As some of you know, I'm a big fan of the DROD series of games. Wonderful puzzles, completely turn based so there's no reflex needed. Just brainpower.

And the diversity of elements involved lets there be some pretty amazing puzzles, interacting in ways you wouldn't think possible. There's a load of user-made holds as well, some as good as or better than the official levels.

Now that the bugs are worked out, they're finally releasing the third one in the series properly, burning it to CD and making it available that way.

Here's the City Beneath Trailer.

And here's the DROD website.

Go play the original (Architect's Edition). Go play Journey to Rooted Hold. Go play The City Beneath. They're all excellent.

Tinkering with fonts and sizes for this comic. Might keep this one, might not.

I felt this warranted a news post. My first ever win in Angband (just plain Angband, not a variant - I've won variants before). Used a Dwarf Warrior. The final battle against Morgoth was both epic and very difficult, but I triumphed.

Character dump here - Budkin III, the Dwarf Warrior

The comic just posted (here) yielded me my first ever negative/hate mail.

I'm not sure whether to be impressed, proud, amused or upset.

I'll settle on a combination of the four.

Yep, 500 strips. I feel amazingly smug.

And yes, the previous news post was an April Fool's joke.

Just an announcement that this comic will be changing over to a fully drawn style, rather than an ASCII-based one. The change should improve the comic immensely.

Don't forget, if you're a coder or have ever wanted to learn - then enter in the 7-day roguelike challenge! The goal is simple - make a roguelike game in 7 days or less. Happy gamings! And thanks to them for sponsoring this comic too.

7 Day roguelike challenge

Do not buy anything from the company Acer. I'll repeat that - do not buy anything from Acer. As I write this, I am quite furious with them - allow me to explain why.

Recently, I ordered a monitor from a third party company - a flatscreen monitor made by Acer, to be exact. It had a single dead pixel (expected), but worked fine for a month. And then the side of the screen started fritzing and going staticy, becoming a semi-mirror of the other side. Understandably, I wasn't happy, but as requested, sent it back to Acer for repairs, as it was still under guarantee/warranty. The monitor was well packed in a large box with lots of packing peanuts. All appropriate accessories (the AC adaptor, the kettle lead and the connector) were included.

That's not the bit that made me angry, defects like that can happen.

Acer got the monitor, held it for 2 weeks and then shipped it back to me. With just the kettle lead and the connector, no AC adaptor. This annoyed me, I rang them up and told them about their mistake, and they promised to send out an adaptor. Only they didn't. A week later, another connector arrived in the post, they'd got it wrong. Now I was beginning to get peeved. They'd screwed up twice. I rang them up again and told them about the problem, and was told that the case had been closed, and transferred me to technical support.

When I spoke to them, they claimed that I'd never included any of the accessories in the box to begin with. No adaptor, no kettle lead, no connector. Bullshit. I included them all, they were right there with the note explaining what was wrong with the monitor. And the guy on the other end of the phone... it was like talking to a robot. I kept saying that they'd made a mistake, and he was just repeating that the warehouse people are thorough, and their records indicated that the cables had not been packed. And he refused to send out another ac adaptor.

And then he gave me the number for their spare parts so I could order and pay for a brand new adaptor. £20 with shipping, according to the lady on the spare parts number.

Fuck. That. Shit.

I fully intend to fire off a blistering barrage of complaints, especially to whoever is responsible for the retarded gibbons who're in the warehouse. I packed those cables. They didn't mark them down, and either misplaced, threw out or stole them.

Do not buy anything from Acer. It might be slightly cheaper, but their customer service and internal procedures are some of the worst I've ever encountered.

Apologies for late upload of Monday's comic. Things went all weird at home over the weekend.

Y'know, I finally got Portal. Yes, I know it's been out for a bit, but it's only this weekend that I did the upgrade to my home system that allowed me to play it. I've had the components sitting around for a while, just not had a chance to install them.

So I'm asking this - any of you here who play it... can you recommend some custom level sets? I'm not just after the quick "This is my first room!" things, I'm after some properly done levels :)

Ta.

Yep, two years of the comic.

And it's not over yet. More to come! But whew, I cannot believe that I've done two years of this!

Well, we've had the comic go to NetHack. We've had the comic go to ToME. We've had the comic go to the new version.

How about going to ADOM for a week?

As you might see on the left-hand side, there is now an RSS feed for the comic. Hooray for convenience :)

A big thankyou to Devnull for sponsoring this comic throughout the duration of the November NetHack tournament. The next one is obviously next November, but the NAO tournament is next June.

OK, angband.calamarain.net has migrated across to a new server. There may still be some teething problems with caching of old versions of the page, but they should be sorted out in a day or so.

This will hopefully fix the problems with the site being down.