Helmut said:

That's odd. The link I posted still works for me in FF. Anyone else? Spike, perhaps the NSA is interested in you alone? Missing as in the link goes nowhere for you or doesn't work as a link or doesn't show  up?

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In some cases, as in my Portal post, the formerly-visible links are no longer visible at all.  In some other cases, I will embed a link, in one of several ways, in my compose window (where I am typing right now), I will be able to see the link, and it is active, but after my comments are posted the links are no longer visible.

 

I'm using the latest Firefox.  And Scout's avatar is squished to the left, and sadly, horribly, shrunken.

Maybe WordPress is just squirrely.

 

Edit:  Should have said that I cannot see any of Gregg's links.  I'll see if things look better in Safari, but after that, I'm done messin' and complainin'.

2nd edit:  Same problems in Safari.  Oh well.

Woweee-zoweee!  At least in this thread, I see links.  I'll have to tootle on over to some of the others and see if my links, as well as other's, are now visible.  It's like having gone to the optometrist after months of being half-blind.

Mr. Lipid and Steerpike:  geekness rules.  [Image Can Not Be Found]

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is kicking my ass.

Character #12 jjj the level six Sludge Elf Venom Mage, insta-gibbed by an invisible orc wizard. Puff of frost.

Character # 30 jjj the Minotaur Fighter, level nine and in the swamps. Poisoned and surrounded. Haste potion to pillar dance to get free and use up stairs without bringing the baddies. Dead by poison.

Character # 112 jjj the Minotaur Berserker, very promising, axe of draining. Jumped by a gnoll while resting to regain health. Thought he was safe running away by invoking his god for berserk speed. The gnoll was using an orcish flail of reaching. Dead by ranged melee.

Character #125 jjj and a zillion others: killed by centaur arrows. Centaurs bad.

Character #130 jjj level nine Deep Elf fire Wizard. Drank potion of rot early, halving already small max health. Oops. Great gear though. Book of the Dead, dagger of returning for range, wand of confusion, robe of resistance. Found the Ecumenical Temple and pledged to Sef. Level danced like crazy, avoided starvation by fleeing to the Temple to drink water. Poisoned by the ghost of jjj #12 and died.

Character #131 jjj dead at level 2.

Character #132 jjj dead at level 1, dead in thirty seconds of play. Fourteen keystrokes, only ten of which advanced the turn counter.

And so on.

Yet… so damn fun. I love roguelikes. They make me want to hit walls while wearing puppies as mittens but I love them.

[edit]

Character #164, Betty the High Elf Conjurer. Killed a goblin, picked up its dagger, while cutting it up for provisions another showed up and attacked. Nearly dead and zero mana Betty ran down the hallway...which turned up goblin number three. Trapped, dead. Total play time: sixty-seven seconds. Seventeen keystrokes.

Character #165, Betty the Deep Elf Venom Mage. Made sick by eating hobgoblin meat chunks, flail cursed by killing a mummy. No remove curse scrolls so no way to swap in an edged weapon to butcher corpses for more food. Starved while exploring for rations. Play time: fifteen minutes.

Character #166, Betty the Hill Orc Fighter. Killed by not watching hit points closely enough while disarming a dart trap to gain trap & door skill. YASD. (Yet Another Stupid Death, rogue-speak for: did something dumb but avoidable which caused death & delete. YASD death posts are a tradition. "YASD. Found Ringil on the floor at level 1. One in a million!* A floating eye paralyzed me."

[growls] Some puppy gloves are getting pulped tonight.

*Odds of finding Ringil on the level one floor of Angband are probably well over 1:1,000,000. Most players never saw the item, much less that early. It's happened, making for a truly epic YASD. I won two huge lotteries and was so excited I didn't notice the oncoming bus epic stupid.

The tile graphic version seems intended as the default. Boo! The limited monster set and other design choices point that way (I say that while still stuck in the early game) and the text display could easily be tweaked to give more at-a-glance info. My roguelike obsession is obviously back in full so I've been making notes to send to the devteam.

There are some innovations over earlier roguelikes in the stone soup version. "o" to completely automate exploration with smart auto-cancels is a genius extension of shift-direction to automate movement in Angband. The tutorial modes, dead clever. Anything that helps people with the huge learning curve of games where everything on the keyboard does something can only be good. The in-game documentation could use a few passes; the explanation of training skills blows. I was mystified until I checked the wiki (http://crawl.chaosforge.org/in.....=CrawlWiki) and read some guides. Victory dancing, turning skills off (list with "m") to force others.

Nethack is pretty much unplayable past the opening without a spoiler list sitting in your lap. Almost every situation is special cased and many action combos approach the wino & cat whisker mustache impossible as puzzles. In Angband once you learn the mechanics–some not at all obvious–it's all turn-by-turn risk management. I'm very much a partisan on the Net(hack)/Moria(Angband) design split but this game seems to have found a nice middle ground. Buckets of infuriating yum.

#189 Better the Deep Elf fire Wizard. Dead by blinking into a room with Duvessa and Dowan. Insta-gibbed.

#190 Better the Deep Elf frost Wizard. YASD. Got cocky, having cleared the sewers. Barely got two levels of Orcish mines done by mephitic cloud (poison cloud that confuses; wonderful spell) and dragging individual orcs up stairs. Duvessa and Dowan on level three but… ya, that didn't go well. Orc with frost darts + spell from Dowan, full health to dead in one turn second time I poked my head down the stairs.

[Image Can Not Be Found] [edit] #210-240 down. More puppy pulping. #239 was my best yet. #240 lasted thirty seconds. These really are for gaming masochists.