Riskin' Rain: 02/12/2014

Someone should tell Alex that there isn't 8 or 9 stages.

And also Acrid is totally the best class.

BEAT YAMA!

Great video!

God Damnit Patrick! Don't be so good at video games!

RISK OF RAIN COMING TO VITA PRAISE THE SUN

Oh hey, cool.

Gonna watch this tomorrow.

Great game, i've only made a first run, survived for 40 mins...

I can only imagine the greatness of co-op!

I don't particularly like Commando as much as some of the other classes, he ends up being more item dependent than some others because his base damage isn't that great. Mercenary is sort of in the same boat, but his attacks have way more invincibility frames and in general synergize better than Commando's.

The best classes though are probably Huntress, Acrid and Engineer / Miner.

There are 9 regular stages + a secret one, you just never go through all of them in a single playtrough.

Yeah, the game doesn't scale in co-op very much which makes soloing much much harder on the same difficulty.

Patrick is good at video games.

This game got snubbed for best soundtrack. SNUBBED!

Nailed it.

Praise the sun?

WHY DOES PATRICK HATE THE LETTER G!?

@ardennes said:

It does, but the difficulty is vastly overrated by people. You just need to find a good balance, since with a properly exped out character you can easily turtle the neverending barrage of enemies on the last level.

Honestly, this game got the absolute best when I maxed out the difficulty timer on the last level with the Huntress and was facing a billion dudes at the same time, including bosses. Super tense and super fun to see those juggernauts fall.

The Binding of Isaac is much, much harder, since a lot more of that game is based on luck than skill, and there are plenty of room combinations and items that can seriously fuck up your run. Not to mention Sheol runs, since Satan can be ridiculously tough compared to the Cathedral boss, unless you have the most gamebreaking thing in the game (Mom's Contact + Mutant Spider/Technology 2), in which case he's a total joke. Or if you have to fight the Mask of Infamy without Piercing Shot or with Dr. Fetus, in which case you're either fucked or you should have a lot of time to waste.

@downloaded: For real? Seems like the Vita is getting all the cool indies.

That new Borderlands2 bundle is looking tempting.

Nice run Patrick! That's pretty much Risk of Rain. Fun game, but all about getting an item/class combination to allow you to kite, recover health, and have some armor. Then you just have to execute on kiting around. Some of the classes are much easier for kiting (Huntress, Acrid) such that health/armor is mainly what you need, but getting a shit-ton of drones with the Commando works as well.

There's lots to unlock and discover, but the item randomness means beating the core game isn't as satisfying as something like Spelunky, where it takes tons of runs building skill and understanding of the game to get to Olmec/Hell/Yama. Even if you get an amazing seed in Spelunky you're not going to roll through the later levels.

Eh, I'd say Binding of Isaac is much more skill based than Risk of Rain (and yeah, much harder). A bad item set in BoI can screw you, but even if you do get a good item set you still need to react appropriately to rooms and bosses, and it's possible to get destroyed if you panic and screw things up, or if you don't know how to take down a boss. Risk of Rain you can just kite around and roll over all enemies if things go right. All of my good Risk of Rain runs just had me running in circles as a whirling circle of death by the third/fourth levels.

I agree that the expansion and hidden levels of BoI do make it even more item-dependent and therefore luck-based, sadly. But the vanilla game isn't as bad. To put it another way - it took me dozens of runs to get down the mechanics, items, enemies, and bosses of BoI and get good at it, while I beat Risk of Rain first day I got it once I unlocked Acrid and got a good item set.

Patrick, please stop running towards the gold to pick it up!

Congrats on the victory though!

@deathpooky: I guess what I meant is that you're never completely fucked in RoR unless you fail to collect any good items, which is kinda hard by design - since normally there are plenty of chests and there aren't any items that are detrimental or completely screw you over, like TBoI's Number One or certain item combinations.

But yeah, I agree, TBoI is much more reliant on reflex in the end. It's just that I never felt like I could roll only on that. But it's still my 2011 GOTY and I enjoyed what The Wrath of Lamb brought to the table.

@ghostiet: Yeah, I'd agree with all that. Neither is like Spelunky where even the worst seeds you can do pretty well on pure skill and each you need to get some items to do well. Though generally BoI requires more skill and game knowledge, and can be nasty even with good items, while Rain if you get the right items you roll.

And BoI was one of my favorites of 2011 as well - didn't like the expansion as much, but still a great game. Looking forward to how he reworks things in the remake for console.

Patrick doesn't suck at video games.

This was fantastic. Nice to see some Patrick x Alex play.

This did indeed have an unexpected ending. Oh well, moving on. Play FTL next.

And Alex calling out on Payton Manning was great.

I love this game. It's such a tactical approach to a side-scrolling shooter, refreshing.. Played it a lot when it was released and I unlocked all classes and almost all items. My favourite class is engineer, followed by huntress, but she seems a bit "OP", which takes some of the fun out for me.

It looks like this game gets more boring the further you get in it.
But it seems pretty cool otherwise.

Congrats! I actually find RoR really boring to watch. Most of the time it just looks like a giant clustereff, everything kind of blends together. I feel like you can find a more interesting roguelike/lite to stream. Anyway, keep up the good work!

Play Monaco, a true videogame.

Holy hell this was boring. whew..... I'll come back when he does binding of Isaac or something

@face15: Agreed. First time I beat the game was with Acrid. The crowd-control with that character is crazy

@markg1022: a regular stream of Binding of Isaac would be pretty awesome, I remember watching some YT streamer that did like...hundreds of episodes of that, it never got old

Nice run Patrick, even though the items deserve all the credit.

J/k, I think, I know nothing about this game.

You can hit all of them in one playthrough if you choose to go back at the final teleporter. The stage you get is random though so it is unlikely.

What a great game. Fantastic soundtrack too... I will play the shit out of the Vita version, I'm sure. I really hope they manage to address some of the horrendous slowdown issues, when things get crazy in later levels.

For my money, I'd like to see Patrick play some Dungeons of Dredmor. I love that game, but I'm totally piss-poor at it. It'd be interesting to see how he fares.

Personally, I'm kinda tired of The Binding of Isaac, as much as I adore it. Folks like Northerlion have drained that well completely dry. I think there's more lesser covered alternatives that would be far more interesting. Well, at least until Rebirth comes out anyway.

Haven't finished watching yet, but the shorthand for items is:

White - Common, useful but not amazing, some are just worthless

Green - More rare, more useful.

Red - Holy shit amazing, getting one of these on level one is the beginning of a winning run. Having three of these by the end of level 2... it's gonna be fun watching you guys beat this.

I love RoR, so many times have I felt invincible and then exploded with some bad decision making, just trying to get an item that's dropped or finish off a single enemy.

I'm pretty sure he saps brads videogame skills when he's sleeping.

Patrick thought I was saying he was bad at games with a comment I made in the stream chat, but I was addressing folks in the chat saying the game looks super easy, which it only is if you get good items. When I didn't get the flow of the game as much, I would play similarly to how Patrick did. I beat the game and thought "I must be good at this", but then I found out that I got great items and I needed to improve my understanding of the game to get further more consistently, regardless of item drop quality.
The game isn't super hard, but it isn't easy when you don't get the right items either.

fell down a very deep hole with this yesterday. even bought my friend a copy but we couldn't get the multi to work. :(.

who else really likes the art/aesthetic? reminds me vaguely of out of this world.

I'm not 100% through with the video, so I'm not sure if they said this, but here is the most important info you can have to survive in Risk of Rain.

Enemies spawn infinitely until you start the teliporter. Once you start it, new enemies will continue to spawn directly near you until the clock runs out. (This next part is important) If you stay in one place for too long while the teliporter is ticking down, they will continue to spawn in the same spots and you WILL get overwhelmed. While the clock is ticking down it is important to keep moving so the enemies wont get bunched up. Once the clock runs out, all the enemies have spawned and it's much easier to take them out.

Great feature, I think you'd like the engineer class.

I am assuming the drop in audio was Windows stupid generic "phone" audio auto adjustment. There is a setting in Windows to disable that. You notice this heavily when re-plugging in headsets or starting skype calls etc...

Right click on your audio icon in your Windows Tray

Go to Playback Devices

Then click on the Communications tab

Change the radial button to "Do Nothing"

Hit ok.

This feature drives my co-op buddies and I insane while trying to play BF4/L4D/Serious Sam/Merc Kings/Borderlands2 and any other game.

I can't be the only one who thinks Risk of Rain is kind of boring, right?

Did Scoops ever start Binding of Isaac again? I just now started playing Risk of Rain and the two feel more similar than other roguelike-likes, regardless of how different the mechanics themselves are.

@revel: I'm pretty sure that's what it was. I sent him a PM about that setting right after the show. I don't think he'll have an issue with it in the future.

@revel: Thank you thank you thank you! This has been driving me nuts on my computer for some while.