I found Spelunky a bit earlier, and I've got ~500 deaths currently. And I still haven't gotten to level 16+.
It, like roguelikes, uses permanent character death and some pretty unforgiving mechanics to create real suspense over pattern memorization. Unlike roguelikes, it's a real-time platformer.
Ultimately, it's a pretty good game and feels like a fully randomized complex SNES-era platform with a wide variety of plans of attack that is pretty damn hard.
Earthbound said:
L.B. Jeffries said:
The only emergent game I've ever seen actually produce a surprisingly deep personal story was Dwarf Fortress. The thing is...who the f*** understands how to play that game? I don't mean any offense to the proud gamers who can, but I struggled with it for hours and hear the same from most people.
Dwarf Fortress was one of the hardest games I've ever played, but I love it. I actually have it up in the background right now. One of the most useful tutorials I've ever found are a series of videos on YouTube. I was lost without them.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5A3D7682BDD48FC2
Heh. As someone who's played Nethack and other ASCII games, I found the not-purely abstract but not-completely pseudo-ASCII graphics coupled with the large amounts of somewhat intuitive but very complex things to do in that game to be difficult. I nearly put it down in the first few hours, but I stuck with it, and am very glad that I've done so. I toughed it through with the help of the wiki, but there are quite a few tutorials around.
Currently, it's one of the few sandbox games to hold my attention for a long time. Getting a fortress running and self-sufficient isn't hard if you know what you're doing (though it does depend on the fortress site.) There are a lot of insanely deep details details in it (the weather system creating rain shadows and screwing with windmill production, the wonderfully fantastic fluids system one guy used to make a computer with, the dev's attention to geology putting a large number of minerals in appropriate places, randomly generated dwarf personalities, and quite a few other things) that are far from realized. It's a complicated game, and its current interface doesn't do it much credit. The adventurer mode is pathetic.
But it is constantly under development. The developer's very close to the community, responding to bug reports within a few days, releasing interviews, and reading suggestions on improving the game in the forums. He works on it full time, and keeps a log up where he chats about what he's done for the day.
I've become jaded by the likes of Peter Molyneaux promising to incorporate everything into their games. Dwarf Fortress is a bit closer than other games are to simulating a fantasy world at the moment, and it's getting much deeper with every release. If you listen to the interviews, the dev's plans are to craft Dwarf Fortress into a fantasy world simulator on the level of, say, Beastmaster over Lord of the Rings and to interact with it in pretty much whatever way you can think of (as a god, or king, or adventurer, or leader of an outpost-whatever). It's difficult to get more enthusiastic about a game than that. But he's been working on it since 2002, and pretty much full-time since its release. I still doubt he'll achieve the goal completely, but he's been steadily working towards it for all these years. And if you can break it down into enough small independent steps, you can code pretty much anything. A date he extrapolated randomly for the 1.0 release is 2025, and he plans to be working on it for at least that long (and still has plans after 1.0.) I'd suggest keeping at least an ear out for it.
Anyway... yeah. Spelunky. Good game.
BigBoote66 said:
Maybe it plays easier on a gamepad than a keyboard.
In my experience, you're right. It feels better (though it hasn't helped my score any.)
