Slashdot Mirror

Funny, everyone seems to be playing SporkHack while others have migrated over to Crawl.

1. Crawl - http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/
2. Letter hunt - http://www.zincland.com/7drl/letterhunt/
3. Tecmo-Bowl (nes) - best console football game ever (it's all about the gameplay and not about the graphics).
4. (missed greatly) 1990s Addams Family pinball game - the best pinball game ever made. Better than the 3/4ths of the machines in "The Lure of the Silver Ball" I've played.
5. (honorable mention) Capture the flag - Atari 2600 followed by Canyon Bomber, and Adventure (played on orignal 1978 Sears tele-games console until the controllers wore out and after we wore out playing with the controllers printed circuit board)

A friend of mine while I was attending university was a developer for Linley's Dungeon Crawl (http://www.dungeoncrawl.org/), a roguelike.

He was ALWAYS talking about game balance. From what I recall, most of his time was spent either fixing bugs, rewriting chunks of code (because the codebase was Ugly(tm) C++), or fixing imbalances introduced when other developers added "cool new spells".

I'm an on-and-off, but avid player of dungeon crawl, mostly due to the influence of my friend. I must say that after a while, you really, REALLY start to appreciate the fact that every character class, every profession, has something to offer. It doesn't necessarily have to be that every class is as good as the other - it just needs to be unique, and not useless compared to the other classes.

But yeah, I think balance is a lost art. Aside from my friend's obsession with it, I have heard nary a mention of it elsewhere, except for maybe a few odd posts on slashdot when MMORPG articles are posted.

-Laxitive

Nethack is great, but lately I've begun to prefer Linley's Crawl. It's more earthy, IMHO.

Those frustrated trying to learn Nethack's large library of instant-kill one-trick jokes may try Crawl, and struggle instead against its large library of instant-kill out-of-depth monsters.

Seriously, from the point of view of the original article, although Crawl is a turn-based roguelike game it gives a convincingly frenetic fast-action feel. You have time to think between moves, but mistakes are punished harshly. The game's principal flaw is that, until you become VERY good, only about 10% of your characters survive long enough to gain any control over their fate.

www.dungeoncrawl.org

It's pretty hard getting that @ down to level 20.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Nethack has the nice difficulty curve -- hard at the beginning, but your character's survival chance goes up post-quest and post-castle.

Been playing Dungeon Crawl lately, which seems to be more fatal then Nethack. [Plus you have Xom, the chaotic god, whenever you decide that the game is too easy.] Its damn annoying to hit dungeon level 10 or 12 and find that your character's survival chances aren't much improved since level 1.

I'd like to mention Dungeon Crawl while we're talking about rogue-likes. It's an excellent program written originally by a Scandinavian fellow (sound familiar?). It's a great game, with 26 different races, 29 different starting classes (the practice-based skill system makes this quite flexible), and the best dungeon-generation code I've ever seen in a rogue-like. Try it! Your life will never be the same! >;->