Its THE dungeon crawler. So many nice neat nuances that make each journey down below unique.
Try Falcon`s Eye if you dont wanna torture yourself with abstract symbols instead of graphics. Its the same Nethack but...Now With Graphics!

Pick up Rogue. Unless its undergone serious transformation, it will be the simplist version. Its text based though people have done various styles of graphical versions. There have been countless mods to Nethack. I wouldnt be surprised if someone hasnt made a coop or pvp version. The original was single player.

Many mods have been made. There are ones that add towns with npcs for quest givers and shopping. The original was one bottomless dungeon. I have heard there are now versions with multiple dungeons in them. New mods have classes to play and character inventories.

HERESY!!!!! Everyone must play NetHack.

Anyway:

Yes, it is a dungeon crawler. It's single-player. There are graphical options for it, but they're usually inferior to the standard ASCII-based interface.

It's derived from Rogue, and mutated into Hack, and then NetHack (for USENET Hack)

Other Rogue-likes include Angband, Moria, Slash'em (a Nethack variant).

So far there has not been a multiplayer version made, though many have tried.

Ascending your character, if you're not a god of Nethack, is -very difficult- to do. I have been playing since '85 or so, and I have NOT YET won NetHack.

Try kicking a kitchen sink for a while.
Or drinking from a fountain.

Or if you get polymorphed into a female, egg-laying species.. sit down.

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HELP! HELP! BEES!

# The incubus helps you remove your armor..

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Graphics, schmaphics. You can't really grok that game unless you are in a universe where it IS the best graphics available. There just was never anything like it before, and it loses something in a post-Diablo II world.

downloaded Falcon's Eye... extracted, double clicked on the exe file and... NOTHING.

what gives?

Do I have to cough, Navy? I just mentioned that 3 posts up

The PPC version is pretty slick, although it's somewhat of a nightmare trying to read the help docs and input all of the complicated commands with the stylus/keyboard.

http://www.nethack.org/v343/ports/download-wince.html

I still have a couple Moria chars lying around at home and work. It's a great diversion. I always preferred Moria due to the town and shops. More of an inspiration for Diablo, I think.

There's Angband which had a multiplayer variant made called Mangband. It was like an ansi graphical mud.

I knew I was addicted to rogue/nethack/moria style games when I saw someone's email address and started to sweat profusely.

I've been dying to try and port this over to the PSP. If they ever work out homebrew games on the 1.5 firmwares - that would be a blast.

I have a J2ME Roguelike game on my cell phone called Dweller. Can be found on Google.

as a long time rogue fan i know all rogue like games i didn't like nethack that much but it's a pretty good game. nethack is a combination of random dangeon with fixed levels you get a pet and you chose from somekind of class.

here is a list of games:

Rogue - the original i played it on and off when i was a kid. got to dungeon level 15 or 16 (it's tough). (there is a palm version)

Moria / Angband - very deep and large dungeon this one has magic spells (rogue didn't) they say diablo came from this game didn't like it that much personally. you get to chose class/race.

Omega - very good game you have to run it in dosbox now . it's a bunch of quest with overland map and multiple dungeons. there is a guild system where you can join (some mutualy exclusive) that gives you abilities you can even cast wish if you are powerful enough. you get multiple attacks and you can chose your combos .i highly recomend this one.

LARN - very decent rogue game wasn't too enthusiastic it's just a different kind of rogue(there is a palm ver).

MAG(mike's adventure game) - like rogue on steroids very well made my fiance' loves this game because much like rogue the number of keybinding is relativly small.

ADOM - much like omega this is a quest oriented game very well made and also very recent. i highly recomend it it has different races and classes with a skill system. the number of key binding is huge. Bards and necromancers can have pets druids might too and you can order them around.

alphaman(i hope i remember the name right) - a sci-fi oriented game you play a mutant with special abilties
dungeon crawl fun game enough said

graphical(sharewares not sure if reap is still shareware):
reaping the dungeon nice entertainment value dungeon crawler scifi with ranged weapons
URW(the unreal world) open ended survival game (the underdog has the page wrong www.iki.fi/urw is the page) . Sami recently added agriculture(buggy)in addition crafting(including buildings) ,hunting(canibalism is a viable option), fishing,trapping,cooking(smoking,salting,roasting,soups etc) ,herding. it's a well thought out finn prehistory kind of game. currently Sami is trying to find help to get it ported from watcom +vesa to a more modern graphic engine (dosbox/vgafix). the game is hard at the begining but get easier as you learn it. haven't played a long time but i've been playing that game for 10+ year on and off and it's still in development .

Oh man, if someone could port that to the T-Mobile Sidekick I would be in such heaven!

Angband is actually one of the largest and has literally hundreds of mods. There's one version where players start out with modern weapons like rocket launchers, assault rifles, etc... But nothing else is changed. You still fight dragons and stuff and there's no extra ammunition in the dungeon so you only get what you bring with you. Of course you can use your gun as a blunt melee weapon.