


Wot I Think Of Spelunky's PC Port

An unsatisfactory resolution


4 years ago


This Is The Most Incredible Spelunky Speedrun Yet

I'm used to Spelunky [official site] speedruns being filled with incredible feats, but the "No Gold True Pacifist Hell Run" below is a thing of wonder. To clarify: entering into the game's Hell world requires obtaining the Ankh from the Black Market, killing Anubis for his staff, killing Olmec, and completing the game requires killing Yama in hell. How do you kill things without violence?…

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Feature: Team RPS chooses the must-buy games from among thousands

Steam Winter Sale Recommendations For You

There are thousands and thousands and thousands and oh God help thousands of games discounted in the current Steam Winter sale. Honestly, it's ridiculous. Where do you start? Where do you end? How many will you ever really play? How many do you have to buy in order to discover the secret Half-Life 3 release date? Well, we can't help with the more existential aspects…

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Express Train To Hell: Spelunky Speedrun World Record

I inch my way through Spelunky [official site], trying to get a read on the layout of each randomised cavern. Caution doesn't always breed success and I rarely reach the ice levels, let alone the hellscape beneath. It's both chastening and invigorating to begin a weary Friday morning by watching a speedrun that sets a new world record - from start to finish in 3:44.…

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Feature: Searching for a cure

In Sickness: Gaming While Ill

Provided you're not hoofing around on a dancemat, wiggling your Wii-stick, or re-enacting all of your favourite John Woo films with a lightgun in hand, playing games shouldn't be particularly arduous. When I was a kid, a day off school with some vague illness was a perfect excuse to spend a couple of hours at the altar of Doom. Playing games while wrapped in a…

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5 years ago

Feature: Descent of a Woman

Premature Evaluation: Vagante

Each week Marsh Davies shuffles apprehensively into the dank catacombs of Early Access and returns with any stories he can find and/or a faceful of cycloptic bat guano. This week he quaffs an unidentified cyan potion and throws himself onto a bed of spikes, repeatedly, in procedural permadeath platformer Vagante, a particularly Roguish Spelunkalike. Did you play Spelunky and think, “What this really needs is…

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Spelunky’s Creator Is Writing A Book About Spelunky

I've had a copy of ZZT by Anna Anthropy - a book about the game of the same name - kicking around for six months, but I haven't yet had the time to read it. That prompted me to almost instantly scroll by news that the same publisher was Kickstarting a second series of books in the same vein: small, independently published, and each focused…

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Feature: On Design

Bats, Man! On Spelunky’s Killing Joke

Spelunky is, I think, better designed than any other roguelike, platformer, or roguelike platformer. It's not because it's a work of genre revivalism. It's not the procedural generation, which jumbles level geometry upon every funny, frequent, fist-shaking demise. It's the bats. The bat, found in its opening world, is a dimly flapping lense through which the entire game can be better appreciated.

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Spelunky SD Mod Adds Co-Op To Free Original Version

The original Spelunky - the free, low resolution Game Maker-made Classic version - is open source. That means it can be broadly modified, which is what Ukrainian programmer Vadim has done in Spelunky SD. The project merges features from the polished remake Spelunky HD with the lo-fi original, most notably adding two-player, online cooperative multiplayer.

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Spelunktroid: Crystal Catacombs

Oh dear, I'm going to have to buy one of those Xbone pads now that they're PC-friendly, aren't I? Too often lately I've scowled at a game only to find that it improves immeasurably when played with a gamepad instead. Last week it was Watchunderscoredogs (still a bit dull though, innit?), this week it's indie Metroid/Spelunky mash-up Crystal Catacombs. All ready to dismiss it, I…

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Blind Taste Test: The Spelunky Blue Frog Mod

If you'd rather not read spoilers on whether a cool mod exists, you'd better stop reading this sentence right now because - SPOILERS - it does. If you'd rather not be spoiled as to the name of that mod, you'd probably be better off not reading the rest of this post, really. Because - SPOILERS - it's called the Blue Frog mod. It's for Spelunky,…

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6 years ago

Seedlunky HD: Generate And Share Spelunky Levels

Do you want to compete against your friends at Spelunky, the randomly generated platforming roguelike? That's what the Daily Challenge is for; each day, a single set of levels is generated which is the same for everyone and which can be played only once. But if once isn't enough to satisfy your competitive urges, there's now Seedlunky HD. The user-created tool lets you set a…

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Geometry Of Death: Spelunky’s Level Generation Explained

If you're anything like me, you've played so much Spelunky that you can close your eyes and generate new levels for Derek Yu's roguelike platformer inside your own head. Here, look, I'm doing it now - bet on what's going to kill me... It was a frog. Sigh. For a more technical understanding of Spelunky's procedural level generation, take a look at Darius Kazemi's browser-based…

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Always Bet On Spelunky Death Roulette


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Woo! Mossmouth Have Made Spelunky At Home On PC!

Here's some splendid news. Earlier this week I had a little grumblefest about the state of Spelunky's PC port, with a lack of resolution options, and very poor windowed mode support. I also had a dig about the unskippable intro animations that were also a pain in the 360 version. Whether it was in response to my moaning, or something they were doing anyway, the…

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Feature: An unsatisfactory resolution

Wot I Think Of Spelunky’s PC Port

Update: Fantastic news! All the main issues below have now been resolved, so Spelunky is nicely at home on the PC. First impressions are pretty important. Especially when you come sauntering over to the PC after a year of absence. Spelunky, beginning as a PC game, upped and left for the 360 as an advanced version last July. And it was brilliant. It's now back,…

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Release AVALANCHE: Spelunky, Papers, Guacamelee

Are you ready to be positively buried under amazing games? Well too bad. Games are largely distributed via non-physical means now, and that's a weird thing to do with them anyway. Take your sick, fetishistic disc orgies somewhere else. (Note: RPS does not actually discriminate against fetishes. Just physical media.) There are, however, a lot of brand new, positively excellent games suddenly populating our hobby's infinitely…

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I Can Dig It: Spelunky PC’s Daily Challenges

Spelunky is very, very tough. Sometimes, it's downright mean. But it pushes you so hard because it cares. Because it wants to see you do better, maybe even excel. It can only teach you so much, though. Eventually - through perseverance, hard-earned wisdom, and spelunking deep into the hardiest reaches of your own heart - you'll master all it has to offer. Unless... no, that's crazy.…

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