Mourning Deathtrap – Borderlands 3 S04E02 – TVM + Mayhem
Battle in the Library – Borderlands 3 S04E01 – TVM + Mayhem
Moxxi’s Handsome Jackpot – Borderlands 3 S03E02 – TVM + Mayhem
Moxxi’s Handsome Jackpot – Borderlands 3 S03E01 – TVM + Mayhem
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.
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.
Borderlands 2 S04 – Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary True Vault Hunter Mode
Starting our playthrough of the Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary DLC in True Vault Hunter mode was a little bit of a disappointment.
It appears that this DLC hasn’t scaled correctly for our current level, meaning that the majority of the enemies we took on during this session were easy to take care of.
As per usual, there’s a certain amount of scene-setting at the start of this campaign, and that amounts for the majority of the content of the first video.
The initial battle in Sanctuary was fairly enjoyable but was obviously set up so as to be impossible to complete (otherwise the story would have been a little short!). From then on, we started to meet the infected enemies that will probably make up most of the content of this DLC, requiring a switch away from my corrosive sniper rifle as they were resistant to damage from it.
There was another good battle as we tried to meet up with Mordecai and his new avian companion before we headed back to our new base camp in readiness for (hopefully) starting the campaign proper. Hopefully, the challenge will increase as we get further into the story.
Meeting Tina to build a bomb in the Shooting the Moon mission was fun, and while some of the side missions we took on were a little tedious, there were some periods of enjoyable combat in the second video.
The final video had a few good sections. There were some interesting battles on our way to meet Cassius, and as we headed back to Helios again to rescue Butt Stallion.
On the whole, a fairly enjoyable DLC, only let down by the fact that its level was set around the 42 mark, and we were playing through above level 50.
We previously played Commander Lilith vanilla ahead of the B3 release and it was serviceably entertaining if laden with enough pointless side missions to make the process often border on tedious.
This time we did it in #tvm but unfortunately, the DLC didn’t scale to our level 50 characters, as such it was overly easy.
There were some highlights, the core Shooting the Moon mission was fun, and the subsequent mission to find an antidote to the DLC resolution is solid content.
What do I recall about these videos? That Vaughn is quite entertaining but an underused host to some uninspired content. It’s great to be back playing with some of our B2 favs but we also spend a fair amount of time with some we don’t care for; Ellie’s missions in B2 are some of the most tedious, as they are here, and Scooter is just Scooter. They do their best to make the content empathetic but you don’t really care.
As I’ve mentioned before I’m all in when it comes to killing bandits, robots and Hyperion soldiers but my interest wanes when killing animals and plant-life. There is, unfortunately, an excess of plant life in this DLC.
The stand-out beyond the core missions now I recall from the vanilla playthrough was some great loot, not so much this time as the loot was capped at level 40 (ish) and we were level 50
The DLC is pretty and does bridge B2 to B3. Play it if you haven’t, it’s free. If you’re above level 40, I’d only do the core story missions unless you feel compelled to wallow in the world and you love killing plant life.
If you don’t feel compelled to do it first hand then watch our videos and experience the joy vicariously.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Mr. Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage – Episode 6 – True Vault Hunter Mode
The final video in our series playing through Borderlands 2’s “Mr Torgue’s Campaign of Carnage” DLC in True Vault Hunter mode.
This video was planned to be a bit of a ‘wrap-up’ session, completing a couple of remaining side missions before continuing on to the final story mission.
We headed back into The Forge, where it appeared someone had been trash-talking us, so we had to deal with them in the appropriate manner (death, obviously!). Then it seemed that Mr Torgue himself wanted to send a camera crew along with us, capturing us killing bikers using Torgue branded weapons. This was a bit of a challenge as neither JBG nor myself had many Torgue weapons, so we were somewhat hamstrung by trying to use relatively underpowered weapons to accomplish this.
Finally, we returned to Flyboy’s territory, to attempt Tier 2 and Tier 3 battles collecting his ‘bling’ and destroying the Escort Buzzards. The Tier 2 battle was relatively straightforward, but by the time we’d failed the Tier 3 battle both JBG and I felt we’d done enough of this type of mission for one session!
It only remained to head back to the arena to take on Piston. Unsurprisingly, he continued to cheat, turning up in a robot dinosaur that proved pretty challenging to defeat. There were a number of times where one of us needed reviving, and luckily when we both ended up in that state, the Badassasaurus was close to death, so it was relatively easy to finish him off. Piston then needed dispatching, which we managed to do without too much drama.
After that, we headed back to Moxxi’s bar for a well-earned drink.
I have to say, playing through Mr Torgue’s DLC was highly entertaining, and it’s definitely a DLC that I’ll consider returning to in the future.
The final video of the Torgue campaign. This DLC has been excellent, for me largely because it has been about fighting bad guys and not nasty creatures. It’s all about bad guys for me.
That said we started with a wrap-up mission for fly-boys which turned into a slog. Largely because the enemies were all in the sky, so if you were fighting for your life the process could be tedious as the sky emptied and you were casting about for something to hit.
The final faceoff with Piston was serviceable, the monster truck made it challenging but a Boss Battle none the less. I would much better enjoy a tiered arena battle.
All in all, I loved the Torgue DLC. Borderlands 3 is in our sights so not sure how much more we will be returning to Borderlands 2, but if I was looking for something fun to do over a long night this would be on the shortlist.