Tuesday, 10th May 2011, 00:19 by mageykun
^Crawl Ultra ending: ascend as an all rune-er, with the orb, with as many demonic runes as possible without becoming overloaded. Dump everything else in your inventory to make room. But before the ascension, make sure you run around in Pan clearing Zigs until you max the variable used to count cleared zigs. Be sure to take a full tour of the pantheon- get every god your race can worship up to ******. And don't stop till you've generated all the fixedarts!
Eh. Or not. Most of that isn't making the game any harder, it's just testing your resistance to grinding.
@Ququman: Goodness, but the player in that review is a whiner, isn't he? Aside from the language barrier forcing him to use-ID everything like a CK of Xom, it didn't seem any more merciless than any other roguelike I've played. Heck, he only died once in ten minutes. And he got to carry over part of his inventory!
If we mean hardest as the game that works the hardest into wearing down your will to play the game at all, I'd nominate the mystery dungeon series. Gods, but that was a mind numbing, boring grind fest for no reward.
Elona gets a nomination, simply because it applies mmo logic to a roguelike. Expect massive amounts of grinding and doing the same thing over and over, wasting tons of time to get anywhere. Again though, this is a kind of artificial difficulty though.
For my personal pick though, I'd like to nominate the ancient dungeon from Lufia II. They built a roguelike inside a traditional rpg- meaning the system gives you very few options to survive. The dungeon is 99 floors deep, there's no way to save- not even the temporary, self-erasing saves roguelike players are used to- item generation is completely random and not dependent on depth, there's no rest button, consumables are rare, you can't retreat up stairs, you start with no equipment, and your survival is heavily dependent on the RNG- you can't skill or spoil yourself out of danger often.
Still, the main challenge is you're playing a roguelike in an environment not primarily designed for it. Not sure if that should count.
If I'm comparing just crawl and nethack, I'd say crawl's harder- but more fair. It's a strange trade off.