- big challenge, high difficulty
- almost everything is random
- a great amount of content
- shitload of skills, spells, attributes, perks, everything
- constant looting

and probably a few more reasons why roguelikes are king.

By the way, are there any good graphics mods for NetHack current version? I was playing Falcon's Eye, but it uses 3.3.1 and the newest nethack version is 3.4.3.)

In a good rogue-like, dying is part of the fun, if nothing else that's certainly a novelty compared to most other games, where the quick save button so easily gets abused. Being forced to live with bad decisions can make for a change of pace and, again, is a different experience to a perfect play through.

For me the probability of losing stops me from getting too invested. It might sound bad, but sometimes it's a good thing. A game with a set plot line can demand countless hours of play, always heading towards victory conditions. A rogue-like is always good to pick up and play for a bit, win or lose you've had an adventure more often than not, and without feeling like you lost (again losing is part of the game).

I'm not overly keen on the genre myself, but I'll stump up cash for the right kind of game. They are, if nothing else a change of pace.

Well said. Only in roguelikes I had situations like I'm poisoned / sick / whatever and slowly loosing health leading to inevitable death.

Struggling with every step, trying to find a way to cure myself, to live or at least to prolong my pathetic existence.

In any other game I would just press F9 for reload.

I'm not a great fan of Rogue-like games, but frankly, to me personally, the idea of starting story-telling games like Witcher and Baldur's Gate over and over again sounds a lot more tedious than restarting randomized Rogue-likes. :D

As a sidenote, the way I understand Rogue-likes, you don't "have" to start again because it's "game over" - if you do so, it's because you chose to do it, too. Abandoning a game like Baldur's Gate or Witcher halfway through would suck because then you wouldn't learn the end of the story. In most Rogue-likes story is so unimportant, that there's really no need to complete them if you don't feel like it. The fun is more in the ride, as long as it takes, in trying to survive and learning new things, not necessarily in trying to get to the end. At least that's what I suppose; I myself tend to get bored pretty soon when playing games without real story or 'handcrafted' areas to discover. But I never really got frustrated by them either, due to the reason mentioned above.

Most story-telling RPGs don't have that much replay value for me, because no matter the differences in your builds, the story, dialogue, environment etc. mostly stays the same, with only minor variations in between. Replaying RPGs, I'd tend to get more and more inattentive to my surroundings, while with a Rogue-like, I guess, the opposite is true, because each replay is a different challenge in a completely new environment, and the unpredictability combined with the possibility of perma-death makes you more attentive.

Funny, that's how I played Oblivion with some survival mods even tho it has a quicksave feature. That I chose not to use :-P

I don't think you die a lot in rogue-like games. I seem to die a lot more in fps and other action genres but dying (or sometimes losing without dying) in rogue-like games is more meaningful. I can't just load a save and try again nor am I just teleported back to the beginning of a level.

I love rogue-like games because it feels like you're an active and real participant in the game world rather than just travelling along the story lines a writer has mapped out for you. You make much of the story yourself. Your choices often feel more real and meaningful and don't have to conform to an overly simplistic morality or whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I really love other genres as well and I love a well written story. But this is just why I love rogue-like games.

For me most interesting thing about this type of games is the way elements of the game world interact with each other to create gameplay experience with narrative flavor without using any form of scripting that some of the bigger games of this genre (like NetHack) provide every time you play them.

Generally roguelikes are getting more publicity thanks to internet and based on the fact they're completely new experience to most people that are surprised a game could carry so much depth through relatively simple mechanics and very often without utilizing any actual graphics and sound assets.

Dude, always change your quicksave to F5, if it's not set there by default.

I uninstalled too many games because of quicksave button laying too close to quickload :P

I haven't played a ton of rogue-likes (mostly Dredmor and Stone Soup), but I do like them and I like elements with rogue-like elements like FTL. A couple of reasons, I guess:
1. An unforgiving but ultimately fair experience. It can be refreshing to play a game that challenges you without being cheap. In a well-designed rogue-like your life is hanging by a thread most of the time, but it's generally your fault for dying.
2. That thing that Uxtull and ChrisSD said about narrative.
3. Replay value! Randomized levels, generally a bunch of character customization, and you're always trying to get further. Rogue-likes are much more built for replay than your average RPG.
4. Exploration, tactical gameplay and other good things. I got bored of writing this list, but you get the idea.

I do change them. Unless... it's not possible or I forget. I mean, when I start playing game it's not the very first thing I think about - changing quick buttons. Apparently I should... It doesn't change the fact that devs who put it this way are complete morons!

Blame the devs and burn their houses. They never should configure keys by default like that, and in good games, there are two slots for quicksaves :P

In Max Payne 2 there were quicksave backups if I recall, and it was a good thing, because I saved too many times in MP1 right before getting bullet to the head

[url=http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/NetHackWiki:Next_version_pool]Keep hoping...[/url]

Hehe - so true, so true.