A big thumbs up: Stone Soup

I took lyyx’s advice this morning and cobbled together Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which looks and plays a lot like NetHack.

It’s painful to say it, but I think I might like this better. This seems to have a lot more depth to it — little things like large-scale mapping, religion systems, a huge array of magic disciplines, waypoint systems, you name it. Actually, none of those are little things.

And it’s tough, too. I keep getting killed — usually because of poison or a cursed item — but any game that keeps killing me off is giving me a proper challenge. I spent most of the afternoon and all of this evening trying to get past level four or so, and with very few exceptions, I consistently … fail.

Installing this for the console wasn’t that difficult; the only real obstacle was trying to figure out why pkgmk wouldn’t decompress the tarball (answer: pkgmk doesn’t recognize .tbz2 extensions) and what to do when the game gives itself a group (in this case, games:games) that doesn’t already exist on the system (I don’t usually include a “games” group, because few games actually seem to use it).

I probably could have avoided those issues by just using one of the telnet versions (that lyyx also mentioned), although it might be nice to have this offline, so I can enjoy it at my leisure. And if you want a “demo” before you actually go through all the work of installing it 🙄 , you can watch a game at crawl.akrasiac.org and get an idea of what’s going on.

This one is a definite keeper, friends. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

P.S.: A gold smilie for lyyx. 😀

13 thoughts on “A big thumbs up: Stone Soup”

Joni 2010/01/14 at 11:27 PM

Ah, roguelikes. I’ve never really been able to get into Nethack, Dungeon Crawl or Angband, but I’ve spent endless hours on ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery). Unfortunately it’s not open source and it hasn’t seen a new release for several years 😦

For lazy Ubuntu users (like me, when I feel like it 😉 ), there’s a slightly dated version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup available in the repositories. Nethack, Angband and even Tome (Trouble of Middle Earth) are available too.

By the way, what’s so “painful” about saying that you like Crawl more than Nethack?

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K.Mandla Post author2010/01/15 at 7:31 AM

Oh, it’s only painful in the sense that I felt I owed some allegiance to NetHack. But there’s nothing else implied there.

It’s funny to think, but a lot of the things about NetHack that I had been unhappy with — for years — are usually corrected or streamlined in Stone Soup. 🙂

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