroughly wiped out the Skag packs that had torn me asunder on my own, Mikey and I chatted at the entrance to Skag Gully. "Hold on," he said, turning to a vending machine, "Let me see what's in here. There's probably a lot of stuff you can't afford." And he went to work, buying up a TRG-30XC Impenetrable Tough Guy Shield and tossing it at my feet.

Although Neumann's gambit seems - to me anyway - completely spontaneous, its effect is quite devious. By dropping superweapons you can't use until you hit high levels, Neumann's out there creating a tremendous incentive for you to play Borderlands more. And there's also the 10 Gamerscore "And They'll Tell Two Friends" achievement, which you earn for playing with a Gearbox dev on Xbox 360. (The achievement is also viral; anyone who earns it will give it to you if you drop into a multiplayer session with them).

"I went through about half my list," Neumann said. "And I was thinking, ‘Where are these other guys?' Then I realized, ‘They're probably all in Europe, which doesn't come out until tomorrow. And they're six, seven hours ahead ..."

But hey, Santa Claus works a 24-hour day too, doesn't he?

Forum threads are popping up on Gearbox and publisher 2K Games' forums from indignant fans who purchased the PC version of Borderlands at stores either accidentally or purposefully breaking the street date of October 27th, upset that the game won't be playable until October 26th, even in single-player mode. One such purchaser, a Twitter user in Germany with the handle Crimvel, posted the following tweet to Gearbox:

I own a legal PC-copy of Borderlands, and we can't even play the Singleplayer cause of the shitty Securom-protection

A few hours later, Gearbox responded:

The PC version won't be playable until the 26th - your retailer broke the street date :(

As you can tell from the sad emoticon, Gearbox isn't happy about the situation. Fans aren't happy about the situation, and 2K Games is more than likely a little ticked at the retailers who caused the situation.

There was bound to be some confusion, really. When you have three versions of a game in your storeroom and one has a different date than the others, there are going to be mix ups. Still, it's one of the responsibilities of running a video game store or department, and I frankly don't see the point in blaming 2K or Gearbox for this debacle, as so many of the forum posters seem to be doing.

We've contacted both 2K Games and Gearbox for comment on the situation, and are awaiting response from both.

Thanks to everyone who sent in this tip!

A ragtag quartet of adventurers wander across the surface of the planet Pandora, searching for the Vault of legend. Along the way they shoot things, gain levels, and gather enough weapons to choke something large that eats weapons, thanks to Gearbox's random content generation. Things to shoot and things to loot. What more could a group of players ask for?

For the answer to that question and more, we turn to the assembled game critics.

Games Radar
Borderlands lacks the charm of Fallout 3, Mass Effect, or Half-Life 2, but it does offer a crap-ton of ‘roided-out bandits, effed-up dog things, giant spider demons, and screeching pterodactyl beasts to shoot with a crap-ton of guns. And that's really what it's about – finding weapons and shooting things with them. You have to assign a skill point now and then, and there's kind of a story, but those things don't matter much. You can skip the text description of every quest in the game, because they will always consist of the following steps:

A. Go somewhere.
B. Kill some shit.
C. Flip a switch or something.
D. Kill some more shit.
E. Success!

1UP
A more traditional description for Borderland would be, "cooperative FPS with Diablo-esque mechanics." You start off by picking a character: Roland the gun-toting soldier, Lilith the stealth/magic femme, Mordecai the sniper, and Brick the boxer/tank. Then you guide that character through a grand journey with multiple quest hubs and dungeons; most of the quests are of the simple "go to a dungeon and kill/collect x amount of y." My first playthrough, where I mostly focused on going down the critical path with a little bit of (but not nearly all) of sidequesting, took about 27 hours. By the way, the overarching story of "finding the secret Vault while guided by a mysterious woman who talks to you in your mind" is just serviceable; it's there to give you a reason to kill things, but don't expect anything more in-depth.

Official Xbox Magazine
Just make no mistake: Borderlands is a hardcore-gamer's game. It won't be fun to those dudes whose two major purchases this year were Transformers and Madden 10. For starters, there's no difficulty setting whatsoever, so when you're getting pummeled - and you will get pummeled - you can't bop down to Easy and race ahead through the story missions. That thrashing you're getting is Borderlands' way of telling you to take your time and properly level your character. Side quests are usually optional in games, but the only optional part of them here is which ones you do. The story missions won't level your character enough to let you survive, so you'll need to linger in each location until you've built yourself up appropriately. (Thankfully, the missions have tags that clearly display this info.)

GamePro
When you can get a full party going, Borderlands begins to shine; it's one of those games that's chock-full of moments that you'll lovingly recount later. Each online experience is made memorable by fun things like smashing into each other with two rocket-mounted buggies, periodically punching your friend to instigate a duel and reviving him later amidst a fight you can't win without him. These moments jive perfectly with the tone of the game, which is surprisingly jovial considering the post-apocalyptic theme. The incredible comic-book art style is a significant factor, with the thick black lines and bright colors breathing a surprising amount of life into an otherwise bleak setting. Watching the nipple-pierced torso of a goalie mask-wearing psycho tumble away from its blood-geyser legs was so silly that I couldn't help but giggle at the absurdity. I got an extra kick out of a lot of the game's goofy characters as well: T. K. Baha is a perfectly loony farmer; the singing, dancing and periodically profane Claptrap robot is adorable; and Dr. Zed's a wildly unprofessional (and unlicensed) medic.

Game Informer
While Borderlands and Fallout 3 share a similar apocalyptic, Road Warrior-esque setting, the former does a much better job of making you feel like a wasteland scavenger. Very few story elements are present, so you don't have a constant "I better get back to the main quest" feeling hanging over your head. There's no disappearing family members or ominous government forces making you feel the need to progress through the story, only the desire to grow stronger and survive the myriad creatures populating Pandora. No matter which character you choose, you're not the offspring of a brilliant scientist or politician and you're not the only hope for humanity...you're just a journeyman with a gun (and ideally a few friends).

Kotaku
Borderlands gets a lot of things right, in particular the balance between being a first-person shooter and being a role-playing game. The shooting mechanics are sound, as are many of the role-playing aspects, save for a few design quirks. Growing and customizing my level 35 Siren was a great deal of fun, when the tedium of all that walking around didn't spoil it. But where Borderlands excels is in offering a functional four-player cooperative loot-hoarding experience, with gorgeous environments to adventure in and smartly crafted items to collect or covet. The game has a few faults, including its traveling inefficiencies-a weak map combined with plenty of long-range fetch quests-and its easily forgettable story line, but it's still relatively easy to recommend, provided you can tap into the best portions of Borderlands, its cooperative multiplayer modes.
Why am I craving Taco Bell?

A 2K release describes the pack's story thusly:

Tasked with keeping the workers of Jakobs Cove alive, Dr. Ned (who is not related to Dr. Zed from Fyrestone) does his job a little too well, creating zombies and other abominations that now run rampant in this region. Players will have to work alongside Dr. Ned as they embark on a quest to cure the inhabitants of Jakobs Cove in this full-fledged expansion filled with new enemies, new quests and rare loot drops.

The same release said only that "The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned" is "planned for release later this year." Price will be $9.99 on PSN and for PC, 800 Microsoft points for the Xbox.

"The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is in development at Gearbox Software and is the first in a series of downloadable expansions that will enhance the Borderlands mayhem in fun and exciting ways," says 2K.

Unlike "terrible" proposals that the Tripwire president John Gibson received in shopping Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 to publishers, Valve's offer was so straightforward it surprised even Tripwire's lawyer. "Valve's contract was the first one we had seen that didn't have any land mines in it," Gibson said, referring to fine print that can come back to bite an unsuspecting studio later.

Gibson offered his defense of Valve following comments by Pitchford that Valve's interest in both developing video games and distributing them via Steam constituted a conflict of interest. While Gibson acknowledges such appearances, he described Valve's position as more that "Our game is good, and so is yours, so let's both make some money together.

"I can say with certainty that if it weren't for Steam, there would be no Tripwire Interactive right now," Gibson said. "Ask the Tripwire Interactive employees if they feel exploited, as they move into their new offices paid for by the money the company has made on Steam. Or me, as I drive away from the company that was built from the royalties we made on Steam, in my sports car paid for by the royalties we make on Steam, to the home that I pay for with the royalties we make on Steam."

Opinion: Tripwire, Steam, And How We're Not Getting Exploited [Gamasutra via Game Politics]

But it has, and so Gearbox has announced is officially on schedule to deliver you postapocalyptic offworld role-playing shooter action on Oct. 20. Considering the fourth-quarter triple-A delays we've seen this year, yeah, that's at least worth a picture of a robot throwing confetti.

Borderlands is Gold! [Gearboxity]

And he does. But it'll be a haul getting there. This past Sunday, Neumann promised to play Borderlands, Gearbox's upcoming "role-playing shooter" on day one and hand out in-game moolah to anyone who sent him a picture of their preorder receipt. We saw Neumann's tweet touting the deal and sent out word, turning a barely noticed Twitter message into a full-on bumrush.

"OMFG KOTAKU DID NOT JUST DO THAT TO ME," Neumann tweeted after getting flooded with preorder claims. Then instead of learning his lesson and cutting off the deal at midnight, Neumann extended the offer a second and even a third day.

We talked with Mike after he finished tallying up and handwriting scores of PSN IDs and Xbox Live Gamertags (above).

"It's north of 200 names, for sure," Neumann said on Wednesday, with "about half of it," coming after we sent up a flare. (Celebrity entrants even included Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling)

"People are still sending me receipts and Gamertags. I wrote a few of the late people down just for fun, but I've had to turn a lot of people down or I'll never get work done again," he said. "And there's swearing robots to make!"

Neumann made his offer available to anyone who sent in visual proof that they preordered the game. His Twitter followership surged from 600 to more than 1,000 as gamers flooded his feed with screengrabs of Amazon preorders, pictures of GameStop receipts, and in-store snapshots. Four people, definitely gunning for extra credit, did a full three-platform preorder - PS3, PC and Xbox 360.

"That's dedication," Neumann said. "I also had a few people buy multiple copies on the same platform for friends. I might give those guys a few extra pieces of loot, but I like to think they're all getting special treatment in a way."

Redeeming his end of the unofficial preorder bargain is not some casual affair, like plugging in some cheat code or loading up a post-apocalyptic Santa Claus swag sack with goodies in a developer build of the game. Neumann's straight up gotta farm all this stuff himself. This will be time consuming, but not necessarily difficult, as Neumann said Borderlands "is a game where you can punch a midget's leg off and, with the right skills equipped, money might come out.

But again, "That's sort of the whole bitch of this thing, we'll actually have to collect the loot," he said. "All game rules are final, so to speak. I've already asked off of work and I still plan to play with these people. Maybe I'll just get really drunk every night so I'll be extra fun to play with. I'll probably be trying to hand out loot in ODST or something and not realize what's wrong."

Yes? Go on.

"No, for real, we got a solid plan and I'll be collecting like crazy with the days up to launch," Neumann said, quite soberly.

With more than 200 people owed playtime and loot, Neumann has enlisted some of his Gearbox colleagues to help bear the load. And though on Monday in the office "a couple people gave me shit," in a good-natured way, Neumann's happy to spend a few extra days playing Borderlands if it means spreading word about his game, a new IP fighting for airtime among sequels in a blockbuster-release season.

"I expected to see around 40 or 50 [preorders]," Neumann said. "I was looking for the super hardcore fans; I wanted to play with them. I'm glad it went down like it did. When you anticipate a result, and what happens is bigger than you expected, it puts a smile on your face."

Neumann declared today "OFFICIAL BORDERLANDS PREORDER DAY," in this Tweet.

"Today is OFFICIAL BORDERLANDS PRE ORDER DAY. Twitter me a screen of you buying the game and I'll play BLs with you and give you loot."

No idea on how this is redeemed, exactly, or what loot you get - whether that's in-game items or IRL swag.

Big thanks to reader Fenring for spotting this.

Update: As reader akusatou pointed out, I think we just called a bluff with no idea it was a bluff. A panicked Mike Neumann tweeted a couple hours ago: "OMFG KOTAKU DID NOT JUST DO THAT TO ME," followed by "That is hilarious." He seems to be serious about following through on this, however. I'm not sure how many people swamped him, but folks, he's only one guy, if he can't follow through on this with everyone, please cut him some slack. Borderlands looks like an awesome game anyway.

And to those who think this was some deliberate dick move on my part, how the hell was I to know? Maybe the guy had some sort of loot code to hand out. I swear I thought Mike was being straight-up serious.

Second Update: Neumann earlier joked that Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling "should make the same mistake I did today." Bowling's reply? A pre-order of Borderlands on Amazon.com. "I admire your bravery, sir, now loot me!" said FourZeroTwo. Neumann said his list of PSN and XBL tags had gone over 100 as of Sunday evening.

OK, enlighten us. Well, first, Gearbox touts a 60-plus hour experience "in just the first play through," and that they've been trying, like a swoony prom date, to deny us their best charms until we deserve it. *Foot tapping.* Yeah, off with it already.

"Remember all of those movie trailers you've seen that give away all the best stuff and the whole damn story before you're even at the theater?" said Gearbox's Randy Pitchford in an email. "Yeah, we think that sucks too. ... [W]e want to assure gamers there is way more to Borderlands. A lot more. So to get that point across here is just a tiny little tease. Meet the Crimson Lance."

Apparently this is one of the baddie factions you'll encounter - past level 15, Pitchford implies - when Borderlands arrives in a few weeks. My, Crimson Lance looks like some heavily armed, robust persons with an antisocial disposition. I'm sure we'll figure out a way to put them in their place.