Derek Yu’s “Spelunky”
tinaja.computer
tinaja.computer
Spelunky is one of the greatest video games ever created. It is pure perfection and I believe this to the fullest possible extent since playing the game for what must be seven years now.
It is an absolute treatise in good gameplay mechanics. Zero percent of it is an interactive story (save the intro and end, barely), it simply excels in being some of purest expression of what makes a game fun to play.
It has a little physics engine - one with no positional resolution (except for tiles) - that keeps the game constantly feeling smooth. The reason acceleration is put into a game, is because linear motion is so bizarre without it. That's kind of off topic but it's true.
What some people don't realize is that you can play spelunky however you want and it stays challenging, and the way you play the game changes over time. When I first started playing, I would methodically go through most of the rooms. Now I go straight to the exit. That may seem like hardly a difference, but the process was very much an evolution of giving up what I thought was necessary to beat the game using my own skills.
The only flaw I have found with Spelunky (and this is arguable): the teleporter is rng. mr yu pls fix.
I have so much more to say but I won't bore you.
btw, for those who don't know the game, the added longevity that comes from these self-inflicted challenges people can come up with (like speedrunning or no-gold) is another neat thing about Spelunky
And that's not for lack of trying. I've spent many hours trying to find satisfaction in Spelunky. But no matter the amount of time I put into it, it always seems like you're far more likely to be punished by bad luck than rewarded for skill or thoughtful play.
Perhaps I've just never gotten over some hump in the game, but I also find it remarkably shallow for a roguelike.
Of course this is all a matter of taste, but I thought it only fair to offer a counterpoint to your glowing review. :)
That said, this probably does explain a bit the contradicting reviews from you and the grandparent poster. Not having the game boil down to luck (or feel like that is the case) is what separates the good procedurally generated games from the bad ones.
As for luck? Spelunky is the least luck-based game out of the 3. It's possible to beat the game with no items at all. The enemies all behave in deterministic ways and there are no dice rolls involved in the combat. Winning comes down to a combination of manual skills and experience at reading the situations and reacting appropriately. Most of the times I die these days come down to taking unnecessary risks (milking the ghost for diamonds or murdering all the shopkeepers in the black market) in the hopes of racking up a really high score.
I want a roguelike to offer me tools/equipment/power ups that offset the difficulty such that I don't constantly feel abused by the game.
Spelunky isn't designed that way. You can't stack items so all you can do is pick those items that best match your play style. Beyond that it does very little to help you... it's deeply and fundamentally unforgiving.
Combine that with the lack of variability in level design (while the levels are individually procedurally generated, each major section of the game feels very similar from run to run), and whenever I play I find I'm just waiting for my next jump to not be quite precise enough, leading to YASD.
So I suspect for those that really revel in highly precise platformers with zero room for error, Spelunky is probably a great game. For me it's just game after game of deep frustration.
Edit:
BTW I'll happily admit that what I call bad luck is probably just a lack of skill. Unfortunately I doubt I'll ever develop the level of timing and precision necessary to play Spelunky well. And because the margins of error are so small, it feels like bad luck when I die... again...
Things are tedious to me only when they aren't challenging. If something is frustrating and really hard, it only makes me want to try again and again and again. If something is easy but just takes many steps to get done, I find it tedious and boring!
NetHack was my first roguelike and I absolutely adored it when I was learning it. I found it very intense and challenging and exciting going for my first ascension run. After having done it more than 10 times, I now just find it tedious. There is so much stuff to do that doesn't take any skill at all such as: item identification, Sokoban (same puzzles over and over for years), castle wand, magic marker, reverse genocide silver dragons, writing tons of enchant scrolls, doing the invocation ritual... It feels more like filling out government paperwork than playing a game.
For me I find Spelunky just swings too far the other way.
But to each their own! I know plenty of people who love it. And talking about it now, I'm tempted to take another crack at it... :)
I think I'm gonna play some Tales of Maj'Eyal (another box ticker I can't seem to stop playing)!
From the wiki:
"Pressing the action button while carrying one will teleport you in the direction you are facing. You will appear a random number of tiles away in the direction you are holding, either 4-8 tiles horizontally or upwards, or 5-9 tiles downwards. Note that you have to jump in order to teleport downwards; otherwise you will just drop the teleporter.
If the destination tile is a solid block, the teleporter tries to find an empty space up to 3 tiles above the selected location - If there is no viable space, the teleporter will warp you into a solid block and you will be killed."
You can indeed use the teleporter 100% safely (as long as your judgement of distance is correct, this of course makes it even more fun) or you can use it as a hail mary in desperate times. Of course, depending on the amount of 4 tile high walls in front of you it might not be much of a risk, this is what makes Spelunky so fun to me, making risk minimizing decision in a split second, I think the teleporter perfectly captures this.
I feel like it breaks two of my favorite things about Spelunky: one, that you usually know why you died and learn something from it; and two, that you can eventually work everything out without consulting the spoilers. Both of those things are big problems in a lot of serious roguelikes, IMO, and Spelunky handles them beautifully for the most part.
(Speaking as someone who 100%ed the original PC version, and sank some hours into the Xbox version. I think, in the end, I'd gotten all the Spelunky I wanted from the original, and I wasn't a big fan of the music or art style in the update.)
BOI definitely handled it's artstyle refresh better, found the HD Spelunky muddy and muddled compared to the original and a lot of needless animated unskippable fluff in the menu and intro screens that means it takes way longer to start a game than it should do.
Discovering the patterns within the apparent randomness (without the aid of wikis, for the most part) was a big part of the game's appeal to me. Depending on what kind of randomness I'm facing, I might need to make quick decisions about timing or routing or resource usage, often needing to weigh risk vs. reward along several dimensions at once. This game does so much with so little, and the attention to detail and thoughtful design have always shone through for me, all along my journey from bewildered novice to cunning whiz.
With a huge back catalog of video games in existence, it says a lot that one can look forward to returning to a timeless classic like Spelunky.
It makes sense as you can interact with almost every object, but trying something unusual and having it actually work as you expect puts Spelunky in a different league from most games.
1-https://www.amazon.com/Spelunky-Boss-Fight-Books-Book-ebook/...
http://squelched.com/issue/volume-13-issue-2-flaming-poo-bag...
http://squelched.com/category/volume-11/11-5/
but seriously, he did so much at for Squelch. The office was covered with things.
Here's hoping. Derek!
I bought one specifically for Spelunky actually, then BOI came out which I went on to 100% Platinum on the device. I'd never have bothered to do that playing either of those on a PC.
Excellent device for games like these and the best d-pad I've ever used