TOM FRANCIS
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Spelunky Strategy Guide: Finding And Defeating Anubis

Spelunky Explorers’ Club

Each day, Spelunky generates one set of levels that’s the same for every player. Each day, we play them. Some of us make videos of our attempts. You can browse mine above (click the listy icon in the top left), or see everyone’s on the blog we set up at https://spelunkyexplorers.wordpress.com/.

On the rest of this post are the earliest dailies we posted. Continued

Soviet Power

As is traditional for this point in the Class Update timeline, Chris and I have both got our taunt kills, and again he beat me to the blog brag. For the unfamiliar, the Heavy class has always been able to point his fingers like a gun and say “Pow! Haha!” But until the recent updates to the class, that wouldn’t kill a man stone dead if he stood in the way of it. Now it does, and there’s an achievement for it.

This is how it went down:

There was a lot of missing completely.

One or two completely wasted ubercharges.

One instance of “I’ve Landed On Your Medic’s Head And This Taunt Doesn’t Fire Down.”

A great many foiled by knockback.

One that goddamn should have worked, he walked right through my finger during this.

And then, on my very next life, the very same guy, emboldened by his apparent immunity to the taunt in our last encounter, impaled himself on my middle- and fore-finger and flew back in a spray of SO MUCH BLOOD.

This is what happened while I blew the imaginary smoke from my imaginary gun barrel.

And these were the spoils. All Heavies become pathologically silly when they unlock these, serious tactics are out the window.

Soon after I jumped back to Badwater Basin and won by a) riding on top of the cart doing the KGB taunt, b) standing in front of the cart doing the KGB taunt, and c) standing actually in the blast hole doing the KGB taunt, and miraculously surviving.

Getting this was a lot more fun than my more gruelling quest for the Hadouken Kill. I was about to call it a night on Sunday, but when browsing achievement progress I noticed I was one Sandvich away from Konspicuous Konsumption, one WE MUST STOP LITTLE CART! away from Stalin The Cart, and only three achievements away from unlocking the Killing Gloves of Boxing, which I had actually started to lust after since giving up my shotgun for the Sandvich.

I joined a Badwater Basin server and munched a Sandvich, stopped the TINY LEETLE MEN from Pushkin the cart the requisite one time, then noticed that everyone else on the server was in the same clan, and they probably wouldn’t appreciate me wasting the slot I was taking up by repeatedly trying to Pow! everyone I met.

So I ended up in purgatory: instant respawn 2fort 24/7. roBurky joined me there, but I soon got autobalanced to the other team. Usually I refuse to fight my friends and Spectate until there’s a slot on their team, but since I wasn’t playing properly anyway I didn’t object.

It was hilarious. Before long most people on the enemy team knew me, and knew that I wouldn’t attempt to shoot them or in any way be effective when attacked. So a lot of them would draw their own melee weapons and take great pleasure in beating me to death as I was frozen to the spot, pointing my fingers impotently at where they used to be. roBurky took this one step further: he was playing Pyro, so would circle me after I started taunting, switch to shotgun and perform his own killing taunt, which takes rather less time to get to the lethal bit.

Not only did he succeed, but this was his fourth Pentadact-killing in a row, so it earned him a Domination. He tried it again the next time we ran into each other, so this time I sidestepped and killed him back with a critical uppercut.

Once I’d earned the gloves, I stuck around for a while to try them out. Long enough to discover that if you can get behind a Heavy Medic pair, you can punch out the Medic and use the crits time to KO the Heavy before he can take you out, even if he’s pretty on-the-ball.

Sounds Like The Spy Update Is Next

The latest post on the TF2 blog has nothing more specific than “a bunch of exciting changes coming down the pipe for the next class update,” but the title of the post is:

Robin also jests about facestabs coming to Left 4 Dead, and generally I get the feeling they know how annoyed people are about the Spy’s erratic backstab detection. “Exciting changes” sounds like something other than just unlocks (which are more ‘additions’), so my bet is that one way or another, they’ll address the issue.

The prospect fills me with dread. The Spy class is where I live, and my home is about to be redesigned and twelve thousand strangers invited in. However much you trust the decorators, it’s a hard notion to embrace.

On the other hand, I’m a lunchtime or two away from 100 hours in those black gloves, so perhaps the timing would be good for a break. But Valve, I hope you know your ideas have to be at least as good as Doctor Disaster’s Sentry Spraypaint detailed towards the tail end of the comments here.

Either way, I think I have to post c) now.

Sorry

For a while there NaNoWriMo was consuming my spare writing time, starving this blog, but then I stopped doing that too, and now the less creative pass-times that I engage in to avoid Wri-ing my No-vel are replacing posting here. Shame, because I enjoy posting here, and I don’t enjoy writing my NaNoWriMo book. Curiosity: SATISFIED.

Meaning, I no longer have novelist ambitions. I fundamentally disagree with the format. I don’t read many books myself. The only thing that excites me about the form is that anyone can do it on their own, but now I realise I can’t. Most of all, I don’t like it. I feel like a fraud, covering for the fact I don’t have any real ideas, I don’t honestly care what this character looks like or how he phrases things, I’m just making stuff up to get the story over. I haven’t decided whether to give up entirely or just try truncating it dramatically – I still like the idea behind my novel, but it no longer seems novel-worthy. It could become a short story, though I’m too late for WriAShorStorWe.

Anyway, I am a bit late with this news, but I’m now officially a professional writer. The new disc ed, James commenter Graham, is settling in well, and I am making words from magical brain waves instead. It is very cool. More than the change in the type of work, what I’m looking forward to most is being able to pitch ideas for features and the like without the grim dread of involuntarily volunteering to write them, thereby neglecting the disc for just long enough to create a chronic crunch period out of thin air. One random idea I had this week – last weekend, actually, in preparation for my first day as a writer – just paid off dramatically today. I have fantastic new information on the next games of two of my favourite developers of all time that no-one else in the world has. I keep studying the screenshots of one of them, gleaning new joy out of tiny figures or details that hint at wonderful aspects of the game. The other, by N creators Metanet, is less specific and unillustrated, but will feature at its heart a mechanic I have loved since almost the start of my gaming life, and only ever seen attempted twice before – both with brilliant results. Metanet are more talented and intelligent than the developers of either of those games, so this is going to be something super-special.

I can say absolutely nothing revealing of either, so I apologise for teasing, but my excitement is desperately seeking an outlet here. The full skinny, also known as the straight dope, will be in our next-but-one issue (the next to hit the shelves has already gone to press).

Also in Awesome this month, I was visible on the BBC six o’clock news last night, in the background of an interview with the Deputy Editor of Edge magazine, for some reason conducted at a PC Gamer desk. Mr Walker theorises that this is because the story would otherwise be largely true, so some form of misleading element had to be manufactured. We propped up our latest issue and plastered stickers all over the desk beforehand, so we ‘pushed the brand’ appropriately. You can watch it here – I do have a link for a better quality video that doesn’t require the hateful RealPlayer, but it’s at work at the moment. If anyone has it, could they comment?

The BBC are bravely covering games more and more, but this report rather suggested that they should attempt to grasp the English language first. If Hugh Pym’s last few sentences made sense to anyone, could they draw me a diagram? And has anyone ever seen an ‘internet site’ that was made of cardboard bushes in a physical room? I know it’s easy to get your language in a twist when talking about the metaverse, but shouldn’t their reporters at least be told what a website is before they go on the air? Anyway, I’m not really complaining, except in the sense that I am. My forehead was on TV. Someone even recognised me and e-mailed us.

Something I Didn’t Understand But Still Feels Right

It’s September the eleventh. Not only the day that Alec Meer left PC Format, but apparently something exploded in some distant oligarchy. It’s funny that the attacks of that day are always referred to by the day, and not the attacks. Are there other historic events that are just called a date, no adjective or even location? It’s like we don’t really know what happened. Didn’t Iraq invade or something? I have dates like that – Friday Before Last, I call one of them. I don’t know what happened, but when I woke up my bike was broken and upside down with the handlebars twisted 360 in my garden. I’m still picking up the pieces after FBL. I intend to construct four enormous towers to show my drunk self that I’m not afraid of it.

There’s a suggestion the amnesia is willful. Somewhere I have a 100MB zip disk with the only copy of an elderly New Yorker’s photos of the collapse, first-hand and close up. She gave them to me, a near-stranger, when I met her because she never wanted to see them again.

Today is a bad, not to mention clichéd, day to remember this. Ze Frank, whose fast-talking scary-eyed vodcast I’ve only been subscribed to for a few weeks, but on which I’ve already come to rely, got his in early. Last Thursday his show wasn’t funny. Instead, he just gave a simple yet extraordinary account of what he did on that day, the haze of physical pain, drugs and rubble smoke through which he tried to see what had happened. He didn’t.

Someone Already Made An Ubersaw

Who? I’ll give you a clue: it was one of these two:

Check also out this one:

By she:

Ow.

Some TV That Was Mostly Shown Last Year In Some Places

Last one of these – I won’t do a music one because I didn’t really get into much last year, and everyone’s heard Florence and the Machine. The Music Downloads tag has everything I liked enough to share.

Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes. Continued

Some News, JC

Seven hours left of the year – another good one, actually. Last year I got a job at PC Gamer, this year I got the job I’d always wanted at PC Gamer. I also got a raise and a house. Did I tell you about the house yet? I’m not allowed to move in until the 12th, but I have a key now:

So I’m counting it as this year. It looks like this:

It was an old man’s house, and he died. It looks very much like an old man’s house inside right now, but we’re going to modernise it heavily. There are dozens of picture hooks which presumably held precious memories and images of loved ones – I’m going to put up framed prints of my favourite screenshots, which is basically the same thing.

The key was a Christmas present. I thought I’d lost my camera for a while, so when I discovered I hadn’t (I refused to look for it for about a month on the grounds that, so long as I hadn’t attempted to find it, I had not in any real sense lost it) I went mad taking photos of everything. It’s hard to get far enough away from normal scenes to make them look interesting (as they are from a plane, for example), so you’ll notice most of my photos are extremely close up instead. This, for example, is a beach at sunset:

Interesting thing I learnt about macro mode over a year ago, then completely forgot until recently: it’s much better if you zoom out, then just put the lens very close. My brain is rubbish.

Recommendations are stronger when you make fewer of them, so for my Stuff Of The Year awards I’m limiting myself to two choices per medium.

Games

1. Battlefield 2. Just before I first set eyes on this, I had to sit through a series of presentations about various console-only games. It was embarassing. I was scared someone from the outside world might peer in and think this was what games were like. When we finally sat down in a lecture theatre and Battlefield 2 popped up on the projector, it was a blissful homecoming to the amazing worlds where I spend my time. Vast, crisp, luscious and magnificently complicated. The social hierarchy of the voice comms system alone is an elegant work of genius. It’s one of those sequels that goes a little too far in improving on the original, and we end up wondering how we ever could have been satisfied with the crude toy that one of the most important games ever made now looks like. Even if you ignore the brilliant, endlessly emotional, ingeniously designed game – and for a long time we did – the fidelity of the world alone makes it extraordinary to be in. The ludicrously thrilling speed and solidity of the jets, the earth-shattering apocalypse of an artillery strike, the exquisite sense of place in every forest, street, mountain and desert. Magnificent.

2. Darwinia. The second-place stigma is misleading, this is the best strategy game ever created – I just have an enormous bias toward first-person games. Ignore if you can the sumptuous style and heart-melting story, what makes my brain explode with delight every time I play Darwinia is the satisfaction of doing almost everything myself. You hold your army together with both hands, controlling your most powerful troops manually while your unpredictable horde of Darwinians flow according to the fluid channels of command you hastily set up for them. It sounds overwhelming, but every task is a game rather than a chore, so everything you’re scrambling to do is fun in itself.

Films

1. Serenity. If you liked Revenge Of The Sith, you should definitely see Serenity. It’s not similar, and I’ve never heard of anyone liking both, but you will I hope break down in tears when you realise the error of your ways. It’s sci-fi your sci-fi-hating friends, girlfriend, mother and luddite cultists will like, because it takes an innovative extra step of actually being good, so it works whether space excites you or not. It excites me a lot. Apart from being witty, emotional, character-driven fiction, Serenity is wonderful epic sci-fi; full of horror, assassins and bureaucracy.

2. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I so nearly didn’t go and see this, but quickly checked the Onion AV Club’s review, discovered it was a “a noir-inspired L.A. mystery that isn’t afraid to show some satirical teeth” and bolted for the door. It is exactly my kind of thing. It’s endlessly cool, incredibly funny, frequently dark, and genuinely thrilling.

Music

1. In Case We Die (Architecture In Helsinki). The most fun you can have with your ears.

2. Twin Cinema (The New Pornographers). Spoiled slightly for me by having the best tracks – Bleeding Heart Show, Sing Me Spanish Techno and Twin Cinema – released on various MP3 blogs before the album proper was available. Spoil it for yourself too and listen to those.

More random images of Christmas follow. Have fun tonight/last night.

Some Incredible Brink Images On Dead End Thrills

Solving XCOM’s Snowball Problem

What’s snowballing? In XCOM, if your troops survive the mission, they get stronger, tougher and get more abilities, which makes them more likely to survive future missions and get tougher still. If they die, they’re replaced by vulnerable, weak rookies, who are likely to die and be replaced by vulnerable, weak rookies.

If you’re finding the game easy, it gets easier. If you’re finding the game hard, it gets harder.

That’s bad. And it’s not just theory-crafting, that’s exactly how my XCOM 2 campaign played out: early on we got crushed repeatedly, then a few lucky missions got us off the ground, and after that my people became almost unstoppable for 35 missions straight – even after I upped the game difficulty.

Any game with persistent resources will have some snowbally tendencies: success has to get you something, or failure has to cost you something, otherwise it’s not really persistent. And some parts of XCOM’s snowballing are too good to lose: unlocking cool abilities for my favourite troops is why I play XCOM.

So you can’t scrap that, but what could you do? Here are some ideas. Continued

SO… MUCH… CAKE…

And other TF2 Garry’s Mod frivolities.

SO… MUCH… BLOOD…

Eight years and thirty-five minutes late, but I’ve never played a game where I spend more time laughing or less time checking the scoreboard.

So My Vesper Became Your Chariot

I have a special weak spot for songs that make me laugh with their opening couplet, and I have a special weak spot for spies, and I have a special weak spot for The Decemberists. So this song (via The World Forgot) was always going to win my heart – it didn’t need to be as catchy and fun as it is.

If, like me, you barely understood the basics of the Plame affair at the time, I suggest having it explained to you by Matthew Baldwin while you listen to this. It’s one of those rare occasions when you realise that thing you kept hearing about in the news was actually hugely exciting if you get the right person to tell you about it.

Sire, My Regard For You Is This Big

I promise not to become someone who links everything they ever do anywhere, as if the mere fact of their involvement is reason enough for you to care. But I happen to have posted two things that fit within James’ remit on the PC Gamer blog recently. Jim mentioned today that he’d tried to look it up online with no luck, to which my mental reaction was “Dear God, he’s right! The world needs to know about Thedret the Exaggerator!”

As far as I know, the steps described in this article should let anyone create their own Exaggerator, but I’ve never tried to repeat the phenomenon. It would seem to undermine it, somehow.