Permadeath Throes

It sounds odd, but in the last two games that I've been playing besides Skyrim, I've gone back to square one with no progress besides being older and wiser.

And I've been finding it fun, or at least, honest and refreshing.

Patching Minecraft to 1.1 revealed a considerable amount of changes, including the food and xp systems, breeding of farm animals, and enchanting. Not to mention, seriously sturdier armor to the point where I begin to suspect a bug... And a new hardcore "permadeath" mode where your entire world is deleted if you die.

For sheer kicks, and desiring a brief interlude of Minecraft with an inevitable ending, I punched in on the hardcore mode with "Permadeath" as a world key.

 That spawned me in a swamp biome with brownish biome-compliant withered trees echoing the ominous tone. 

 Before I could change my mind, an inviting hole in the ground beckoned me.

 It turned out to be a rather long, interesting sequences of tunnels that eventually petered out into a ravine, but more importantly, yielded a ton of iron far faster than nearly any other world I've played.

 Before I knew it, I was decked out in iron armor, and rampaging through as if on adventure mode, chasing Endermen, zombies and more.

And yes, even the odd creeper or two. There were a few explosions, but to my surprise, they didn't seem as lethal as I remembered. The iron armour was surprisingly durable, and having a full food bar regenerates back half health in a short period of time.

It was about this time I realized permadeath wasn't going to be as short-lived an affair as I thought, settled down, started building a tower up, digging a staircase to bedrock below, widening out to make a small underground tree startup nursery, changing my mind to turn the grassland I had settled on into a forest grove instead, dug half a moat into the beach sand while attempting to get glass for skylights, dug an underground wheat farm (One no longer crushes farmland while walking on it!), built a fenced grass plot with new shiny fence gates, attempted to fish some cows into said plot, realized holding wheat lures in the cows much easier, bred a little cow calf, which promptly fell down the back steps into my tower and necessitated the building of a back door to the tower while shoving the baby bovine out, dug down to bedrock, found diamonds amazingly quickly, in just sufficient quantity to build an enchanting pedestal and a bookcase, which necessitated a gravity-defying renovation and widening of the brand new second floor of the tower to accomodate a 6x6 enchanting room, while getting shot off the new adjoining walkway by bored skeletons, eventually got around to enchanting some items, started getting ambitious and went down to bedrock again to create obsidian from lava with the last three diamonds in a new diamond pickaxe, built a nether portal a hill away, had a thrilling and cowardly time being on tenterhooks setting up a netherworld hq/shelter while hit and running zombie pigmen, went back to the overworld surprised I was still alive, ran out to slaughter some other mobs for enchanting xp, got pelted by 2-3 skeletons a foot away from the door of my tower, didn't think I was in that much trouble and was still rampaging through spiders when suddenly, from out of my field of vision completely, hsssBANG.

Red screen. One button. "Delete world."

Wow.

Then there's the Realm of the Mad God. Which has been my sick little 15 minute turned 5 hour addiction of the past month, which has finally made it onto Steam as a free-to-play title.

All power to it, I say.

It's certainly a far sight better than my two aborted attempts at trying to install Lineage II to give their "truly free" model a try. (I'm on my third attempt, and I'm about to give up if it fails and wait for Aion to become "truly free.")

I couldn't resist taking the Steam version for a spin (achievements!). Unfortunately, the current Steam client is a tide bit laggy in terms of FPS and suffers from some input lag - or at least I found it so on the laptop on a mobile broadband while at work... But still playable.

I also found it interesting to observe that I fared far better than a number of (presumably) Steam newbies by virtue of the fact that I've played ROTMG a bunch before. I died less, shot at stuff with better aim and generally progressed faster through knowing more about the game (as compared to the first time I played it, certainly.)

Alas, hubris was cut short at lvl 17 - when I was just thinking that I might actually get this first Steam character to lvl 20 without *gasp* dying. One was caught between three lethal snowballs from an Ice Demon, and despite desperately mashing the Escape to Nexus key, it was a couple split seconds too late between the slowed response time, the laggy input and internet connection.

Out came the gravestone and the score screen to summarize the short-lived bytes that were my first Steam account's character.

The End. Ready for a new beginning, whenever you are. As I said, refreshingly honest. These are games with an end point built in. Who needs an endless grindy endgame, or incrementally numerical progress to the point where one is bored shitless but there's still another ladder to climb? Permadeath games offer a natural stopping point, a place to take a breather, until the next attempt, until the next try to do even better.

I rather like that. (What I don't like is when someone else can inflict that stopping point on you prematurely, but that's a different story. Here, we're talking roguelike permadeath. You screw up, your character dies, you gain knowledge for the next time, easy to repeat and continue.)
 More games should give this a go. Have the guts to say:

Game over. Try again?