Yeah, I just experienced the throwing-a-rope-and-it-stopping-in-midair symptom again. And it was my last rope.

EDIT: Also, you should be able to become a cultist if you sacrifice yourself to Kali. Sort of a "Thank you for the ultimate sacrifice, I shall grant you the ultimate gift in return." And she brings you back to life in cultist form. But afterward, you could only gain life by sacrificing damsels, not rescuing them. If you rescue them, you lose life ("Kali frowns upon your betrayal." accompanied by two other cultists waiting in the transition tunnel, one knocks the damsel, incapacitating her and takes her back to the previous level to be sacrificed, while the other knocks you, and deals one damage). Then once you get to the tomb, on the first level you're greeted by a message; "These people are unwilling to sacrifice themselves. As my only true follower, kill them!" Then when you get to Kali, she says, "How dare you look upon me without my permission! I shall destroy you, heretic!"

Mmm... Wantses to playz it, I does.

[Hell of an updraft around here...]

Hey, I found a bug, and I can name this one!

Hell of an updraft around here... I ran toward the side of a rock, and grabbed onto it like a ledge, but when I brought myself up, I was in the "falling" state, and it was like I was floating a few centimeters above the rock instead of actually standing on it. When I eventually moved off the rock, I smashed into the ground with the grace of a thousand ton stone, and died.

And yes, counting sacrifices and maybe having a new special door for getting so many sacrifices would make me a happy panda.

Yeah, the altars are very imbalancing for the rest of the game. If you were to include an easy mode, though, that's probably how the altars would be. (Hell, just having altars around like that could sort of be an "Easy mode"...)

I really like the altars, though. They're really fun.

Yes, it is indeed a "wizard" mode. Specifically, a "conjurer" mode. (Actually, it might be really cool to be able to summon stuff up at your feet on a whim...)

rjb, as I said before, I realize that some people want to play the game as a finished work meant to be played just as the developer wanted it to be played, and I can sort of understand that, but I can't comprehend how allowing both that and the more engine-centric play-styles causes the first to stop existing...

Also, another reason I would like to see an easy mode (I really believe this could be done by allowing the player more health, to increase the margin of error for him or her) because, as someone else said, the repetition you end up with. An analogy might be a sort of food-related thing. Imagine you have a table with four holes in it which lead to an interdimensional area (so it can hold tons of stuff). In each of these is a delicious soup, and in order to get to the next, you have to be done with the last. So you begin on the first, and it's delicious and great, and soon enough you're ready for the next part, but to get to the next part, you have to finish consuming twice the amount of soup you've already consumed of the first in order to get to the second, and you end up in a situation where you're not eating the soup because you like it, but you're eating the soup because you just want to taste the next one, and you find yourself miserable with the current soup.

Also, I don't want an easy mode as a form of experimentation. I want an easy mode because Spelunky has too much stuff in it for its difficulty. If it were a game like, say, IWBTG, it would be fine. But Spelunky brings tons of new stuff to the table, and doesn't let many people experience it. So yeah, me sucking is the cause of my problems, but I'm not mad because I suck, I'm mad at how much unnecessary soup I had to consume to get to the next one. If I sucked but I didn't have to repeat the suckage over and over again, the game would be more fun.

I still don't understand how the very existence of an easy setting would make the game less fun...

I mean, if you don't want to play on easy because you like the merciless challenge of normal Spelunky, play classic Spelunky and not the easy mode. If don't feel like merciless challenge at the moment, play easy mode. In easy mode you would be able to beat the game, and you would be able to experience everything the game has to offer except for the merciless challenge (and maybe getting the special achievements... if I didn't get special achievements in easy mode, I'd be perfectly fine).

I want this to be the case because Spelunky is so unique. It's currently the only game in the platformer\roguelike genre out there, so I believe that the goal should be to allow for as many play-styles as possible to be fully satisfied instead of only a few being able to play this new interesting idea (which is based on roguelikes, which will draw roguelike players, who might not have the greatest of reflexes, which means the people most interested are most likely to not be able to play it, and will basically not be able to experience an entire genre of games that is actually based on their genre of choice... I mean, imagine if third person shooters were so radically different from first person shooters that hardcore fans of the latter just weren't able to play it; that's just plain evil).

(SIDENOTE, to all the people who claimed I'm just angry because I suck...)

Also, I wanna say something. In order to make absolutely sure that I wasn't just angry because I sucked, but was truly angry about the things I said I was (because so many people accused me of being mad because I was bad at the game), I downloaded (the demo of) I Wanna Be The Guy. Yeah, the one renowned for its difficulty and keyboard-smashing-ness. I sucked at it, but I didn't care. It didn't seem to present anything new, really (at least not the parts I managed to play). It had a guykid, with a little gun, and it had spikes and platforms, and a big boss thing (that's as far as I got). Nothing really spectacular, because its allure was the difficulty. I sucked (quite terribly) at it, and I didn't get mad at it. At all. So for those who said I was just mad because I was bad, you're wrong. I'm mad because I thought the effort that I had to put in was not in balance with the rewards I got, and that the game had so many spectacular effects and possibilities it was misleading in the play-style required to play it (that is, avoiding spectacularity at all costs). If you plan on making over half the game involve awesome events and effects, don't force the player to avoid it, let them immerse themselves in it as they choose.

Er... "This my opinion and it is right and yours is wrong."

But another part of having fun with the game comes from situations that are made by the random level generator.

See, the way it is now, you come across randomly generated obstacles, and overcome them usually in a very bland fashion, otherwise you'll probably die. I want to be able to encounter randomly generated obstacles, and overcome them in a totally spectacular way. The game supports "the spectacular way" and even appears to encourage it because of how spectacular it is, but when you try to do it, you end up usually dying young. If you're playing pre-gen levels, you're just facing the same challenge over and over, and the playground is limited, but if you could play whimsy in the randomly generated levels, the playground is nigh endless. And yes, being able to choose one area type to "practice" in sounds like a lot of fun.

And rjb, what I am suggesting would be pretty much like (to continue your analogy) having a football game that allows you to play football, but also allows you to just play with a football (despite how entirely ridiculous that would be for a football game). This way we can both be happy and have fun in our own way but with the same game.

EDIT: As a continuation of this post post-posting (wow, this language is obnoxious), I believe that even if you had already seen everything before playing the hard mode, it would be just as satisfying. Why do I say this? I saw the tomb at least two hundred times and Kali at least thirty before I beat him, yet when I beat the game, I was perfectly satisfied (that is, as satisfied as I could be for being so angry at the game for being so misleading and bastardy, and for not really caring all that much for the "YES! I DID IT!" satisfaction).

YES! That's a great idea! And it would allow the harder modes to have much more impact when you said you had seen them, too. (@Candlejack)

rjb: With the changes I suggest (relating to difficulty), it would be the exact same game, except with an extra mode added on the side. I saw quite a few people saying that a "Wizard" mode would be cool, but for some reason having an easy mode wouldn't? As for the "game not telling you the difference" problem, well, the game could just tell you the difference. Tell you that easy mode is meant for players who aren't really looking for the satisfaction of accomplishment, whereas the normal/hard mode is. Or just come out and say, "In easy mode you have more health, but hard mode is more rewarding to players looking for accomplishment."

And I don't see including difficulty modes as a cop-out at all. I see it as a way for a developer to allow players with different play-styles have fun with the game the way they want to have fun with it instead of the way the developer wants to have fun with it. So (repeat concept) some people can have the "YES! I DID IT!" fun and others can have the "Haha! That was cool!" fun without being punished.

I said in an earlier post that even if it's not in the main game, I wouldn't care, but if some modder wants to make a spacelunky, they should at least make a version of the game with this behavior, even if they didn't go all out and change the boss or anything, just add the mothership taking off and you having to play at least a level of UFO.

Also, a friend's suggestion (he wants there to be more extra story stuff, the alien thingy was actually his idea also before I totally changed it):

If you manage to take out the black market through whatever means, after it, (suggestion branch: my friend said a ninja should contact you and give you a ninja suit, which makes you invisible when you duck. I had a different idea) a person contacts you and says that he and the rebel force have been trying to take down the evil Shopkeeper Union's monopoly on cave markets, and he gives you a new outfit to show that you're with the rebel force, and for the rest of that game, if there's a shop in the level, there would be a special event ("I hear gunfire!") and when you find the shop, there would be a closed door so the two can't get out, and a rebel and a shopkeeper would duke it out inside the shop. When one side wins, the door opens and either you have a shopkeeper to deal with, or  the rebel takes over the shop and says you can have any of the items you want for free as a reward for your help. Then in subsequent games, the rebel outfit could be an extra outfit like the damsel-suit is. (The "Changing Room" could, instead of a single outfit, be used to cycle through many outfits.)

Or you could just have the cool new outfit part. I wouldn't care much. But the rest of it would be totally awesome. Of course, it might be a bit hard to code in, but I don't know.

And Traveller, for people who want there to be worth there, they can just say, "I saw the end of Spelunky on normal difficulty/superhard difficulty!" People who plan to play on easy mode probably wouldn't care about beating the game anyway. At least, I wouldn't. My reason for an easy mode is that I want to be able to play Spelunky like a fantastical action-game instead of a cold can't-take-risks-or-do-cool-things-at-all-game, because the game seems to be more built with that gameplay in mind. If the game is meant to be played without awesomeness in mind, why allow it to be played that way. It's like a D&D game where a player asks if he can do something completely awesome, but totally illogical, and the DM saying, "Yeah, do it! That would be totally awesome!" and then killing the character outright after he does it. It's a total buzz-kill, and in the case of Spelunky, down-right infuriating.

So, um...

Hey, guys...

I really didn't plan on ever coming back here ever again, but I came back to see if there was anything new on this thread and found Delmion's post and was calmed down, a lot. Even though it's embarrassing beyond comprehension to know that I went off like that earlier. (You guys should seriously consider making a few logical, specific arguments instead of the all-too-common "just don't play it" or "I like it and so do a lot of other people." They just don't work, especially when it involves a unique game like Spelunky, where people really can't go find an easier game that's like it.)

So I have a few bugs...

First, it's the ice area. The whole thing is a giant bug The idol trap is useless. If you stand up on the falling blocks above the spikes and grab the idol (or don't, it doesn't matter), and you just stand on the platforms as the fall, you'll survive just fine and dandy. It's because you remain in the "standing" state on the block, and spikes don't hurt you in that state, so you can just grab the idol, wait, and move on. I think standing on a falling platform should have a state of it's own so the game mechanics still work right.

Next, it has to do with firearms. If you're in a narrow corridor (one where you can't jump at all) and you have a gun, and you just fire and fire and fire and fire, slowly your momentum upward will increase, but won't discharge. So you can be in a narrow corridor, fire lots, and then go into an open area and as soon as there's room over your head, all the pent up energy will release, and you'll be flung into the air. This could even possibly be used to jump from a narrow ledge like that, because you can actually use it to go higher into the air than you can normally jump.

Next, the bullets are graphically glitchy sort of. If you fire a bullet, normally it will hit something and kill it or make a small puff of smoke, but if it hits a movable block, it will just teleport to the center of the block and disappear, with no puff of smoke.

Also, suggestion again:

I would really like to know what people think of my suggestion for the UFO. It got no feedback last time. If you're in the UFO ship in the ice area, and you wait until the ghost would normally appear and the big alien is still alive, the ship should start to shake, you fall unconscious, and the ship leaves to dock with a bigger, more matronly mothership. This mothership would be four levels long, and would take the place of the tomb (so I've changed my suggestion quite a bit). You go down through the ship, and at the end you have to fight a big alien-boss to replace Kali (the fight should be fundamentally different from Kali, too), and you manage to land the ship on Earth, (which would take the place of the idol, seeing how that discovery would be a great discovery).

Also, I would really like to know how having two difficulty modes would make the game less satisfying. Including an easy mode does not mean that the normal mode (or even hard mode, for those of you who have inhumanly fast hands and actually think Spelunky should be harder, if you exist) would be easier or less satisfying, and for people who want the uncovering of new areas to be their satisfaction, those people can forgo playing the easy mode. This way the players like me can play easy and have their satisfaction (messing about with the enemies and objects and such) and the players who like hard games can have their satisfaction (reaching the new area through the use of immense skill or robotic repetition). The two areas would not even affect each other, so I can't find a valid reason for not including an easy mode. A reason I think the game is hard is because of the margin of error players have (because of the very limited HP supply). So players could play normal mode (start with 4 HP) or easy mode, (start with user-specified amount of HP) (actually, more like "custom mode," because people could choose to start with 1 HP for super-hardness). Sure there's the instant deaths like spikes or the bottom of the ice area, but the game could easily add a floor to the ice area if a player chooses to start with more than, say, 8 HP. Spikes could be removed if the player chooses to start with more than 16 or such. Not only would this be easy to code, it would make the game more accessible to many players, and allow other players to be able to just jack around with 99 HP or something.

I would do it myself but I don't have a version of GM that's allowed to do it, and even then, I don't really know how to use GM.

(Yeah, I started it again, because it hasn't ended yet, and I'm a persistent bastard.)

No, screw this.

I'm done.

I'll go try and be a linguist or something I guess. Gaming obviously isn't my thing and I apparently shouldn't even be playing the good, new games.

I don't care anymore. Make Spelunky discriminate against people of hispanic lineage or something, I don't give a shit anymore.

This is the angriest I have ever been on the internet. I've gone from normal to angry to frothing at the mouth and using all-caps and I've now reached the "it's not even fucking worth it to interact with people like you" stage.

The farthest I've ever been is "angry" but...

Not only do I not want to fucking be here anymore, I don't deserve to be here anymore. Derek, permaban me or delete my account or whatever it is you do.

Screw all of you.

I like Kegluneq's idea, but that's one of those things that really would decrease satisfaction for hardcore gamers.

Something that wouldn't decrease satisfaction for anyone but would increase it for some would be DIFFICULTY LEVELS.

If you think even having the option for a game to be easier makes the hard level less satisfying, I dare say you are just plain stupid.

That's along the lines of saying the fact that spinach exists, food overall isn't good anymore.

You don't seem to realize that just because there's an easy level doesn't mean hard level is any easier. Hell, it could even make it more satisfying, because no one has to worry about being blocked from content and getting angry. They'd be playing a rehash of things they've seen (assuming they've been through the easy mode) that's just way more difficult. Or if they want to have to go through hours of manual labor in order to reach new things, they can just never play the easy mode.

THIS HURTS NOTHING BUT HELPS SOMETHING, WHERE IS THE FLAW?

And the idea that the existence of an easy mode makes the game less satisfying has been countered, so if you plan on saying, "but it makes it less satisfying" just don't, unless you have a really, really good argument.

Derek, I'll try to be a bit less angry-sounding, despite the fact that no matter what I say, people just say, "Meh I like it don't play this game and I don't care if you like the game or not."

Someone said that a difficulty setting would actually make the game worse. How would it do this? By allowing both sides of the difficulty argument to be fully satisfied. That's so terrible, I know...

How is making non-hardcore players able to have fun and making hardcore players able to have just as much fun in the same game a bad thing? Is it because you don't want non-hardcore players to be able to say they beat it, even if it is on easy mode?

You haven't done your job. I'm not in your world. I persevered to beat the game because that was my only goddamn option and I hated it, and I still hate that I had to do it, and I don't plan on ever looking back and saying, "Gee I'm glad Derek made a game that had a good concept that was completely freaking ruined by the fact that it only had one difficulty level and it was 'fuck you' it was so great." No. By that logic, I would love playing <insert crappy game here> ten years afterwards because... I dunno, it made me more able to play crappy games. This game didn't make me better at games. It made me better at Spelunky. I can't use that skill in life. All I can use that skill in is Spelunky. And as I've said many times before, I'm hardly better at Spelunky at all, even after eight hundred plays. I can hardly ever make it to the ice caves from the normal caves and my death rate in the Jungle is probably about the same as it was in first five hundred.

I wasn't about to "sit this one out" and you refused to let people like me play your game and get the full satisfaction from it, FOR NO FUCKING REASON AT ALL! Oh no, wait, your only reason was "I don't want to follow industry standards."

What's wrong with easy modes? They let hardcore players have fun, and they let non-hardcore players have fun, too. Without them, all you're doing is arbitrarily excluding certain players from the game, which can only be translated as a total dick move.

But everyone seems to think people that aren't as good as them shouldn't even be allowed to play the same games as them, even if the games are interesting. Gee, I guess I should sit this one out. Along with Cave Story (which I did), and along with Gish (which I did), and along with whatever next game comes along that everyone loves but people like me aren't allowed to play for no real reason. For some reason people think that games that have OPTIONS BETWEEN HARD AND EASY are worse than games that give you the option of "be a skilled gamer or don't play and I don't give a shit if you like the game or not."

(No feedback on the suggestions?)

Or... you could follow industry standards and have one part of the game that kicks hardcore player's asses, and another part that doesn't kick their asses. So the two groups can choose which part to play, but not miss out on content?

Oh wait, let's ignore the fact that that approach does make both groups happy, and just dismiss it because THAT WOULD MEAN INCLUDING AN "EASY" MODE. Seriously. Yeah, there's more accomplishment for beating it the way it currently is, but only one group likes the accomplishment. The other group cares more about the journey toward the accomplishment, and this game has taken that group, and given them a nice "screw you" because the journey there is only fun the first fifty or so times, and I had to do it EIGHT HUNDRED TIMES. If it had only taken fifty tries, I would have been just as happy, if not more, and those people who want to play on hard mode would also be perfectly fine.

I know it's a strong statement, but I stand behind it fully. I seriously can't comprehend how a person can seriously suggest that games should be exclusive to certain groups of players, despite other groups' interest in it.

Next, while you say that you wouldn't have liked to complete Spelunky in only a few tries, I agree. I probably wouldn't keep playing if I beat within a hundred or so tries. But as soon as it started getting past three hundred, I was having no fun at all. I was performing manual labor so I could see the rest of the game, not being entertained. This is why I think that unlockable content (yeah, I would easily say that the later levels of Spelunky are more like unlockables than anything) shouldn't be new content, just an interesting rehash of the old. There are some people who want to have their fun by messing around with UFOs or playing with the physics, but the game doesn't allow it. The game only rewards one style of play. But why? How come people who like the game but not that play-style are ignored and basically told to leave? This is part of the reason I hate Gish with a fiery passion that seems to be straight from the center of the earth. The game had you playing as a ball of sludge. It had interesting levels and was totally fun, except that it was only fun the first time. After you played a level once or twice, you had already been affected by the coolness of it, and now you were just trying to get to the next area. And the people who wanted a more open game where you could play for the fun of being a ball of sludge were disregarded.

It just makes no sense at all that a person would advocate games being exclusive instead of universal.

(Am editing to reply to Derek's post.) (EDIT'd)

Positive perspective... Okay.

I can safely tell you that I don't hate Spelunky down to the core. The core is the part that I really like. It's a platformer\roguelike, which is right up there with FPS\roguelike and Half-Life 2: Episode 3 for me. The part that I don't like is the shell.

I really love the gameplay. The basic gameplay of throwing rocks around and exploring a cave or a temple or an... underground jungle ( ). I love all the things it's possible to do. You can throw rocks around, jam arrows into walls to make a short ladder, push blocks into lava as a temporary stepping stone, sneak past worshipers of Kali, stick-up a gun-shop (this leads to a suggestion later), strategically knock a UFO into a bunch of yetis, or swipe a jetpack from an alien mothership after slaying its captain (yet another suggestion-maker). All these are things that aren't hard, but are very fun. This is why I play the game. (And why I seem to dislike it so much. I feel like you've made it too hard to get to the fun parts. Why not make the fun parts easier to get to and the hard parts just as easy to get to (this way both groups' ideas of 'fun' can be satisfied)?)

Woe is me, I forgot the suggestions... (EDIT)

(Suggestion 1)I think it would be great if you could point a gun at an unarmed shopkeeper and he would put his arms up in fright. Then you could lead him around hostage style and even force him to do things for you (it'd be nice if this could lead to a special secret thingy). But if you take your gun off him to long, he'll either try to make his escape or go for his own gun. If you point a gun at him in his shop, he'd move out of his little corner so you could hostage him around. If you pick up a gun in a shop, though, you have to activate it. This could be done by just pressing "x" when holding a gun. The first time a gun is ever held, you have to press "x" to cock\load it, which means its psychological shopkeeper effects would be activated, too. I think this could be cool.

(Suggestion 2)A friend of mine made a suggestion when I mentioned "spacelunky." He said it would be cool if in the ice area's "psychic presence," if you were to stay in the mothership until the ghost would normally appear, the ship would start to vibrate, you would be knocked down (unconscious) and the ship would take off and board a larger ship, which would act like another area. So the progressions would go from the normal 4cave, 4jungle, 4ice, 4temple, boss to, say, 4cave, 4jungle, 2ice, 4UFO, 2ice, 4temple, boss. Even if you don't plan to do it in the official game, if some modder wants to add a spacelunky theme, I request they do this, because it would be totally awesome.

For whoever thought that I thought the main goal was the end boss, you're wrong. The problem I have with the core content of the game being hard is that people like me who don't have naturally quick reflexes are essentially locked out of the game after a certain point.

How would you feel if I said to you, "Sure, you can play Super Mario Brothers, but your eyes are blue, so I'll only let you play the first three worlds." You'd probably be quite a bit pissed off, because I wouldn't even let you try them, I would just tell you, "Nope, sorry, not allowed to see it."

That's how I felt with Spelunky for a <i>very</i> long time, and I don't think I was wrong, even having beaten the game (only because of the tunnel man). If I didn't have money to shove into the tunnel man's pockets at every turn, I would never have seen the temple and maybe the ice cave, because I would have given up, because the game is too hard. I believe that what Derek should do is take a lot of the "challenge" (in quotes because something that relies on you doing something hundreds of times before you succeed is not 'challenge', it's labor) out of the core game, and add more extra content for those people who want to do more with the things they have seen. I was angry before not because I was having trouble in areas I was already in (although that was the cause of the source of the anger) but because I wasn't even given the chance to see the rest of the game. I wasn't able to overcome the jungle after having been through the caves (and even since then I've only accomplished it a few times) so I was essentially locked out of half the game. It felt like the game had a series of walls, and walls are <i>not</i> good game design. The player should be able to expose himself to the entire game no matter what his skill level, and then be allowed to take on various challenges related to the other content.

I just don't understand how a person could disagree with this. Why should people of lesser skill not be allowed to play the whole game and be barred from having the fun they want to have? By making more content that is optional and less that is mandatory, more people will like it. There are some people (like me) whose main goal is to see the game. They want to go through the game and have fun with the basic elements and play with the world in the game and how the different elements of it interact. The aim is more on the "Ha! That was awesome!" or "That's really cool." than the "YES! I DID IT!" entertainment. Then there are people who aim for the second form of entertainment. If the game's basic features are presented without very high skill requirements, the first group is satisfied, but the second isn't. But in this fashion, there's a way to satisfy both groups. It's to have the basic features require less effort to reach, but include optional challenges that require lots of skill so the second group can have their fun too. For an easier to understand explanation, it's like the whole game is pretty easy to get through, but then there's much more "okay, it's like that level, but with x!" or "now see if you can do it with this extra challenge put in it!" type levels. The way it is currently is "if you can't do this part, fuck you, I'm not going to let you see the other parts of the game because you suck."

Yes, that is seriously how I felt throughout my playing of this game. Constantly. Just because I didn't have extra fast reflexes Derek, the game decided that I shouldn't even be <i>allowed</i> to see the tomb level. And the tunnel man is not an acceptable compromise here. What that does is make the whole game suited to the "YES! I DID IT!" club, and then says, "okay, but if you suck I'll let you do it the skimpy way." What that does is make the first club have their bragging rights and then lets the second group know that they didn't even finish the game fairly, they had to skip levels. Don't start at the top and work downward through the difficulty levels, start from the bottom and move up, so that the second group can beat the game squarely, and allow the first group to beat the game squarely, <i>and then some</i>.

Yeah, I've probably repeated myself a few times in this post, but so many people just don't seem to understand the concept of difficulty.

Next, for all the freaking people who said that this isn't the game for me, shut up, please. I try not to get too angry on the Internet, but when someone tries to tell me that I shouldn't be playing a game because I'm not as good as them, it just makes me want to take their eyes out. I like the game. I love roguelikes, I love platformers. Telling me that the mixture between the two is "not the game for me" is just dumb. Games are fun, not work, and when a game requires that you try EIGHT HUNDRED GODDAMN TIMES before you're even allowed to know what the rest of the game is like, it starts go from the fun side over to the work side.

I'd still like for you to make the game a bit less infuriating. Jungle levels and ice levels still have way too many spots where success is more up to the game than yourself, unless you plan on wasting all your supplies on one level, so you can die to the next one. As I said, I've been able to make it to the ice level from the caves TWICE, in about 850 plays. It's not the caves. It's the jungle. The game goes from fair+easy to unfair+hard to unfair+medium to fair+hard. The difficulty is totally jacked up, and half the game consists of the random level generator determining your fate instead of you. Honestly, if the game had the jungle and ice areas taken out entirely, it would be much more fun. I feel like the middle two areas are meant more as a barrier than anything, meant to keep players who want to have fun but aren't good out of the end-game, and only allowing the ridiculously persistent or naturally skillful players to see the end, or even the two areas before the end on some occasions. When I beat the game for my first time, yeah, I was happy, but I would have been much happier if I didn't have to try 800 times. I was happy, then I, as I predicted, looked back and said that the fact that it took so many tries was just stupid. A much better way to have made the game would have been to allow players to beat the game in a relatively low amount of tries (I'd go for at least below 200), then have the main challenge in extra content like the high-score doors or secret areas. This way people like me whose main goal was to have fun the whole way through instead of only at the end can be satisfied, and those whose main goal is to be able to brag about all their accomplishments can be satisfied through the extra content. You could have more extra content and less core content, and the game's quality and accessibility could be much greater, and more people would be able to have more fun for more time, instead of some people having fun the whole way, but most people only having fun at the end because they've yet to realize that they wasted tons of hours so they could be satisfied for a few seconds and decide that the whole thing was basically a terrible game whose only quality was addictiveness. As I've mentioned before, this is a recurring problem among the indie gaming scene; only the people who have naturally great reflexes or who are just innately good at games are able to play some of the most praised games, while those like me are forced to quit in the early stages and be held back from 80% of many games. Cave Story and Gish did it. Both games seemed like a lot of fun, but it was impossible for me to advance past the first few sections in either because I'm not a masterful gamer, and I'm certain I'm not the only person like this. The only reason I made it through Spelunky was because in my 800 plays I was able to shove money into the tunnel man's face until finally I was able to just start at the tomb and hope I made it to the boss, who was actually easier to get past than an average level in the caves.

So unless your goal really is to insult people with less skill than others (in which case I will never play your games again), I believe that some major balancing is in order to make the game less exclusive.

Yes, I'm seconding the ideas for character customization past being able to unlock the woman for playing.

Customized hats would be really cool (especially if people could make their own hats).

Also, the bit about dinosaurs; my friend also suggested that there be a level in the jungle having to do with raptors ("I hear raptor shrieks!" or something, and there would be raptors in place of man-eating plants, but they would behave like Kali-worshipers in how they react to the player (as well as other humanoid characters).

Also, Port-a-lunky. And Spacelunky. And Steampunky. Bah, I'm willing to wait for all the open-source resultant mods for that (except for Port-a-lunky). For now, I just want VERSION 1.0! DEREK! NOW, GET TO WORK!