Free Game: Spelunky (and an accidental diatribe on exquisiteness in games)

Some of the real thrill of an open internet is the altruism with which persons or communities come together to create things intended to be shared and experienced, whether for five minutes, or five hours. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown up on movies and music designed to sell well to the most people possible, rather than please the creator and a smaller, more intimate audience, but when I see this kind of work put together with care and attention, and given away freely, no less, I’m a little humbled by it. Player appreciation, rather than the gee-whiz response elicited by a triple-A title, enriches the experience in a unique way.

Moving on, then. Spelunky is an Indy Jones-like treasure grab platformer, and like many small indie games these days, it borrows play elements from a number of other well-known games in an attempt to synthesize something that feels fresh and new, yet familiar and therefore intuitive. Have a couple screenies:

Spelunky is among a class of games that are exquisite miniatures, little one-off masterpieces mainly developed by one or two persons, but often helped along by community of enthusiasts. The developer, Derek Yu, is an accomplished game designer, and even though Spelunky is still in beta, it’s nearly as mature as an old SNES title. To earn the “exquisite” part of my irritating phrase up there, a game should be somewhat “self-contained,” which I suppose needs its own explanation.

Why Professional Chess is Boring, and How it Will Continue to Be So

There’s an issue with great chessplay, and it’s that very few of us have the ability or time to truly understand it. There’s an issue with how chess is played as well: some of the greatest mental athletes in the world are competing across boards all year round, and no one, except the truly dedicated fans, really cares.

There’s already hot international competition. Pretty much any country with a soccer/football team has chess players in the mix, so the same retarded nationalistic fever that drives that sport should apply at least partially to chess. Just recently, a dynamite Indian player, Viswanithan Anand, snagged the world championship, ending a merciless Russian (and Russian satellite) domination, previously broken only by Bobby Fischer in the 1970s.

But no one really cares.

This is due in large part to the first sentence up there: good chess is tough to understand and is therefore hard to get really worked up about. Yet, chess and its metaphors are ingrained in our culture. For example, everyone knows what it means to be a “pawn,” or that “Checkmate!” is a good way to describe a particularly satisfying victory.