Nethack is the game I've played more than any other.. having played it literally for decades and decades. Yet I switched to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup about 5 or 6 years ago, and really haven't gone back except to try Nethack again every now and then only to feel it too painful and slow to continue playing.<p>I've been spoiled by Crawl's autoexplore, its richness of gods and god-granted powers, its colors (in text mode, not tiles), and many other new features and innovations. That said, Nethack is still the deeper game in so many ways. Crawl's "don't do it like Nethack" approach has prevented it from taking all sorts of great ideas from Nethack and making Crawl in to a richer game -- things like making more advanced use of pets (like training them to steal from shops), more things to do in shops, use of altars beyond merely converting to a god, use of potions beyond merely drinking them, more uses for item inscriptions, all the ways to combine items, the list goes on and on.<p>All this makes Crawl seem like the shallower game, though it's still plenty of fun, and I still play it to the exclusion of most any other roguelike for now. There's a lot of room for improvement, though. I just wish they'd take more of the best parts of Nethack and make Crawl even more fun.