Every year at every convention, seemingly every member of the press reminds his small percentage of the community that this has been a great year for gaming, with many anticipated titles on the horizon.

They're not lying. But that's because the video game industry is a great one that pumps out certifiable masterpieces with all the regularity of other mediums. Sure, it's rare that any of them are actually new ideas, but now with Kickstarter crowdfunding the fifth Broken Sword and the possibility of tax relief looking slightly more feasible, it seems that we're in no danger of not hearing about how swimmingly everything's going in the world of games development (apart from the continued existence of Electronic Arts and paid downloadable content) for some time.

But something, somewhere in the dark recesses of my caffeine-soaked mind, has clicked, and now I don't care ... not about Assassin's Creed 3, the bulked up PC port of Dark Souls, nor even the concept of The World Ends With You coming to iOS (and I've wanted that game since I realized everything about Japan is awesome and/or clinically batshit).

I can't seem to care. Because I am entranced by the prospect of Gunzerkin' Super Badass Skags and backstabbing PWR Loaders.

When Epic Games designer Cliff Bleszinski inadvertently stired an industry buzzphrase in "bigger, better and more badass" back when Gears of War 2 was in development, I'm sure he had no idea just how much Gearbox Software would outdo him.

Feeling pretty stupid now, I bet.
 

Borderlands 2 is absolutely crammed with things that, even with all my access to the Thesaurus.com, I can't describe as anything other than "stonkingly cool ideas." Not just in the visuals or gameplay but every strata of the design.

Case in point: Robots don't spawn out of holes or mysterious doorways that don't lead anywhere -- they are fired at you from a moonbase in orbit. I don't need to get semantically fancy with that because it's just cool.

Even the original game's overall design philosophy, first-person shooting mashed with looting, managed to surprise everyone in 2007 -- if only to think that no one else had thought to do that before. And setting Borderlands on a world with both sci-fi and western elements made it immediately recognizable as a mainstream game that was just kooky enough to be innovative without being shamelessly weird for the sake of being shamelessly weird. 

Its progeny follows four new characters (with plans for a fifth) as they team up with the original four vault hunters to knock the smart-mouthed autocrat of the Hyperion Corporation, Handsome Jack, off his perch. It's a vaguely alluring premise largely because Jack is such a likeable villain who fires obnoxious threats at your ear at every opportunity over a seemingly planet-wide intercom system. I'm frankly amazed he isn't British. Being witty villains is our only marketable skill.

But he's just the tip of the chemically imbalanced iceberg that is the Borderlands cast -- the way to really get to know Pandora's population of maniacs is pursuing side quests. Mark my words, that will be where the meat of the game's contextual story is. And that is such a good thing.

However uncynical you might be about the concept of side quests, they are usually filler in most games. They so rarely match the scope and scale of main missions that it has become one of the key marks of a great role-plahying game when you can't tell the difference.

This leads me, in a roundabout way, to my point: As exciting as the prospect of Diablo 3 was, it was always clear that it would only be half of a game.