::A Geek in Korea::

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a rogue-like, is a harsh mistress. It’s a punishing role playing game that runs basically on any computer with a monitor and a keyboard. Right now it’s recaptured my attention because there has been a thread at a forum I was reading that taught me a few things I hadn’t know about the game that had annoyed me.

The hardest part of a rogue-like, besides looking at a screen full of text where “@” represents a player, is getting a handle on the interface. Everything is done with the keyboard with shortcut keys representing commands, and not only that, the shift and control keys modify the commands. You have multiple menus and overwhelming options to begin.

Very often there are options you don’t know about that would have prevented your death, but due to the interface being a mass of keys, it’s often hard to know about different options. Sure, there is a readme file with lots of helpful key bindings and stuff, but you need to know what they are even talking about by playing the game before you would ever know why one thing or another is bound to what key. Don’t even get me started on classes, races, and god choices in the game. It’s enough to make any person feel lost.

For the longest time, I would traverse the dungeon by pressing the directional key, following a wall, and simply keeping in one direction until I ran out of hallways to explore. Then I’d go down a level, get slaughtered, and start over. I learned this week I can press “Control-O” and auto-explore everything in one level of the dungeon in one to five key presses.

If I discover anything, I automatically stop. If I see a monster, an item, an object, or an exit, I get command back and I’m able to act as freely as if I had pressed each individual keystroke as before. This alone has made the game 100% easier, faster, and more fun. I didn’t KNOW about this option until I had dug into some menu for some other key combination and found out about it. Now I consider it a necessity, and can’t imagine even tolerating the game before I knew of it. And yet this is the second or third time I’ve come back to Crawl. No wonder I quit, frustrated last time.

Every time I get back into this game, there are things I discover. For example, if you have necromancy skills and raise the dead (depends on your spell or god) you can command them to attack your enemies (that’s AWESOME!) by pressing the exclamation point key! I was playing a mummy character, and I was able to raise pet zombies, but I had no idea of their purpose until I found out about THIS menu. Pets went from a neat toy to a killer sidekick.

There are TONS of secrets to discover, and a LOT more for me to learn in this sort of game. I usually get frustrated, since I haven’t even seen past the beginning levels with a character, but I’m slowly getting better. I’ve also started watching games on http://crawl.akrasiac.org/ via PuTTY at work before classes start. I’ll have it in a small window as I create papers and prepare my materials.

I throw it up and it’s like the Matrix for everyone else. ASCII flying around, text rapidly updating, all sorts of weird symbols on the screen that don’t seem to make sense. Only I can decode what the hell is going on when other people play the game, but I’m learning a few things about different races, combinations, and what NOT to do in the game.

Eventually I might even get an Orb of Zot and complain about how difficult something other than the very beginning of the game is for once. Either that or I might get a character that survives for more than one sitting. One thing at a time. Probably not.