Lol, the "Ferneyhough of games," eh? Well, I'm not much for difficulty in games, but I'll try it (the original ASCII)
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I actually remember reading about "Rogue" and "rogue-likes..." good refresher.
I was a big fan of Nethack, which was the "open source" or community developed extension to Hack, which succeeded Rogue. For the primitive interface, the interplay of the items, characters and situations managed to surprise even the most jaded of veterans with novel situations. there are some different GUI versions (tile, isometric and 3D available.)
Anyway, the overview is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NethackAnd an article (admittedly a decade old) that describes some of the bizarre permutations that were possible.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080113042211/http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/01/27/nethack/ One of the most interesting characters you could play in the game was a Tourist with a handful of darts, a wallet full of cash, an annoying flash camera, and your only armor was a loud Hawaiian shirt. If you survived long enough to get to the first shop, you could do pretty well. Nethack had more than a dozen character types.
I'm not that big into "shooter" games, but when my kids got an Xbox, I got Fallout 3 and really enjoyed it. Not only was the nuclear survival vault where the game starts located pretty close to where I grew up, but it was a wonderfully open ended game. (You could finish the main story line in 10 hours, but you'd miss all the fun, like the perky, cheerful cult of incestuous cannibal Republicans in the remains of Annandale VA, some of the radioactive flesh eating zombies on the Metro, and the Republic of Dave, and the having an insane psychologist trap you in a black and white, 1950s Suburbia acid flashback Virtual Reality nightmare.). Some complained that there wasn't enough guidance from place to place, but you can wander all over and explore endlessly and still stumble into unexpected situations. It's not really a "shooter"-- some situations require negotiation, is sneakyness. I'd have to confess that the ending of the scripted part was underwhelming, but as a whole I really dug it. Not that I can make many comparisons to other "shooter"/RPG games.
The game I'm wasting most of my time on now is Sega Total War Medieval 2. It's like a Civilization game with a far more detailed overlay for battles, where you can zoom in and command battles in real time from any angle you want, and zoom down see combat at the individual level. Although released in 2006, it's a graphics pig, but on a decent machine the battles are too much fun, and the financial/character/diplomatic framework and be pretty engrossing. I'm still having trouble with Tamurlane shows up with his war elephants. For 20$, it's a steal. Some of the history and scale elements don't work, but on the whole it's hugely addictive if you a strategy game or history buff.