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XSpelunker
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About the game
It is 1983, and the explorer Michael S. Xavier has gone into the Yucatán jungle convinced that the old accounts of the Maya ruins hide something. Through the letters he sends home between levels, you follow him from the jungle into the outer ruins and then into the deep ruins, where what he finds is not quite what the history books say.
XSpelunker is a platformer of short, dangerous levels, built from scratch each time you play. You start with a machete, a few bombs and a few climbing ropes, and find more along the way: stones, a shield, a bow and arrows, boots for higher jumps, a diving mask, an anti-gravity belt and, deep down, a phaser. Every level has a three-minute timer and a way out somewhere below; monkeys, snakes, scorpions, piranhas, bees and stranger guardians stand in the way, and a long fall hurts as much as any of them. Health only comes back one point at the end of each level, so careful play pays.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game for the MSX, the 1980s home computer standard that was especially popular in Japan, Europe and Brazil (where it sold as the Gradiente Expert and the Sharp Hotbit). It is a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release, made for MSX1 machines. It runs here in the blueMSX emulator with C-BIOS, a free replacement for the MSX system software.
Click Play, press Space on the title screen, and press Space again when the "WAIT..." message for the new level goes away. Your computer keyboard works as the MSX keyboard. F2 saves the full state of the emulator in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad acts as the MSX joystick: the bottom button is the machete (Space) and the right button changes the item (M).
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Left / Right | walk |
| Up | jump; climb up; hold in the air to grab a rope |
| Down | crouch (and look down); climb down |
| Up twice / Down twice | jump off / let go of a rope |
| Space or X | swing the machete |
| Down + Space | pick up an item, or drop the selected one |
| Space held, arrows, release | throw the selected item (bomb, rope, stone, arrow) or fire the bow or phaser |
| M or Z, or 1-8 | change the selected item |
| P | pause |
| M on the title screen | settings |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Crouch to look around. Crouching recentres the screen on Xavier and lets you see further down, which is the best way to check a drop before you take it.
Keep bombs and ropes in stock. Early levels can always be finished without them, but later ones may need a wall blown open or a rope thrown to a ledge. Heavy items, like the idol, can also be left on a floor button to keep a door open.
Check the settings. On the title screen, M opens options to make Space jump off ropes instead of a double tap on Up, to turn the machete autoselect on or off, and to turn the in-game music on or off.
Credits and licence
XSpelunker was written by Santiago Ontañón, who releases his games as Brain Games; code, graphics, music and the letters are his. It is inspired by Spelunky and by the Spanish 8-bit classic Livingstone Supongo, but shares no material with them. Data is compressed with Pletter, by XL2S Entertainment, and a few short routines come from public Z80 and MSX programming resources, credited in the source code. The game is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3, and the author's repository at the release tag is hosted alongside the game. The licence texts are linked from this page.