PixlBit

This is blog suicide. Who in their right mind would publish a new blog in the middle of February? Well, I had some thoughts that I wanted to get down and out, but don't have the patience to wait until March.

I got my 5th Platinum trophy last week from Deadly Tower of Monsters. It was a fun distraction of a game and I would probably recommend it whenever it goes on sale again. Before you even ask, it is an isometric beatem-up kinda game with a campy 70s sci-fi B movie vibe.

What I really wanted to talk about is Mad Max, which I have been playing a lot of over the past week or so. I have decided to try a different approach to how I am playing this open-world game in the hopes to increase my enjoyment of it. There is also the hope that I will not burn out before I finish the campaign, like what happened with Far Cry 4. There are two things in particular that I do in open-world games that I decided to chang up. The first is how I approach the map and the other is how I upgrade my character.

Firstly let's look at the map. One of the tasks in Far Cry 4 was to ascend towers strewn across the map and disrupt Pagan Min's broadcasts. Doing this would add markers to your map and unlock new weapons and upgrades for your character. Once the items were on the map, I would feel the need to go and explore them all and that is how I hit a wall before the campaign was finished. Mad Max has hot air balloons that you can ascend to scope out the areas and add markers to your map. Unlike Far Cry, I can see no other benefit to using these balloons than to scout out places of interest... so I have only used the first one that you come across. This means that I happen upon locations and tasks during my normal course of play and clear them off the map when I find them. It feels far more organic and I like the feeling of discovering places on my own.

Regardless of the type game, I love to upgrade my character to full power as early as possible so that I can just breeze through the rest of the campaign. I have just been keeping up with the game as I progress and it is liberating. Instead of spending hours going in and out of mennus to determine what I have to do in the game to unlock the next perk, I have been playing the game. It is an approach that I can't believe that I never thought of before.

Anyways, I have been having a blast with the game and cannot stop thinking about getting back into the wasteland. I think that it may be one of the most underrated games of 2015, especially since it had the unfortunate pleasure of releasing the same day as MGSV.