Gamers are an odd bunch; we moan if there’s not enough change, but then we moan when there’s too much. One of the things that old fart gamers bitch about the most is just how easy today’s games are compared to ye olde games of yore. Clearly Ken Levine (creative director for Irrational Games) feels the same way about this and so has announced a “1999 Mode” difficulty level for BioShock Infinite.

“I’m an old school gamer. We wanted to make sure we were taking into account the play styles of gamers like me. So we went straight to the horse’s mouth by asking them, on our website, a series of questions about how they play our games.”

This resulted in a bunch of BioShock fans (56.8% to be exact) saying that they really loved difficult, permanent decisions being forced on them insofar as character development goes. And thus “1999 Mode” was born.

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“No,” says the movie studio, “it’s way too expensive and the R rating minimises our audience.”

“No,” says the once signed director, “I couldn’t find funding for it even though I made Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“No,” says the game’s lead designer, “we don’t have a need to get it made.”

That last one is exactly what BioShock lead designer, Ken Levine, actually said when asked about what was happening with the movie. That’s a total bummer.

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If you cast your pixel-addled minds back to the PlayStation Vita’s debut, you might recall BioShock bossman Ken Levine getting up on stage to tell the world about how he’s planning on bringing the franchise to Sony’s upcoming handheld. Right after that, he vanished into thin air like a Houdini Splicer and hasn’t been heard talking PSV BioShock since.

Unless you count that very brief discussion Levine had with IGN a few months ago, we haven’t heard anything else. In that IGN encounter, Levine confirmed that BioShock PSV would be a standalone game and not a portable version of upcoming Infinite.

Luckily for us, website Joystiq caught up with Levine and asked how things were progressing; the bad news is that nothing much has changed in the last couple of months. In fact, Irrational Games is thinking of outsourcing the PSV BioShock entirely.

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Two days ago, Eurogamer jumped the gun and reported that they had “an anonymous source” in the industry that had confirmed Borderlands 2 is in development. Gearbox had no choice but to come clean.

The game has now been officially announced and will be making a debut appearance at this year’s Gamescom in Germany and then at PAX Prime towards the end of August. The game’s official website is already live.

According to a rep from the game’s publisher, 2K Games, Borderlands 2 will combine “invention and evolution”. It will also feature “all-new characters, skills, environments, enemies, weapons and equipment, which come together in an ambitiously crafted story”. Of course, it’s still set on Pandora but expect to explore new regions. The game is scheduled for a release sometime between April 2012 and November 2013. That’s a massive release window but it at least gives me a metric ton of time to finally finish the first game.

Source: Kotaku