Let's start out by exploding a myth about this game: Spelunky is in no way, shape or form a "roguelike". For starters, roguelikes are a subgenre of the dungeon-crawling genre, and Spelunky is most certainly not a dungeon crawler (i.e. a small-scale tactics game with a heavy exploration aspect). Moreover, Spelunky cannot be said to have "roguelike elements" either. Because, contrary to what fagots who know as much about videogames as Roger Ebert think, what makes a roguelike a roguelike is not the randomized stage layout, but the game's LACK OF A CONVENTIONAL SAVE FEATURE. This is why, for example, a game like Ancient Domains of Mystery, and others like it, are still considered roguelikes despite featuring environments that are to a large extent pregenerated. So what makes a roguelike a roguelike, as I've already said — or, to be more precise, what makes a dungeon-crawler a roguelike — is, above all else, the lack of a conventional save feature. This, however, does not fucking mean THAT EVERY GAME THAT DOES NOT ALLOW SAVING IS A FUCKING ROGUELIKE. Because, if that were so, EVERY SINGLE ARCADE GAME EVER MADE WOULD BE A FUCKING ROGUELIKE, FAGOTS! — So get your shit straight: roguelikes are dungeon crawlers from which the ability to save (or, to be more precise, the ability to continue from a particular save point more than once) has been REMOVED, thereby arcade-izing the genre — but this doesn't mean that any genre from which saving has been removed is a roguelike; it's just a genre which has come closer to arcade (or early-console...) design sensibilities. What the fagots are basically doing here is the equivalent of looking up the definition of, say wolf on Wikipedia ("the largest wild member of the Canidae family of carnivorous and omnivorous mammals"), and then coming out and saying that, because piranhas for example are carnivorous, they are a subspecies of wolves — wolf-fish, perhaps, a "fishy" variation of a wolf, a fish with "wolfish elements". But a wolf is A MAMMAL, fagots, whilst a pirhanha is A FISH — you can't wrench a subspecies out of its species and arbitrarily pick out some of its characteristics (and moreover subsidiary characteristics...) and use them as an excuse to insert it into ANOTHER FUCKING SPECIES for christsake. How can I explain this elementary concept to you more plainly? Here's another example: a metroidvania is a platformer involving lots of saving and backtracking. But many FPSes (or adventure games, or dungeon crawlers, or flight simulators, or, or, or...) also involve lots of saving and backtracking, yet no one calls these games "metroidvania FPSes" or "FPSes with metroidvania elements". And the same goes for the randomized stages — simply consider that there are countless games from other genres which employ this feature (e.g. strategy games like Heroes of Might & Magic, or space exploration games in the style of Elite, or even ancient action stuff like Asteroids for christsake) and yet no one calls them roguelikes, or claims that they have "roguelike elements". In other words, "permadeath" and random stage generation ARE FAR TOO COMMON (AND MOREOVER SUBSIDIARY) DESIGN FEATURES, and "roguelike" far too specialized a genre label to warrant bandying it about from genre to genre in such an indiscriminate fashion. In short, the notion that Spelunky is a "roguelike" or has "roguelike elements" is pure humbug that (regardless of how and by whom it began) its creator is more than happy to perpetuate for the simple reason — and this is the crux of the matter — that the roguelike subgenre has a (well-deserved) reputation for being "hardcore", a reputation which Mr. Yu would dearly love to co-opt for his ludicrous little "indie sensation". So I've got news for you, Mr. Yu: you are not hardcore, you are just a fagot who abuses videogame terminology in order to trick others into granting you more respect than you deserve — and, considering how pathetic your best game so far is, guess what: you don't deserve any.
