Dungeon Encounters
When I was a kid, my parents wouldn't let me have a Nintendo. They reasoned (correctly) that I was all but certain to spend as much time as possible playing video games if there was a video-game machine of any sort in the house.
However, my godfather was an enthusiastic early adopter of personal computers, and once I was old enough to be trusted around electronics, I started getting hand-me-downs.
And this is how I got my first computer -- a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. By the time I inherited it, the TI-99/4A was already hugely out of date, with accessories that were hard to find and/or vastly overpriced.
But critically, the TI-99 was a computer on which I could play games. And that made it a truly awe-inspiring device that instantly changed my life.
One of the first games I purchased for it was Tunnels of Doom.
Tunnels of Doom was, to put it kindly, "not a great game". It was a primitive, partly text-based dungeon crawler, but it had nothing like the depth or nuance of a more modern title like Nethack. It was endlessly difficult to run. Tunnels of Doom required memory and save slot mechanics that my TI-99/4A did not have particularly good support for -- starting a game, or loading any particular save, required I/O to a cassette tape accessory that only worked intermittently. One did not really spend time "playing" Tunnels of Doom as much as one spent time "troubleshooting" Tunnels of Doom. Even so, my friends and I poured endless hours into trying to figure out which settings/options/cassettes might plausibly yield an hour or two of simulated dungeon crawling.
All that said, I think it's clear that there's something about the "descend into a dungeon and gain power by beating increasingly difficult monsters" formula that really appeals to me. And a title that strips that formula down to its most archetypal form has good odds of being a game I very much want to play.
Dungeon Encounters is that game. Oh my god. I love it so much. It's everything I ever wanted Tunnels of Doom to be and so much more. Thank you Square for funding this thing. Thank you Cattle Call for making it. I know the audience is small. I know all of you probably didn't earn much money for your efforts here. But thank you so very much.
This seems accurate. Guilty as charged, I guess?