The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

The Binding of Isaac was one of the first games I wrote about on this blog way back when and recently a new version came out and it's fucking fantastic!  BoI:Rebirth is one of the ONLY games I have pre loaded off steam in years so that should be a good indication of just how good it is.

The Binding of Isaac is a rougelike game about a small child trying to escape from his mother killing him.  You must make your way through a randomly generated dungeon picking up items and killing enemies with your tears.  Like most games in the genre, permadeath is a large part of the game so if you die then you have to start all over again with everything reset to its starting values.  As you play and have successful runs, you start to unlock stuff like characters, challenges, items, locations and much much more. 

Basically, if you were a fan of the first Binding of Isaac it's essentially more of the same thing.  It's basically another expansion back disguised as a full game but the amount of additional content and fixes to certain things is so huge that it's absolutely worth the price of admission.

The Binding of Isaac is one of those games that just eats your fucking time without you even realising it.  You'll fire it up thinking "oh I'll just have a quick run or 2" and then 6 hours later your still playing it with absolutely no signs of stopping.  While the game doesn't contain any multi player features, if you have a group of friends to share stories of your successes or complete bullshit deaths the game becomes even more fun because everyone has their own unique story about some shit that happened to them.

Rebirth takes sharing the stories to a whole new level though because now you can share your dungeon seed with another person and they can re-live your run for themselves.  When you pause the game you are given a 6 character code that you can pass on to someone else and when they input it they will be given the exact same dungeon you were in.  However playing with a seed doesn't count towards unlocks or anything like that but you can still challenge each other if you feel like you had a particularly tough time.

If you aren't already in on the whole Isaac thing, go and buy the game right fucking now.  I'm serious, just close this window, fire up steam and fucking buy it.  Binding of Isaac is some of the most fun I've had with any indie game ever and it's the kind of game basically everyone can enjoy.

One Way Heroics

What the fuck is this, Year of the Rougelike?  So many fucking rougelikes popping up in my steam client I don't know which ones to buy first.  Keeping that in mind, I did the most logical thing and started with the one I got for free on Steam via my steam wallet and my god am I glad I did.

One way heroics is a game developed by Smoking WOLF and I know very little about this person/these people so I can't comment on any other their works.  However, One Way Heroics is an amazing little rougelike that is simple on the surface yet contains a surprising amount of depth.

The story involves your hero on a quest to kill some kind of dark lord but as you adventure through the land, the left hand side of the planet is being swallowed by the abyss.  Therefore you can't stop for too long to level up and gather equipment, you gotta haul ass and carefully plan your route to maximise EXP gain and item acquirement.

At the start of the game you have to choose a name, a class (of which there are about 6 or 7 if I remember correctly) and a few perks.  After you're done creating your little doomed avatar, you have to choose a world.  You can choose the world that you played previously or you can have the game generate you a random new one, but on top of that you can type in a string of letters to have the game generate a world OR you can choose one of the special worlds that change daily.

When you win (or die, which is more likely) you are given a stats screen to tell you just how well you did that's broken down into easy to understand parameters and based on these results you are given points.  With these points you can expand an interdimensional box that allows you to transfer items from a dead character to a new one OR you can use the points to unlock new features such as classes or perks.  As you start winning you begin to unlock things like different difficulty modes, which turns a rather pleasant rougelike into a gruelling challenge that will really test your skill and luck.

The game also features an online element where you can enter a dimension with other players and you are able to see how far they got or what they died to and I think this is to help you plan ahead, but I just like laughing at the people who get killed early on because I'm a bit of a bastard.

With a game this good you'd expect it to be expensive right?  Well wrong, it's one of the cheapest things I've ever seen coming in at a mere $3.50 on Steam and $1.99 if you get it off a website called Playism.  So really you have no excuse NOT to check it out.  It's a great game, a good way to kill some time if you're busy yet has enough depth to sink hours and hours into if you're that kind of player.

Free Game Friday: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Well, I'm about to kick off a weekend of gaming with something free for everyone to enjoy!  This week have have Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a challenging game with perma-death!

This game is a rougelike, and for those that don't know what that is, it's a genre of game that involves randomised dungeons, loot and enemies, and usually tasks you with getting to the bottom of whatever structure you have to move through.  This game is no different, you have to get to the bottom of the dungeon, grab the Orb of Zot, and get out again, easier said than done though.

There is a lot to be said for character creation with race and classes being provided out the arse for you to fuck about with.  In fact, there is so much to this game that it would take me far too long so if you do play it, go find the wiki and use that to help you.

Like I said before, if you die, your character is deleted and you have to start from scratch again.  What makes this even cooler is that as you get deeper, you will be attacked by ghosts of your previous dudes, so you have to be extra careful when that starts going down.

It can be a bit difficult to get your head round this one if you are new to the genre, but there is plenty of material to help you out.  Even if you do only play this for a weekend, I promise you will not beat it!

LINK!
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

The Binding of Isaac

Well, this is the first real post I'm going to make, so I figured I'd make it about the game that's been taking up a pretty significant portion of my time.

What you are looking at up there, is the splash art for The Binding of Isaac which is available on Steam and created by the dudes who gave us Super Meat Boy.  The game itself isn't exactly new, as with most games, due to my massive backlog I don't play new releases usually for a LONG time, unless I've been particularly excited for it.

Anyway, before I get into talking about this game properly, I'll give a quick overview of the story.  Basically, you play as Isaac, a naked baby who is a victim of abuse from his fundamental christian mother.  Isaac's mother believes that she is hearing the voice of god, who has commanded her to sacrifice her only child to prove her love for him.  Isaac then promptly jumps into the basement and so begins your quest to kill your own mother.  AWESOME!

OK, so the story is kind of dumb but that's OK for this kind of game.  Basically what Isaac is, is a Rougelike.  For those of you who don't know what that is, it means that you have to deal with randomly generated items, loot and enemies in order to go kill the big bad at the end and if you die, you die permanently and have to start over.

Now I'm not a huge rougelike player, I have enjoyed things such as Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and the like but I've never really been any good at them.  Isaac streamlines the dungeon crawling thing and makes it very accessible to those who aren't familiar with this genre.  There is no character creation, no option of race, gender, class etc. just a few naked babies to choose from (which are basically all Isaac wearing some kind of wig or eye patch or something) and a big dungeon to explore.

Now this isn't exactly a long game, it's actually pretty short as far as most rougelikes go.  The game has about 5 stages from the outside, which expands to 8 or so when you beat it for the first time.  But don't let that fool you into thinking this is an easy game, oh no, its HARD and it will kick your ass every which way until your crying like a little bitch in the corner of the room.

The game starts out out weak as shit, your bullets do sod all real damage and you have very little health, but the game provides you with HUGE amounts of treasure to find to upgrade your naked baby into a god killing powerhouse.  However, the game only turns you into a god killing power house every once in a while and will most of the time give you crap items and then fuck you over with a really hard room of enemies or a really annoying boss.

I mean, check this goddamn screen shot out

In the 56 runs I've had of this game so far, I've beaten it a grand total of 2 times.  Oh yeah, the real kick to the nads here is when you beat it that one time, it doesn't count, you gotta beat it AGAIN to make the mom kill count.  That first time just gets you the epilogue and the final few stages.

But this is the beauty of Isaac.  Even when the game gives you a crap set of items the challenge never feels unfair, it still always feels like you have a chance and no matter what shit happens to you, there is always that vague hope that the next item room will give you that one thing you need to win.  Plus the other great thing about this game is the sheer variation in the items.  My count reads 107 and that's not even nearly all of them and whats crap to me will not be crap to another player, so each person can really adapt to their own kind of play style.

I could talk for hours and hours about this goddamn game, but instead of gushing on here maybe I'll try and find a way to record some footage and gush there instead because this is turning into a bit of a wall of text.

However, before I wrap this post up, there is one thing I want to mention, and that's the DLC.

That up there folks, is the logo for The Wrath of the Lamb DLC for this game, and oh my god is it a case of DLC done RIGHT.  When I look at most DLC for games recently it just irritates me as tacked on garbage or shit we should have got anyway, but this, this is a perfect example of how DLC can be used to really improve a game.

This shit adds so much goddamn content.  Alternate levels, new rooms, new bosses, new versions of Isaac to play as, new endings, new enemies, NEW GODDAMN EVERYTHING!  It adds difficulty as well as a shitton of new stuff that makes the game feel fresh.  I can't commend the developers enough for providing DLC of this quality.  Also its cheap, I snagged it for a mere $3 off Steam, and who can't afford that!?

So hopefully you'll give The Binding of Isaac a go, I'm done gushing on here.  Any more gushing about this game will hopefully be done in hilarious videos of me failing to win.