Category: Headhunter

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Poisoning Turkeys – Borderlands 2 S06E02 – Headhunter 2

Playing as the familiar Mechromancer at least meant I wasn’t all at sea at the start of this video. The opening sequences provided some fairly intense combat, and again it took both JBG and I a little while to find our feet and stop dropping into Fight for Life mode.

Sadly the ‘story’ didn’t really develop, and once we headed outside things started to go a little downhill. The final confrontation with the giant turkey was almost laughable, but once we realised what we had to do (slag the turkey!) we started to make some progress.

However, once the turkey was dead, things really took a turn for the worse. I’m sure someone thought it was amusing to listen to Torgue’s grannie’s story for minutes, but it really didn’t do it for me. Plus the fact that when JBG inadvertently went too far from grannie she started the whole story over again. Ah well. I don’t think we even completed the second of her ‘story’ missions.

Torgue’s Headhunter DLC started kinda well despite the premise of first poisoning then killing a giant unkillable turkey for prime time TV entertainment. There were initially a bunch of bad guys inside Torgue kitchens that were pretty tough, which was briefly fun.

The theme of these headhunter missions is to play a character we’re not playing in the main game and to start with only one weapon. Ahead of the first headhunter, I’d only briefly played as Axton. For this headhunter, I played as Zero who I’ve got a lot of history with. I like to max the killing blow melee skill and mix it with a high powered shotgun, one blast and a swish of my blade would take out most, except here I didn’t have a shotgun.

The gameplay stepped up visually as we got outside but stepped down the fun with the introduction of the annoying flying bugs and then the turkey itself.  It took us a while despite a number of slag references and being given a slag gun as part of the mission, to realise we needed to slag the turkey (there might be a joke in there). Once we twigged the need for slag it was just another boss, lots of running around avoiding deadly barrages while shooting back from cover. After the turkey, we got the grannie conversation. I guess someone at Gearbox thinks they’re funny.

From a technical aspect, the only real issue was the appalling quality of my mic audio. I was using the Bluetooth headset that crashed out mid-game a few weeks ago but otherwise has performed admirably through over 40 gameplay videos, except I had noise cancelling turned on by mistake, which overlaid my voice with a robotic compression effect, which is difficult when your default voice sounds a little robotic in the first place.

Otherwise apart from editing out an eternity of the grannie chat and a small audio sync discrepancy, there wasn’t much to fret about.

 

 

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Exploring Hallowed Hollow – Borderlands 2 S06E01 – Headhunter 1

I’d never played through the Headhunter content before, somehow missing them in my single player escapades. JBG came up with a couple of interesting twists to spice things up: starting afresh with a new character, and limiting ourselves to a single weapon.

The gameplay was relatively uninspiring, but given the original $2.99 price tag I guess you can’t really expect too much. We were given an interesting mix of bad guys to fight off, and our level 30 characters ran into a bit of trouble a couple of times.

We had a few technical issues during the recording of this video (not least JBG managing to turn off recording when he meant to mute his microphone!) but I think the edit actually comes out pretty well. We plan to continue with some of the other Headhunter missions in the future, so we’ll see how they go.

When AD asked me at the end of this video what I thought of the gameplay my immediate answer was rubbish; I’m never going to rate shooting pumpkins as a pleasurable pastime. The game restrictions we forced on ourselves were interesting entertainment though, especially as it was the first time we’d done something beyond straight gameplay.

For a start we played as each other’s Avatar, in that I was using a level 30 Axton and AD was using a level 30 Siren. On top of that, we had to allocate skill points and only carry one gun going into the level.

So, while I didn’t enjoy the gameplay and we DIED (once – a fire breathing flying pumpkin got us), it is actually quite entertaining to watch.

On the technical front, this was the first video we used OBS to record webcam. As ever we messed it up royally by only specifying 2.5Mbs data rate for the 720P video, which means our greenscreens had a lot of compression artefacts in the background. For once AD’s looked better than mine after it was chroma keyed.

We live and learn. We have since tested 720P @5Mbs and the chroma key works well. You’ll see that in the next headhunter video.

For now, have fun.