Diablo The Hell is the Anticrawl

[Pollen_Golem]

http://www.diablothehell.narod.ru/main.html

This mod is only slightly older than Stone Soup, and like Stone Soup, is based on a randomly-generated fantasy RPG from the mid-90s. Its back-loaded difficulty masquerades behind a gentle introduction. Tactics are tricky and crucial to survival, but death is forgiven with a little XP drain. You're granted no opportunity irreversibly handicap your character or change intrinsics. There's dark atmosphere and endless variety. Equipment is super important and changes your playstyle drastically, and depends heavily on your class, and yet is not scummable other than a handful of solid quest items. The economy is stringent and identification is limited. You only need the single .MPQ file from Diablo to play this.

There is one way in which DTH blows away all competition I know of, and it has to do with feedback and balance. Every one the stats affects how your char responds to a whole lot of things, and you can just feel from playing that you are lacking in vitality or something. It really punishes minmaxing that most games reward, even for mages, but not simply in making your character an ineffective hero that just can't stop dying. No, you figure out your weak spots in a minute of gameplay. And it doesn't even have to throw numbers at you to inform you. In this way it's like the polar opposite of Crawl, and so good it's uncanny.

[Greyr]

Happy playing! ...and check for updates regularly!

Posted by: Mordor 5:15PM 26/12/07

[Pollen_Golem]

it was you all along

[treerex5]

Greyr made the game?

[Pollen_Golem]

Here are some more connections I've realized. Combat takes place on a grid, and positioning is the most important part of tactics. Narrow bottlenecks are possible early on but are made harder eventually due to knockback and wider environments where you have to make do with corners. Monsters spawn in packs. Luring monsters back individually is important, but hard to do because monsters alert everyone around them when they see you. Ranged combat is short, but those few spaces where you don't get hurt are very important. Blinking monsters are fun to chase so you don't get frustrated at never getting to hit them. Natural regeneration is the default way to heal because healing potions are too rare and expensive to spam everywhere. While you can sell items, they are devalued so much that they're rarely worth dragging to town. Weapons that are not great for your characters are best left in the dungeon unidentified. Both games have modest cooldown periods for particularly effective abilities.

[Pollen_Golem]

What, no responses? Does nobody here reminisce about Diablo, ever?
Here's a video from Greyr's secret youtube account:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g555t45x90
And some random gameplay videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg-RyZu18iI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW51TVb7PC8

[twelwe]

i already replied as many times as i wanted to

[duvessa]

if you know someone who lives in an apartment (or dorm or whatever), you can pee into a frisbee and freeze it, then take the frozen pee disc out of the frisbee and slide it under that person's door at night. then when they wake up there will be an unexplained pool of pee next to their door

[Arrhythmia]

if you know someone who lives in an apartment (or dorm or whatever), you can pee into a frisbee and freeze it, then take the frozen pee disc out of the frisbee and slide it under that person's door at night. then when they wake up there will be an unexplained pool of pee next to their door

why not just pee on their door?

[1010011010]

if you know someone who lives in an apartment (or dorm or whatever), you can pee into a frisbee and freeze it, then take the frozen pee disc out of the frisbee and slide it under that person's door at night. then when they wake up there will be an unexplained pool of pee next to their door

why not just pee on their door?

You can get some momentum in the piss disk, hopefully it will slide away from the door. Best case scenario the puddle would be in the middle of the room, baffling the occupant.

[Zooty]

if you know someone who lives in an apartment (or dorm or whatever), you can pee into a frisbee and freeze it, then take the frozen pee disc out of the frisbee and slide it under that person's door at night. then when they wake up there will be an unexplained pool of pee next to their door

Agreed, pee frisbee is much more Anticrawl.

[Rast]

if you know someone who lives in an apartment (or dorm or whatever), you can pee into a frisbee and freeze it, then take the frozen pee disc out of the frisbee and slide it under that person's door at night. then when they wake up there will be an unexplained pool of pee next to their door

How would they know it was pee? Maybe they would think the roof had leaked.

[thromnambular]

if you know someone who lives in an apartment (or dorm or whatever), you can pee into a frisbee and freeze it, then take the frozen pee disc out of the frisbee and slide it under that person's door at night. then when they wake up there will be an unexplained pool of pee next to their door

How would they know it was pee? Maybe they would think the roof had leaked.

You have to eat a bunch of asparagus first obviously.

[Pollen_Golem]

The frisbee metaphor is appropriate for this thread, especially since I went to sleep after my last post.

[Pollen_Golem]

You know, chance is the only reason you guys obsess over Stone Soup and not The Hell.

[amuletofyendor]

Glad to see I'm not the only one that still plays Diablo from time to time. Makes me feel less lonely .

[ZipZipskins]

what is happening here

[Hirsch I]

wow, I finally found the amulet of yendor. I feel so hardcore and oldschool now.

[Pollen_Golem]

Glad to see I'm not the only one that still plays Diablo from time to time. Makes me feel less lonely .

Oh you're not alone at all - this game alone has a fairly large, active online community in English: http://diablothehell.freeforums.org/
People tend to forget the magnificence of Diablo because the dreariness of its combat in the Vanilla version overshadows other memories.

[tasonir]

Does diablo the hell run on macs?

Ironically I used to own both diablo AND the hellfire expansion, although if I wanted to reinstall them now I'd have to pirate copies...

[Pollen_Golem]

I have no idea if it runs on macs. It runs on Windows XP and Windows 7 for sure.

You don't actually need to install anything - diablo, hellfire, or the hell. You just drag a single file (DIABLO.MPQ) to the folder where you extracted The Hell. Boom, done.