Microsoft Studios

Spelunky was developed by Mossmouth and was published by Microsoft Studios. It was released on July 4, 2012 and retails for 1200 MSP. A copy was provided for review purposes.

Spelunky casts you as a nameless adventurer seeking treasure in a deep cave. Blocking you from your bounty are countless enemies, traps, and other hazards. The way you choose to tackle these challenges really defines how the game will play for you. Some may crash ahead fearlessly while others will be more cautious. Spelunky is technically an action/platformer, but it also has roguelike qualities as well. You run and jump, whip and shoot. What’s surprising is to learn that death is permanent here and one false move sends you back to the very beginning.  It’s a truly unique game and is presented in a very attractive manner. It does everything it sets out to do, even when it’s rejecting modern gaming conventions.

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Ascend: New Gods is an action game. The fact that players take control of gigantic warriors known as Caos that mow through hordes of beasts with magic and melee weapons while trampling the tiny, feeble humans under their feet as a man might a rodent, informs those who pick up the controller of as much. The fact that these towering, stout champions appear before the seemingly indomitable Titans of the game as not but rodents themselves, betrays that there may just be something more to Signal Studios’ game than the repeated mashing of a face button that could effectively get one through the title’s E3 demo.

Although Signal promises that more challenging enemies will turn up later in the game, the demo, while enjoyable, left one wanting to see what other tricks the studio has up its sleeve. Most of the encounters could be won by relying on basic attacks, the repeated swinging of a sword or war hammer until the foe(s) before the Caos were felled. Getting beyond the basic “press X to kill stuff” approach to battles is something that all developers of action games must work to overcome if they are to differentiate their work from that of the competition.

Signal has plans for that. A unique form of multiplayer (more on that shortly) and a slew of challenging beasts that may require a bit more cunning to overcome. “We have tons of different monsters in the game,” Signal Studios Lead Game Designer Ian Scott explained to XBLA Fans at E3. “As you saw, the humans are really small in our game; they’re kind of like rats. You can pick them up and eat them for health, but there’s obviously things that are a lot bigger than you and more badass. Well, I don’t know about necessarily more badass than you.” Scott isn’t sure whether or not the team wants individual non-Titan enemies to be tougher than a Caos, but he asserted that there are definitely enemies that can dole out a walloping.

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Spelunky, Mossmouth‘s gift to the platforming and roguelike world, is not easy. In no capacity is it easy, and in fact as of writing I have died ~600 times. Sure, a lot of that was just to find information, but we assure you the death counts for this game will be in the thousands for most players. While every adventure through Spelunky results in a score, and surely that is important, the real goal here is to make it to the end and get the treasure spoken of only in whispers in back alleys and on forums. This guide has a deluge of tips and tricks for you to employ in your journey through Spelunky, as well as an ever growing account of all the secrets and unlockables in this game. Here’s the disclaimer:

Spelunky is first and foremost about adventure. It’s about failure, about dying, about losing, about learning from each and everything you see that inevitably kills you. Part of the glory of Spelunky’s design is finding out how things work, the nature of the AI and of the ever-changing environments. You should experience that, and you should do so without this guide. We recommend you not look at this guide until you’ve died at least 100 times. That said, if you’re frustrated, or if you have to find the secrets right-just-now, we welcome you to enjoy our wealth of information.

We have no intention of spoiling the whole game for you, so the secrets and unlockables are on their own page, away from the tips and tricks. That said, there are plenty of spoilers in here as well, but we have separated each and every collection of tips by section of the game to which they pertain. Everything you’ll experience for the majority of your “newbie” experience is just below and none of it is entirely shocking, though there’s much useful information there. At the very bottom of this guide is our tips to completion, and they include information from every single thing, including the secrets, but they’re also our most comprehensive (and tested) tips for success. We wish you luck, adventurer. Read More

Welcome to the super secret section of our guide! The content is secret… not… not the guide. Spelunky is rife with “Did you know?”s and “Where IS this place?”s, and it’s our job to try and find them. Actually, it’s your job, but if you’re having trouble it’s our job to help! Not sure why you need to find these things? Well if you want to complete your journal, you’ll have to make your way through every nook and cranny of this game. We’ve cataloged each and every secret we could find, but as far as we know there are still much more out there, lurking in the roguelike shadows of this game. This guide will be updated as myself and the community discover new things. Please email me at todd@xblafans.com if you find something not in the guide. If you’re not ready to see all the secrets, head on back to the Tips & Tricks page. Read More

Take a ride on the surface of Mars. Fall from great heights. Ride a Ferris wheel. Seven tracks are featured today–mostly Trials tracks, but we’ve thrown in a Supercross and Skill Game for good measure. To download these tracks by entering Track Central, selecting Get Tracks, then pressing X to search. Enter the gamertag below to find the track. Be aware that the search is case sensitive. A big thanks to the Trials Evolution community for the borrowed videos. Hit the jump to see this week’s picks.

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Some pre-release goodness. Curious? Tune in on Twitch.TV
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Microsoft and 4J Studios bringing Mojang’s world-building simulator, Minecraft, over to Xbox Live Arcade was a big deal when it was announced and was promoted as such by grabbing some of the spotlight during Microsoft’s pre-E3 2011 media briefing. As such, it stands to reason that the console holder and the Swedish studio behind the original version of the game hammered out a deal months ahead of time before carefully fine-tuning the specifics of its E3 announcement. Sure, that’s reasonable all right, but that’s not the way it happened, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Studios Phil Spencer recently informed Destructoid.

“So I have a funny ‘behind the curtains’ story on Minecraft,” Spencer explained. “It was about a week before E3 last year when we made that deal as a first party. I believed in the project and we knew the studio. The graphic behind me last year on stage — if you were like, ‘What is that?’ it’s because it was created in one night. Even the people inside Microsoft, as they were looking at it, were thinking, ‘What is that Minecraft thing and why are we putting it on stage?'”

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Released on XBLA last week, Zen Studios’ Marvel Pinball: The Avengers Chronicles DLC for Pinball FX2 offers up a quartet of new Marvel-themed tables for gamers to flip silver balls around for 800 MSP. According to the Penny Arcade Report, the foursome are the result of two years of collaborative work between Marvel and Zen. Each of the tables was in development for around eight months, with 75 percent of that time being spent on testing.

“The table I’ve been championing literally since we started this whole thing is The Infinity Gauntlet,” Chris Baker, the interactive manager at Marvel Entertainment, told the Penny Arcade Report. “I think it might actually be what prompted the idea for event-based tables in the first place, just because the idea of Infinity Gems becoming their own balls is so conducive to great video pinball missions. I think more than any table Zen has made so far, this is definitely a videogame and definitely not something you could see actualized in a traditional pinball form. One look at the Reality Gem in action, where the table warps your reality by literally flipping it upside down, and I think you’ll know what I mean.”

After going hands-on with the table at E3 and with the review copy, XBLA Fans has seen firsthand the genius of its intricate design. Zen’s blending of visually impressive comic book elements with satisfying silver ball play is the result of seasoned table designers, but the team behind Infinity Gauntlet wasn’t always capable of such innovative works, admitted Zen Creative Director Neils Sorens. “We started out as game developers who happened to be pinball fans,” he said. “Our lack of pinball design experience showed in our early work, which was derivative and doesn’t stand up well to what we’re putting out these days.”

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Welcome to our Challenges & Encounters guide, two of the key returning features in Magic 2013! This page is for the Challenges, Encounters can be found here. As they were in the past, these puzzles require you to solve intricate victory solutions from abysmal situations. Most of these puzzles require you to win during that one turn, making this a very small, difficult piece of Magic strategy. Since these are puzzles, however, we can solve them the exact same way every time! As such, each solution will be in step by step format, so you can’t possibly miss a beat.

Important: We strongly advise you either view every step before trying these, or you stop the timer after each move, as some steps are between individual card plays rather than entire turn phases.

Again, there are 10 Encounters to go along with the 10 challenges, so if you want solutions or help with those, head on over to the Encounters guide page. Read More

The Encounters are back in Magic 2013 and that means single-minded AIs following patterns until you win or lose. These patterns will be the same every time, but keep in mind that they will still block and attack logically regardless of the pattern. Since this is a card game and you still have to draw cards normally in Encounters, it’s important to remember that sometimes you can’t win without the right cards. That’s perfectly fine, these may take a couple tries no matter how sound the strategy is. The first three are pretty simple Encounters so their solutions are pretty straightforward, but as you progress you’ll find these Encounters get more and more difficult (and more and more unfair), so we hope you’ll find this guide useful.

Also back are the puzzle challenges. These challenges dare you to solve intricate Magic puzzles with a very specific setup and solution set. You can find our solution set to those challenges here. Read More