We hope you’ve enjoyed the August TA Playlist game of the month, dodging robots as you travel with your cat-like companion Mui across the beautiful Planet of Lana. But August is drawing to a close, and next month will bring a different sort of adventure on a different planet.No, we’re not talking about Starfield (although we might be the only ones today!)… there’s a great chance the new Bethesda space RPG will show up for a TA Playlist vote at some point, but the September 2023 poll instead focused on four of the highest-rated titles offered to Xbox Live Gold subscribers through the Games With Gold program, which officially ends this month in favor of the new Xbox Live Core subscription tier.Looking back at the past decade of Games With Gold, we found several highly-rated games that had never been featured in the Playlist, and the voting this month was fairly close, with all four games earning between 20% and 30% of the total. In the end, though, Resident Evil, Assassin’s Creed II, and Portal 2 came up short, leaving Borderlands as this month’s winner!Developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games in 2009, Borderlands helped popularise the “looter-shooter” subgenre of FPS/RPG hybrids with its unique aesthetic and space-Western sci-fi setting.Borderlands places you in the role of a mercenary Vault Hunter on the lawless and desolate planet of Pandora, hell-bent on finding a legendary stockpile of powerful alien technology known as The Vault. With its addictive action, frantic first-person shooter combat, massive arsenal of weaponry, RPG elements, and four-player co-op, Borderlands spawned a whole new type of shooter that has only grown in popularity, spawning a massive franchise and a huge following.Borderlands has a TA user score of 4.37 out of 5.00, with around 450,000 tracked gamers having started at least one of the game’s three tracked versions. The standard version has 50 achievements in the base game, with a total of 30 more across five different DLC packs, and a total of nearly 24,000 gamers (6%) have managed to snag them all. The Japanese stack has less DLC, for a total of 70 achievements, while the Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition combines all 80 achievements from the English version into one list. A walkthrough by thirtysmooth is available to help, but the completion is still estimated to take 70–90 hours including all the DLC.Here’s the full breakdown of the votes. It’s fairly unusual for the lead to change after the first few hours of voting, but this month’s vote saw Portal 2 and Borderlands in a see-saw battle for first place, with Valve’s puzzle-platformer holding the lead going into last weekend. In the end, though, Borderlands pulled ahead and claimed the 18-vote victory.As always, unlocking an achievement in any one of the three tracked versions of Borderlands will advance your TA Playlist badge count, and you can also get credit for commenting in the Spoiler and Spoiler-free threads that will be generated on September 1. Join in the discussion on the TA Playlist Hub and tell us about your vault-hunting adventures.
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