NVIDIA are one of the big name gaming houses in the electronic entertainment industry. For the mobile industry, NVIDIA manufacture and sell a number of entertainment-based products such as the NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV set top box and the NVIDIA SHIELD Tegra K1 gaming tablet. Both of these SHIELD branded products are based around the NVIDIA Tegra mobile chipset, using the newer and more powerful Tegra X1 in the SHIELD, which has 256 GPU cores in addition to eight application processor cores. The SHIELD K1 tablet uses the slightly older, 32-bit, quad core 2.2 GHz Tegra K1. Today’s story concerns the NVIDIA SHIELD family and NVIDIA’s gaming pipeline. The SHIELD Android TV box is already getting a reputation for being a console-quality gaming product and today’s announcement is not going to change this.
For the SHIELD set top box, today NVIDIA have announced that the full version of Borderlands 2 is coming to the SHIELD. This is the full version, ported to the Android platform but designed for the SHIELD console. Borderlands 2 is set five years after the original game and will offer players a choice of what was initially four playable character classes but have since been upgraded to six classes, each with their own unique abilities and skills. NVIDIA’s announcement also mentions adding “new gameplay elements” as well as improving how customizable each character is, plus a new “Badass” ranking system is being implemented.
In addition to this news, NVIDIA have also announced that the less powerful SHIELD K1 tablet will be getting Borderlands 2 ported to it in the coming months. The SHIELD K1 will also be gaining Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, which has already been released for the SHIELD console. NVIDIA also highlighted that Batman: The Telltalle Series and QBert Rebooted will be coming to the SHIELD platform. We have already seen how Telltale support the NVIDIA chipset on both SHIELD and regular Android devices, so that these two titles are coming is less of a surprise but still welcome nevertheless. In addition to announcing local games for the SHIELD products, NVIDIA mentions that they have launched a number of new titles that utilize the GeForce NOW service. Shadwen was released about a month ago with Hard Reset Redux available from June 3rd. We’ll also be seeing Mighty No. 9 and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens as soon as these games are released later this month.