It’s probably ~15 or so years old, it mentions Brogue as a recent release and that came out in 2009.
Nice to see a mention of the ##crawl channel on freenode, I spent a lot of time there during DCSS 0.9 to 0.12 or so, I even took 3rd in one of the online tournaments! [0] The guy that won that year was a child chess prodigy who then became a mathematics professor who has worked at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. There was another top level player who was also a mathematician, and both of these guys won a Morgan Prize (and also have Wikipedia articles). I got a GED in my early 30s, somehow I was able to keep up ;)
Another regular from ##crawl posts on HN from time to time as well.
Brogue is probably my favourite, followed by Crawl. Much respect to Nethack though: seeing the high level players zip through a run is something to behold.
I share the admiration for Crawl. It really was probably the first good roguelike, where you continuously have to "play your hand", make the best of what you have. It's in sharp contrast to a roguelike like ToME, where you can (and pretty much must) plan how to optimize your skill paths (the meat of the game) before you even click begin.
But there's not one Crawl, it's been worked on for so long that there's honestly little which has survived from Linley Henzell's game other than flavor (and even that is questionable). And the newer versions make you realize what the Slay the Spire devs made a fortune on: while a hard game with real decisions where you have to play the hand you're dealt can be fun... it's also fun with the occasional "exploit", lucky broken combinations of events which give you a free win (or more likely, make you go down in a blaze of hubristic glory).
I still have an unfinished NetHack 3.2.1 (yes, I’m partial to that specific version, dual wielding is a sin) game I’m reluctant to get back to. I’m so far I don’t want to make any mistakes and mess it up.
And NetHack truly is amazing in its details. How to get a pet dragon? Change your sex to female using a ring or similar, tranform into a dragon and then #sit. You’ll get an egg. Which will hatch into a (hopefully) pet dragon. Which you can accidentally kill, if you throw food at it (if you don’t feed it, it’ll stop wanting to be your pet) too hard. Lovely.
Multiple nethack ascender here (~50x in 20yrs). I usually play in the traditional November tournament (originally devnull, now tnnt). Never set aside the time to learn any of the other roguelikes mentioned in the article, but wanted to mention that nethack itself is a class of games. Many people have written variants to scratch a particular itch (the article briefly mentions spork, which was one of the very first). Some of those are wildly different from the base game. There is even a separate tournament in June dedicated just to playing as many of the variants as you can (junehack)
Faster Than Light is another great roguelike, especially with the Multiverse mod [1]. You pilot and crew a ship, relentlessly pursued by your enemies and forced into ever more difficult battles. It teaches you how to think long term but also survive in the short run, so you can prosper in the long run. A bargain for $3 recently.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 34.6 ms ] threadNice to see a mention of the ##crawl channel on freenode, I spent a lot of time there during DCSS 0.9 to 0.12 or so, I even took 3rd in one of the online tournaments! [0] The guy that won that year was a child chess prodigy who then became a mathematics professor who has worked at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT. There was another top level player who was also a mathematician, and both of these guys won a Morgan Prize (and also have Wikipedia articles). I got a GED in my early 30s, somehow I was able to keep up ;)
Another regular from ##crawl posts on HN from time to time as well.
[0] https://crawl.akrasiac.org/tourney12a/all-players.html
I like Angband but its crudity repels me. It's enough to make me do my own roguelike. Almost.
Any of you try that dwarf fortress roguelike?
Notable mentions: Cataclysm and JupiterHell.
FWIW, I won rogue once, never ascended in nethack yet.
But there's not one Crawl, it's been worked on for so long that there's honestly little which has survived from Linley Henzell's game other than flavor (and even that is questionable). And the newer versions make you realize what the Slay the Spire devs made a fortune on: while a hard game with real decisions where you have to play the hand you're dealt can be fun... it's also fun with the occasional "exploit", lucky broken combinations of events which give you a free win (or more likely, make you go down in a blaze of hubristic glory).
And NetHack truly is amazing in its details. How to get a pet dragon? Change your sex to female using a ring or similar, tranform into a dragon and then #sit. You’ll get an egg. Which will hatch into a (hopefully) pet dragon. Which you can accidentally kill, if you throw food at it (if you don’t feed it, it’ll stop wanting to be your pet) too hard. Lovely.
[1] https://subsetgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35332&p=1...