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.

The Vita: Good System, Needs Some Work

I own both a Vita and a 3DS, so what I'm not here to do is have a stupid one man portable console war.  I will say very briefly though, that I do prefer my vita to my 3DS.  It feels better to use and the games on it (Project Diva F and P4G, for example) I feel like playing way more than anything on my 3DS.

Anyway, if you do a bit of googling around for the Playstation Vita, it's not hard to see that really it's not selling all that well.  It's not doing awfully badly in its own right but it keeps trailing behind basically every other system on the market.

Now Sony have made some good steps getting all these indie developers involved.  The inclusion of The Binding of Isaac and Hotline Miami on the Vita is really good, but if Sony want this thing to do well they need to do more.  I think the biggest problem is that while the system is a nice piece of hardware, there really isn't anything good to get people to buy it.

Sony got kind of lucky with me, since I had a great deal of my shit stolen.  The port of P4G and Muramasa made me really excited because I would be able to play updated versions without having to overspend on original PS2 and Wii copies, which was nice.  But one look around the shops in the EU make it very clear that the Vita isn't getting much love in the games department. 

The situation in Japan isn't much better either though.  The selection is far far greater out here than it is in Sweden or the UK, but the problem is that the current game library for the Vita is mimicking the late PSP library.  What I mean by this is that there is nothing that really stands out, everything is just school girl dating sims or generic looking anime RPGs that only the most hardcore otakus would be remotely interested in.

If Sony just buckled down and put out lets say, 3 absolutely stellar games with good amount of content and quality, sales would skyrocket I imagine.  The Vita is a really nice piece of kit, people just need something to fucking play on it.

3 scary games for the 31st

Well Halloween is finally upon us people!  Now, the big Halloween nights out around Japan all went down last weekend, since Halloween itself falls on a Wednesday and people are working and whatnot.  So! If you need some living room scares, I'm here to provide you with 3 games that may get the fear flowing.

In case anyone cares the game in the top picture is Fatal Frame (or Project Zero)

GAME NUMBER 1! THE BINDING OF ISAAC!

HOORAY! I finally get to talk about this thing again!  You may be scratching your head at this first pick since The Binding of Isaac isn't all that scary really, at least not at face value.  No, the Binding of Isaac is just disturbing, in both plot and imagery.  Apart from your enemies being all horrible disfigurations from a babies nightmare, if you spend enough time in the basement then you'll realise just how grim Isaacs tale really is, and once all is revealed, it's really quite unsettling.  So if you want a Halloween game that wont make you lose sleep at night, Isaac is the way to go!

GAME NUMBER 2! LONE SURVIVOR!

This little indie gem really impressed me when I fired it up for the first time.  It's one of the only horror games that is actually trying to be scary rather than just startling.  While you may not think a game with 2D pixel art could be all that scary, the atmosphere in this thing is oppressive as all hell.  It's not very long, but the feelings of dread and panic are delivered in such huge amounts that staying in the world of Lone Survivor for extended periods is quite a strain on the senses.

GAME 3! HALF-LIFE 2!

What the fuck am I talking about? Half Life 2? scary? Well hear me out.

When I say Half Life 2, I don't mean Half Life 2 itself, I mean the absolutely staggering numbers of mods available for this game.  Of that large number of mods, a good deal of them are scary mods, and good ones at that too!  Nightmare House 2 and Grey are 2 really good ones just to get you started, but you can find so many scary fucking mods for this thing it'll make your head spin.  So fire up google and get to it.

There you have it folks, a good way to burn a wednesday evening at home for halloween.  Also, don't worry if you are a gamer on a budget, the above titles are cheap as chips so you won't be breaking the bank for any of these games.

Blog Updates!

Well I don't really have time to make a full on big post today, so instead I'm going to grace you with some ideas I have for the near future.

First, I'm planning to do more Isaac videos, mainly of the challenge mode and probably with commentary.  I'll upload them even if I lose, but I probably won't upload every attempt because that will get pretty dull pretty fast, probably the first attempt and then the 5th, 10th etc.

The other big video project I have in mind is doing some mahjong commentary, playing online and explaining why it's bullshit when I don't win.  It'll also be semi educational so it might be of interest to anyone wanting to learn the game

There is also an idea to do a kind of non-gaming related video series but I'm still thinking about that one.

Finally, I have a big month long event that's going to go down starting from around September 1st, but you'll find out more about that tomorrow!

Look forward to the stuff, hopefully you'll enjoy it!

I made an Isaac video and then uploaded it

DUHHH

So the story is, I was testing to see if FFSplit just to make sure it worked and also to make sure that if I did record a game, it wouldn't make my piece of shit computer crash or make the game unplayable, I'm new to this whole recording games thing so I was testing the water.

Anyway, when I started this run on The Binding of Isaac, given that I spent the whole thing playing like a goddamn idiot I still managed to win.  Usually I wouldn't upload something like this but I had a couple buddies that wanted to see the run, so really it's for them, but hopefully some other people will get a kick out of it too!

Now that it's tested, the plan is to make videos of me completing the challenge modes with some commentary or something.  Depending on how interesting they turn out to be, I might upload the unsuccessful runs so you can all point and laugh at me as I don't do so good, but we'll see how it goes.

Anyway, enjoy this little test run I did, despite my crap play I still managed to luck out and get a win!

Videos!

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.