February 11, 2009
It’s not really about soup, I suppose.
So, I was continuing to have a roguelike urge, and Talking Time had, conveniently started up a thread about stupid roguelike deaths. I was all playing Shiren, but they kept talking about a PC roguelike called Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s apparently a modification of Dungeon Crawl, if you couldn’t guess. Since it was popular and free, I decided to give it a go.
It went badly. It was all ASCII characters and I couldn’t grok the controls or understand anything. Ugh. I went on my twitter and complained.
Red Hedgehog responded in surprise. “But it’s so newbie-friendly with its mouse controls!” Mouse controls? I knew of no mouse controls…
It was then I learned that Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup with tiles is almost a completely different and much much better game, from an interface standpoint. Everything is very visual, and you can mouse over anything to get a list of commands that object can do, and the most common ones are mapped to the left and right click. So the mouse basically works as a cheat-sheet and an interface all at once. You can even see what the enemies are holding by their pictures. It’s pretty rad.
Once I got controls that worked, I was hooked for quite awhile!
Granted, I suck ass at these games. There’s like… a whole bunch of layers or something in the game, many different dungeons in the dungeon, and I still haven’t found any of them. Not one. But I’ve been pretty impressed by the different classes, as they really do seem to play fairly differently, at least at low levels. I’ve had the most success with Healer, though, as they come already with the knowledge of what potions are potions of healing, which, well, really helps me remember to actually attempt to use potions of healing. Which is probably why I’m so successful with that class.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a roguelike, it comes highly recommended by me. It’s so, so much easier to comprehend than, say, Nethack, and it’s a good time. Oh, and if you want even more information, I’m sure @play would be happy to oblige.