Is that even a computer game genre? Platformers where the game utterly hates you, does not provide save states or extra lives, procedurally generates the levels and - in the case of Spelunky - has extensive interaction with the level environment. Well, if there isn't, I'm making it up now.
Spelunky (downloadable) by Derek Yu takes you, in the guise of a chibi Indiana Jones, through four different "worlds" with randomly generated levels. And it's deadly. You get a life meter with three hearts, but that's not worth much once you realize that giant boulders, bombs and certain monsters instakill you anyway. And then you restart from the beginning of the game, because Spelunky hates you.
Yet it's still fun, because the levels are new in every playthrough (though with familiar building blocks after the twentieth playthrough or so) and a game takes about 10 minutes so you aren't actually losing that much progress when you die. Much like Rogue, except as a platformer.
It also borrows the concept that everything is useful (more prominent in Nethack than Rogue), so eventually you will be picking rocks and skulls off the ground to trigger motion-sensitive arrow traps, and then tossing the arrows at enemies to kill them. More evil players do that with human corpses instead...
Tower Of Greed (flash game) isn't nearly as complex as Spelunky, but it still has a certain roguelike appeal. You jump up a downwards-scrolling level like in all those other downwards-scrollers. The twist is that you are supposed to gather gems along the way, and then you can leave the tower (through doors along the tower) when you feel you have enough gems. If you die before leaving the tower, you don't get recorded in the highscore table, and (more painfully) your achievments aren't saved. You have to quit willingly to have the game count.
Of course, there are "achievements" for both how many floors you can survive and for how many gems you gather - I haven't quite gotten to 100 floors yet.
Simplistic, yes, but the controls are close to perfect (unlike the feeling of steering a paraplegic slug I get from many other scrolldown platformers) and the levels are somewhat procedurally generated (though with big building blocks, so you end up learning how to pass certain floor designs anyway).
And much like Spelunky, a game takes about 5 minutes, so failure doesn't lose you that much game time. This... has gotten me hooked in a way no other game in this genre has before. Good job.
I'm keeping an eye out for other games in this genre.
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Musings about gaming. Irregularly updated.
Posts
4 comments:
Toejam and Earl: the first one, for the Sega Genesis. It did have lives and passwords, but it was a (3D!) platformer with an option for procedural world generation, multiple floors (and ways to travel between them), and unidentified items presented as wrapped presents. You had to either have them identified by a mysterious carrot man or cross your fingers and use them blindly to find out what they were.
As for "the game hates you" factor... there is no actual way to kill any of the enemies, outside a few *extremely* limited-use actions. The only ways I can think of off the cuff were paying the opera lady to sing them to death, and using the rotten tomato or slingshot presents.
Ah, interesting. I never had a Genesis, my neighbourhood was a (Super) Nintendo one. :)
Genesis had some really awesome games, but I guess they were a little more obscure than the good stuff for SNES - a lot of people seem to have never heard of them.
Also don't bother with the other two TJ&E games if you see them. They kept the weird surreality, but they ditched the rogue-like elements to become fairly standard platformers.
ROGUE is:
#########
#-------#
#---@---#
#-------o
#-------#
#---d---#
#########
Platformer is:
----------
----------
#d#-#@####
##########
How'd those come together? Spelunky is loderunner with random levels. Terraria is side-scrolling Diablo with crafting of your home.
Post a Comment