Update to Cave Story: the Gameflaws site has moved to
http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/
New game for the list:
Nethack. A bastardly hard turn-based randomly generated dungeon crawler; the inspiration for Diablo, and the successor to
Hack (which itself follows from the big daddy of them all,
Rogue). Twenty years old and still undergoing active development.
http://www.nethack.org/ -- the main site. Downloads for Linux, UNIX, Windows, OSX and Mac Classic, among other things, as well as source code. Available (for most platforms) in both top-down tty (ASCII art) and top-down tile graphics flavours.
http://slashem.sourceforge.net/ -- SLASH'EM, Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic, is a Nethack variant that adds more stuff - more areas, more classes, more races, more items, more enemies, more objectives, more abilities, more spells, and more difficulty.
http://www.darkarts.co.za/projects/vultures/ -- Vulture's Eye and Vulture's Claw, high-quality isometric-graphics versions of Nethack (Eye) and SLASH'EM (Claw) with full mouse support. Linux and Windows binaries, source code might build under OSX.
For those who don't like to learn-by-dying:
http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~eva/n...oilerlist.html -- the Nethack Spoiler List. Item and enemy stats; spell effects; how to identify items; how prayer and sacrifice work; how to teach your pet to steal, and how to tame new pets; and much, much more. Most of this applies to SLASH'EM as well, and some of it is SLASH'EM specific. Note that since nethack is randomly generated, much of this is in the form of general techniques - for example, it can't tell you where the Oracle is, but how to recognize it when you find it; it can't tell you what a blue potion does, but how to find out for yourself - without meeting an untimely end if it happens to be Sickness or Paralysis.