My Philosophy and the Tale of 100 Rogues
expensiveplanetarium.blogspot.com
expensiveplanetarium.blogspot.com
They're the Perl of video games.
I picked up Oblivion (a few years late) and am kind of turned off by what seems to be a complete lack of attention to the player's experience. All of the work went into the world and game system. The environment, items, spells, NPCs, AI, towns etc. are all the focal point of the game and NOT the gameplay or the interactions that are part of playing the game. Swinging a sword feels like no action at all. Swinging a sword and hitting an enemy is completely anticlimactic, as there is no feedback other than perhaps some audio and the enemy health bar decreasing. Most RPGs suffer from this lack of visceral or juicy feedback.
As for the situation on the App Store; when "perusing various games on the App Store ... 'unimpressed' is a severe understatement" is my sentiment as well. But the tricky thing is that the successful games/apps are not always the best. It doesn't necessarily require taste, principles, or even a huge effort to get a smash hit.
"We had been playing this interesting indie game "POWDER" ... but at the time, I had no idea that POWDER was just the tip of a massive, 30 year old iceberg - the Roguelike genre (here's the wikipedia page on Roguelikes, if you aren't familiar)."
Which is surprising, but understandable.
However, this:
"Along the way, I also got very into "Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup", which while it is a fantastic game, the original author, Linley, was not very disciplined about throwing things into his game"
That is pretty much the exact opposite of why Dungeon Crawl was created.
The classes in Nethack have been refined many years to be distinct, but equal. That is, each of the classes has distinct strengths and weaknesses, but the sum of the strengths and weaknesses is still roughly the same for every character. This means that there is no "ideal" character for beating the game - the ideal character depends on one's play style and the phase of the game one is in.
For example, consider the barbarian class and the wizard class. The barbarian class is great for hack-and-slash players, and is extremely strong early in the game. However, high initial strength and lack of intelligence means that the barbarian peaks early, and is at a disadvantage later on, when ranged and magic attacks become more prevalent.
The wizard, on the other hand, is quite weak at the beginning. He starts out with few supplies, no armor, and limited magic. However, his ability to learn new spells and increased skill with thrown weapons means that the wizard becomes quite a powerful character later on, surpassing the barbarian in most cases.
These sorts of dichotomies are the sort of thing that really make games like Nethack enjoyable. By ignoring previous works in the genre, this person avoids mistakes, but also avoids a lot of the richness that adds to the depth and replayability of his games.
And please, change the title to include "iPhone game" or similar, currently it looks like a philosophy article in lesswrong style.