roncli.com blog: September 2015

If you haven't been following my Twitch stream, one of the games I've picked up recently is Crypt of the NecroDancer. It's a rougelike game where normally you have to move your character to the beat of the music, all the while avoiding deadly traps and attacks and killing all the baddies.

I say "normally" because there's one character that's different.

Bard is special in that you control the speed the game moves at. I call it NetHack Mode, because you get time to think about your next move without having to worry about your enemies moving. While it would seem like it's the easiest mode possible, I find that it's the classic case of trying to not beat yourself. You could easily spend 30 minutes or longer per game not only trying to get the best gear in the game and make sure that you never take even a single hit, but man that's boring and this makes it real easy to just go light speed and open the door and *BAM* you're black skeleton'd.

I've streamed some Bard Deathless, which requires you to win as many games as possible in a row without dying, but only to limited success. Prior to last week, my previous best was 27 consecutive wins. While this sounds like a lot, the record as of last week was 60 wins.

Today, the record stands at 112.

I spent four days of playing about 16 minutes per win to set the new Bard Deathless record. It was tiring, as I'd spend 9 hours per day playing, with one day going all the way to 5 in the morning to hit the 100th win. My final death ended as it always does on Bard, a preventable tragedy. I had a fireball and didn't use it against a red dragon, and ended up not having enough room to kill it without it killing me. In short, I beat myself. But not before I crushed the record.

I put up a playlist on YouTube of all 112 wins, but this isn't something you're going to want to go through from beginning to end... that's 30 hours of video. Not a whole lot of highlights to be had (I did highlight one moment of stupidity early in the run), but if you're interested in seeing how a deep Bard Deathless run works, pick one of the videos and watch one or two of the games. I'm usually pretty good at verbally documenting what I'm doing and bringing up any unusual events as they happen.

Up next: actually beating Aria.

Labels: Crypt of the NecroDancer, Gaming, World Record