PixlBit

Spent the whole day playing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (BtPS) again. I'm up to level 17 as Claptrap. I haven't finished the main story-line although my friend Mark, playing right next to me on his own system, is pretty close to the end. I've been trying not to pay too much attention so I don't spoil the story for myself, but it's not easy. 

I played all sorts of missions, both story and side ones today. Everything is very similar to B2. You hit warp points to get to new areas, jump in a hover-bike or car, and travel through hoards of indiginous creatures and badies to fufill some wacky character's fetch quest. There are a ton of visual jokes laid into the game referencing the old Borderlands or various things in pop culture and gaming. If you look and listen closely there's a ton of them.

                  

                                                             Hover-Bike

The hover-bikes are pretty cool. They float on small propellors like ride-on drones. You can rise into the air a little bit and then slam down to damage what's beneath you or just rise to get over an obsticle. It makes it a little easier to get around crater filled terrain. In multiplayer the bikes can spawn clones of themselves so you don't have to always go to a station if your teammate loses his bike. I thought that was a nice touch. 

               

                                                     The Grinder at Spings'

I found this thing called The Grinder in Concordia, the town that serves as a main hub like Sanctuary did in B2. It's in Springs' and you have to do a side mission to make it work. It mashes up weapons to make new ones. You can combine three items, but I'm not sure what makes what. I've just been trying to combine like rarity and like item to see what happens. I combined three blue rarity weapons and got a purple rarity one. Sometimes you just get a better weapon of the same rarity though. It's a neat alternative to always selling everything you don't need. You can even combine with Moonstones to raise the chances of a really great item. Moonstones are kinda valuable though just like Iridium in B2, so I only tried it once.

            

                                            The Boomtrap tree is on the far left.

I'm following the Boomtrap skill tree for Claptrap and have unlocked up to "I am rubber, you are glue". This skill has a chance to make enemies' bullets reflect off you every time you make a kill. If it's successful, something else happens too called Torgue Fiesta. Crazy latin dance music plays and loads of grenades shoot out of you. Whenever this happened, I would rush the enemy and let the grenades do their work.

                                                   

                                                   The SHiFT vender is in Concordia.

I've been using SHiFT codes. Or rather my friend Mark has been gathering them on social media sites like Facebook and then handing some of them to me. You can enter them into a special SHiFT vending machine and get gold keys to open the gold key weapon's locker that gives you random but always good items. The first time I got a purple rarity sniper rifle and the next a purple rarity shield. Almost all my weapons and mods are of purple rarity now. Purple is pretty good stuff, but there are legendary orange weapons above them and I haven't seen even one yet. 

I did get a little stuck on one side mission. It was one where it seemed you had to execute jumps just right to get to some levels above you. I used my thrusters and made it to one objective but the next one seemed impossible. Turned out that all I had to do was overcharge the jump pad in the room. That technique was introduced to me earlier in the game, but I had forgotten about it.

So that's about it for my second day long play of this game. I probably won't touch it until next week while my friend Mark will be long done and working on his second play-through. Ah well, that' the way it goes.