Rejoice, for Rogue has been ported to the iPhone and is available from the App Store right now. Go and play it - it is fun and free. This implementation has both primitive graphics and old-school ASCII modes (just rotate the screen to switch) pinch-zooming and (optional) gesture based commands.

If you like Rogue, though, you need to try NetHack. There is an iPhone port, but it requires a Jailbroken phone. License incompatibilities seem to be the main issue with getting the game on the App Store - does anyone know if there is an 'official' port on the way?

Rogue - classic Unix game comes to the iPhone [Gandreas.com via Touch Arcade]

Once the initial shock of daylight and antialiased fonts has worn off, they will probably need to chill out with a quick dungeon hack. Tombs Of Asciiroth is a labour of love — recreating the look and feel of an ASCII roguelike in Firefox.

There is full-length quest to be had wandering the titular Tombs, and the usually obscure keyboard commands are illustrated with a nice tutorial level with pop-up tip windows.

It can be a bit slow, and you will need to install Google Gears if you want to save your game, but there is plenty of old school fun to be had. You can't not like a game that includes the phrase "Use the sword against hostile Ampersands".

The Tombs Of Asciiroth [Icculus.org]

While sussing out an appropriate Nethack image for my post on the Best Year In Gaming History, I happened to Google up a new Nethack t-shirt. There have been Nethack t-shirts before, but all of them have sported the message "I wished for a blessed +3 GDSM and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"... which makes them far geekier than anything I really want to stretch across my quivering pectorals.

But I really like the throwback simplicity of this Nethack t-shirt over at Non-Zero Chance. "Thrill to the sight of an at-sign fending off a horde of lower case letters!" the copy explains.

Out came my credit card, and I even bought Eliza a present in this t-shirt. Unfortunately, it only comes in sizes up to 3X-L, making it a baby doll fit for the likes of Jabba the Hut but impotent to contain the gelatinous latitude of Eliza's own truly astonishing girth. Maybe she can put tape on the back and wear it as a pasty or something. Florian Eckhardt

Nethack T-Shirt [Non-Zero Chance]

What was the best year in gaming? For me, there are many candidates:

• 1982, when I, a three-year old with a skull engorged with more snot than brain, first discovered the delights of pretending an at symbol was an elf in Rogue on my mother's Unix terminal.

• 1986, when after a night of feverish dreams about Octoroks, I broke into a friend's house while he was on vacation to play Legend of Zelda.

• 1994, when I lost my virginity after my girlfriend and I became aroused by the suggestive manner in which the 'I' piece slid into a mound of blocks to achieve a Tetris.

• 2000, in which I first discovered that pretending to be a girl in Everquest and punctuating every sentence with a *giggle* could be turned into a profitable industry selling high-end raid swag on eBay.

• 2003, when I beat Cliffy B. into a gurgling, garishly dressed mockery of humanity behind a Vegas casino.

But I could probably find similarly important memories for any year: my whole life's been about games.

Next Generation has attempted to look at the subject of Best Gaming Year more objectively, employing a crack team of scientists and philosophers to pin the precise apex of gaming greatness to the Gregorian calendar. Unfortunately, they didn't have much success at narrowing it down between candidates, essentially just citing every third or fourth year as a great one. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good rule of thumb: 1993's Doom followed by 1996's Quake and N64 followed, of course, by 2000's Daikatana. Florian Eckhardt

The Ten Greatest Years in Gaming [Next Generation]

Webcomic artist and filker Rob Balder has written an anthem for NetHack the ur-Diablo dungeon crawler as old as the goblin-pocked hills.

Released under a Creative Commons license, the song is slightly droney, but has some of the same charm as Jonathon Coulton and other geek artists.

It is a parody of "Pepper" by the Butthole Surfers, a fatalistic ditty about young people meeting tragic ends. It reminded me of my endless dying in NetHack, a game which never runs out of cruel twists of fate.

Nethack Anthem [PartiallyClips]