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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I feel like the microblog feature would be more useful if we could get a separate feed/filter that doesn’t include the tags of magazines that you’re subscribed to. For example, I’m subscribed to /m/fediverse because I want to see the threads that people post here. I don’t necessarily want to see every mastodon post tagged #fediverse, though.

    It also looks like we can’t subscribe to a tag by itself, without subscribing to a magazine that includes that tag. So yeah, some more separation there would be nice.



  • Before I get into curmudgeon mode, I want to plug my two favorite roguelikes:

    • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead - Zombie/sci-fi apocalypse survival roguelike with a bonkers level of depth to it. It’s very actively developed, and the devs are constantly adding more stuff to it. They also have their own lemmy instance at cdda.social.
    • Doom Roguelike - Perfectly encapsulates the early Doom games in roguelike form. This one is on the opposite end of the complexity spectrum from CDDA. Much simpler gameplay, though still highly tactical and challenging when you crank the difficulty up. The same author has created a spiritual successor, Jupiter Hell. I haven’t logged enough hours for it to supplant DoomRL’s position yet, but I do have to say that the atmosphere of it is fucking amazing.

    With that out of the way, let’s move on to “old man yells at Rogue Legacy”:

    The term “roguelike” has been stretched to the point of uselessness, often for marketing purposes. This necessitated the introduction of the term “traditional roguelike” for those of us that still want to discuss actual roguelikes. Binding of Isaac, Dwarf Fortess (fortress mode), Dead Cells, and Slay the Spire are all excellent games, but they’re not roguelikes in any useful sense. If I’m looking for games that are “like Rogue”, none of those are good suggestions. Moria, Nethack, Pixel Dungeon, DCSS, and DoomRL are.

    Cataclysm: DDA occupies a bit of a weird space here. It fits within the technical definition of a traditional roguelike, but the overall experience is more of a departure from Rogue than other traditional roguelikes are. It’s almost more akin to Minecraft or Terraria, in that you face dangers to gather resources to create items to face bigger dangers to gather more exotic resources to create more powerful items… and so on. I sometimes refer to this type of roguelike as “neotraditional”, in order to acknowledge this departure.

    Before anyone accuses me of being prescriptivist, sometimes prescriptivism is important. I’m not for haranguing people over every terminological deviation, but some terms are unique and useful, and we should try not to muddy them. “Begs the question” and “reactionary” come to mind. “Roguelike” was one, but it’s pretty far gone at this point.