I played a crapload of ADOM a long time ago, never even came close to the endgame. I love the different classes & skills though.
Now I'm into Shiren the Wanderer on DS. Yeah, yeah, it's not ASCII, but it's as roguelike as they come.
I love the scope of Dwarf Fortress but the pain of learning it was too much to overcome.

the dwarf fortress concept is crying out for a usable GUI. the whole depth of the game blows my mind, but i just don't give enough of a shit to figure out how to play it in it's current state.

Yeah, once that Dwarf Fortress world finished building I picked around at it for about 30 minutes and absolutely no clue what I was doing. It looks really, really complex. It seems like a _great_ concept, but damn!

Gave ADOM another go...I'm starting to dig it...I am getting tired of that damn crazy farmer killing me in the first dungeon.

Well, thanks to this thread, I dug out my copy of nethack and started to play it again. Man, I forgot how much of a blast this game is.....

I've bought probably hundreds of RPGs over the years...and none of them offer the replayability and depth that Nethack and other Roguelikes do. Sure, they doesn't have extremely detailed (and hackneyed, rambling) storylines and no graphics at all, but the quality of gameplay is so high I don't even notice.

I was thinking the other day that DUNGEONQUEST is very much like a Roguelike board game.

Michael Barnes wrote:

Without the graphics and what not, nethack has to focus on the game play which is pretty intricate. Plus, you're mind puts in the details that you are not seeing on the screen and sometimes that's more impressive than any graphics. Not to say I don't like graphical games but it seems that many of the better games out there are either older or don't have as good of graphics (WoW being the exception).