Review: Spelunky Is Frustrating, Random and Brilliant

Image courtesy Mossmouth, LLC

Too many of today’s videogames are roller-coaster rides, designed to create a sense of thrilling danger while in reality keeping you perfectly safe. Spelunky is designed to destroy you. It tells you all of its rules, does everything to make sure that you understand what can kill you, and then it beats you down until you get good enough to get one step further.

It would be maddening, if it weren’t such a refreshing escape from the usual cocoon of safety.

Spelunky, originally released for free on PC in 2008, has been thoroughly refreshed and polished up for its Xbox Live Arcade debut this week. Its gameplay mechanics are the product of roguelike design principles applied to a fast-moving side-scrolling platformer visually reminiscent of the classic Broderbund game Spelunker.

Its levels are randomly generated, and the difficulty level is sky high, made even higher by the fact that there are no continues. It doesn’t matter if you’ve played through 75 percent of the game and amassed a fortune in coins; one death strips you of everything.

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Game|Life Podcast: Talking Walking Dead With Telltale’s Writers

Put a microphone in the center of the table and this would be an awesome podcast.
Image: Telltale Games

We talk with Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, project leads on Telltale’s The Walking Dead adventure games, on today’s episode of the Game|Life podcast.

Telltale Games, creator of episodic point-and-click games like Sam and Max and Tales of Monkey Island, has recently turned its attention away from cartoons and toward more realistic franchises like Law and Order, Jurassic Park and now The Walking Dead. The zombie-apocalypse game has received the most favorable feedback, largely thanks to its intricate branching storyline. Every dialogue option that you select will cause characters to treat you differently, and the story can go all sorts of different directions based on your decisions.

Vanaman and Rodkin join Chris Baker and me somewhere in the middle of this week’s podcast to discuss the process of creating such a tangled web of interlocking stories. This is bracketed by segments featuring Marty Cortinas and Peter Rubin, largely focused on whether or not our listeners like him or not. Spoiler: Somebody really does not. You can call in with your questions or text us at 567-694-5326 (56 POW! GL FAN), and we may answer them and we also may give you fabulous prizes.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

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Chinese iPad Game Depicts Slaughter of Stereotypical Japanese

Enemy Japanese soldiers are torn to pieces in Defend the Diaoyu Islands.
Screengrab: Wired

A new iPad game called Defend the Diaoyu Islands takes an ongoing dispute between China and Japan and makes a game out of it — one that paints the Japanese as invaders and tasks you with brutally killing them.

The conflict concerns what Japan calls the Senkaku Islands, a small chain of islands situated between Okinawa, Taiwan, and mainland China. Japan has controlled the islands for decades, first claiming them in the 19th century.

China believes that Japan ceded its authority following its surrender in World War II. No one lives on the islands, but recent years have seen non-lethal maritime confrontations between the Japanese coast guard and encroaching vessels from China and Taiwan.

Defend the Diaoyu Islands, published by Shenzhen ZQGame Company, depicts the islands as sovereign Chinese territory under siege from the Japanese. The website Mobisights translates the App Store description as follows:

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Cheat Your Way Through Final Fantasy VII on PC

Image: Square Enix

Square Enix will re-release its classic 1997 role-playing game Final Fantasy VII through its downloadable games store, it said on Thursday. But it’s not just dumping the previously existing PC port of the game. It’s adding a few new features, including the ability to cheat.

In addition to cloud-based game saves and an Achievement system, the retooled Final Fantasy VII will feature an “editor that allows players to maximize characters’ health, magic, and money,” according to Thursday’s announcement. This might seem like anathema to role-playing game fans; after all, the entire point of the RPG gameplay formula is the act of gradually leveling up your characters from weaklings to superhumans.

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Nintendo: Online Community Key to Wii U Software Sales

The Wii U Gamepad as seen at this year’s E3 conference.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Nintendo’s next game console, the Wii U, will rely on downloadable games and the Nintendo Network to drive profits, president Satoru Iwata told shareholders during a recent meeting in Kyoto, Japan. Such online services will be key to maintaining “momentum” in the console market, as the Wii U, the 3DS, and “future” Nintendo platforms will all be connected to the same network.

Iwata stressed the importance of the Nintendo Network in response to a question about adding fees to cover costs of expanding online services. Iwata said the company was “not considering” any subscription fees and that by letting users recommend games to each other over the Miiverse communication service, Wii U owners will be enticed to buy more games.

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