Hobby #4: Roguelikes

There’s a lot to say about this one. Roguelikes are, possibly, the best genre of games out there. They also have the worst graphics other than, say, Interactive Fiction (which I will be writing about soon). What are Roguelikes, exactly? Let me explain…

An example of a roguelike

In the late-ish 70’s, the game “Rogue” graced personal computers, which were still pretty much just coming into being. It was a simplistic game, consisting of a main character (the @ symbol) trying to plunder the depths of an infinite dungeon that was randomly generated. This dungeon consisted of nothing more than walls (- and |), floors (.), monsters (various letters such as D for a dragon), items (more or less just symbols like { or /) and you. At that time, your goal was to loot the randomly generated dungeons while managing your health and hunger. Yep, you heard me. I said randomly generated. That essentially means you’ll never explore the same dungeon twice, ever. Thus the element of exploration is added in addition to survival and strategic thinking. “Strategic thinking?” you may ask. Well, to defeat monsters, you must consider many things, including but not limited to:

• What items are you wearing and which ones are in your inventory?
• What is your position in the corridor/dungeon compared to the monsters’?
• If you throw, say a harmful potion at the monsters, will it hit them from where you are?
• What about nearby traps? Any you could lure monsters into?
• What are the monsters’ resistances? What is there speed compared to yours? Their defense? Strength?

Not only does this quickly discovered strategic layer apply to monsters, but to the corridors and secret passages and etc. And one more thing: things in the dungeon, like monsters, only move when you move. Thus you may or may not consider it something of a “turn-based game”. Which reminds me: there is treasure galore in the dungeon, including but again not limited to: staves, weapons, armor, food, false items, potions, and most importantly: money. Money is your score in Rogue. If your second character got 75 levels deeper than your first characters, but picked up less money, they would be in second place on the high score list. Thus adding even more thought to this massive thought process, in addition to the many, many keyboard commands necessary to do specific things.

After Rogue came a game called Moria, which was basically its duplicate child, from what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I’ve never played Moria. But obviously it was popular enough to spawn…

Angband. Boy, this was a popular game in its time, which wasn’t exactly that long ago. Angband introduced, with the addition of things like new commands, items, monsters, “unique” monsters, and a “final boss” of sorts, a town level. This town included some random villagers that were moderately fun to practice-kill to get used to the very slightly revamped battle system that now included races and classes (like a mage with spellbooks and such!), and various all-purpose shops that would supply you with what you needed. IIRC, this was the starter of the “word of recall” scroll, one of the most useful items in all roguelikes.

A screenshot of Zangband

Angband was popular enough to spawn many, many successors including what may be the most popular of the bunch, ZAngband (Capital A is no mistake). Oh, boy, to this day it is still one of my all-time favorite roguelikes. In addition to having a huge overworld in comparison to Angband’s rather-pitiful-in-comparison town level, it feature over 15-20(!) new races, and some great classes like Warrior-mage and Paladin, it also introduced many other things like the ability to make monsters into your loyal companions (Yay! I can have a Knight Archer be my friend!), and different “realms” of magic that most mage classes choose from inlcuding Nature, Chaos, Life and Arcane. Also, the newer versions of ZAngband have things like a randomly generated overworld (very fun) with random quests (can be tough but fun) and 100’s of different kinds of shops with a random inventory. Kind of in-depth, eh? Anyway ZAngband was popular enough to spawn things like…

ToME. A very popular variant of ZAngband which is a variant of Angband which is a clone of Moria which is a clone of the game that started it all. ToME rules, to say the least. It and it’s currently rather few variants such as Furyband (which I am playing right now as a race I programmed) are just too in-depth and fun to explain in a couple of paragraphs.

Pros of the genre:

Very fun

In-depth

Loads of character customization, especially in games like ToME
Very fun

On top of everything else, massively addictive

Cons of the genre:

None that I can think of :/

Overall score: 10/10 – These games reign supreme in dungeon exploration and IMO in RPGs in general.

Links:

Play Rogue online (must have Java): http://www.hexatron.com/rogue/ Warning: start with this game, but I am not responsible if the addictiveness causes you to ignore the other parts of your life. This applies to all Roguelikes.

Angband: http://www.thangorodrim.net/download.html

Angband variants including ZAngband: http://www.thangorodrim.net/variants.html

ToME: http://www.t-o-m-e.net/download.php?tome_current=0

Furyband (my fave ToME variant): http://www.furytech.net/furyband/furyband.php