HDMod sends you back to the worlds of the original Spelunky with all the polish of the sequel
Spelunky 1 is the best game ever made. I prefer its pacing, difficulty, and variety to its sequel. And yet if I was to recommend one of these games to a new player, I would find it difficult to advocate for the original. Spelunky 2, released eight years later (and twelve years after the original freeware version), has better player movement, better art, and a dozen small design changes that make it a smoother experience. Spelunky 1 is the better game - the best game! - but it feels old by comparison.
Enter the creators of the HDMod for Spelunky 2, which recreates the original Spelunky's world generation, enemies, characters and items within the sequel. So now I can play Spelunky 1 inside Spelunky 2 and experience the best of both.
"Spelunky 2 feels like an improvement in almost every aspect," says Super Ninja Fat (SNF), one of the mod's creators, speaking to me over email. "The engine alone made many fixes, mechanic improvements and quality of life changes over the original. However, many fans like myself miss the first game's pacing and content distribution."
Parrying is gaming's best and raddest adoption - a decisive and effortlessly stylish retort that serves instant, embarrassing karma to threats as diverse as lightning bolts, chainsaws, and freight trains. Press R1 to pay absolutely no respect. It's also a cheap trick that shrinks gods and monsters to the tiny space where your blades meet, reducing the shadows of colossi to whimpering bunny silhouettes. At their best, nailing a string of parries and ripostes feels like performing Swan Lake while winning a rap battle against god. At their worst, they're the design equivalent of blending a bag of spinach into sugary pasta sauce so fussy toddlers don't realise they're eating quicktime event.
I recently discovered my least favourite parry ever in Marvel's Spider-Man 2. Fights in Insomniac's Spidey games fizzle with fistly pyrotechnics so ill-suited to requiring you to anticipate incoming hands that Spidey's glowing head halo does it for you. In Spider-Man the first, you don't even have to consider danger until the same second you respond to it. This lets you focus your entire brain on what matters: doing stuff that makes you nod and go: "Oh yes. That's some shit Spider-Man would do".
Me when I'm being used as a comparative example to make a larger point.
But in the sequel, just knowing that a wiley thugoon might spring a parry-only punch forces a shift in priorities from "I want to do this" to "I don't want that to happen" which messes with the cadence something awful. It's so ill-fitting it feels like it emerged from a focus group, run by and consisting entirely of suits, each of them focused on suit-dazzling the other suits with the suitiest suggestions possible.
This is how so much of parrying feels to me now. It's Chris Pratt. It's Timbly Charmander. It's 20g of added bison protein in an 18g Chocolate Hobnob. I used to crackle with glee at clinching a "not today, fucko" against Ray's clanging mechasnout in Metal Gear Rising. Now I long for a game brave enough to snap my sword in half forever if I'm stupid enough to think I can deflect even a swerving bumper butt from a medium-velocity rat ambulance.
Onimusha: Way Of The Sword is not that game. It has five different varieties of not-today-fuckos you can use during a day in the life of true Edo period geezer Miyamoto Musashi, and something like four extra fucko-be-gones. You can block, dodge, super dodge, parry, and deflect, which is basically a parry with extra steps. Dodging fills an execution gauge, and parrying fills a gauge that engulfs your sword in crackling anti-fucko energy.
This is not a war. There is no glory or prize to be won, no victory to be had. There are no gods to satisfy or rewards to covet. There is nothing to gain. You are not here to save the galaxy or prevent the apocalypse. There is a truth, but it is not holy. It is beyond holy. It is this:
Twelve traitor lords remain.
House Of The Dying Sun begins with an imperative tolling bell, and can only end in ruin. That is your explicit purpose. It tells you upfront, not with a cutscene or Sim Cameraman prologue, but in black and white, with intoxicating immediacy.
Levels open with thrumming drums and full engines warping you in to the target, under a beautiful classic font declaring dramatic titles like "Vengeance at Ember Field" and "Slaughter at Horuus Gate", in keeping with its almost 1970s filmic energy. Suns blot out enemies. An ally flies through the fire of missiles you shot down. One HUD marker doesn't rotate with you, and that feels better. Every level is a careful diorama, a stage.
The Commander Goes Zapping in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam
"War is fun," says the commander. "You get to shoot things."
The radio is cracking heavy static, the helicopter blades are whud-whud-whudding over our heads, bullets are whipping past, or plinking loudly against the chopper's hull. The commander in the seat next to me is still speaking but I can only hear snippets of what he says. It's almost impossible to make out the rest of his rubber-banding words.
"It's -— and yeah -— sometimes you -— shot at -— that's -— "
I'd like to say this is an atmospheric feature of Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, the latest multiplayer shooter to be set in the jungles of 1960s Vietnam. But it's really just the game's comm systems buckling under the pressure of a war sim that relies on wall-to-wall chatter. The pilot, who has a clearer radio channel with me, translates.
"Basically, he says: war is fun!"
Like the conflict it's based on, the warfare in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is not symmetrical. The two factions don't have matching abilities. US players can fly helicopters and drop napalm strikes. The North Vietnamese have tunnel systems and better camouflage. The first Hell Let Loose, set during WWII, had the same hardcore tactical battling and quick deaths. But the factions generally used the same explodey technologies and methods of war. Here, each side has a distinct flavour. The sound of choppers either makes you anxious or relieved.
Down on the ground, you either can't see ten feet ahead of you for jungle bushes, or you can see for miles (and be sniped for miles). You can take a boat downriver, but a dozen muzzle flashes might erupt from the bushes at any moment. You almost never see the person who riflewrecks you from a mysterious position in an abandoned fishing village. The safest place, surely, is a hundred feet up in the sky.
A trail of white smoke whooshes past our helicopter.
"Wow," says the pilot. "Rude."
The commander stirs next to me. "Was that an RPG?" he asks.
Maybe you've observed this too. There's a line some games cross past which you no longer feel like you're playing the game. The game is playing itself, and you are there to be fed feel-good brainjuices. I'm not talking about idle games - you're doing something, but you're not really doing something. Sometimes you click a glorified "next" button and flashy numbers rocket upwards. Sometimes you put a pip into a skill tree over here, instead of over there. Poncle's bestselling bulletnothing is the leading exemplar of this. I think it's rubbish, partly because it feels like treacle. But mostly because it is accelerating a dull trend in game design: to make the game auto-go while building a coffin of upgrades around the player until they have precisely zero thoughts, swimming in whatever the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank is, flooded with dopamine. Death, I say! Death to the self-playing videogame.
Vampire Survivors is not alone in hoodwinking me into the sensation that I am doing something when in fact I am a sad void pressing left and then right. Loop Hero sets your hero autotumbling around a circuit of monsters, and the closest it comes to having meaningful decisions is in the basic Carcassoning of resource and monster tiles. Ball X Pit is a roguelike ransacking of a classic arcade brickblooper with autofiring bullets. It eventually contains a full admission of defeat to the automaton approach to game design: an unlockable character called "the Radical" who will play brickblasting runs on your behalf and choose upgrades without any input from the player whatsoever.
Vampire Survivors turned a basic shmup into a karmic hamster wheel. BallXPit is an LCD brickpong toy running on cruise control.
The self-playing game automates a primary verb of play. That is a fancy way of saying: Me no shoot, game shoot for me. It then gets you as fast as possible onto a trundling treadmill of dopamine and ostensible progress, while sort of reminding you of another game you played before. The physicality of this "kernel" genre underneath is not really needed. It just needs to look like bullet hell. It just needs to seem like Breakout. They can become lauded, successful games, praised for their addictive charms and approachability.
To me, they are automated fun. Poisoning hand-to-eye happiness with the anti-activity of the idle game. We are lurching toward the idlefication of all genres. Why stop at Asteroids and Breakout? Let us automate Doom. Let us automate Street Fighter. Let us automate Rogue. You think I'm joking, but somebody is already working on the latter and it's giving me a bad case of the squinty eyes.
Self-playing games take microdecisions away from you in favour of macrodecisions. You don't need to choose where to aim your gun every second, but you will need to decide what ammo upgrade to select for the next level. This is an inviting approach for game designers (and not unique to the self-playing game). It allows designers to sidestep the difficult psuedoart of "gamefeel", and player skill becomes less of an issue to account for. You can focus on the metagame, the upgrades and abilities and perks and extras. The exofun. All you need to do is make the braintickling numbers work, and then make it look flashy.
But what if some genres are the microdecisions?
If somebody automated Devil Daggers, I would stab them in the hands with a barbeque fork. If somebody automated Tetris, I would have them arrested. When a designer of a racing game makes drifting round corners feel the perfect balance of scrapey and buttery, this feeling can carry the entire racer despite how bad its story mode inevitably is. On the other hand, when somebody strips an essential verb out of Asteroids and claps on an incremental skill tree, I can't help but feel they have piggybacked on the physical feeling unlocked by bygone engineers to deliver what is effectively Cookie Clicker under the hood. This is not a revolutionary new form. It is Candy Box sans the sense of humour, with a lobotomised arcade classic attached.
An essay on Eliza, Luddites, and the ghosts in the company Slack
In the field of games we do a lot of arguing for videogames to be considered as cultural works on a par with other fields: film, television, theatre, art. One way of doing that is to explore games critically on their own terms, but this article is my attempt at Taking Games Seriously from another perspective: putting a videogame in dialogue with other pieces of culture and not arguing that it belongs there. Just… assuming it does.
In magazines like the London Review of Books or The New Yorker you’ll often get several works about a topic used together to approach it from several directions – putting them in dialogue. And that’s what this is. A kind of ‘comparative study’ which (for the first time? Has someone done this before?) includes a videogame. The topic I’m exploring is the digital worker in an age of AI and digital surveillance. The game is Zachtronics’ Eliza, written and directed by Matthew Seiji-Burns – a 2019 visual novel that explores a burnt-out Seattle AI tech worker’s experience of re-entering the world, and figuring out who she wants to be in it.
The work of fiction is Calvin Kasulke’s Several People are Typing, a modern take on the epistolary novel, which is entirely made up of the exchanges between people on the channels and DMs of a PR firm’s Slack. At the beginning of Several People Are Typing, the central character wakes to find his consciousness has somehow left his body and become trapped in the work Slack.
And the work of non-fiction is Jathan Sadowski’s accessible and punchy The Mechanic and the Luddite. Subtitled ‘a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism’ Sadowski’s book explores how contemporary digital technoculture presents new and increasingly inextricable challenges when resisting capital’s exploitation of every part of our lives.
Together we can use the three works to come at the question: as technology is so intertwined with our lives and work, how do we unpick ourselves from the machine?
In the wake of Microsoft’s latest decision to lay off, kick out, and otherwise terrorise its stable of game developers, onlookers were understandably outraged. If you've been a PC gamer for the past twenty years, there was probably a secondary feeling: one of familiarity.
If you predominantly play on PC, Microsoft has always been a force that destroys your favourite developers and makes the experience of playing your favourite games worse. You don't even have an era of BMX helmets and neon green consoles to look back fondly upon; instead your memory is filled with Games For Windows Live error messages and all the other studios Microsoft cut down.
Big concrete is taking over. There are now enough megastructures in games to justify a whole bundle on Steam. You may not be familiar with the term "megastructure" if you've not yet been cornered by your architecture-obsessed pal in the pub, or by your manga mate who keeps telling you to read Blame. It is basically an artificial space so huge you can't easily conceptualise it. One enormous planet-covering city encased in a shell. An orbital world many thousands of kilometers in circumference. Thatawful shopping mall in Edmonton, Alberta.
Big weird places that make you feel like an insignificant pipsqueak, essentially. Megastructures are not new to videogames. The subterranean complex of Portal 2 stretched further than fans of the first game would have guessed, and the cavernous corridors of Halo suggest a galaxy of long-lost giants. But now indie developers are increasingly exploring these colossal spaces. And small developers, it turns out, go pretty big.
"I spent quite a lot of time in my childhood staring out at vast roads from nearby hills full of little travelling dots," says Aleksandra Herout, developer of Metal Garden, a first-person shooter set in a drab land with a titanic concrete ceiling for a sky. "As the place I grew up in is a transport hub for the greater region, there was much of this architecture to be found in local landscapes.
"It wasn't just the size that made them stick with me, but also the sense of anticipation. The promise that this open road would lead me somewhere else. I kept returning to this feeling again and again throughout my life, and it very much impacted the visual language of Metal Garden."
'It is large enough if it makes your head spin and heart pound'
In Herout's 2-3 hour singleplayer shooter, you wander lonely hilltops and lurk through deep blocky catacombs, routinely blasting dark gunfolk and beefy catlads who - it is suggested - have caught wind of a priceless discovery: a way out of the structure. The shotguns and sniper rifles are straightforward, and the jetboot doublejump is as satisfying as equivalent leaps in Destiny 2. But it's the landscape that makes Metal Garden easy to recommend (plus it costs peanuts).
