The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

They say the highway’s just one big road, and it goes from here to there…

There being Table Mountain, of course.

So, I kept checking back in and reading Netbrian’s Nethack Let’s Play and it was making me all hungry for some hot Rougelike action, especially since I didn’t have anything else on my gaming plate at the moment. It really made me want to play Nethack. But Nethack is complicated and ugly and… I tried it once. It went badly. It was then I realized I had one of the best Rougelikes ever made on DS, Shiren the Wanderer. I might as well whip that out and play a couple more rounds of that instead of intalling Nethack and hating it.
So I did.
And I immediately got farther than I ever had back when I first bought the game. Such as, you know, to Table Mountain, which is the goal of the game. Heh.

It’s kind of cool how the game slowly starts to change over time, something that I never really survived long enough or smart enough to see. It slowly becomes less and less about combat and more and more about identifying items, using every bit of your inventory effectively, and evading enemies. I’m about as far from a rougelike master as you can get. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon is really more my style. (SMILES GO FOR MOTHERFUCKING MILES) But it’s amazing how much I’ve improved. Since I bought Shiren, I’ve played so many rougelikes with varying degrees of success at them, but I’ve obviously learned something, because I’ve started to become vaguely effective.
For one, I was using items. There were so many situations where I know, back in the day, I wouldn’t have wasted, say, an item that could hit multiple enemies when I wanted to affect one enemy. I wouldn’t have used a staff to give me a minor boost and more safety when there was a vague, shady chance that it would be more useful later. I never did those things, but anything that keeps you alive keeps you going in a rougelike, you gotta. And thus, I’ve gotten farther.
I also had to deal with jars, which is something I’ve never really had to do before this. Chiropractic Jars are pretty amazing, and I ended up with many Jars of Change, which I used to decent effect to swap items for hopefully more useful ones. I also got the joy and pleasure to meet my first item-rusting monster, which kinda killed all my equipment, which may have been a reason I died soon after that. Heh. But it was all neat!

The thing that really hit me about this, though, was how new it all felt. Like the title up there, it felt like I’d not put time into this game before. Higher level play gets different like that, I guess. It was the fun times.
I dunno, going back to the game certainly scratched that itch, which is good. Also, it’s a damn shame that Shiren is on so many clearance racks and stuff. It’s pretty well $15 dollars everywhere, if not cheaper. If you have a DS and care about rougelikes in the least, it’s a game that should be in your collection.