PixlBit

With some slight adjustments to my schedule, I couldn't blog anything Sunday or Monday night like I usually do, but I found some time this afternoon on Tuesdy to do it. I got back from North Carolina on Saturday. On Sunday I hung out with my buddy Mark (aka Mad Krammer) and we played Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel co-op all day and then again on Monday until Xbox Live crashed around 9pm. Turns out some hacker group turned them off again. I don't know how that all worked itself out, but I hope it all got fixed. I want to do more co-op gaming next weekend.

So the first thing Mad Krammer and I did was finish the whole game on True Vault Hunter mode, and I mean both the final boss and the last side mission where you fight an even stronger version of the final boss. I was dubious that we would beat it twice like that but we did. At the end, the game gave us the message that we could begin the next higher difficulty level, but since the DLC for that hasn't come out yet, it just read some strange code. It should read "Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode".

I was also going for the Fragtrap related achievement. You have to use every .exe special and there are a lot of them. Eventually I had to respec my skill tree because there just aren't enough points given by the level cap to get them all. I got it though and discovered the benefits of using the health boost skills for that character.

The glitched one wasn't in Serenity's Waste. I think it was in the Robot Factory, but I forget.

Another thing we did in this playthrough was discover that one of the vault symbols was glitched. You can go right up to it, but when you press "x" to discover it, nothing happens. This was really disapointing because without this one thing, you can't get the achievement for getting at least level one on every challenge in the game. We did a lot of the challenges anyway, especially the location specific ones because they're fun.

Mad Krammer showed me some of the secret areas in the game, since he's been playing longer than I have. One was a Super Mario Bros. designed level that turned out to be kinda difficult because of all the aliens (can't remember what they're called off the top of my head) that swarm you.  Another was was the Excalibastard sword which you can only get when you are of a certain experience level.

That pretty much finished all we could do with two max 50 level characters in this game. Yes, there were a few more challenges to get, but since one of them was glitched as of this writing, it wasn't so important to mop up the rest of them with no achievement at the end of it. So, on Monday, we started some new characters. I chose a Gladiator and he a Fragtrap. At first I took him along with my level 50 Fragtrap to power level him (it was funny to hear my Fragtrap acknowledge another Fragtrap in the game with some funny comments). He leveled really fast and got to level 12 after only a few missions. Then I created my Gladiator, and when I got to level 6 or so solo, we teamed up again so I could beat the Deadlift boss, which I always get stuck on. We played as a level 12 Fragtrap and a level 6 Gladiator until Xbox Live crashed around 9pm.

The Gladiator is female and she uses a shield, called an Aspis, that's also a weapon. I was going for the 100 kills with the Aspis achievement and had to master that thing. It absorbs whatever hits it and stores it as attack energy. Then you release it, and it shoots out at whatever enemy you're facing. I got pretty good at it after a while, and when I hit level 14, I got the achievement.

I was also fiddling with weapons. I decided right from the start she would be all about speed, so I favored weapons with fast rate of fire, and put all bonus points into boosting anything speed related. This worked well for a while, but eventually I would come across weapons that had a lower rate of fire, but double the damage. I had to compromise in such cases and go for the damage. That kind of ruined my plans and, eventually, I ended up using lasers. How that came about I don't know, but you are subject to the randomness of the item drops in this game, and have to go with what you find, regarless of your plans. This bothered me, but I had to throw my hands in the air and give it up to lady chance.

Despite having broke the 100 hour mark playing this game, there's still more to do. There are two more characters I haven't tried, both of which have achievements attached to them: the Lawbringer and the Enforcer. Then I guess I'll mop up as many challenges as I can with my level 50 Fragtrap and hope the glitched one is fixed.

Ade ade ade that's all folks!