Everyone says they’re awful at Spelunky. Even the best. At least that’s what I tell myself as I die on level 1-2 from an arrow trap I’d noticed but instantly forgotten, or a bat I mistakenly thought my motor skills could defeat. But when good players crash out of Spelunky and curse their awfulness, they’re in the Ice Caves or Temple, or probably even further, frustrated that they messed up getting into the City Of Gold or Hell. Not the Mines, the first set of levels. My home and my nemesis. I really am awful at Spelunky. But I didn’t really know how bad until it came out on PC last week.
It’s fascinating that a game can experience a Renaissance with the introduction of just one mode and the freedom granted by moving to PC. That mode is the Daily Challenge, which gives every player a single attempt on the exact same set of levels as everyone else. Everything’s identical – the layouts, the item drops and shop contents – rather than the randomised nature of the standard Spelunky Adventure mode. Finally, the playing field is levelled, and at the end of your run you see your position on the day’s leaderboard, ranked by the money you’ve accumulated. It’s perhaps a poor indicator of the quality of your run, but it’s brutally precise and demands a new strategy of risking maximising score over maximising survival, as you save cash rather than spend it on potentially life-saving equipment.
The Daily Challenge’s perfect partner is the freedom on PC to easily capture video of your run. Have you watched much video of your own play? I haven’t until now, and it’s been revelatory to witness the lack of care I take, the traps I blunder through. I become the backseat driver to myself, angered at my own stupidity. I’ve started to play feeling myself watching, a pressure I’ve never quite experienced before. But it’s a positive one, because the reason why I’m so bad is becoming clear, and I might even be improving.
Naturally, the core reason to record play is to upload it to YouTube, granting Spelunky players a daily repository of attempts on the exact same level with a quick search. You can even watch them before your run to get a prior warning of the threats you’ll face. And here’s the thing, rather than expose Spelunky’s mechanical underpinnings they actually demonstrate their magic through showing the multitude of options Spelunky’s tight little toolset affords.
And here’s another surprising thing: the very best players don’t even look that skilled. Watch, for example, Ryan “Northernlion” Letourneau play. He clearly explains the logic behind his decisions and seemingly never performs a flashy move to dance through risk. Skill in Spelunky is about precise movement and clear decisions. It’s about perception, clarity of intent and execution; if you’re relying on reactions and blind luck, you’re doing it wrong. Curiously, the upshot is that if anything, being exposed to the best makes me feel I have at chance of attaining better. My reactions aren’t as good as they were, but I like to think I can at least think my way out of a tight spot, and Northernlion seems to indicate that’ll work just as well.
The social opportunity in Spelunky’s Daily Challenges is clear, and has been taken up by Tom Francis, ex-PC Gamer writer and developer of Gunpoint with the Spelunky Explorers’ Club, a league of his Daily Challenge-playing friends, including me. Francis has adapted the official leaderboard in favour of ranking the league by the level reached, which effortlessly reveals the consistency with which the best players can make their way deep into the levels. And the communal nature is remarkably fun – I’m getting up first thing in the morning to make my attempt and follow my league-mates during the day.
Daily Challenges show how powerful a great new way to play and the opportunity to share it with others can be. While so many games build vast infrastructures to allow social interaction, an informal one is working at least as well around Spelunky, one that I feel we’ve claimed is ours. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll even help me to get better.
The post Still Playing: Spelunky’s Daily Challenge appeared first on Edge Online.
Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/still-playing-spelunkys-daily-challenge/
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