Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Stupid metafilter informed me of a new release of dungeon crawl stone soup a week before the new release of dwarf fortress. I lost several days to this game while I wait for the linux port of dwarf fortress to be released.
DCSS is a roguelike - a member of a family of games where you manipulate keyboard symbols around a dungeon killing monsters and collecting loot. The quintessential rougelike is nethack. I tried to like nethack but it seemed like a game designed for rule lawyers rather than for fun. I don't think I ever had a game last more than a few hours, food was scarce, every other weapon and item was cursed and the monsters were all faster and more capable than you.
To be successful with nethack you need to be prepared to memorize tons of information and take hundreds or thousands of notes. All magic items are unidentified in the game. The way to discover their use is to use a scroll of identify (which are in extremely short supply) or to do experiments and make deductions.
To identify a wand you could engrave something on the floor and carefully note the quality and color of the result, dip it in holy water, and then use it in a carefully controlled situation (like down a hallway on any level above 5 against a flying creature with it's back against a wall) to narrow it's use down to a 3-4 different types. To be successful you have to inscribe the wand with notes detailing what you did and what you think it is.
You will have to update this description every time you use the wand as well.
Considering you may play 10 characters before you get lucky enough to get past level 3 and most of your time playing is spent taking notes, it never seemed very fun.
DCSS's gameplay is similar but it has removed these headaches. It will automatically label items as you use them (or see them used) and material and equipment seems much more common - I've rarely been resource starved. Fire a wand and you'll know instantly when it's a wand of fire or a wand of missles. No more puzzling out its use from cryptic descriptions while thumbing through a dictionary.
My second character in DCSS has been alive for more than a week of real time play and has gotten into some tight scrapes during this time. The stories that develop - that time I fireballed myself to try to eradicate a swarm of killer bees, the time the ice beast and troll followed me up some stairs and I had to try to teleport away, the time I ran into a thief that stole my poison darts and wands and used them against me until I had to flee - all these stories make the game much more enjoyable.
The automated scripts are also wonderful. You can press 'o' to autoexplore - making low level dungeon exploring a delight. You can use 'X' to automatically pathfind to any point in a level (with shortcuts like '>' to find stairways). Ctrl-F brings up a search box where you can search for any item, shop, or place you've previously discovered. After collecting enough gold to purchase some armor I found days ago in some shop, I was able to search for 'transparent plate' and have it automatically pathfind my character up and down levels to the shop.
You can also use 'G' to go to particular levels of particular dungeons. I could be on the 7th level of the 'vault' and want to go back to my stash (on the second level of the 'Lair of Beasts' to drop off items. Using the keystrokes 'GL2<Enter>' starts my character automatically pathfinding up the levels of the vault, up the several dungeon levels, and down the levels of the lair until I'm standing on my stash. These scripts make the game a joy to play.
Finally, though the game is a rouguelike and can be played in a terminal, DCSS has a very nice tileset. And it makes it a very easy game to pick up.
Still, last weekend I found myself yearning for dwarves. The linux client hasn't been released yet and I don't know how long I can wait...
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