...I cut the graphical crap and play the Rogue descendatnt,
NetHack. (MSDOS version - I understand with unixoids you know, but I can't
stand the vi key mapping...) I've *never* beaten the thing, and I'm
already a version behind! But the Power of Open Source makes it so
wonderfully complicated even if you ARE just an @ symbol in a dungeon of
dots!
Rogue was something I discovered by accident; I went to a small college
where even an English major like me could get an account on the DEC PDP-20
(DEC 20) mainframe they had at the time. Of course, you got twice as much
disk space and some traffic priority if you *were* a computer science
student, but I didn't mind. I found the games and it was kinda rigged so
you could only play when the load dropped below a certain threshold which
tended to mean 2am or something; i teneded not so much to get killed as
thrown out when work came first! well, try iut and you're hooked (I hear
there is even a version of the original Rogue for PalmPilots.)
Just think, me and a few pals in the campus Dr. Who club (closest thing
we had to an SF club) used this whole big computer for frivolous things
like, um, sending email to each other!
Kristin
