conrad_zaar over at Livejournal gave me five things to write about, as mandated by one of the few blog-memes I always enjoy both reading and writing. I am posting each Thing separately, because I am being baroque and wordy and a single post would be far too unwieldy.
(Anyone who wants to join in the fun can post a comment. I'll give you five words/phrases to write about.)
Nethack was my introduction to the world of roguelike games. It made me the ASCII purist I am today. It kept me in QWERTY training after I had switched to Dvorak for all of my personal keyboard use,1 allowing me to remain generally employable. Thanks to Nethack I spent hours upon hours engrossed in terminal screens and Usenet discussions, as well as developing a persistent tendency to see the emoticon :D as a dragon standing next to a newt.
So it's a pity that I don't like it very much any more.
Nethack had (and has) a lot going for it. It's a ridiculously complex game that requires strategy, tactics and luck; it's a mélange of fantasy references, silly in-jokes and puns; it offers various different playing experiences, both built into the game and added by the playing community in the form of voluntary "conduct" challenges.
Its arbitrary lethality was one of the things I liked most about it, especially at first. While still mostly unspoiled I would blunder about happily, discovering new and strange things and (more often than not) getting killed by them. In a normal game this would have boosted me along some sort of learning curve, but a combination of my own lack of application and Nethack's deliberate, obstructive difficulty meant that I never really got anywhere until I had accumulated information from lurking on rec.games.roguelike.nethack for a while.
Unfortunately, once I was spoiled enough to progress further in the game I discovered that the rest of it was actually quite dull. It's an unfortunate and perhaps ironic fact that the really challenging, difficult part of Nethack is the part that everyone has to play, and only relative experts ever get as far as the easy part. Once I had ascended2 once I could have tried again with a different character type or extra conducts … but I had no desire to play through a boring game again, even (or perhaps especially) in a more difficult mode. Even the early levels are pretty boring if one is playing through them prudently with the aim of getting further.
I still have quite a lot of affection for Nethack. I like its silly item interactions, its funny messages, and its bewildering array of ways to die. It's just that an occasional reference is more than enough to satisfy my appetite. If I want to play a roguelike that is actually fun and challenging I will play Crawl every time.3
I wonder how you feel about Dwarf Fortress. It seems like the strange offspring of a forbidden tryst between the sims, dungeon keeper, and an anonymous roguelike.
I kind of like it, but the masochism of using the interface drives me mad after a while. Using Nethack keybindings to run what is a kind of RTS is just Bad And Wrong.
The real-time aspect of Dwarf Fortress turned me off even trying it. I don't generally go for RTS-type games (everything gets too hard to keep track of!) and one of the things I like most about roguelikes is the way they let me take my time (although I generally end up dying because I'm not taking my time).
How about ADOM? Crawl's a nice diversion, but if you really want some roguelike meat to sink your teeth into...
I played ADOM briefly, but it is too much like a regular video game and not enough like a roguelike (in the more specific sense of "the kind of roguelike I want to play"). I didn't enjoy starting to play it (unlike Crawl) and it didn't make me want to get further into the game (unlike Nethack). Just not for me, I guess.
Incidentally, did you leave this comment before the Google Wave incident? It's more than a little bit creepy of Google if your commenting here added me to your contact list there. My secret identity may not be as safe as I had thought!