Bjorn

Some of the new store items in Afterbirth are game breakingly good (Chaos and Refresh), which makes the store even more compelling. If I've got 15 coins, I already consider it worth the time to open every time for a shot at Blank Card or one of the batteries if I've got a good active item.

That reminds me, I always meant to try a game with an all MEC team, preferably all with the punching arm, and just punch everything to death.

Somebody finally put together a summary of the ARG hunt.

Yeah, if I ever do another run, I think I may well skip Memetic Skin and force myself to use other upgrades. It made even late game Classic pretty trivial a lot of times. I did find MECs more useful when using the Roulette Second Wave option. Units who ended up with a poor collection of skills could be turned into MECs, which then at least gave me a guaranteed set of skills I knew could be useful, particularly when other units were healing.

Oh, so apparently there's an actual ARG going on with Edmund dropping hints on Twitter and some hints hidden in codes in the achievement images (assuming people aren't jumping at shadows, but based on Edmund's tweets, they aren't). Current thought is pointing towards there being real life clues somewhere in Santa Cruz (where Ed lives). Looking to see if someone has a coherent writeup of the hunt so far.

Apparently it's not just a cap, but a cap that's variable based on how strong your current build is. Someone posted a video the other day of Ultra Greed being unbeatable because he could heal faster than they could do damage (their shots were also spawning coins, which I think can heal him, so the whole run was kind of a mess for that person). Edmund has acknowledged the balance is off and it's one of the things they are supposed to be working on. With the unlocks, Afterbirth had a bug that unlocked everything for everyone. I don't know if it's been fixed yet or not, or what the trigger condition for it was. It happened on my primary save, but not on my secondary save (which is brand new, thought it would be fun to start from scratch and see what that was like).

Haha, I still make stupid mistakes I'm particularly prone to play later than I should, to the point where I'm tired enough that I end up doing stupid things and ruining a run. I also still keep the item/card/trinket list open in a window, as there's still a handful of items that I just cannot remember exactly what they do or how they interact, even after all this time with the games.

I...um...have logged like 300 hours between the original and Rebirth. I kinda super got into Isaac.

A few thoughts on pills, as they are quite a bit more complex than just sometimes good/sometimes bad, and don't really map over to the shrines in the same way. Isaac is full of risk/reward decisions, of which Pills are just one example, and that risk becomes less and less as you identify more pills in a run. Since negative affects should only hurt you once, that means that over the course of a run you might have 2-4 negative pill encounters, but a dozen or more positive pill uses. Of course it is possible to end up with a pill pool of almost all negative, but that's fairly rare. Pills are interesting versus some of the other risk/reward decisions because the reward actually increases in desperate/risky situations. There's one pill that fully heals you if you are at 1 red heart or less (but normally hurts you) and another pill that gives you a heart container if you are just at 1 container (but normally removes a heart container). This shifts the statistical chance of a good effect in the favor of the player in those situations. It also means that if you find those bad pills, but know under the right conditions they can be good pills, they can be incredibly valuable to hold onto. The heart container one is particularly useful if a Devil Room presents itself and you're only at 2 heart containers, as it's essentially a free item. The one that becomes a full heal can be used to burn all your health on a blood bank safely knowing that you can heal all the damage. Thus, pills actually eliminate the risk element of some of the other areas of the game. This creates a strategy where unknown pills should a) always be taken on the first two floors (when a wipe isn't a big deal) to identify them OR in mid to late game desperate situations when you're running out of health. In the original Isaac, pills were the only way to affect the hidden luck stat. Oddly enough, both negative and positive luck had uses. In fact, aiming for a negative luck if it is an early pill type found was a valid strategy to increase items drops (because of how luck was used in the drop calculation) Telepills are the only item that can take you to the I AM ERROR room, which is usually a fairly valuable room to end up in. Saving Telepils until a floor is fully explored and the boss beaten can potentially score a player 1-3 extra items (along with money and pickups). Explosive Diarrhea initially looks bad (as it can hurt you), but can be useful in a pinch if you're out of bombs or want to save bombs and use it to blow up a tinted rock or secret door (being careful of course). Because different starting characters have different stats, some pills are immediately useful and it's much safer for those characters to start popping pills from the getgo (judas and samson particularly with their low starting health). Getting Balls of Steel in the pill pool (which does not contain every pill type on each run) has saved more runs than I can count.

I actually quite liked all the challenges except for Speed, so I really recommend dipping into them except for it. I haven't beat Brains or Onan's Streak yet, they're hard but at least both are interesting variations on a normal Isaac run. Most of them give you interesting goals/item combos that are manageable or challenging in an interesting way. GOTTA GO FAST! just isn't that interesting when the original game already wanted you to consistently beat Mom in 20 minutes to take a shot at the Boss Rush. There is still more stuff the devs are going to unlock (likely tied to the Greed machine), and I'm hoping one of those is an alternate path to the new super boss. Mega Satan has three paths to it now (a card, Dad's Key and the traditional Angel route). I don't know why they wouldn't have multiple paths to the new one. Oh, hey, new patch is supposed to come out tonight sometime. Okay, I might give it a few more runs if there's hope that some of this stuff gets adjusted.

I think I might take another long break from Isaac. I've really enjoyed the expansion, but simultaneously find myself kind of frustrated with it. The path to the new boss if very frustrating, and forces a kind of playstyle I don't enjoy. Previously I've beat every boss with every character, and almost beat every boss with every character on Hard Mode. I have no interest in having to do that with the new super boss. Just, no, not with what it takes. The Speed challenge is one that requires constant restarts to get a good starting item, as without a high damage starting item, you're not going to make it to the Heart in sub 16 minutes no matter how good you are, and I really hate just sitting there restarting over and over checking the treasure room. The same with the Lost in Greed mode (fuck doing the Lost with the new super boss). Some of the new item combos are really neat, but I also feel like the frequency that I get interesting item combos is lower now because of the sheer number of items. I haven't even seen Brimstone a single time (though I have got Godhead 4 times now, so that's weird).

It's been awhile since I played 1, but didn't Bethesda kinda botch the whole 50s motif? In the original, in the outside world that culture hadn't continued, but in the isolated vaults, it had? Bethesda just ignored (or fundamentally misunderstood) what F1 was doing.

Mallory Ortberg is taking over as Dear Prudence! I am very, very excited about this. I know this isn't really feminist related, but I figure the people who regularly read this thread will be the ones most likely to know and care about Ortberg's career moves.

Oh hey, I had totally missed that Emily Reese, of the Top Score gaming music podcast, is part of a new thing called Joon that is a podcast network where full episodes are available by backing the podcast at a minimum of $1/mo on Patreon. I really enjoyed TS, even though I ended up falling way behind on it (catching up is what actually led me to discover this). I haven't given the mini/free episodes a listen to see what I think of Joon yet though.

It seems like half my Facebook feed is playing it, and those aren't generally people who talk about games a bunch on Facebook.

I played about 2 hours of it and gave up. It was neat, but it lacked something, the kind of hook that made me excited about restarting after a loss.

I try to keep a decent record of how much I'm spending on games, and even though I have a silly big Steam backlog, I'm spending less now than I was a few years ago and playing more games. I'm okay with that, even if there are dozens of games I'll never actually get around to playing.

If you have the Slingshot DLC, it can help with skipping lasers. I'm pretty sure it introduces a couple of enemies with plasma rifles earlier than normal, so if you can capture one you can get a headstart on research. I know that's true on Classic, I don't know if the same enemies show up on Normal.

An activist I'm friends with in St. Louis made this comment about the Mizzou journalist stuff:

Don't worry, someone will mod in a muzzle soon enough.

I do think it's well within the realm of concern to take a look at overreaction, which I believe is often unintentional, but a completely anticipated outcome now. That was my point in bringing up the way the two Yale professors were being treated, not that it represented the over sensitivity of college kids, but that it follows the same trend of overreactive smack downs that follow so many public fuckups. I also have the same reaction to the people being harassed in my earlier link about the journalists at Mizzou. The mass comm professor fucked up, but doesn't deserve the volume of shit she's getting either. I'm seeing something interesting (and not surprising) go down on Facebook today. I have a lot of western Kansas farm and ranch types on my feed, and a lot of them are talking about how two Sheriff's deputies shot and killed an Idaho rancher a few days ago. The rancher had a gun in his hands and was in the process of putting an injured bull down when something went horribly wrong and the result was him being shot to death. The interesting thing is how many of these people are calling for a full investigation that must result in the two deputies being charged with murder, because obviously the rancher's wife is telling the truth. These are all the same people who lose their shit defending the police when it's a black person killed. Not that I expect any of them to have an epiphany about cops killing other people, of course.

Rockets are the best! On Classic Ironman, grenades and rockets usually went towards destroying cover of tougher enemies so my other units could get a guaranteed kill. I had one dedicated Grenadier on my last playthrough who had 6(!) grenades thanks to the Roulette option.

I'm really not knowledgeable enough on it to want to say anymore.

So should public protesters, camped out on public land, in full view of the public expect to be able to create "safe spaces" free from people photographing or videotaping them? I'm particularly bothered that a mass comm professor was involved in driving off a student reporter (she's not a journalism professor, btw).

How funny, as that's the opposite of what I generally do for most games (keep kb/m handy for certain menu stuff and gamepad for actually playing).