Spelunky Goodness

So over the past few weeks Matt has been playing Spelunky and every morning we come in a talk about it. I played it on the PC, which is freely available for download, and Matt has been playing the newly released version on Xbox Live.

The amount of changes between the versions is incredible, and it is abundantly clear that the Xbox version is by far a more polished and jam packed experience.

For those who don’t know Spelunky is a side scrolling adventure platformer, heavily inspired by the Indiana Jones franchise. What makes the game stand apart from the others is that it is endlessly unique. This is achieved with procedural generation, the random creation, of pre-built segments spliced together.

So every time the game begins, a whole new world is waiting for the player to explore.

Spleunky is also notoriously difficult, just how Matt likes his games. Everything, from the simplest enemy to the environment has the ability to kill the player if they are not careful. And as such, I never finished it, which is both an attractive feature and one of its biggest draw backs.

But the game makes up for it with clever design. In every level there is a chance to save a damsel in distress, or in the first world, discover an idol which triggers a rolling boulder, or a pit of snakes, an alien mother ship, get an Egyptian headdress, the list of unique game defining moments goes on and on, allowing for the ultimate in player narrative.

Because even after the game is over, we still get to talk about it and share the unique things we discovered in the game.