Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is splendid news. Rogue-like-platformer Spelunky has inched out of Beta status and gained that shiny Gold. You can go get it here. If you need a reason to do so – well, I direct you at the long feature Quinns wrote on its joys, in which he took time to insult me in passing. You remember Quinns. Nice guy. Doesn’t have much iron. Anyway, well done, Derek, maker of Spelunky. Also, the news that he’s bringing another version to XBox Live means we can all look forward to when it’s released in a year’s time, and all the console journalists finally realise it’s awesome, and it really gets on my fucking wick because I’ve been telling them to play the bastard thing for the last two years (Cross-ref: Trials HD).

And to give a taste of what you’ll be doing a lot in Spelunky, here are some death montage vids.
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The sum of RPS coverage of Spelunky: a single news post mentioning that it existed and was pretty good, maybe. Secret fact: If you read that post very slowly and in a totally silent room you can actually hear the sound of Kieron phoning it in. The closest thing to hyperbole in the post is him calling Spelunky ‘clever and neat’, which is analogous to calling sliced bread, uh, sliced, or saying that war is bad. I mean, what I’m saying is that the man’s an asshole. You dropped the ball, Kieron! The ball is currently rolling away from you! There it goes, rolling through the door to the old people’s home! You’d better chase it!
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Relatively late to this, but picked it up from Qt3 over the weekend and do like it a lot. It’s the new game by Derek Yu who you’ll best know for his involvement in the IGF winning Zelda-but-a-fish (With lots of other stuff) Aquaria. It’s called Spelunky. It’s basically Rick Dangerous meets Nethack: An underground platformer where each level is randomly generated whenever you play. By widening the skill-set slightly and allowing a lot more expression than you’d expect in what looks like Rick Dangerous, it really minimises the horrific-death-happy repetition which blighted Rick. About the only cost is slightly akward controls. This is clever and neat. See it in action beneath the cut…
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