Spelunking

So, I've been playing this game lately, called Spelunky. It's a freeware downloadable game by Derek Yu, and it is to nethack what mario is to zelda.

For those of you without extensive knowledge of all the gaming world, I'll clairify that little metaphor. Zelda is an expansive top down two dimensional world where you collect items, fight monsters, and generally be a sword-weilding menace. Every map in the game is lovingly touched by dozens of designers, artists and programmers to make the game perfectly balanced and nice to look at. Nethack is a procedurally generated dungeon crawler where the maps are randomly generated (sphagetti dungeons, unfortunately), and you collect weapons to kill monsters and generally be a sword-weilding menace. See the similarities?

By that extension, Mario is a two dimensional side-scrolling platformer game where you go through several worlds of varying types, jumping on the tops of enemies, hopefully collecting powerups and uncovering shortcuts. Spelunky, now that I've finally gotten to it, is a procedurally generated two dimensional sidescrolling game where you travel through several levels of varying types, jumping on enemies, trying to collect powerups and unlock shortcuts. The similarities are obvious, to both nethack and mario, and I feel this game is a stunning and essential addition to both today's gaming climate and the world of procedurally generated games.

You see, this game is good, and not just pong good, I'm talking will probably make it's way eventually to a console good; and while it's only been out for a month or so, the important telltale sign is that a community has sprung up around the game, spaders, overaccheivers, version testers and more. You don't get that on an average play-once-and-discard game.

Most importantly, Spelunky is a solid peice of proof that dungeon crawlers are not the only type of game that can be successfully procedurally generated. You could, theoretically, procedurally generate an entire game of *any* genre, and while the obvious place the industry started is on the simple end of the scale, I'd wager that eventually you're going to wind up with more complex games for more complex genres.