Incredible Spelunky player reveals how to kill the Ghost

Legendary video streamer Bananasaurus Rex has completed another seemingly impossible feat in Spelunky: he has killed the Ghost. (Warning: mild spoilers ahead.)

Spelunky, which we incorrectly labelled the third best game of the last console generation recently (it is the best), is a game of beautiful and precise systems, one of which chases down players who linger in its levels with a spooky apparition that kills you in one hit.

Previously thought to be unkillable, B-Rex has identified the Ghost's weakness, if you can call it that. As is now immortalised on the Spelunky wiki, the Ghost has 9999 hit points and there are two things in the game that can chip away at that. One is a passing shot from an AI UFO (1 hit point, so useless), and the other is when she enters lava (99 points).

Neither seems particularly useful. Once unleashed by the player's inactivity or other missteps, the Ghost follows them around Spelunky's procedurally generated 2D platform levels in a wafting arc, drifting through walls, traps and other obstacles that you must navigate. In order to drag her through lava enough to strip away 9999 hit points, you would have to do something superhuman.

Something like navigating to the darkest pits of the secret Hell stages, using bombs and ropes to create a safe(ish) environment around a decent-sized lava pit, and then kiting her through it repeatedly, for example.

One of the wonderful things about this video - and any of the author's - for any long-term Spelunky fan is the ease with which Bananasaurus Rex handles the moment-to-moment difficulties of Spelunky. He makes it look so simple, but everything you see on the screen is abnormal: his ability to jump breezily and consistently between narrow platforms, his health and power-up totals, his indifference to almost every trap and adversary. You are watching a master at work.

What's more, while killing the Ghost - I have been capitalising the G out of respect and fear, incidentally - is a monumental feat, it pales into insignificance compared to Bananasaurus Rex's other recent achievement: creating the first ever recording in Spelunky history of a solo eggplant run.

I guess the only thing that could impress me more than these two achievements would be killing the Ghost with UFOs, something I suspect will never be done.

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