Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year 2011: August

Gearbox announced that it was working on Borderlands 2 this month, a good way to get the nasty aftertaste of Duke Nukem out of many gamers‘ mouths.

Set to take players through new unexplored regions of Pandora as one of four brand new character classes, the massive success and awesomeness of the first Borderlands has ensured that fans will have high expectations of the sequel.

Bethesda suing Minecraft developer, Mojang, over its fantasy puzzle game Scrolls‘ name infringement on the Elder Scrolls series became a big story quite quickly.

The fantastic drama of an industry juggernaut‘s lawyers trying to crush a small independent studio got short shrift from gamers. You can‘t get this stuff in real life. Oh wait. You can, right here.

The back and forth lawyering waged well on into October, growing increasingly hostile until Mojang head Notch challenged Bethesda to settle things the old fashioned way. Read his out-of-court settlement proposal here.

You‘ll have to keep reading SPOnG‘s Review of the Year if you want to see how things turned out for Bethesda and Mojang when the courts reached their decision in October.

August also was also host to annual gaming event Gamescom held in Cologne, Germany. While many of the same big name titles that were shown at E3 shone again here, there were also newly announced games like Borderlands 2 on show and many smaller developers got the chance to strut their stuff as well.

You can read SPOnG‘s rundown of the show award-winners here.

Probably the most entertaining part of Gamescom was the increasingly aggressive sniping between Activision and EA, who were both gearing up for the battle between their upcoming Call of Duty and Battlefield releases. Here‘s Activision‘s attempt to take the moral high ground . Meanwhile, EA‘s delightfully vitriolic response is here.

August was a little light on major releases. Codemasters might have had high hopes for Bodycount, it being the spiritual successor to the fairly well received shooter Black, but unfortunately for Codies its release was met by a wave of underwhelmed reviews.

You can read Mark‘s bored impressions of the game here.

Driver: Renegade 3D on the 3DS was another disappointingly unimpressive release this month. You can read its dire review at David Turner‘s merciless hands here.

Fortunately there was still the chance for next month‘s console release of Driver: San Francisco to quickly redeem the series.

August is redeemed somewhat by the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution late in the month.

Though fans of the series may have been put off by the series‘ new development team and absence of Deus Ex‘s creator Warren Spector, Human Revolution was released to great critical acclaim and was generally agreed to have lived up to the reputation of the original.

SPOnG‘s review of the futuristic RPG/shooter served as the debut piece of their latest talented and devilishly handsome new writer in what surely must be considered one of the most notable and important events of the month... perhaps even of the entire year.

You can read the review of Deus Ex: HR here.

I say, ‘Perhaps’ because it appears that: ‘Mass Effect 3's FemShep Revealed’ really took the interest of the gaming community; there’s no accounting for taste.

Check out all the August news, starting here.