paratactician:

I started playing Spelunky – the ‘enhanced edition’, not the lo-fi original – in March 2014, during the last Oxford vacation I ever spent at my childhood home in Birmingham. I don’t know why I bought it. It was cheap in a sale on GOG, but even so, it’s a famously hard platformer and I am famously bad at platformers. I never honed those nerves and thews on Mario. I miss jumps; I get stressed. I think I lasted half a level in Meat Boy. I ought to have bounced off Spelunky after my first handful of deaths.

Instead, I got hooked. I’d play it a few times (which doesn’t take very long; early in one’s Spelunky career surviving for five minutes is a significant achievement) and then decide it was too hard and not for me. The next day I’d fire it up again, wondering if I’d somehow magically got better at it overnight. This lasted for the rest of the vacation, until I went back to work and lost all my free time again.

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The platformer where I threw all our bombs to get out of all our problems and pT used all our ropes to get us out of poverty, culminating, every time, in a dead gold god squashing us to death