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Spelunkin' With Scoops

Spelunkin' With Scoops: Spelunkin' With Scoops: 02/03/2014

Announcing the death of this feature might have been slightly premature.

Patrick Klepek goes down and down and down in his regular runs of Spelunky.

Feb. 3 2014

Posted by: Patrick

In This Episode:

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54 Comments

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BisonHero

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@draxyle said:

@herbiebug said:

Binding of Isaac is a great choice. Word of caution should you choose to play it: it is not the best idea to install the DLC right away as doing so will significantly increase the difficulty of the entire game and you cannot turn it off without using a mod tool. Trying to learn Isaac with Wrath of the Lamb content active can be very frustrating.

That explains a lot. I wanted to like it, but I just lost patience with the game after awhile. Waaay too much variance in luck.

After playing it for awhile now, I feel like Spelunky has the perfect balance for a game of its genre. The game gives you enough control and authority over what happens that if you screw up it's your own fault 99% of the time.

FTL is somewhere in-between Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, but it's still a little too punishing for me. Still a great game though.

I think FTL is waaaaaaay more RNG-dependent than Binding of Isaac. I like them both a lot, though.

In FTL, if you get RNG screwed, missiles hit you all the time, and the game never gifts you weapons, so you have to buy all your weapons from shops, robbing you of money you could spend on shops. This will set you back a few hundred scrap, between all the repairs and weapon buying, which is a considerable amount.

In Binding of Isaac, if you're really RNG screwed, you can still just beast mode everything as long as you're really good at evading enemies. The later levels are very difficult to do if you've found no damage or attack speed upgrades, but it's technically possible. Certainly more doable than hitting Yama with a whip or something.

Anyway, the interesting thing that FTL, BoI, and Risk of Rain do is that they have a much, much larger pool of items than Spelunky. With Spelunky, you're looking for that perfect run where you beat Olmec/Yama, and maybe this time you didn't have the climbing gloves, or didn't have the spike shoes, but your kit by the end is often pretty similar. FTL, BoI, and Risk of Rain are the exact opposite, in that you rarely finish the game with anything resembling the same kit. All 3 games have far more variance, as do most roguelikes and roguelike-likes. Spelunky has almost no inventory variance aside from how many ropes and bombs you get from crates and shops.

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BisonHero

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So what's up with Scoops walking into a shop that has climbing gloves and a cape in it and being all coy about it? Mr. E-sports got some big britches now, huh?

Yeah, I know he was trying to conserve money because it was the daily challenge, but Patrick has taken the wrong lesson from being able to rob the black market. Like, you should still buy shit when you're in the mines. Sure, there are decent odds you'll run across the cape or jetpack in the black market, but at the very least he should've bought the climbing gloves. They are immensely helpful.

Also, he was mad at himself for dying in the lava during the daily challenge, but c'mon, he activated the shopkeeper by the exit and wasn't even trying to bomb him, he just ran away. If Patrick hadn't died in the lava, the shopkeeper almost certainly would've shot him like 2 seconds later.