The Binding of Patrick: 03/06/2014

Love these!

Like a lamb to the slaughter.

Woo!

HAIL LORD GAMBLOR!

YAy

Is Wrath of the Lamb really even worth it? I guess it's only three dollars...

Figures you'd get Technology 2 (One of the best pickups) while using Phil Fish Judas, had you gotten that with Maggie or Cain, that would have been a total sweep.

@getz: Dude, it's worth it. It adds so much content to the base game. Loads of new items, new Bosses, many new Mobs, Curses, and more. If you want to play Binding of Isaac, you really should get Wrath of the Lamb as well.

Honestly, only get it if you've done like, everything in the vanilla game, from unlocks to achievements. WotL adds a new final level, but most of the other additions aren't super amazing. They largely feel superfluous. It adds 2 room types that damage you, so they're basically never worth interacting with if you have any soul hearts. It adds a bunch of items that boost the velocity of your bullets, which is an even worse stat than range because the default shot velocity is fine. It nerfs the boss item pool, because most of the new boss rewards yield a bunch of pickups (you saw Patrick get the lame cardboard box in this video) like hearts and keys and money, instead of, you know, STATS, which you desperately need.

Also, wow, I forgot how TERRIBLE the item descriptions are for Scapular, Mitre, Guppy's Tail. It's bad enough that Trinkets get no description AND have very subtle/inconsequential effects, but the item descriptions in Wrath of the Lamb are far more ambiguous or unhelpful compared to the base game (though the base game had some stinkers, such as Rosary's "Faith Up"). The lack of a journal/codex that actually explains items you've picked up is probably the biggest flaw in the vanilla game and the expansion. Also, all of the performance issues.

Still, I love this game to death. FYI, Patrick, the only good trinkets are Mom's Pearl, Cancer, Curved Horn, and trinkets that end with the word "Penny", but several of those are locked until you do some challenges or beat the game with certain characters.

scapular op

@bisonhero: I disagree quite a bit. I think WotL adds a ton of variety to the game. There is alternate versions of every stage, new enemies, new items, a new class of item (the passive ones), new bosses, new room types, new chests and traps. *edit, plus curses and the challenges.

When I first bought Binding of Isaac, I played through it a few times and got bored with it. Wrath of the Lang is what made me dump a hundred hours into this game.

man, patrick installed wotl way too soon, I think

@guardianknux said:

It adds a bunch of new content, I just think all the new content feels really haphazard. He kinda just threw in everything and the kitchen sink, whether it was a particularly good idea or not. I outlined my major complaints in the last comment, so I won't repeat them.

I think the original game is more fair, compared to the move speed of some of the new enemies in the Cellar and Necropolis, and some of the new Cellar bosses that are crazy aggressive.

@thatdudeoverthere said:

Yeah, I woulda waited a little longer (might have been nice to see Sheol first), but I get the sense that Patrick knows him dying hilariously is where the laughs are, so maybe this was a good call.

Seriously, though, pre-WotL, Pat was still taking all kinds of damage in the Basement (I don't think he's ever gotten Basement Boy). He has yet to go through the crucible that is playing the game as ???/Blue Baby, which I think helps a lot in learning to evade enemies better in prep for WotL. We must reforge Patrick, so that he can be hard like iron, yet flow like water.

Installing WotL this early was basically Patrick going to Cloud City to save Han and Leia even though Yoda knows he isn't ready to face Vader yet.

Now that you have Wrath of the Lamb installed, I would really suggest getting the SpiderMod.

In its default state, it basically doesnʼt do anything to the game, but you can enable a handful of bug fixes (use everything but “Double Buffering”) and controller support, including vibration—though you probably wonʼt be interested in that now.

It enables hardware acceleration for Flash, which means the game should run better, and thereʼs a “window rendering mode” which may help with your recording issues. (but try without that first)

Iʼve never run into that weird loading bug when using it either.

Rename “Isaac.exe” to “Isaac_original.exe” and the mod to “Isaac.exe” if you want to launch it via Steam and still get achievements.

P.S. Rather than use a Wiki: http://platinumgod.co.uk/

@bisonhero: I've had wrath since the beginning, and while it's much harder, you're speaking nonsense. I got the d6 on my second blue baby run with wrath installed, I think you just suck.

@hedfone: What does getting the D6 with Blue Baby have to do with anything? And how does it relate to my skill at the game?

@bisonhero: I agree with you somewhat for most new players, but I don't think us or Patrick could have sat through two weeks worth of long runs through vanilla BoI. It's fun when playing yourself to try out different character and strategies and see different item combinations en route to 10 mom kills, but it wouldn't have been fun to commentate or watch when half of them would have been steamrolling to mom for an hour+.

And it's not like he got wiped today. He survived pretty well with difficult-to-use Judas and made it to Mom with Maggie, both with a little luck. Patrick has some basic strategies down and most of the bosses, and now it's just learning the annoying new enemies and bosses.

@patrickklepek I've become an avid watcher of your rouge-like features. The Binding of Isaac would have never been on my radar if it weren't for this. Keep up the good work Scoops! I'm crossing my fingers you will eventually move on to FTL.

Edit: Also, ALL HAIL GAMBLOR!

It's dangerous to go alone.

http://platinumgod.co.uk/

good times!

I think the Challenges are one of the more fun elements of Wrath of #TeamGFB. There's 10, each of which tasks you with beating a certain boss (Mom, Mom's Heart, Satan, or the other final boss) with negative conditions and/or certain starting items. Each challenge, once successfully completed, unlocks a new item for use in regular runs, some of which are crazy good (The Candle, Epic Fetus, Counterfeit Penny, arguably SMB Super Fan).

Also, yeah, I agree with @bisonhero that the descriptions for a lot of the items in the expansion are TERRIBLE, either due to being unclear (Mitre, Scapular, etc.) or just plain wrong (SMB Super Fan, Jesus Juice). It's a real bummer, but the wiki is really good, as is http://platinumgod.co.uk/

@bisonhero: I don't know what you're talking about. Half the fun of playing this when it came out was the very Dark Souls-like community deciphering of what the items do and what was left on the game. If they had added detailed descriptions this game would have been worse for it.

I do agree that the trinkets and some of the new drops make the game harder by way of imbalancing it, though. However, seeing the insane runs Patrick got in vanilla (he was making me feel bad for sucking at this until I saw him play WotL), maybe the game was a bit too lenient before.

It took me embarrassingly long to "get" the screen cap for the video.

Patrick one piece of advice (I bet it has been stated already): Only pick up soulhearts once you cleared out the whole level. Else you might waste health pickups because you use your armor up, while there are hearts still lying on the floor.

Thanks for the entertaining content!

I hope Patrick finds a way to solve the framerate issues, because that's definitely not how the game runs normally.

Did he say The Wrath Of The Lang at the end?

Personally I'd say it more than doubled the value of the game for me. I enjoyed the vanilla version, but it was Wrath of the Lamb that really sold me on that game. The extra enemy variety is a welcome addition, they offer up some really cool new risk/reward rooms (one fairly useful, one a lot less so) as well as some more secret areas. The additional endgame is also well worth seeing, especially if you've become accustomed to the standard zones which become fairly manageable after you've played through a few times. And there's a huge bunch of extra items which add a number of pretty interesting combinations and such (including some really powerful ones which can be very helpful against the increased overall challenge).

Why do you keep yum heart over the book of rev? book of rev is a direct upgrade over yum heart. you can keep using it and full health to get more soul hearts but yum heart is useless at full health.

A very suiting start to Wrath of the Lamb

Poison: Working out for Patrick and Brad since March 2014.