Yeah that's very true. Every step forward makes previous ones easier.
Some general tips that helped me:
Always carry something. A stone, a vase, a weapon. Anything that'll set traps off. Also a good idea to carry something through the levels as you can be faced with a trap at the start of the next. Save you wasting a bomb.
Try get the shortcuts opened so you can practice on each world.
Never jump off a ledge, hang and drop.
Crouch a lot and look at the next level below. The more you know, the less can surprise you.
Ropes are helpful if a bat is coming in right on top of you, it'll shoot straight up and kill it.
I love/hate Spelunky but haven't played for ages since I had got as far as 665 deaths and wanted to take a nice shot of my new TV showing the 666th death and haven't got around to setting it up yet.
is there any sign of the daily challenge option being added to the Xbox version? that'll get me back...
I hope the console versions get it but it feels to burdensome I reckon with the closed was of the consoles. It also felt like daily challenge was a thank you to pc due to a belated return to the pc after hd went 360 first.
Managed to get to the temple levels on a regular basis yesterday, even got to the Mothership once for about 5 seconds. It's true about keep playing this and after many deaths it begins to click. A bit like Dark Souls in that respect, doubt I'll complete this either!
Daily Challenge record: place skull on TNT, blow self up, $0, Level 1-1.
Some guy just completed the egg plant run solo, I didn't know what an egg plant run was and now that i do, I know won't ever get near those kind of skillz. Spoilers ahoy:
Is the challenge simply to go as far as you can? I was expecting different objectives.
I deliberately killed myself thinking I'd missed the imagined objetive.