Life In 19x19

I used to play nethack. Never ascended. The farthest I got was to some weird kind of maze level (not the dwarven mine, something much deeper, it had demons in it and looked like a very dense maze). I also have dim memories of fighting some guy with a bunch of priests, I think he was the one who had the amulet, but I don't think I ever got the amulet from him.

Then I discovered the spoilers on the internet, read a bunch...and then didn't have much interest in playing after that. So once I knew how to ascend, I didn't have the patience to do so any more.

Sounds like you made it to the quest. It gets easier after that. You just have to beat your quest nemesis to get the Bell of Opening and your quest artifact, then go down several more levels, defeat Medusa, go through a few mazes, storm The Castle, traverse The Valley of the Dead, get through 30 or so levels of Ghennom's mazes, along the way defeating the demon princes Asemodeus, Baezelbub, Orcus and Juiblex in their respective lairs (quickly unless you want them to summon Demogorgon!), ascend Vlad the Impaler's tower and defeat Vlad to acquire the Candelabra of Invocation (a strong sneeze should do the trick), climb the Wizard's Tower, defeat The Wizard of Yendor, find The Vibrating Square, perform The Invocation Ritual, enter Moloch's Lair, defeat The High Priest of Moloch and grab The Amulet, return to the surface, pass through the elemental planes of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, enter the Astral Plane, get past the Riders, Death, Famine and Pestilence, find your god's High Altar, perform a few stupid-ascension-tricks, offer the amulet and ascend to Demi-god(ess)hood. Piece of cake!

wms wrote:Then I discovered the spoilers on the internet, read a bunch...and then didn't have much interest in playing after that. So once I knew how to ascend, I didn't have the patience to do so any more.

Now I'm well acquainted with the spoilers (and have even read the code on occasion), but in this case I don't feel like the game is blown for me just because there is so much to do and any number of mistakes can doom it for you. Even with the spoilers, it is no cakewalk. So my challenge is to not screw up and punch through to the end. Similar to playing out a really good joseki or fuseki and feeling satisfied at that stage of the game, knowing you made the right choices and should (should...) reap the benefits.

Bruce "Ranger about to enter Gehennon" Young

Oh, I'm not saying the game is easy or ruined by the spoilers. It's just that once I discovered them, I knew that I'd play by every step consulting the spoilers to figure out the best move, and that style of play didn't seem all that fun. I could have kept playing unspoiled, or with minimal checking, but when I know that I can do a some research and have more success, it's hard to enjoy the repeated failures that I'd have without the research. So just knowing that the spoilers were out there made it harder for me to enjoy the game. It's just something about my personality I guess.

If you had a dead spirit in your head that would always tell you a pro-level move in a go game if you asked, would you still enjoy playing without asking the spirit's advice? I probably wouldn't. And I wouldn't much like mindlessly plunking the stones down where the spirit tells me to, either. Good thing Hikaru was different.

Many people have gone years without ascending, even with spoilers. Worldwide, the number of unspoiled ascensions certainly numbers in the single digits. I've aware of just one, and it's a borderline case - they used Wizard mode to learn things; contrast with the guidebook's recommendation of using Explore mode, which is more limited.

So, while I admire those who play unspoiled, I don't expect them to ever beat the game.

I have a new toy that's been preventing me from studying go, even on nights I'm able to avoid working until 2 am.

DOOMRL - DOOM Roguelike

If you hear the howls of imps and the tortured whirring of arachnodemon gears in your nightmares, you should play this.

It comes with built-in geek points (in-game achievements and unlockable challenge modes) -- I've gotten up to Cacodemon Sergeant rank. Done fairly decently on Hurt Me Plenty (made it through the Phobos Hellgate with an Angel of Berserk [challenge mode limited to melee weapons]) but Ultra-Violence is really tough, and I haven't been brave enough to try Nightmare mode yet.

By the way, new bugfix release of Dwarf Fortress is out since my last post extolling its virtues. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves

Yeah, I've been meaning to try DoomRL, but I'd have to hook up a separate keyboard. It doesn't seem to have a VI keyset, and my netbook has no numpad.

If you're looking for a more introductory and user-friendly roguelike, consider trying Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. You can play by puttying into crawl.akrasiac.org. It's meant to not need spoilers, but it's every bit as crushingly difficult as Nethack.

DoomRL is pretty fun, though it can get annoying pretty quickly with how crashy it is.

The virtues of Dwarf Fortress cannot be extolled enough. Any game that produces something such as meatgodding cannot be ignored.

DOOMRL crashy? I've never had it crash on me.

The worst I've had happen is the music doesn't play sometimes, and that's just because it doesn't seem to be Pulseaudio-aware, so if another non-PA app has grabbed the sound card exclusively (Adobe's Flash plugin is REAL bad about that) then it won't be able to play sound until that app has been closed/killed.

You could send the developer a backtrace maybe? I'm sure he/she'd be interested if you can get a predictable crash.

I suck at Nethack but I like it.
I'm really into Dwarf Fortress currently (fortress mode, so it's not really a roguelike), best video game ever made by Man.
I've always wanted to give Stone Soup a try, but never found the time to do it.

stone soup actually has a tournament going on now, I've beat the game once (and only with 3 runes) but it's still fun to get points for things like killing unique monsters, entering branches, and getting runes.

I started with nethack, moved to DCSS and Brogue (which is very good) and now mainly play adventure mode in Dwarf Fortress. The next update of DF is meant to add a lot of cool things to it, I'm eagerly awaiting it. Also have played the occasional Unreal World, which is like DF adventure mode on steroids. Give it a try (it's very hard.) Oh, as for "classic style" roguelikes, I'm very fond of Frozen Depths

When I was younger, I used to play some obscure-ish roguelikes like Moraff's World, Castle of the Winds and Mordor. Does anyone else remember these?

TheBigH wrote:When I was younger, I used to play some obscure-ish roguelikes like Moraff's World, Castle of the Winds and Mordor. Does anyone else remember these?

I've never heard of Moraff's World, but I've seen the others. It's interesting watching teams bring roguelikes into modern times. Different things have been tried (up to and including adding pokemon). Growing up though, the roguelike I played most was the psx Azure Dreams. Wish they'd get around to a sequel.