Roguelikes

[Sivart]

I want to play one. I felt like it was time to broaden my gaming horizons and stuff, y'know? Any ones you could recommend? I know Marcus plays them and stuff.

I've already played Angband buttt... when I played it, I went into a shop, and then the filthy hobo drooled on me and made it impossible for me to move from the sop entrance.

[John Mora]

Try Shiren the Wanderer.

[marcus]

You can move diagonally. You can also kill the villagers with no penalty.

Anyways, for beginners I recommend straight up Rogue. It's simple, no extra rules or keys, and it's pretty straight forward.

Nethack is one of the more fun yet unfriendly roguelikes in terms of difficulty. There's a lot of subtle nuances to the game but it comes completely from experimentation (unless you cheat by reading a guide).

I don't like ADOM because I hate having to run through the game the exact same way since it uses a pregenerated world map but a lot of people swear by it. It's a complex game like Nethack but doesn't have the YASD (yet another stupid death) aspect where you take one step and die from a falling rock like NetHack.

Dungeon Crawl (and the Stone Soup variety) are closer to Diablo in the way you storm through dungeons and it's more combat oriented. It's also the only roguelike I know about where abilities come from race instead of class.

ToME is basically anime Angband. There's so much overpowered crap in that game it's ridiculous.

If you want a story roguelike, check out Legerdemain. It's a unique approach the design and it's pretty fun.

DoomRL is a remake of Doom as a roguelike and it's surprisingly good. Really, really good. Powder is another good "lunch break" roguelike in that it doesn't require much time to start and finish.

Play IVAN if you want to die. A lot. I don't think it's even possible to beat IVAN without cheating and the developer pretty much said he designed it to kill you. If you actually make it out of the first dungeon without losing a limb or having your equipment turn into bananas then consider yourself lucky.

Elona is a Japanese roguelike fully (mostly) translated. It's a lot more forgiving but wacky crap happens at every corner. My loli familiar got pregnant after drinking well water and gave birth to an alien that destroyed an entire village.

Finally, Incursion is probably the most complicated roguelike. It follows the DnD 3.5 rules almost exactly and monsters have pretty decent intelligence in that they'll use the environment and all their abilities to kill you from afar before shredding you up close. It comes with a college textbook sized readme and a section that basically says "it's okay if you die in the first floor it's pretty normal."

[Gustaff 13]

Azure Dreams.

Yeah. I said it.


And Spelunky, if it counts.

[hitogoroshi]

Angband is one of the easiest roguelikes out there, I'd give it another shot.

[Translucid]

Any of the Chocobo's Dungeon games I believe would be a pretty easy way to get into the sheer basics of roguelikes, while also being insanely cute.

[John Mora]

Shireeeeeeeen

[Red Dragon]

Isn't that a DS game?

[John Mora]

Yeah, but it's a pretty mellow introduction.

[Smurvis]

Ok, I thought I knew everything there was to know about all genres, but here I am learning something new.

What the HELL is a Roguelike?

[Denmo]

Hmm. (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Roguelike)

[Translucid]

It's any game where you go around stealing people's powers by touching them.

[John Mora]

It's any game where you go around stealing people's powers by touching them.

http://gremlindog.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/rogue.jpg

[marcus]

Ok, I thought I knew everything there was to know about all genres, but here I am learning something new.

What the HELL is a Roguelike?

Any game derived or mostly inspired by Rogue, a 1980 computer game by two college students. Unlike Dungeon (the first digital interactive roleplaying game) and pedit5/dnd (the first graphical roleplaying games), Rogue generated a random dungeon and scattered monsters and items across it allowing near infinite replay value. This made it hugely popular among college students until more refined, story based RPG's came out like Ultima and Wizardry (which went on to inspire Japanese console games Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy).

As Rogue became popular, people took the source code and made variants of it. These variants and all games like it are considered Roguelikes. Roguelikes generally contain the following qualifications to be considered a Roguelike

-Randomly generated content. Roguelikes are primarily about infinite replay value.
-Turn based gameplay. Every move counts as one turn. Roguelikes stress tactics and strategy over straight up hack and slash.
-ASCII or simplified graphics. The tradition of using ASCII or square tiles has stuck and most roguelike developers explain the tradition as a throwback to the simpler days of text based and tabletop games were you had to imagine simple markers as your characters.
-Permanent death. Roguelikes are ultimately about choices and consequences and conservative playing. Items can be cursed or have negative effects but identifying an item isn't always an option. Death always looms around the corner, but in about 90% of all cases death is avoidable with conservative playing. The other 10% is pure luck.

Roguelikes are often different from each other in what the game offers, but every roguelike is based around those four principles. The game has heavily influenced the modern dungeon crawler including Gauntlet, Diablo (the diablo developer even states his love of roguelikes in an interview), and the Japanese roguelike series Mystery Dungeon.

[Smurvis]

Hmm. (http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Roguelike)

Any moron can use google Den! It takes a REAL butthead to make a forum tell him. :3


No but really, any addition to wanting to know what it was, I was hoping to get a few good recommendations in the process, and I'd rather get that from the Pav than google. So take that.

[John Mora]

No but really, any addition to wanting to know what it was, I was hoping to get a few good recommendations in the process, and I'd rather get that from the Pav than google. So take that.

Guess what: that's what this whole topic has been.

[Smurvis]

I thought all those were like old PC games. You mean they're current? How could I have not heard of any?! (besides Chocobo Dungeon)

[marcus]

I thought all those were like old PC games. You mean they're current? How could I have not heard of any?! (besides Chocobo Dungeon)

Most roguelikes started in the late 80s early 90s and they've been developed on ever since. Most of them are open source so there are dozens of variants available (of varying quality). There's even a mecha roguelike series called GearHead but I haven't played it yet.

Roguelike isn't a lucrative genre so they're pretty rare outside of the freeware world. I've been making an American western themed roguelike for a year or so but haven't gotten anywhere on it. I picked up the Jap copy of Action Game Maker and thought about making a Spelunky style platformer but I'm focused on other things.