Spelunky

This piece contains spoilers for Sea of Thieves.

The free games for Xbox Live Gold members in August have been revealed - two on Xbox 360 and two on Xbox One. And the Xbox 360 games you can play on Xbox One via backwards compatibility.

A new Spelunky World Record has been set at $3,404,400.

Earlier this year YouTuber Spelunky God set a world record be blazing through Derek You's action roguelike in a brief one minute, 47 seconds and 182 milliseconds. Now, the accurately named speedrunner has bested their record by zooming through Spelunky in a mere one minute, 41 seconds and 499 milliseconds, shedding nearly six seconds off their record!

Spelunky player D Tea has set a new speedrunning world record by dashing to the true ending of Derek Yu's platforming roguelike faster than anyone ever has.

Last July speedrunner Pibonacci dashed through Spelunky in a record-breaking 1:55.353 (that's one minute, 55 seconds and 353 milliseconds). Now, YouTuber Spelunky God has bested that by over eight seconds with a new world record of 1:47.182.

It doesn't take much more than a cursory glance at the pastiness of my skin or the way I flinch at the words "team sports" to realise I have never been a fan of the great outdoors. Nature seems a little bit too adept at making terrible things happen to adequate people for my liking, and video games seem to agree.

Spelunky creator Derek Yu is penning a book on the game's development.

Sony has revealed its gaggle of free offerings for PlayStation Plus subscribers in October.

A new Spelunky speedrunning world record has been set by YouTuber Pibonacci, who breezed through Mossmouth's epic action-roguelike in one minute and 55 seconds (and 353 milliseconds).

Sometimes the Spelunky world record hunters seem to speak in another language. They enthuse about eggplants and Udjat Eyes, Hell runs and Olmec, a vocabulary incomprehensible to outsiders.

Sony has revealed a dozen new games heading to PS4. Some are going multi-format too.

UPDATE 22/04/2014: Well that didn't last long! Within a couple of days of YamaYamaDingDong setting the Spelunky world record with $3,109,850, did a man named Buddy7heElf come along and surpass it with an astounding $3,140,325.

Inspiring Spelunky savant Bananasaurus_Rex has just set a new world record in Mossmouth's incredible action-roguelike Spelunky.

Modder Joey4track is working on a mod that transforms all of Spelunky's art assets and music into a Metroid-themed adventure.

A key component of Spelunky's brilliance lies in its randomly generated levels, but sometimes you just want to be given a second chance when a particularly promising run is cut short by a stupid mistake. And now, thanks to a new mod, you can!

We've had our say on 2013's best video games. And so have you. Now, it's the turn of the developers, the makers of the virtual experiences we so love. Read on for the games of 2013 according to the creators of the likes of Super Meat Boy, Assassin's Creed 4, XCOM, Oculus Rift and more, complete with Twitter bios.

Legendary video streamer Bananasaurus Rex has completed another seemingly impossible feat in Spelunky: he has killed the Ghost. (Warning: mild spoilers ahead.)

Usually you have to pay $50 for it, but for a while the Standard Edition of GameMaker: Studio - a game making tool would you believe - is currently free.

Spelunky's gobsmackingly brilliant Daily Challenge mode has been added to the PS3 and Vita versions of Spelunky as a free title update, creator Derek Yu has announced.

Let's Player Bananasaurus Rex has successfully performed Spelunky's legendary eggplant run solo, making him the first person to ever record the act in single-player.

We're in the business end of our games of the generation series, and having run down through our top ten we're now into the top three, as voted for by Eurogamer contributors. First up it's Spelunky, Derek Yu's spectacular platformer that's enjoyed several console revivals throughout the last few years.

UPDATE: Spelunky on PSN has now been confirmed for Europe next Wednesday, 28th August, the developer announced on Twitter. I can dig it.

My daughter's due date was this Thursday. There's no sign of her so far but, like any father-to-be, I've spent the last few days slightly awestruck by the responsibility I'm facing. I look at the trees outside of the office window and think, cripes, she's not going to know what trees are. Somebody's going to have to tell her about trees. And parliamentary democracy. And Tabasco sauce.

If you've been following my series of Daily Challenge videos, or if you read my Spelunky PC review, then you're already aware that Spelunky is one of my favourite games of all time. I will never stop playing this game.

The PlayStation Vita has become something of a mecca for indie developers with such titles as Hotline Miami, Thomas Was Alone, Retro City Rampage, Lone Survivor, and The Binding of Isaac on (or coming to) the platform, but none of these ports actually enhance the experience beyond opening up the opportunity to play them in transit or in bed (which my cat and I strongly prefer).

In my experience, a 10/10 score at the end of a review is not meant to represent outright perfection. It's better to think of games that achieve these dizzy heights as doing just that: elevating themselves to the highest category of praise, reserved for experiences that come with a universal recommendation. When I saw Spelunky on Xbox Live Arcade receive 10/10 in our review last year, I once again imagined that that was the writer's message.

When I played it myself, however, I changed my mind. Spelunky is perfect. I wouldn't change a single line of code that makes jumping around this 2D platform roguelike so pleasurable. I wouldn't touch a single variable in the algorithms that govern its procedural level generation. I wouldn't change a pixel of its gorgeously smooth and chunky cartoon graphics or a note on its horribly catchy, ceaselessly lovable soundtrack.

I've since realised that there is one small detail I would change. I'll come to it later.

Read more

LAST DAY: It's all over! Well, for me Spelunky will never be over, but today is the first day in three weeks where I haven't woken up super early, dragged cables all over my lounge and recorded myself jabbering away over the top of a Daily Challenge. I hope you've enjoyed the videos - I've had great fun doing them and it's a pleasure to load up Steam now and see that every notification is someone playing my favourite game!

Spelunky! We love Spelunky. Derek Yu's 2D platform roguelike was a hit on Xbox Live Arcade last year after it was given a glossy makeover for its console debut, and anyone on the Eurogamer team who hadn't already fallen in love with the lo-fi PC original certainly fell for it on 360. Lewis Denby paid tribute to its "astonishing creativity" and "spectacular depth" in our review, before Ellie named it her game of the year. We even recorded a podcast devoted solely to extolling its virtues.

Randomly-generated indie adventure Spelunky will gain a new daily challenge mode exclusive to Steam, developer Mossmouth has announced.

Side-scrolling indie hit Spelunky will return to its PC roots on 8th August, and be available for purchase on Steam and GOG.com.

"Spelunky is returning to PC on August 8th, 2013!", developer Mossmouth wrote on the game's official Tumblr. "The walls are shifting..."

Spelunky was first launched on PC in 2009, but last year grabbed our attention after being reborn into a souped-up Xbox Live Arcade port. The new PC version will include all of the latter's upgrades.

Read more

The enhanced HD version of Derek Yu's cult-classic platforming roguelike, Spelunky, will be coming to PC this summer, developer Mossmouth has announced.

Has Sony given up on Vita? The big spend on big games appears to be over, save Killzone: Mercenary, and last week Sony predicted just 5 million Vita and PSP sales - combined - for the financial year ahead, which is significantly fewer than it managed during the year just ended. In other words, Sony expects things to get worse.

At the Game Developers Conference this evening Sony announced a number of new PlayStation games.

The PlayStation 4 will get Blacklight: Retribution and Primal Carnage: Genesis courtesy of Sony's Pub Fund, which is being continued as the company looks to make it easier for developers to self-publish on PlayStation.

Zombie Studios' Blacklight: Retribution is a free-to-play first-person shooter that first released in April 2012 on PC. There's a PS4 trailer below.

Read more

Fan-favourite XBLA roguelike platformer Spelunky is full of surprises. In this case it received two surprise 160 MSP DLC packs that stealthily came out yesterday while all eyes were on Sony.

I am currently reading a book (the telly's broken) titled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's the autobiographical account of one woman's attempt to raise her Western-born children according to "the Chinese model". This involves banning all television, playdates and sleepovers, and insisting on hours of academic drilling and violin practice. The aim is to produce prodigiously talented and successful adults who are ultimately grateful for being forced to work so hard.

It's been said in the past that Gears Of War is the most referenced game in all of videogames journalism, thanks to its tenets of cover, carnage and meat-headed chunkiness. I've been scouring the four corners of the globe's games writing in the past year, though, and I'd wager it's been replaced. Barely an article slides through a printing press or CMS back-end without the words Dark and Souls appearing next to each other at some point during the body copy.

Do you like video games? Do you like poetic justice? If so you'll probably like this, too. Derek Yu, the youthful creator of Spelunky and the father, in a sense, to Spelunky's legions of angry shopkeepers, was playing Dark Souls recently. Guess what happened.

Earlier today, I was sat at my desk listening to the chorus of early-morning tweets from friends and co-workers, and one stuck out to me. GamesIndustry International editor Matt Martin reflected on his time in Cologne this week with this: "Almost all my interviews at Gamescom this week were about free-to-play. Anything else was just filler."

Are you still playing Spelunky? We're still playing Spelunky. Mossmouth's roguelike underground 2D platform game has captured our imaginations like nothing we've played this year, including previous podcast favourite Fez.

The original version of Derek Yu's platforming roguelike Spelunky has been ported to browsers via HTML5.

It's the second day of Rezzed, our new PC and indie games show in Brighton. Compared to the Eurogamer Expo it's an intimate affair - so far, anyway. But a couple of things about it have been striking.

I haven't completed it. What I have done is die, hundreds of times, in a variety of gruesome and hilarious ways. I've been impaled on spikes. I've been nibbled to death by piranhas and clobbered into oblivion by angry shopkeepers. I've blown myself up with bombs, I've fallen down cavernous holes and I've been stung to the core by a giant queen bee.

Death comes frequently in Spelunky. You'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes at yet another indie platformer with cute graphics and chirpy music - albeit one that goes out of its way to be as tough as possible. But the more you play, the more it surprises you.

For starters, death isn't just frequent - it's also permanent. There's no saving in Spelunky. Get munched by a man-eating plant or stomped on by one too many frogs, and you'll have to start again from the beginning.

Read more

The much anticipated Spelunky remake is coming to Xbox 360 on 4th July for 1200 Microsoft points, Major Nelson has announced.

Spelunky is a game about stories. Great big ones that last hours, five-second misadventures and everything in-between. No single one defines it. Instead, over hours and restarts they blend together, and from your missteps and triumphs some kind of epic takes shape.

Not bad for a rogueish platformer with a red-nosed hero. Spelunky was released for PC in 2008, and this XBLA remake is the real thing: an audio & visual overhaul, new objects & zones, and all the original's genius for accident and disaster.

The re-done visuals are gorgeous. As with every 'update' to a classic, there are those who will swear blind by the original pixels, but the hand-drawn art here is bold and colourful with the exagerrated proportions of its cartoony figures keeping just enough of the original sprites. There's one tiny touch I miss - the edges of the spelunker's hat used to flop up and down, but now he's wearing a hard hat. Perhaps a well-drawn fedora would have inched too close to copyright.

Read more