Items

Empire Bay holds two collections, and between them they account for 209 separate finds. That is roughly where the similarity ends. One set is addressed by chapter and the other is addressed by neighbourhood, and that single difference decides how you chase each of them, when you can afford to ignore one, and which of the two can quietly close a door behind you.

What Each Set Is Pinned To

Every entry in our Playboy magazine location guide carries a chapter number. All 50 of them sit somewhere inside the campaign, the list opens at Chapter 2 because the first chapter holds none at all, and the descriptions are written as instructions for the scene you are standing in: go upstairs instead of following Henry and Joe, take the basement stairs instead of walking into Joe's apartment. Read the page top to bottom and you are reading the story in order.

Our wanted poster location guide never names a chapter once. Its 159 entries carry a district instead, the descriptions are about alleys, fences, garage walls and rooftops rather than about missions, and the page signs off by telling you to clear one area completely before you move to the next. Only one poster in the whole list, #98 in China Town, is described as something you will walk past during a story cutscene.

The Magazines Follow The Story

Fourteen of the fifteen chapters hold at least two magazines, and the busiest are Chapter 3 and Chapter 11 with five apiece. Nothing in the run is front-loaded or saved for the end; the set is spread fairly evenly across Vito's whole arc.

Two of those entries come with an explicit warning, and both are worth knowing before you reach them. Playmate 10 sits on the fourth shelf of the distillery office in Chapter 5, and our guide is blunt about it: take it before the fire, because it is your only chance and a restart will not give it back. Playmate 26 in Chapter 10 is near the lift generator and wants you to be quick, or it goes. Everything else on the list is described as a thing lying in a room you are already walking through.

The Posters Follow The Map

The posters divide across nineteen districts, and the split is lopsided enough to plan around. Little Italy alone owes you twelve. Dipton, Hunters Point, East Side and Midtown are worth ten each, and the three smallest are down at six apiece. The numbering does not march cleanly through the districts either: several of them are picked up twice by the list, so the numbers column below is worth reading before you commit to a route.

Height is the recurring obstacle rather than distance. Poster #74 is on a repair shop chimney behind Joe's garage and our guide suggests accelerating a car at it; #108 in North Millville sits on a platform with no stairs and wants the same treatment; #121 in Midtown is on a rooftop you reach by climbing the building next door. The advice the page closes on is to treat an out-of-reach poster as a puzzle rather than a miss, search alleys and the walls of buildings that stand out, and finish a district before driving to the next one.

Running Both In One Playthrough

Because the two sets answer to different things, they belong in different parts of your run. The magazines have to be picked up while the chapter that owns them is still on screen, so keep that list open beside our chapter by chapter walkthrough and glance at the next chapter's entries before you start it. The posters are pinned to walls that are not going anywhere, which makes them the thing to sweep between missions or in a dedicated drive with one district at a time.

One quirk in the magazine list to be aware of while you count: 48 of the 50 entries carry a Playmate number, two of them do not, and the numbers 3 and 25 appear nowhere on the page. The find in Chapter 2 near the wrecked cars at Mike's shop and the one in the Chapter 10 laundry room are the two unnumbered entries, and our guide does not say which of the missing pair each one is. The locations themselves are described in full, so nothing is lost on the ground; the gap is only in the labelling. For everything else this folder covers, from the story itself to getting the game stable on PC, start at the Mafia 2 guides hub.