There’s a lot of playthroughs, strategy guides, showcases of mods, and so forth out there. They are an important part of the ecosystem, but they are also kind of boring. How many times do you need to see someone one-shot the final boss? How many times do you need to see someone play the games with the worst possible gear? There’s just diminishing returns there. At the same time, there are people out there innovating in this space all the time.

Somehow Borderlands 2 is still something that captures people’s imagination despite being 14 years old at this point. Since the game has been modded a lot during that time, and the speed of modding just going up with all the new AI tools, that’s the game that’s most prominent here.

I also decided to leave out multipart videos. There are some great out there, but I wanted one-parters here, since that usually means concise videos that get to the point. Sure, some of these are over an hour long, but considering that usually that’s from 10+ hours, you know you are getting the good stuff.

Here goes:

altered. and RooticusBeer – Borderlands 2 but- OH GOD HE’S CHASING ME

This was the inspiration for me to write this.

By modding friendly fire and hiding the minimap and adding some other rules, this changes the dynamics of the game completely. It’s still the same playthrough, but this time one player is trying to kill the other. Also, there’s money on the line. It is kind of intensive for a video of it’s length because it just keeps the momentum going through the whole hour plus runtime.

oboeshoesgames – Borderlands 2 but im LARPing as X Æ A-12 the whole time

To me oboeshoesgames is the OG. Sure, I had seen plenty of BL2 videos before I stumbled onto him, but those were just top 10 lists of weapons and guides to various Easter eggs within the game. This guy is very different. He has a weird sense of humor, but he can make it work. He has largely moved away from the franchise, but still returns to it regularly, and always seems to enjoy it. I also appreciate his love for the original game.

There was a point in time when he tried to do these role-play videos, but most of them are series rather than single videos, but at least we have this one (where the original point was to get to a million dollars, but it changed at some point).

oboeshoesgames – Borderlands 1 Very Accurate Story Recap

More oboeshoegames. He has made these story recaps for all the games, but this one is the best. I assume many people would disagree (and if you watch this, you will get those recommended to you). Yet, this has the best line in all of them.

oboeshoesgames – Borderlands: The Movie

I wasn’t going to put more than two of this guy’s videos, but I couldn’t help myself. This one hits the mark on weirdly many things regarding the movie (which many of us have already forgotten or just wanted to forget).

Cashew1405 – BL2 Hide and Seek Got Out of Hand.. FAST!

Cashew1405 is from Australia, so he has made Borderlands: The Pre-Sequal (TPS, as it’s usually known) a big part of his brand. Yeah, if you are not aware of the in-game and real life lore, this might not make sense… Anyhow, I love The Pre-Sequel. It just has less things to do, so I don’t play it that much, but it is my favorite of the series, by wide margin, so I tend to watch this guy stuff.

So, here’s a BL2 video from him. Again, modding involved. They are playing hide and seek within random maps. There are more videos with the same theme, but for some unknown reason I chose this one.

Cashew1405 and friends – Forcing Borderlands Creators into a RACING TOURNAMENT!

He is not really living up to his brand as the TPS guy, considering that there is a racetrack in TPS and that was omitted from the options, even though they had a custom track for BL3 which doesn’t have one either.

Cashew1405 and LilGasmask – I Forced LilGasmask into a TPS Bingo Race

Finally TPS. There’s actually more of these Bingo races available for other games, but, again, I like TPS, so here we are. The idea is that they have a bingo board with various things that can happen in the game (like finding a specific weapon) and they try to get a bingo on a 5×5 board. However, if they get something, their opponent can’t get it anymore. If all lines of five are blocked, whoever gets to 13 first is the winner. There’s a lot of strategy involved when you need to block your opponent.

(Actually, this is one of the worse ones, since Cashew has an advantage, because many players don’t know this game very well.)

LilGasmask – Can You Beat Borderlands 2 With ONLY Cars?

LGM often tries to appear as the curmudgeon within the creator community, but if you follow him for any length of time, you’ll learn that inside he is a softie. And we love him for that.

However, he does have another great quality: He is very analytical and he is trusted by his peers to be able to explain why something works the way it does in this spaghetti code of a game.

Miq – What Is The Fewest Enemies You Have To Kill To Beat Borderlands 2?

Miq does a lot of these challenges that are more about being persistent than anything else. Than, every once in a while, he comes up with interesting perspectives on the game. Like this one. Kind of pacifist run, but since you can’t not kill things in the game, he just does his best to minimize it.

MrTx01 – The Last Borderlands Youtuber to Find Me Gets Eliminated! (Geoguessr Tournament!)

I know MrTx01 mostly from bingos (see above), but he comes up with other weird ways to collaborate with other creators. I find this the most interesting.