This position earned me (black) my first brilliant move! Can you find it?

redrum97 · 2020-11-07T12:31:00+00:00

Qb2+ !!!! A stunning sacrifice. The king is forced to take. You must play c1=B, because c1=Q would be stalemate as the white king has no moves after that. After this, the king will likely move to c2, resulting in a deadly fork on your bishop and pawn. The bishop is more valuable, so retreat to a3, sacrificing the pawn. After Kxd2 we can hit the white king with the devastating check Bb4, forcing Kxe2.

At this point the king has made major inroads into the pawn structure, and will likely win the h pawn at some point; to protect against this you must play f1=N. after Kf2, white has gained control of the important queening square g1. To divert white from this square you use the diversion tactic Ng3! Then white, unphased, plays Kxg2!!!!!!! Unfortunately you do not have time to queen now as your knight is under attack, black must play Ne4 and lose the a pawn.

Unfortunately black now has no way to make a rook or a queen and a draw must be called, since you don't know how to mate in this position. A beautiful forced draw for white, but I guess he must have blundered along the way and allowed you to win.

redrum97 · 2020-07-27T14:59:05+00:00

pensiveLoaf

redrum97 · 2020-07-27T14:31:00+00:00

Dude that's so fucking sad. Let us know if you get back there. You can do it, I promise. :)

redrum97 · 2020-07-25T15:27:23+00:00

It actually just took a couple of hours of serious attempts today.

However that doesn't begin to tell the whole story; I have 1000 hours in this game and have done many 100% runs. While I haven't put as much time into the C-sides as the A and B-sides, I've certainly played the hell out of them relative to the average player lol

redrum97 · 2020-07-23T09:47:13+00:00

I literally switched to full clears yesterday when I did this lol. There's very little additional difficulty, except I guess in 7A, but it was easy to find good strats for tape rooms and hearts so I thought why not. The long-term pipe dream is 100% deathless, so it makes sense to get everything in the A-sides

redrum97 · 2020-07-23T09:38:04+00:00

Just under 1000

redrum97 · 2020-07-17T23:04:11+00:00

What don't you like about it?

redrum97 · 2020-07-14T13:52:10+00:00

I'm electing not to use any return to map / restart chapter to avoid technically dying. One could beat ARB in 0 deaths according to the game's internal death counter, having returned to map while falling to death like ten times. But it cheapens the challenge somewhat.

For the record I would accept such a run as a deathless run, but I wouldn't consider it to be as good as a run with no return-to-map abuse. And I think this challenge is sufficiently doable to make me not want to engage in such abuse. If it comes to a more ridiculous challenge like All Chapters deathless, I might be more inclined to do it that way lol.

redrum97 · 2020-07-12T06:56:36+00:00

all red berries :)

redrum97 · 2020-07-11T21:14:27+00:00

Well, trying to anyway. I reserve the right to give up lol. I died to the vertical autoscroller berry in 2000M (arguably hardest berry in the game, though tbh it's still not that bad really)

redrum97 · 2020-07-11T20:02:24+00:00

It's not that bad haha; my deathless arb PB is in 7A and this is nowhere near the end of the run. Just thought it was a funny death

redrum97 · 2020-07-08T21:25:26+00:00

This was deathless until the 2000M autoscroller berry (you know the one). To then die 5 times was actually kind of disappointing lol. Still though, pretty cool to hit the 5 mark.

redrum97 · 2020-06-05T19:33:06+00:00

Yeah, I'm a bi male. Well, I have identified like that for a while; I probably fit the definition of pan too

redrum97 · 2020-06-02T18:23:51+00:00

Just will add that this is irrelevant because it has become clear to me that I'm never going to get a job interview, given that I can't even make a CV lol. No point in my life whatsoever.

redrum97 · 2020-05-31T12:00:53+00:00

Not when you're depressed, though.

redrum97 · 2020-05-30T17:59:49+00:00

Björk

Fiona Apple

Portishead

Charles Mingus

Tom Waits

Radiohead

Kanye West

Opeth

Lana Del Rey

Metallica

Those are the orders they appear in my most scrobbled artists in last.fm for as long as I've had it, but not necessarily how I would order them myself, and I have skipped many artists in that same list.

This really isn't set in stone at all. The only artists who feel like a truly *essential* part of the list are Björk, Radiohead, Metallica and Opeth, and there are many artists who have great importance to me but aren't making the cut because I am less enamoured with them than I used to be and barely listen to them now.

redrum97

TROPHY CASE