Over the weekend I was reading an article in MMORPG.com and in it someone mentioned that Diablo was inspired by the old DOS text game, Moria. This opened the floodgates of a slew of memories of Moria and so I decided to try to download and play it. After talking to a programmer friend, I got a thing called "D-Fend Reloaded" which is a DOS emulator front end for Windows, and upon installing that I was able to get Moria working (for those interested, wikipedia has a Moria entry which is where I started, and you can probably find D-Fend Reloaded by searching for it on the web).

Okay so so notes about Moria, for the uninitiated:

1. You are an @ symbol walking around a map made of various alphanumeric letters and whatnot (the . is an empty floor square, the $ is gold pieces on the floor, the + is a closed door, etc).

2. You make your character by picking a race and class and then the game randomly rolls ability scores like in DnD. When first making a character, you can reroll stats as many times as you want, which sounds too good to be true and could be abused to some extent, but the rest of the game is so punishing that it's okay.

3. When you get reduced to 0 hit points, your character is dead. His or her gear ceases to exist and you can only play the game at that point by making a new character, from the beginning. So if your level 15 Wizard dies, you 're SOOL and it's back to square one where you're attacking rats with a dagger (and missing) in dungeon level 1 again.

4. Virtually all possible mistakes you could make are usually irreversible. You can only save the game when you quit out of it for the time being and you cannot have multiple saved game files, only one.

5. Things cost money from vendors. You get money from going into the dungeon and finding it. There are ore deposits in the walls, and random treasure in rooms, plus the monsters, of which there are many, will sometimes drop treasure when you defeat them. You can find items in the dungeon and then sell them to vendors, usually for a major wholesale markdown as compared to the sell price (which is not the same as the asking price, there's haggling and your charisma determines how good you are at that).

6. Some monsters, traps, etc will destroy or degrade your gear. When that happens, your gear is now damaged (or the magic bonus on it has been reduced, if still in the positive, then it's less magicked up if in the negative, it's damaged). Damaged stuff cannot be sold to vendors.

7. Stuff you find is usually unidentified, meaning you don't know if that dagger you just picked up is magical, cursed, or just a dagger. Unidentified stuff can be sold to vendors, who will usually treat it as non-magical and not cursed until you agree on a price (by haggling!) at which point the game IDs the item and you get to find out if they ripped you off or you ripped them off.

8. Cursed items give magical minuses to hit and to damage and cannot be unequippped without first using a scroll of Remove Curse, which costs money. At which point you MAY then unequip the cursed item(s) you have on and discard them (cannot be sold).

9. Potions and scrolls you find in the dungeon are unidentified, unless you've found a similar one before and figured out what it did by successfully using it, selling it, or using a scroll of Identify on it. So you'll find an item with a description like "Red Speckled Potion" which will remain described as such until you say "The hell with it" and drink it, only to find out it's a Potion of Blindness (makes YOU blind, temporarily). Or you can try to sell it, the vendor will buy it for about 10gp (after haggling) and then tell you what it was. Scrolls work the same way, unidentified scrolls will have gibberish titles like "Scroll labeled ishkcz fef" etc.

10. Wands and staves also need to be Identified, and some are bad, like the wand of Haste Monster, etc, so while it's true you can try to identify them by using them, A) you might end up dead because you buffed the monster and B) even if it's a good wand, you still don't know how many charges it has left.. That's right, they use charges, and you won't know how many are left in it unless you use a Scroll of Identifiy, which is like 100gp and very often not worth it.

11. Monsters can steal your stuff then go invisible, teleport away, etc. Then, if you're lucky enough to actually track them down and defeat them, they still just drop randomized treasure, they don't have your stuff anymore. It's gone forever now.

12. Some monsters hit you with gaze attacks, spells, etc that make you too afraid, confused, blind, slow, etc to do what you want to do, at least until the spell wears off. It can be quite frustrating.

13. Sometimes you'll be walking around, down a narrow (one square wide) hallway and to set off a trap. It might teleport you to a different part of the same dungeon level, or make you fall through to the next lower one, or poison dart you or acid your gear for gear damage, or sleep you , or blind you, or freeze ray you to the point that you take daamge AND one of your potions is destroyed (liquid freezes, expands to crack potion flask, then melts and drains out of the cracked bottle),etc. My Fighter SUCKS at finding this stuff in time for it to help him too. Luckily he has the HP and fortitude to save ignore the poison and absorb the damage most of the time.

14. While haggling with vendors, if you have no great clue what something's worth and you guess way too high, or don't come down in price enough to get near the actual retail price, the vendor can get annoyed with you and kick you out of their store temporarily. When this happens, you have to go back to the dungeon for a while then come back to "reset" the vendor, but when you do, his inventory may have changed and he doesn't have the item you wanted anymore.

15. Even in a game this simple, there's grinding. The dungeon is a basically a mine filled with monsters, but there's still valuable copper, silver, gold, and gems in the walls, and you can totally get it. Getting it requires you to use your pick or shovel to hit the wall until you finish tunneling into it. This can take one keystroke or 20, depending on random properties of that particular bit of quartz vein or magma intrusion, etc. The squares that have valuables in them are marked as such, but you can only see the surface, so you need to mine into the wall a little to reveal deeper areas. There's also a scroll of Treasure Detection that will reveal deep ores for you, but costs money. The mining get's more lucrative the deeper you go, but the monsters get scarier too.

16. Monsters have a range of different abilities and attacks which will cause some to be a problem and others to be easy pickings depending on your class. My fighter, for example, has only one melee attack, but a doozy. Sometimes you walk into a room with a couple of giant lice in it and they start multiplying like crazy. They die in one hit, but they're dodgy enough that you miss sometimes, and they're also faster than you, so you have to either run in and try to kill all of them before getting swarmed or run away and shut the door. The wizard, on the other hand, just fireballs them one time and doesn't think twice about it, but he has problems against other stuff.

Okay, so all of that being established, I'm enjoying the HELL out of playing this game again. It's as if I went in knowing that the designer had it in for me and was trying to pull devilish pranks, like putting in traps that only degrade your gear and making wands of Haste Monster, etc. You say things to yourself like "I know there's some kind of angle here, how can they make this bad for me...." and you try to play conservative and smart in response, not unlike an actual adventurer would if actually delving into the unknown. Even the mining feels as laborious and tedious as it should, being mining.