The Glade 4.0

The 0.8 version of Crawl was recently released, and to celebrate, there's an "unofficial" tournament (the official annual tournament is still coming up in August as usual). It began Friday evening U.S. time -- oops.

Anyway, if any of you are into roguelike games, Crawl is pretty great -- even if I do have a love/hate relationship with it. The announcement is over here and all the specific details are here.

If you like traditional text-based roguelike interfaces, you can play on either CAO (crawl.akrasiac.org) or CDO (crawl.develz.org). CAO is in the US, CDO is in Germany. You'll want a good terminal/terminal emulator. PuTTY is great for Windows; any of the popular terminal emulators for linux work great too. If you use the unicode charset (this is the default in CAO's 0.8 configs unless you change it), be sure to set PuTTY's translation to UTF-8 and use a font with good unicode coverage. I recommend DejaVu Sans Mono, a BitStream Vera clone.

If you prefer graphical tiles-based roguelike interfaces, you're actually in luck this year! There is a beta webtiles interface now. Webtiles games run on CDO and count towards the tournament.

So far I've managed to win a Felid Berserker with 3 runes (minimum) and splat about a dozen Merfolk Ice Elementalists. I'd like to win a MfIE before the tournament ends, but we'll see. For the moment, I'm just happy that I finally got my win overall rate over 1%, thus narrowly avoiding earning myself a place in the badplayers learndb entry :p

A couple other random things:

1) Yes, the servers are lagging quite a bit from time to time during the tournament, especially during player creation. It's generally not bad once you actually get a game started.

2) If you're going to play Crawl (tournament or not), join ##crawl on Freednode.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.