News You Can Bruise for 2002 January 29

In The Ballad of Michigan J. I have some fun naming space aliens (Zcat and Grep) after Unix utilities. It turns out I'm not the only one to do this sort of thing; witness The Saga of Argc and Argv.

One thing that happened to me in Texas was that my uncle Robert showed me Diablo II. Whee! It's quite fun, and I got up to level 11 without much trouble (then I went back to San Francisco; that's not where trouble abruptly started). I went away thinking there was a Linux version of Diablo II and I could continue to play it, but I couldn't find any evidence of such a beast. Oh well. I'll just have to do productive things with my time.

Now, a famous article compares Diablo II to Nethack ("But what about the Amulet of Yendor?"). On the other hand, Diablo II's mechanical similarities to Angband have so far passed largely unnoticed. Until now!

• In Diablo II you have a base camp exactly like Angband's town (complete with black market and "your house"). The only differences: there are fewer shops (because Diablo II has no food, digging equipment, or books of magic) and no hostile monsters in the base camp.
• The inventory system is the same annoying slot-based thing as Angband's, though its graphical object-size nature makes it both more restrictive (though actually less annoying). You can only stack scrolls, but you have a few extra slots reserved for potions which makes it more bearable.
• The combination of the above two items means that in both games you spend most of your time gating to a dangerous place, killing a bunch of monsters until you've got all the good items you can carry, then gating back to town and selling your good items. Only in very rare circumstances and only for short periods of time does this ever happen in Nethack.
• Diablo II's randomly generated magic items are like nothing in Nethack but similar to the randomly generated artifacts in Angband.
• The quest and wilderness system is not like Angband proper, but Zangband has many of the same features. However, I won't push the similarities any further.

In one of the bizarre twists that marks my life, Robert used to play the Palm game iRogue a lot. The author of iRogue, Bridget Spitznagel, also ported robotfindskitten to the Palm.

Note that a couple tracks from Andre Nguyen, including the fabulous "6660 Minutes", are missing.

AHW is the new, much better title for the previous Crummy feature Multiple Meaning Headline Watch, which is itself a side project of Funny Headline Watch (more), a wholly owned subsidiary of Crummy Headline WatchCo (NYSE: HEAD), a figment of my fevered, headline-obsessed imagination.