Newcomers to old-school roguelikes may find Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup more accessible as an entry point to the genre, which can be played in a graphical interface in your web browser via https://crawl.develz.org/play.htm or via classic SSH interface at joshua@crawl.akrasiac.org (password "joshua").

I've been playing DCSS super casually, on-and-off, for well over a decade now, and the last time I checked in, it felt like they've perhaps sanded too many of the sharp edges off. I enjoyed the hunger system. butchering creatures into chunks for my kobold to eat was fun. throwing potions was cool. the identification minigame was good classic roguelike fun, and cursed equipment was fun. I could go on and on.

I understand that they have to keep updating it to keep it fresh for long-time super-experienced players, but it's like an entirely different game now, compared to the one I first played years and years ago.

The online servers for DCSS often host old versions if you'd prefer to play those; crawl.akrasiac.org hosts versions back through 0.11 (released in 2012). Given that it's so easy to play old versions, I'm happy that the devs are open to toy with getting rid of sacred cows in the new versions.

Also, item identification still exists, even if everything else you mentioned has been changed in some way. :P

identification is still a thing, but iirc cursed items aren't a thing anymore?

but yeah, it's nice to be able to go back and play older versions, but at this point I don't even know which version I would like to play. I'm fine with playing trunk here and there, it's just interesting to see a long-term project like this gradually shift focus over time.

I just liked playing as a kobold berserker, a cannibalistic little bastard tooling around a dungeon, getting into trouble, killing stuff and chopping it into chunks to eat, and occasionally being rewarded by my blood god.

You can install it locally as well and play in your terminal.

https://crawl.develz.org/download.htm#linux

DCSS is more combat oriented, Nethack/Slashem about thinking out of the box and doing crazy stuff to survive in critical places/situations.

(hf here is hardfought.org)

Thanks, I forgot I had hf defined in ~/.ssh/config

I cannot edit my post, so I hope people see your post

This is all I need, I'm already trying to break my Larn addiction. (/s)

I liked Larn (and Omega). I wasted many hours on Larn.

Author didn't go into the fact that some of these games arrived with PCs; AFAIK there was never a Unix version of Larn.

I thought larn was unix-only

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larn_(video_game)

(I think I recall playing larn because it was one of the roguelikes available on unix)

Back in the day, I played the Amiga port of Larn with little graphical tiles. Lots of fun. There was a graphical Amiga port of Hack too, but it was too buggy.

Whatever you do, don't visit https://larn.org. You'll never get that time back

That’s not at all true. I played Larn on an Ultrix VAX 8600 circa 1987.

My wrong. It was written for Unix.

Well, I guess there's something funny with the license; it's not packaged for Debian, and I can't remember a time when it was.

Larn has a noncommercial license, so it's nonfree by Debian standards.

This appears to be the licence for Larn:

https://github.com/primeau/Larn/blob/master/LICENSE

That seems to be a normal MIT licence (without advertising clause). Debian packages loads of software under that licence.

[Edit] That appears to be JS Larn, which is apparently derived from Larn and uLarn, but with an MIT licence replacing the original author's. You can't do that.

I think Larn had a free clone called ularn.

Ditto, I play Slashem daily. My deepest level it's been 13 or 17, but I won't surrender. Also, IF games and csokoban games.

Since it’s a hard google: Interactive Fiction

Why not just connect to a MUD?

That's a completely different kind of game. Roguelikes are single-player games, MUDs are multiplayer games. Roguelikes usually feature permadeath, MUDs rarely do. It's the difference between an RPG and a MMORPG.

Also Nethack offers a turn based top down gameplay simulated with ASCII chars, MUDs are real time or almost real time based with a wall of text and prompt based, like a text adventure.

I don't think anyone plays MUDs with plain telnet. Just use a client with an automapper like tintin++

Or kbtin.

On top of what others have said, the advantage to using one of these remote versions (besides removing the need for a local install), is that they often provide support for arcade-style features like leaderboards and the ability to watch other players games either live or as replays.