[E. Albright]

Originally posted by David Gervais:
I think he's talking about games like 'Rogue', 'Nethack', 'Larn', 'Moria' and 'Angband' I've played all these games and don't think they are 'Better' per say, just that they leave more to the imagination and therefore appeal to a wider audiance. I think Dungeon Odyssey has a lot more potential though.

[IMNPHO]Ahem. I'm sorry, but I must disagree. After playing the DO demo, I couldn't make myself WANT to play it when I could be wasting my time playing NetHack. There's IMNPHO just no room for comparison 'twixt the two. It's not a matter of NH (the only Rougelike game I've played since I was in high school, which is to say since the early-to-mid nineties) leaving "more to the imagination", as I'm one of those heretics who plays exclusively with very-non-ASCII tiled graphics, and always have done so (heck, if the Falcon's Eye isomorphic interface was NetHack 3.4.0 compatible, I'd probably be using it, and if FE gets updated before the next Version of NH, I probably will be using it). It's just that NetHack seems so much more immersive, so much deeper. In the six or eight months since I got hooked on NH, I've yet to have a character Last more than two days, but I get attached to the forsaken little buggers in a way that I never could with DO.

Yes, I only played the demo. Yes, I've heard the rest has a lot more to offer. But the demo doesn't seem to exhibit an engine with the same capability as NH. Admittedly, it may not be fair to compare the two. NetHack is a venerable but dynamique monstrosity spawned by (IIRC) a development team which has included at least twenty individuals across a period of nearly two decades, whereas DO has had far less in the way of time and developers. So yeah, it's probably not fair to compare 'em. But if I wanna play an "old-school hack-n-slash RPG", I've got to go with NH.

[And as to modding, NetHack is open source, so any changes one might want can be easily affected (sez the lad who's working on a MS in CS, and thus isn't, hélas, speaking for the gamer on the street; I'll admit that DO slaps NH around quite brutally in terms of popularly accessible modification...)][/IMNPHO]