Angband<\/em> and a hundred other roguelikes but I always go back to DC.<\/p>\nI could tell you that it is because there are so many classes and races, but to be honest I don’t play Spriggans or halflings or Kenkus. I rarely play mages. (I like dwarf paladins – better armor and start knowing what a healing potion looks like. Very valuable information.) I could tell you that it is because there are fewer random deaths – items are more likely to help than hurt, sinks won’t murder you – and therefore you are the cause of your own misfortune, but the truth is I do stupid things anyway, like zap a weak kobold with a random wand that polymorphs it into a steam dragon. And it can be cruel enough to put a centaur on dungeon level 2. Hate those guys.<\/p>\n
The truth is that I play it because there is so little to actually do. Nethack has tricks you need to memorize to get far. ADOM has a plot and time limit and corruption to watch. Dungeon Crawl is really just about finding awesome loot and killing monsters. As a roguelike, there is no save, so you are regularly starting from scratch. I’ve never ever come close to winning the game, certainly not as close as I have in Nethack.<\/p>\n
A comfort game needs to be familiar, but has to be able to surprise you. DC’s artifacts are sometimes very surprising; the time I found an artifact ring on the third level that gave me +10 to damage was sweet and awesome. Then I got killed by poison. Or that great suit of crystal plate with poison resistance. Then I starved to death because I mutated into a vegetarian.<\/p>\n
As someone who writes almost exclusively about strategy games, it might seem a bit surprising that my comfort game isn’t Field of Glory<\/em> or Bronze<\/em> or Colonization<\/em>. It’s a graphically primitive, punishingly difficult game that forces you to begin again whenever you fail. <\/p>\nI contain multitudes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life has a way of throwing more things at you than you can really handle. I’m sort of in that situation right now. When I need to take my mind off things and relax with tea\/wine\/beer, I go to my comfort games – games that require very little real thinking but remain engaging. A comfort […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[21,100],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-I8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2736"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2738,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2736\/revisions\/2738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}