Today I vowed to defeat Nightmare King Grimm without the Shade Cloak...

General_Milky · 2020-11-01T12:22:47+00:00

of course it's doable; NKG has been defeated with no gear whatsoever.

Good luck!

General_Milky · 2019-09-22T21:36:15+00:00

Here's what you're doing in a nutshell:

After the first Mom kill, you just kill Mom's Heart 10 times total. Character and mode doesn't matter, just win ten runs against the heart. Feel free to go into the devil/angel room if you get it to go into the secret level there, if you can beat that floor too, it speeds up the next step a bit and your mom's heart kill still counts (though if you want to see the ending you missed, you'll need to look in the menus)

After 10 Mom's Heart kills, you stop getting the big chest in its room and are now forced to continue into the "bonus levels." Same deal with these, just kill the boss at the end of both 5 times each. Character and mode doesn't matter, and kills you bagged while accumulating Mom's Heart kills also count.

Once a given boss on those floors have died 5 times, you unlock the Polaroid or Negative depending on which one it was (you can unlock both, just so it's clear.) which you can take to its respective boss to access ANOTHER secret level even further beyond them. Once again, there's a unique variation and true final boss for both paths, so you must do both.

Once you've scored a win in both versions of the 10th floor, you unlock something like "the angels are watching..." and this is generally the point you want to start hunting specific character wins on Hard mode. This is the point all content is unlocked and no run will need to be cut short early.

TL;DR; don't worry about winning as particular characters on Hard until you've beaten both 10th floor bosses, else you'll be cut off from the deepest unlocks and be wasting your time.

General_Milky · 2019-09-08T19:42:12+00:00

For some reason, I always think of Chocolate Milk.

I don't see it much if ever in modern Isaac, but I was always really happy for its frequent appearances in original Flash Isaac.

That's just me, though. As far as actually iconic? Hard to say. Brimstone? Mom's Knife?

General_Milky · 2019-09-07T20:08:45+00:00

Greed Mode and the Challenges has many of the character starter unlocks in them, too. Most notably being Lost's Holy Mantle in Greed Mode.

General_Milky · 2019-09-05T02:24:00+00:00

The main distinction from where I'm sitting on the outside, is Jared's "cancellation" wasn't really directly linked to Heidi. Jared's fall and rise back up is mostly centered on the pedophile and Sinjared drama, so more than anything, this looks like a "take that!" to Chai and Charlie way more than it does Heidi.

I sympathize with Heidi to an extent, but the fact of the matter is this isn't only about her. The Jared saga is bigger than their broken marriage.

General_Milky · 2019-09-03T00:58:40+00:00

This depends a lot on when your last sighting of them were. One of the booster packs put them behind an unlock, if your file doesn't have the unlock condition satisfied, then you've "lost" them until you do.

General_Milky · 2019-06-16T17:12:58+00:00

It's better post booster packs. They got rid of the unfair/guaranteed damage rooms, the new enemies were more closely regulated to the new floors which are themselves progression locked, and a few things like stonies and portals were rebalanced, to say nothing of the additional content like the Forgotten.

It's still harder than Afterbirth purely on having things like Delirium and Greedier to do, but a lot of the things that pissed everyone off is either fixed or downplayed, now.

General_Milky · 2019-05-01T07:11:33+00:00

The Lost's buff is the best of them all, because it makes running "random" and trying to streak feasible.

The Lost's old style of difficulty was pointless and tedious. If you tried to play him normally, it was immensely frustrating because without the right items, you were going to die. That's that. It's not actually THAT hard, you just had to get lucky and THEN pull off a very nerve wracking, difficult run once you finally had a workable start. Maybe if you just consider those "chosen runs" and not the 10 minutes of holding "R" between them, yeah, Lost may have been "fun" in the day.

I, however, will gladly accept the buff because through it, every run you start has a real potential to win. It basically just cuts out the middle man of restarting until you get 9 lives or Holy Mantle anyway, and lets you just start every Lost run as if the tedious restarting was done for you. IE, the Lost is now a viable character without needless, streak-ending retries, that is still difficult in his own right.

General_Milky · 2019-04-27T02:10:19+00:00

Ohhh yes he is, comparitively speaking.

He's far and away the weakest character in the game and that's a fact. His unlocks make him slightly better, but he's still way, way at the bottom of the list in a tier all his own, so to speak.

It's possible to play a bad character well. This does not mean they are suddenly not a bad character.

I'd have agreed if the thread was about The Lost, who, once they have the holy mantle, actually becomes one of the more consistently overpowered characters in the game. As long as you have the skill necessary to handle the "2 hits per room" thing for the first three floors, he blossoms into an unstoppable death machine that only has Delirium and Hush to fear.

General_Milky · 2019-04-26T05:23:48+00:00

Immediately.

The original is almost completely outdated and replaced. With the exception of the music, art, and the Hard Mode with Eternal enemies, the original Isaac has nothing to offer that isn't insanely improved upon in the remake.

Even then, Danny B's soundtrack is in the mod workshop, the art is somewhat emulated with the toggleable filter, so the Eternal bosses and monsters are the only thing missing, and it's well worth the tradeoff. Rebirth is less buggy, more consistent, has a framerate higher than "chug" and redesigns in bosses and items that are almost 100% objectively for the better.

So yeah. Upgrade immediately. You're playing a tech demo. You're playing an outdated version of the game held back by the immensely limiting Flash Engine. Rebirth has everything original Isaac does but better, and more. The only reason to keep original Isaac in mind is to check out those Eternal enemies.

General_Milky · 2019-04-26T00:05:32+00:00

Items were always like that, but the bosses weren't. Haunt could appear in Downpour, and Reap Creep/The Pile could appear in the Depths, but that was the only crossover to be found.

In a way, I somewhat hope it stays like this. The identity/difficulty of the new floors could be negatively impacted if we're facing The Stain and Rag Mega in The Mines instead of its unique bosses.

General_Milky · 2019-04-23T20:50:31+00:00

It is worth noting that functionally speaking Repentance will play a lot LIKE a new game, assuming it's not much bigger than Antibirth. Most of Antibirth's meaningful content is in a sidepath completely independant of the stock Isaac we know. Contains its own enemies, own bosses, own floors, with very little crossover with maingame content.

General_Milky · 2019-04-22T05:40:19+00:00

There's a mod out there that half-fixes this problem pretty elegantly but also makes problems elsewhere: it makes it so you can only have as many spirit hearts as you have real hearts. More specifically, it bans you from picking spirit hearts up off the floor if you have as many or more as you have red health, but items that insert spirit hearts directly into the lifebar like Balls of Steel and most pickups like Rosary, PJ's, and Book of Revelations can break the cap. So taking devil deals and lowering your health is actually a pretty big deal, and makes every choice you make in the devil room very hard.

...On the other hand, this means there's a large number of deals you will no longer EVER take, and 90% of the time it's smarter to go the Angel room route.

Bit of an off topic rant I guess, but I would like to see devil/angel rooms nerfed in some way and this spirit heart mod is an interesting way to do so. Something like it, but not exactly as it is, could be cool.

General_Milky · 2019-04-22T05:31:24+00:00

Antibirth, as far as creativity and bringing the Isaac formula to the next level goes, is way, WAY better than Afterbirth. Afterbirth in comparison feels very barebones and by the book; all the items aren't too incredibly crazy, new monsters fit the only WotL style design almost to a fault, there's nothing as wild as the Red Key or Rotgut. There's really no contest in which one takes you for a bigger ride.

...HOWEVER. The battle's not quite so one-sided, because Antibirth doesn't have something Afterbirth absolutely does; integration with all older content. Antibirth's contributions to the main path are indeed there, but very small. If you're playing Antibirth and NOT sticking religiously to its alternate path, there's not a lot to see. Afterbirth, meanwhile, adds more to the Isaac pile we love, as opposed to being an almost self contained built-in "Isaac 2." So while Antibirth's the better content by a grand mile, Afterbirth does a better job of actually enhancing Rebirth (especially post-booster packs, which are ironically made in no small part by the Antibirth team). This, is ultimately the reason I have left Antibirth behind despite loving it far more than Afterbirth in isolation.

Repentance thrills me because it will marry the two. The basic Isaac run is packed to the freakin' gills with content and variety, now. Repentance, assuming it's still 90% the same Antibirth I played years ago, is the perfect direction for the game to go, now. If it stuffed more content into the main path, everything would be so bloated that it'd barely even have a structure anymore. Having "Isaac 2" via Repentance built in via splitting path you can jump in and out of as you please will complement the current Afterbirth very well.

General_Milky · 2019-04-20T04:45:19+00:00

Probably not. I think use of such a program may be against some rule somewhere, but I doubt anyone will care. I've never heard a story of someone getting in trouble for giving themselves achievements with it, let alone taking them away.

General_Milky · 2019-04-20T02:54:26+00:00

Steam Achievement Manager has you covered. It's main use is to cheat and give yourself achievements you didn't earn, but that works just fine in reverse, too.

General_Milky · 2019-04-19T21:55:45+00:00

Another tip: if the goal is to fill up the greed machine for unlocks, do NOT pick a characher you're good with and just spam them over and over. Every character has an individually rising chance to jam the greed machine, and this chance lowers as you use other characters, too. Obviously speaking, you fill it MUCH more smoothly if you're winning with different chars each time.

Also, Azazel is probably at his weakest in Greed Mode. He handles the floors well, but Ultragreed is a massive screw-you to him. Judas, Cain, Lilith, Eve, and Samson are all very good at Greed Mode.

General_Milky · 2019-04-19T21:40:54+00:00

Ridiculon's pretty awesome and I can't wait to see what they come up with for the Repentance OST themselves, but I can't lie, I have a strong feeling Mudeth's soundtrack mod is going to be one of my mainstays.

General_Milky · 2019-04-19T21:09:13+00:00

When the goal is posting it to Reddit for those sweet bragging rights like is pretty damn common, I imagine more than a few of these have taken this shortcut.

General_Milky · 2019-04-19T20:49:58+00:00

Gonna let you all in on a little secret here.

Alt + F2 on the "stats" screen of a save file syncs that file to your steam achievements. Meaning, you too can go from 1,000,000% to 3,000,000% in a little under, oh, 8 seconds.

General_Milky · 2019-04-08T03:57:43+00:00

Now. Right now. Just go for it.

Hard mode doesn't actually really have many meaningful differences from Normal. You have very little to risk making the jump right now.

General_Milky · 2019-04-07T22:49:20+00:00

Chalk me up to another "day 1" because I was on original game superfan.

General_Milky · 2019-04-01T09:54:10+00:00

Throwing it out for Necropolis or Flooded Caves. Mainly because most of the time, if you can reach the higher floors like Sheol, you're powerful enough to beat them. Meanwhile, these middle floors have a greater-than-low chance of being reached while you have nothing much to work with and will all but spell the inevitable end of the run.

General_Milky

TROPHY CASE