The Tavern

http://www.gearfuse.com/unevenly-distributed-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the/

Article by John Brownlee about how we're all barking mad and awesome. Links to DCSS at the end, calling it the "best, fairest, most polished and accessible of the modern-day rogue-likes." Also linked on boingboing, so I'd expect traffic to be going up a little

Thanks, great article. Posted on BoingBoing - now that could really boost things!

I have to say, I do see DCSS as the standard-bearer of the modern roguelike. I haven't played many others, and I did not play the original rogue until after trying several others.

However, I did play "Hack" before it became "Nethack". I eventually gave up on Nethack because it just got too gimmicky, too arbritrary, too easy to die - you should not be able to die as a result of eating an egg.

I tried others but none stuck. Then I found Linley's Dungeon Crawl, and it was like "This is everything Nethack should be". I'm sure other roguelikes are good too, but DC for me captured everything good about nethack and was very similar in many ways, but the class / species system and spellcasting system + Gods just blew nethack out of the water. That and the fact that it was a lot fairer in not making you die to a thousand stupid little spoilery things.

So, to sum up - other roguelikes go off in different directions, while DCSS picks up the core of the rogue tradition that nethack greatly enhanced, and just makes it way way better. It is, I would say, definitely the state of the art and the "truest" in the roguelike tradition.

Thanks, nice article. With good writing

I confess, I'm still very much a Nethack player. I've played it to death, and ascended every class in the game. With seven years since the last version, it was time to find something new, or start doing ridiculous conducts.

I've dabbled with pretty much any RL you can name, though Nethack is the only one I ever 'won'. Of what's out there now, I'm a fan of Dwarf Fortress, though miserable at actually playing it... ToME 4.0 looks interesting, though the interface reminds me of World of Warcraft of all things, Quests, hotbars, Situational background music, and so on. I'm not sure if it's a good thing, but it's certainly a brave direction to go in.

DCSS is definitely the heir to the throne in my mind, currently. And I also think it's since Stone Soup that this has come about. I played Linley's version back in the day, and while it certainly was a fun game, it only really got the most casual kind of play from myself. It's the changes since then that make all the difference; the auto-explore, the searching, the attention to detail and balance. My hat goes off to them all, and it's nice to switch from a game last updated in 2003 to one with an hugely active community and almost daily builds