Linley’s Dungeon Crawl

By: Derek Yu

On: June 21st, 2007

I really just wanted to show off dessgeega’s awesome crawlthrough (which is wonderfully explained and stylishly depicted), but since we haven’t featured Crawl on our front page before, let’s do it.

Ostensibly based on Nethack, ADOM, and other Roguelikes that came before it, Crawl nonetheless innovates by offering loads of very different race/class combinations to start with, as well as a varied pantheon of gods. dessgeega says that Crawl is “leaner and more balanced” than Nethack and is “logical, consistent, and straightforward.”

But yeah, play the game if you haven’t already, and definitely check out the entertaining and extremely informative crawlthrough by dess. I’d love to see more stories from the dungeon!

Tile version available here.

Posted in Freeware, Highly Recommended, Linux, Macintosh, Roguelikes, Windows

Kornel

This IMHO is the best available roguelike nowdays. I’m kind of dissapointed you didn’t mention the DungeonCrawl restoration project — Stone Soup ( http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/ ) which brings *A LOT* to the Crawl experience, also in terms of streamlining the interface and giving a tutorial for beginners, what makes it the most friendly classic roguelike around!
iopred

I still like my nethack, a steeper learning curve, but it really is a well oiled and balanced machine.

I also wish dessgeega would start using capitals, such a horrible mess to read.
Rz.

capital letters are for the weak.
Xander

Heh, I got a little teary eyed when I read that crawlthrough (In a manly way Â¬.Â¬). I can’t believe I’m starting to miss that grammatical insensitivity.
NOT DESSGEEGA

I HAVE YOUR CAPITAL LETTERS FOR YOU AND I DENY THAT YOUR NETHACK IS WELL OILED AND BALANCED. IT IS THE RESULT OF DECADES OF CRUFT AND PATHETIC GEEK JOKES BEING INTEGRATED INTO THE SYSTEM MECHANICS. YOU WOULD DO WELL TO crawl IOPRED. AND PERHAPS PRACTICE YOUR OWN PREACHINGS AND CAPITALIZE YOUR OWN GODDAMN NAME LIKE THE PROPER NOUN IT ALLEDGEDLY IS.
raigan

I think Kornel’s being modest, DoomRL is definitely the best roguelike ever. If only it was on DS…
notiopred

when people get assertive at me it makes me wanttotouchmyself
Iopred

Nethack variants like SlashEm are filled with horrible cruft, Nethack itself is very lean when it comes to features. The odd developer joke (Schrodingers Cat) can hardly be called cruft. In most cases things that were originally added for a joke (sinks) actually exist for a good reason (identifying rings).

im sorry if this upsets your favourite roguelike notdessgeega, but crawl is a balanced game, but so is nethack, even though its learning curve is much steeper. maybe once people have enjoyed crawl, they will come play nethack.
failrate

Nethack is excellent mainly because one can play it on a terminal and from behind look exactly like you are working hard on some difficult server problem. Graphical roguelikes suffer from the fact that they are obviously games :D
failrate

What I would advise is for somebody to make a numbers and color based roguelike for Excel. Then, even in Windows offices, y’all could skive on the clock while looking like you’re being diligent. No reason why sysadmins should have all the fun.