If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build. -- John Perry Barlow
Yeah, I know, I know. First-person shooters and real-time
strategy games are big, Big, BIG! But I've got ADD and I
get bored easy. Walking around a maze and shooting at the same 4 monsters over and over gets old quick.
To keep me challenged, interested, and excited,
man, I GOT to have a good Rogue-like game. And Zangband is the
best.
Folks who are used to ultra-realistic 3-D Voodoo-Hoodoo graphics and spectacular
explosions of pixellated gore probably don't quite GROK why roguelike games are
so popular. I mean, instead of a GUN and a ROCKET LAUNCHER you get the "@"
symbol. This is you, in your fear-inspiring glory! And instead of a bunch of
DROOLING MUMMIES, you get attacked by "O" and "T" and the VERY DREADED "p."
ASCII characters that inspire INCREDIBLE FEAR! What the FUCK?
But the thing about rogue-like games that makes them worth playing is the
incredible DEPTH of the game world. Zangband, for example, has >1000 types of
monsters to fight, 100 levels, 50+ quests, and an unending array of fascinating
game situations.
The other thing that's cool is that you develop a CHARACTER. Your character is a
work of ART, not just based on what you HAVE or what Pacman level-route you
follow, but on all the choices you make from the minute you start the game. It's
TOTALLY COOL.
Like I said, Zangband is the connoisseur's roguelike game (nethack coming in a
close second or third, maybe). There's a kajillion ports to practically every
platform under the sun (Acorn RISC OS?!) and lots of cool sites about it. You
should start playing Zangband TODAY. Go! Now!
