[Roguelike] Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Download
Direct link to Windows installer for 0.7.1, which is apparently required

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Roguelike (it's much too difficult to write my own description of the genre)

Once you know what a roguelike game is, the important things to know about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup are:
- Level grinding is outright impossible throughout most or all of the game for most characters.  When it is possible, it's not very useful.
- The game is way easier to learn than most roguelikes, and great effort has been put into making the interface intuitive and reducing reliance on spoilers.
- Game balance is also emphasized, so there are very few occasions where something is either useless or brokenly overpowered (and you can expect them to be fixed if they are).
- There are very few "best" items, very few guaranteed items, and no wishing for specific items.  As such, you shouldn't ever expect (or try to) play the same way twice.
- There are many different dungeon branches, most of which have their own monster sets and level generation algorithms.  As such, there is a lot of variety and the game is less linear than most roguelikes.
- There are many vaults.  In the context of Crawl (and some other roguelikes), a vault is a pre-designed map which ranges in size from a tiny portion of a dungeon level to an entire dungeon level.  They usually contain items, monsters, interesting features, or all three.  I have made many of these, and most are included in the game.
- The game is under active, open development and is frequently updated.
- As you may have inferred from the previous points, Crawl is basically the opposite of NetHack.

Required screenshot:

(see the download page for screenshots of the tiles version, but be aware they're out of date and the game is significantly nicer-looking now)

I love this game.  Especially cool folks might want to check out online play on either http://crawl.akrasiac.org (primary server) or http://crawl.develz.org (development server), or the irc channel (##crawl) on freenode, but being uncool is okay too.

I love this game, even though I'm kinda crap at it. There's a great thread over at the bay12 games forum about it, if you are interested in perusing it.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28410.0

For anyone trying to improve their playing, note that most of the advice in the above thread is absolutely horrible advice.  Ask the learndb instead.  Or ask me. 

i love this game, even if my high score is 315.
Also, Zin the Law-giver gives you really much stuff.
that's what i started with:

Zin isn't really useful until near the end of the game or the extended game, and at that point, The Shining One is probably more useful, anyway.

Zin is a lot more useful in 0.7 than in 0.6 and prior, though still probably weak compared to other gods, especially for a beginning player.  On the other hand, Sanctuary is one of the game's few reliable life-saving abilities.

If you want lifesaving, go Lugonu, Kikubaaqudgha, or Cheibriados, for self-banishment, Death's Door/Borgnjor's Revivification, and Step from Time, respectively.  Or wait until the cats branch is merged into master and released (or play on cats I guess, if you're fine with a few bugs, unfinished bits, and lack of polish) and play as "Felid" which gets extra lives.

On the subject of advice, again, the irc channel is also nice, but be sure to stay away from the wiki.  I can probably also answer most questions and such.

god damn it.
I was a demonspawn chaos knight of xom, became his favourite toy, but at level 3 that !@#$!@#@$ signmud killed me. FFFFFFUUUUUUUU...

Sigmund does that.

Also, Xom's opinion of you is random, and it's not all that rare to become a favourite toy, or even his teddy bear.

You can make xom's opinion better by getting strange mutations, killing monsters, wearing cursed stuff, etc.

I hate when games uses keys out of the alphanumerical keys. (< and >? What that hell?) also, Y doesn't seems to work.

Y doesn't seems to work.

Y is different from y. You most likely used y. You need to hold shift or press capslock before you press Y. Or did you mean a different Y? [/offtopic]

---

Anyways, nice game! But i think you coulda also placed a screenshot of the Tiles version. Y'know, the one that isn't the confusing ASCII?

Also,

Big image is big

That thing is way too big. Please put it in a spoiler tag or something. Plz plz plz plz plz plz plz plz plzzzzzzzz?

Plz plz plz plz plz plz plz plz plzzzzzzzz?

one is enough.

You can make xom's opinion better by getting strange mutations, killing monsters, wearing cursed stuff, etc.

That keeps him from getting bored, but it doesn't necessarily make his opinion of you better.

I hate when games uses keys out of the alphanumerical keys. (< and >? What that hell?) also, Y doesn't seems to work.

Use the keymapper if you hate it that much?

edit: here's a screenshot of the tiles version, with the added bonus of it being hilarious if you've actually played the game.
needless to say (again, if you've played the game), I died