45-Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom (Capcom, Arcade, 1993)
Comparing this updated top 50 list to the list I made years ago, Tower of Doom is one of the few games that has actually moved up. Previously, I’d had it listed in position 50.

Tower of Doom was the best of the 4-player arcade cabinet games. You could play a fighter, dwarf, cleric or elf. You could pick up new weapons, extra arrows for your bow, magic items, and gold to spend in a store between levels. The cleric and elf had a list of spells right out of the Player’s Handbook which improved as they went up in level. Everyone except the elf had a shield that was useful in the same way as the Knight’s shield in Trine. Plus, certain characters had moves that were performed like the special moves in Street Fighter 2. These were bull rushes, rolls, dive attacks, and slides – as useful for evading traps as they were in melee.The game’s combat was far more technical than most sidescrolling beat-em-ups.

There were branching routes in the game, secret areas, and the list of enemies in the game included kobolds, ghasts, troglodytes, manticores, medusa, a beholder, and a couple dragons for stage bosses. That’s the kind of game you’d never imagine having seen in an arcade, and that’s why the game is on my top fifty list.

44-Neverwinter Nights (Bioware, Windows, 2002)
If it weren’t for the Aurora toolset that let you create your own adventures, complete with its complex scripting engine, this game would never be in my list. I viewed the included adventure in much the same way that I viewed Rivers of Light back in the day – as an example of what you could do with the adventure construction set they’d handed you. And I spent long evenings for a year building my adventure, complete with custom music and custom rules for wandering monsters and setting camp. My adventure had four possible endings.

43-Autoduel (Origin Systems, Commodore 64, 1985)
For a game that was released twenty-five years ago, I do a lot of thinking about and writing about Autoduel. And if I could see only one old game remade as a modern video game, this would be it.

The main draw of Autoduel to me was the degree to which you could customize your vehicle. You could create a compact, sedan, station wagon, or van. You could select which tires and which engine to use, and assign armor to the sides and the undercarriage. You could load up with machine guns, recoilless rifles, rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and lasers, positioning them on any side of your vehicle. The game even had smoke screens, oil slicks, mines, and spike droppers.

The best thing is that the game was an RPG. You could take the vehicle out on the road on courier missions, hunts, and missions for the FBI. You’d make money through missions, arena battles, and by selling parts salvaged from other vehicles, and use the cash to upgrade the car you had. Meanwhile, your character’s driving, gunning, and salvage skills would slowly increase.

42-Borderlands (Gearbox, Windows, 2009)

Since Borderlands is such a recent release, I likely don’t have to talk much about it. I’ve written plenty about it on this site already. Great shooter, RPG elements, fantastic art style, multiplayer co-op added quite a lot. Too bad the storyline sucked and the PC matchmaking was broken.

41-Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (Konami, Nintendo Entertainment System, 1990)
I have a very warm feeling when I think about Castlevania 3. Had it been out on the Wii Virtual Console earlier, I’d have bought it immediately. Checking now, I see that it was released in January 2009 – guess I’ll have to go buy it.

Until Symphony of the Night came out years later, Castlevania 3 was the best platformer I’d ever seen. It had branching paths, incredibly creative levels, hidden secrets, and three different playable NPCs with vastly different abilities that you could recruit. Grant the pirate could climb walls, which let you get to a lot of otherwise inaccessible locations. Syfa the wizardress got spellbooks rather than the axe/knife type items that Trevor would pick up, so she could throw fire, freeze enemies with ice, or protect herself with these weird power globe thingies that would spin around her. Alucard was the best. His basic attack was a projectile, and he could change into a bat and fly around.

The levels included factories full of giant pendulums and spinning gears, rivers that you’d have to wade through unless you could freeze the water with Syfa’s ice power, and an amazing level where blocks would drop from the sky, eventually allowing you to climb on them to reach a high ledge. Maybe you had to play it in order to get it, but I loved it.

Make sure to come back next week for games 40 through 36, which include selections from the racing, rpg, fps, and light gun genres.

As I continue to play through Borderlands, after having completed the main quest, I notice more and more the external influences that must have affected the game’s design. For example, the pillar of light that appears when you activate quick travel looks very much like the pillar of light coming from City 17’s Citadel in the Half-Life 2 episodes. And the game’s scythids are very much like headcrabs. There are probably many more influences I’m missing.

But by far the thing I’m noticing most about Borderlands is that it’s a heck of a lot like Fallout.

In many ways, Borderlands is more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 than the new 3D Fallout 3 game is. Of course, Borderlands couldn’t use Supermutants and Deathclaws, but there are so many other factors omitted from Fallout 3 that are present in Borderlands.

Aside from the fact that both games take place in a wasteland, the most apparent thing is the music. The ambient drum-heavy music sounds like it could have been taken directly from one of the original Fallout games.

Another thing is the irreverant, often adult humor. In one of the original Fallout games, you could have sex with a girl, after which her father would force you to marry her at shotgun-point. In Borderlands, Scooter calls the Catch-A-Ride “more busted than my momma’s girl parts”. Things like this crack me up.

Both the original two Fallout games and Borderlands have a penchant for Easter Eggs and intertextuality. In Fallout, I stumbled across Dr. Who’s Tardis and found a velvet Elvis. In Borderlands, “Mad Mel” is an obvious combination of Mad Max and Mel Gibson, you can find the leg lamp from A Christmas Story, and when you choose an orange vehicle there’s a “00” painted on the side. Dukes of Hazzard, anyone?

Fallout 3 obviously had more of a plot, whereas Borderlands has multiplayer gameplay, which is one of the main draws of the game. I could go on comparing and contrasting them, but the most interesting comparisons have already been made.

This is a pretty cool site. The Gun Show allows people to upload and show off their Borderlands items, and it seems as though they may have a system in place for people who want to trade items. Fun to look through.

Last night, I completed Borderlands’s single-player story mode, using Mordecai the sniper. And while the gameplay is so addictive that I plan to continue playing multiplayer Borderlands with friends, I have to agree with reviewers that the ending is lame.

There’s now an interview online in which Randy Pitchford calls Borderlands 2 a “no brainer”. They’re not yet actually working on a sequel – first they’ll be knocking out a bunch of DLC. But when they do, here are a bunch of things I’d like to see from the game.

10- Destructible Environments

Imagine that a nearby explosion could knock bottles off tables and topple shelves. Imagine that an incendiary grenade could set a hut on fire. How about if you could destroy entire buildings Red Faction style? Yeah. It’d be cool.

9- The Ability to store items

So you find this awesome shotgun that shoots rockets. But you can’t use it for another 4 levels. You’ve got to carry it around with you. Or maybe your favorite weapon just became obsolete, but you’d love to give it to your friend the next time he’s online. You’ve got to carry it around with you.

If Borderlands gave you a personal locker of some kind, it would make inventory management that much better.

8- Vehicle Improvements

Going into the Dahl Headlands, vehicles begin to seem like a huge deal. There are bandit rocket car patrols and even a vehicular boss battle. But after that, things fall off. Vehicles become primarily a way to get from A to B quickly. Borderlands 2 will need more vehicles. Maybe single-seater motorcycles, three and four-seater cars with multiple turrets, maybe a couple APC or tank vehicles. A couple water vehicles and maybe a helicopter would be nice. An armored mini-mech like the kind that appeared in Butcher Bay would be phenomenal.

The randomization of weapons in Borderlands is wonderful. If they could work the same randomization into vehicles, it would be awesome. Vehicles with dual side-mounted shotguns. Vehicles with ram plates and wheel spikes. Vehicles with tank treads. Vehicles with mine-droppers and smokescreens. This alone would make me want to buy the game.

7- Character quick start

After finishing the game last night, I wanted to start a new game with a Soldier just to see what he played like. I had to sit through the entire intro, and then do the stupid tutorial over again. They need to provide a way to start a new character quickly. After the 4th time, that intro and tutorial gets OLD.

6- More than 87 Bazillion Guns

The diversity of weapons in Borderlands was fantastic. You know they’ll need to ramp it up for the sequel. Maybe a few new weapon categories like speargun or chain gun. Maybe a flamethrower or sonic weapon. Grenades that leave behind acid puddles for 5 minutes. Go even crazier.

5- Creature Diversity

While it’s true that there were multiple kinds of Scags and multiple kind of antlions, I wish that there were more than six or eight creature types in the game. How about doubling that? Fifteen or so seems doable. And I love the fact that each creature has a different critical hit spot – that needs to stay. I liked the game’s two or three unique bosses, and seeing more of those would be great too.

4- More humor

One of my favorite moments in the game is when Nine Toes is introduced – the still image overlay to the right is hilarious. But how many of those are there in the game? Six or eight? And how many are funny? That’s the only one I can think of. Programatically, adding more would be super-easy. The only investment is paying a comedic writer to come up with the stuff. Borderlands does humor very well – I loved the conversations and voice recordings of the insane archaeologist Tannis – there just needs to be more of this humor in the game.

3- Different characters

In a sequel, you wouldn’t want the same four characters. Roland kind of bugs me, and Lilith is annoyingly arrogant. If any character remains, it should be Brick. He is quite simply awesome. Mordekai would be my second choice for a carry-over, but I think keeping only Brick would be best. Other characters might include a different Siren – perhaps with different and more diverse Siren powers.

A PC psycho character might also be a lot of fun. His ability could be brief bouts of increased fire rate and unlimited ammo. He could eventually gain skills that would let him leap from one vehicle to another, Mad Max style.

I’d also like to see more diverse skill trees. Perhaps branching ones like the skills trees from Champions of Norrath, where the skills branch out and sometimes rejoin.

2- Better QA

I’m not sure if it was only the PC version, but Borderlands was super-buggy. Online play required router configuration, Gamespy connectivity stinks, voice chat doesn’t work, and the PC interface feels like a bad console port. Also, sometimes when I pick up a weapon it equips itself. It’s intermittent, and I HATE it. Borderlands 2 will need better quality assurance.

1- Better Story

The number one thing I’d wish for from a Borderlands sequel would be more story. Hunting an alien vault on a new world should be fascinating and magical: hunting down small clues to the aliens’ existence, finding ruins with incredible artifacts, and seeing others’ amazed reactions.

I’d also like to have seen more of an ending. I’m fine with being able to continue playing after completing the game, Oblivion-style, but perhaps a better explanation for the chick who magically guided you through the game, a cutscene showing the amazing vault, or maybe the automatic awarding of an orange-level loot item. Just something more satisfying.

I’m sure that Borderlands 2 will have lot worth playing, I just thought it would be fun to create my own feature wishlist.

I’m playing as Mordecai the sniper, so first off I’ve got my PPZ Liquid Wrath sniper rifle. In addition to doing over 200 damage, it zaps right through enemies’ shields. Very nice.

And secondly, my standby at medium range. The HLK War Cobra. It’s got a scope nearly as good as the sniper rifle, and fires in three-shot bursts. That’s 72 damage times three. Very nice.

My sniper, Beernut, is level 22 right now. As I move along in the game, I’ll probably post some more weapons as I get new favorites.

I’m playing the Steam version of Borderlands on a PC, which means that I’ve been playing about a week less than the XBox and PS3 folks. It also means that I’m not playing on a platform for which the game was designed. The menus in Borderlands were obviously put together for a console, and it shows. I’ve got to hit ‘E’ to compare weapons and the space bar to drop a weapon. It would have been so easy for them to create a mouse-based GUI with right-click options had they only decided to spend the time.

Even more frustrating is the flaky online connectivity. Rather than using Steamworks to connect players, they went with Gamespy. I’m still not exactly sure what my initial issue was, but the first day I tried, I was completely unable to connect to a multiplayer game. I suspect that setting up port forwarding (how to) is what fixed the problem, but that type of router wizardry is beyond many people. The game’s online functionality should have been designed to be as easy on the PC as it is on consoles. I swear – the PC doesn’t have achievements, but there really should be a fifty-pointer for successfully connecting to a private game.

On Tuesday night, I played the game for a few hours with my cousin Paul in Connecticut. Once we got the game successfully running, we gave Steam’s built-in voice chat a try. It worked, but only in the same sense that an overnight security guard “works”. That is to say, the push-to-talk was broken, voices cut out mid-sentence, and Paul observed that speaking at all on loading screens made me sound like Max Headroom. Next time we’ll probably use Skype.

After the ordeal of starting a multiplayer game was complete, it actually became kind of fun. I was playing Brick, the tank, and Paul was playing as Lilith, the siren. You get no skill points for the first five levels, but they whizzed by and I reached 5th level and got my berserk ability before I knew it. Berserking turned out to be far more fun than I’d expected. Brick screams like an enraged mental patient who missed his antipsychotic meds, sprinting around and throwing punches at the rate of a machine gun. Except the punches do way more damage than any machine gun I’ve found in the game so far. I ain’t kidding.

As it turns out, Brick and Lilith work really well together. He absorbs the damage and gets in close for punches while she keeps her distance. If need be, she can get in close too, and then escape with her phase ability. I end up using Brick’s rage a lot of times just to heal myself, since he heals continuously while raging.

Managing quests in multiplayer can be a bit annoying. Since Paul has played through a decent bit of the game before, he runs up and gets quests, then switches active quests from the log screen all the time. At first, I didn’t even realize there was a log screen, since I hadn’t gotten that far along in the tutorial in my single-player game. Honestly, I suppose there’s really no good way to handle this, short of making the player hosting the game a kind of “party leader”. And although I’ve heard that the game doesn’t have much plot, I can’t help but feel that I’m missing out on what little story there is.

Other annoyances:

• If your inventory is full and you try to pick something up, you’ll drop a random item. Could be really bad if you’re in a public multiplayer game and you accidentally drop that ultra-rare sniper rifle. Some unscrupulous bozo could snatch it up before you have a chance to recover.
• Vehicles are a pain in the ass to steer. You accelerate and brake with ‘W’ and ‘S’ and steer with the mouse. Boo.
• There’s too little story. The game feels like an endless series of fetch quests. I could sure do with some more variety.

But all in all, I’m still playing the game. I’m actually playing it a bit more than I’m playing Trine. I won’t recommend the game, but I also won’t suggest that you not buy it. Just read some reviews and make up your own mind.