Somehow it reminds me of the Map editor i used for Doom Maps, where there was a wireframe 3D display so you could view the map you were building. If it's moving you can see the 3D depth and understand it, but any single frame alone becomes noise and is useless. Quite often on the map editor i'd move something back and forth several times while in my head it converts to what it really means in 3D...
Anyways, seriously cool, although limited in it's execution. As a demo of what he could do, great, but i certainly wouldn't want to play the game through like that.
edit: Actually that reminds me, there's a library you can use that converts the screen to ascii art, i think called
. On higher resolutions you can probably play it pretty well... [url=http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/]see link for aaquake