N1njaSquirrel

Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

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 To clarify, the fundamental idea of the floating eye as an unattackable monster isn't bad design, what I was referring to was enforcing the idea with a harsh punishment, rather than just telling the player. I think Nethack is just better when it warns you about floating eyes, and I feel the same way about Isaac's downside items.

 

To me that sounds wrong. Why can't I learn by doing rather than being spoon fed information? While playing through Dark Souls (well, any game with grandiose bosses), I die to bosses because I'm not informed beforehand of their tells, or their damage potential. I don't rage quit and say it's bad design. I go back, I figure out what the tells are, how best to deal with each move, and I beat the boss.

 

What you're asking for essentially, is a guide to be in every manual, because not knowing something beforehand makes it bad. No thanks, that sounds awful. 

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My understanding of the floating eye situation (and keep in mind this is coming from a perspective of not having played nethack) is that the warning it gives before you attack is mostly there for experienced players, so they can move quickly through an area you already explored and not get totally fucked because a particular monster appeared. Basically, nobody who already knows what a floating eye does will ever attack one except by accident (or in rare circumstances), so they added a way to avoid frustrating deaths without having to remove the monster. Also, is the warning it gives "attacking this will probably paralyze you" or is it more like "are you sure you want to do that?". If it's the latter that's still pretty dangerous to an inexperienced player.

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Well that was the weirdest run I ever had: I thought that Brimstone would overwrite Mom's Knife, but instead it made a barrage of knives appear about a second after firing the normal one. A barrage of homing, poisoned knives. I went up to six health mostly due to freak good luck with pills, then down to zero and a few black hearts due to my greedy devil-dealing. Still, by the end of it all I was Guppy, and the Duke of Flies.

 

Weird.

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Ultimately I think the knife barrage is a bit less powerful/valuable than Brim, but it's certainly neat and worth getting at least once.
 
For those interested in the themes of Isaac, Arthur Chu wrote an interesting piece about his relationship with the game, having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian home.  I find these explorations of Isaac really interesting.  I grew up in a very Christian town, but my family was not particularly active in religion (believers, sure, but not of the daily worship, fundamentalist kind). 

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Yeah, I went for it because I wanted Brim, but I don't much mind what I got. Still had the original knife to deal damage with too, plus that swarm of little knives circling around the room.

 

Another thought that happened there: has anybody experimented with or done any math on how many items you could potentiall get during a single run? A library plus a couple of batteries meant I got to touch just about every book in the game on that run and put them out of the pool, so I really got a lot of neat stuff once I got to the chest. I guess Guppy's Tail, Contract From Below and a Forget Me Now could really set you up at that stage, or it might even be possible to completely break the game with some sort of Blank Card plus Wheel of Fortune infinite charges setup.

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If you count rolling into items using d4 as getting them I'm pretty sure you can easily get every item in the game if you get the d4 early on. If you get the paperclip or a gold key, jera rune, blank card, and a couple of 48 hour energy pills you can probably get them all legit on the chest.

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...or it might even be possible to completely break the game with some sort of Blank Card plus Wheel of Fortune infinite charges setup.

 

Blank Card + Jera can duplicate unopened chests, throw in some recharge bonuses (the Habit is the best if you have some healing ability on a floor), and you can actually get every single item in the pool. Not every item will be available every game, so you can't get everything in one run, but you can definitely exhaust the pool. I've never pulled it off, as I ended up running out of keys and foolishly didn't leave myself one on the floor to keep duping with blank card. If you go back quite a few pages, I think I put up a spoilered image of me filling an entire room with Chests in the Chest.

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For those interested in the themes of Isaac, Arthur Chu wrote an interesting piece about his relationship with the game, having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian home.  I find these explorations of Isaac really interesting.  I grew up in a very Christian town, but my family was not particularly active in religion (believers, sure, but not of the daily worship, fundamentalist kind). 

That's a great piece. I've been very impressed with Arthur Chu's writing over the last few months. I'm sure Edmund must be thrilled at it too, since from what I've heard that same kind of upbringing was very much the inspiration behind the game.

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Blank Card + Jera can duplicate unopened chests

 

Didn't know it doubled those too, but I guess it makes sense. Also didn't know it worked with runes. Not pills though, right? Otherwise you'd basically just have to get the right setup for carrying both a Jera rune and and a 48 Hours Energy pill and get endless everything.

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Not pills, but it does duplicate batteries B)  Which means any floor where a pair of batteries drop is a floor where you have infinite uses of Jera. 

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Didn't know it doubled those too, but I guess it makes sense. Also didn't know it worked with runes. Not pills though, right? Otherwise you'd basically just have to get the right setup for carrying both a Jera rune and and a 48 Hours Energy pill and get endless everything.

It's not possible to carry both between floors. If you get starter deck it replaces all pills that spawn with cards, and if you get little baggy it replaces all cards that spawn with pills.

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To me that sounds wrong. Why can't I learn by doing rather than being spoon fed information? While playing through Dark Souls (well, any game with grandiose bosses), I die to bosses because I'm not informed beforehand of their tells, or their damage potential. I don't rage quit and say it's bad design. I go back, I figure out what the tells are, how best to deal with each move, and I beat the boss.

 

What you're asking for essentially, is a guide to be in every manual, because not knowing something beforehand makes it bad. No thanks, that sounds awful. 

 

But I don't want a manual of boss tells, Isaac has boss tells to be learned and I'm fine with those. With boss tells, I still have the potential to dodge an attack the first time, knowing just makes it easier. Similarly, I still have the potential to get hit by it once I know, dodging them is a matter of skill. Dodging an item whose effects I don't want is strictly a matter of "Have I encountered this item before?"
 
Let's take a specific example. I think that Isaac would be a better game if before you picked up the Strange Attractor for the first time, it warned you "This will pull enemies towards you". Yes, that would remove the moment in the room after picking it up where you notice that that's the effect it's having, but I don't think that's a great loss. It would also remove the moment where I, and some percentage of players like me go "Wait, it does what? I don't want that, get rid of it!" I think removing that moment makes the game better, enough so to make up for the loss of the mildly interesting moment where every player discovers what the item does.
 
Does it not make the game better to remove the unpleasantness of being stuck with an ability some people will hate? Or am I undervaluing the little moment of discovering what the Strange Attractor does? Hell, what if we didn't have the warning before pickup, but the inventory screen gave you the option to discard the Strange Attractor if you decided you didn't want it after figuring out what it did? Would -that- not make the game better?
 
I realize a discard option has the potential to be mechanically relevant with regards to certain combos and anti-combos, which isn't the intent, so let's say you can only discard an item within three rooms of picking it up.

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Let's take a specific example. I think that Isaac would be a better game if before you picked up the Strange Attractor for the first time, it warned you "This will pull enemies towards you". Yes, that would remove the moment in the room after picking it up where you notice that that's the effect it's having, but I don't think that's a great loss.
Strongly disagree. Also that's not what that item does.
 

 

Does it not make the game better to remove the unpleasantness of being stuck with an ability some people will hate?

I think it's a fallacy to assume that a game is improved by removing unpleasantness. The Walking Dead would not become a better game if no one died in it.

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I think it's a fallacy to assume that a game is improved by removing unpleasantness. The Walking Dead would not become a better game if no one died in it.

 

As a sweeping generalization sure, it, like all generalizations, is false. But in this specific case, would removing this specific unpleasant thing not make the game better?

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...no?

The only time I get annoyed by Isaac is when it doesn't give me anything to work with. Isaac is a chore if you get zero damage/tears upgrades. The rest of the time, I'm content to be along for the ride. Being able to drop items would add a massive UI clusterfuck for a marginal and obnoxious benefit. Really, the only difference between getting screwed over by items and getting screwed over by bosses/enemies is that you've been trained to think that items are unconditionally good and bosses are unconditionally bad. Every item you take is a risk. If that scares you, don't take it.

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Every item you take is a risk. If that scares you, don't take it.

 

That is absurd. If I were to do that I'd end up with no upgrades at all, and be in the zero damage place you don't like.

 

 

.Really, the only difference between getting screwed over by items and getting screwed over by bosses/enemies is that you've been trained to think that items are unconditionally good and bosses are unconditionally bad.

 

That is just not true. If I am good enough at Isaac combat, I can beat a boss even if I'm not familiar with it. There is no skill I can be good at to avoid an item with a downside, I just have to get screwed over by it once, and from then on I'll know.

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That is just not true. If I am good enough at Isaac combat, I can beat a boss even if I'm not familiar with it. There is no skill I can be good at to avoid an item with a downside, I just have to get screwed over by it once, and from then on I'll know.

 

Okay, I've been following this discussion and mostly understanding both arguments, that statement is weird. Wasn't your original complaint about the Emperor card teleporting you to a boss before you'd healed up? If you were better at combat in Binding of Isaac, that most certainly would have helped you avoid the downside of that item. In fact, I can't think of any item the downside of which is not mitigated by being good at the other systems in the game. I would argue that you should only risk picking up items insofar as you believe your skill at the game can handle their potential downsides. That's an interesting dynamic that would be lost if all items had positive effects.

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That is just not true. If I am good enough at Isaac combat, I can beat a boss even if I'm not familiar with it. There is no skill I can be good at to avoid an item with a downside, I just have to get screwed over by it once, and from then on I'll know.

 

Yes, it puts you at a disadvantage, but it no more instantly kills you than a boss does. And, again, almost no single item puts you at a disadvantage except by it being difficult to get used to: Strange attractor is a difficult and dangerous item, but can be incredibly powerful in tandem with others, and you'll never find out what those combinations are if you're too scared to take it. The same is true of tiny planet and soy milk. And yeah sometimes fate will frown upon you, but part of the satisfaction of the game is surviving until you find that one item that ties it all together and lets you destroy the rest of the game.

 

That is absurd.

Yes. Yes it is.

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This is all also very strongly hinged on your perception that when you pick up something you don't like you are stuck with it, even though the game really fosters a pragmatic attitude towards how discardable individual runs are in the grand scheme of things. Realistically, even if you decide to take your lumps you probably won't be stuck with the thing you hate for more than half an hour at worst (which is to say best). And there's always the option to restart.

 

With boss tells, I still have the potential to dodge an attack the first time, knowing just makes it easier.

 

And with unknown items, you still might get lucky and get something you like. I think it's a bit weird how you're mixing levels in those analogies like running into some sort of jinxed pickup is a given, but in bossfights aaaaanything might happen.

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Okay, I've been following this discussion and mostly understanding both arguments, that statement is weird. Wasn't your original complaint about the Emperor card teleporting you to a boss before you'd healed up?

 

That was one of my complaints, and in that case the argument that you can skill your way out of it is valid. I died because I hadn't healed, but I could have avoided the death were I good enough to not take damage. My other points were about passives with negative effects (if I don't want an item's downside, but I don't know what the item is, there's no way to avoid that bad thing happening), and a bad experience with the Tower card where it spawned an undodgable configuration because I was somewhere with poor mobility, instead of in the middle of the room. If I'd known what the Tower did, I could've prepared for it and avoided taking damage, but because I used it somewhere poor (which I had no way of knowing not to do), it put me into a situation I couldn't escape with skill.

 

 

Yes, it puts you at a disadvantage, but it no more instantly kills you than a boss does. And, again, almost no single item puts you at a disadvantage except by it being difficult to get used to: Strange attractor is a difficult and dangerous item, but can be incredibly powerful in tandem with others, and you'll never find out what those combinations are if you're too scared to take it. The same is true of tiny planet and soy milk. And yeah sometimes fate will frown upon you, but part of the satisfaction of the game is surviving until you find that one item that ties it all together and lets you destroy the rest of the game.

 

I GET that the downside items have valid uses. Sometimes, I won't want them. Maybe I have none of the pieces of the combo, maybe it actively counters one of my other items, or maybe I have miserably low speed and don't need the Attractor pulling things any closer to me. There exist situations in which, because of an item's downside, I would rather not have that item. And if I don't yet know the item's downside when I pick it up, this leads to a situation where I just got hit with a penalty that I had no way to avoid. It sucks to experience, and it's an instance where an otherwise fair game does something bad to me that I can't avoid with skill.

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To be honest, the knowledge/skill distinction you are making is supremely weird to me. Seems to fall right into that hole of things that people like to think are just about talent, and craft or hard work shouldn't factor into it. So a game that you could waltz right through if you happened to have godlike skill is fair but one that you could waltz right through if you looked at a wiki for a bit to speed up the learning process is unfair? I guess that's not really how I feel about it.

 

I mean, one is an entirely hypothetical consolation for somebody as moderately talented as myself. The other is a very real option.

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Well it looks like a magnet so it's not like there was NO way you could have guessed, but okay whatever. And the tower card says "destruction brings creation" when you pick it up, plus if you know anything about the symbolism of tarot cards the tower is generally Not A Happy Card, but okay whatever I guess. The emperor says "Challenge me!" when you pick it up.

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To be honest, the knowledge/skill distinction you are making is supremely weird to me. Seems to fall right into that hole of things that people like to think are just about talent, and craft or hard work shouldn't factor into it. So a game that you could waltz right through if you happened to have godlike skill is fair but one that you could waltz right through if you looked at a wiki for a bit to speed up the learning process is unfair? I guess that's not really how I feel about it.

 

I think I've explained myself just about every way possible, so it's starting to look like either this is something I cannot communicate well, or I'm bothered by very different things than the rest of the people here. Either way, I'm just about ready to give up, but I'll give it one last shot to try to explain the knowledge/skill distinction. It's not that allowing for knowledge is bad, if it was I'd be complaining about learning boss patterns. The issue is disallowing skill.

 

Imagine there was a point in the game where it spawns a blue door and a purple door. One of the doors kills you, one of them lets you through. It's always the same colour, but the only way to learn which is to go through a door. That is a situation that can be defeated with knowledge, but the way in which it discards skill is kinda bullshit. Now obviously death is an extreme example, but what if the bad door only did one damage? Still bullshit. That's how I feel when I pick up an item with a downside that I don't want. The game hit me with a bad thing which I had no opportunity to avoid. Sure I'll learn for next time and know whether or not to pick it up, but that doesn't make this time any more fair.

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If the game had 300 different doors with 300 different colors and 300 different effects, I would be very surprised indeed if none of them damaged me. In fact, in Binding of Isaac there are doors that do a point of damage, and you seemingly don't have a problem with this. They look very obviously different, very spiky. So you can say your analogy is different, because there's no visual difference between the doors -- but, as I said, there were plenty of clues as to what those items did before you ever took/used them.

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