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So an @, a D and a & walk into a bar
Typhoid Manny
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Do you love incredibly lethal dungeon crawls, but hate graphics? If so, have I got a genre for you.
Roguelikes!
It all started with a little game called Rogue, way back in the day in 1980. Some nerds wanted to take the rules for randomly generating a dungeon in AD&D and turn it into a computer game you could play by yourself. The computers at the time couldn't handle much of what we would call Graphics, so they used ASCII instead. Your dude is represented by a white @ who travels in a turnbased manner around rooms and corridors rendered in beautiful ASCII, collecting money, thwacking monsters and upgrading gear. Oh, and when your dude dies, that's it. You gotta start over. You can save, but if you get fucked by hobgoblins, the game deletes your save. This is cool because it encourages you to be smart about shit. If there's a fight you have no chance of winning, you're more likely to run away and prepare more if you've invested fuck knows how many hours in a character that is just as mortal as you.
So after Rogue took the nerd world by storm, a bunch of different groups of enterprising souls took the premise and extended it in a bunch of different directions. One of those groups made a game called Hack, which added stuff like stores, and also expanded the shit out of Rogue's list of items and monsters. This started one of the two major roguelike branches, because a couple years later Hack turned into NetHack, which is the game most folk who know about roguelikes think of when they think of the genre.
The other main branch came a couple years later with a little number called Angband. Thematically it's all Tolkien shit, you can be an elf or a dwarf or a hobbit, in your travels you run into Gollum and Saruman and Smaug. Your ultimate goal is to get to dungeon level 100 and kill Morgoth's punk ass.
Here are some roguelikes you should play.
ROGUE: even though it's like 30 years old, it's still playable as shit. If you're used to Nethack or Angband it's gonna seem pretty simple; there's only like twenty different kinds of monsters and a handful of different types of equipment. There're no character classes or races, and your only visible stat is Strength. However it is hard as balls even by roguelike standards. There's a flash version you can play here and here's a bunch of info about mechanics and how to keep alive
NETHACK: Its predecessor mostly isn't really worth playing because this game has everything good about it plus a fuckload of other stuff. Basically NetHack takes Rogue's basic concept and expands on it hugely. Dungeon levels are still one screen big always, inventory works basically the same way, et cetera. Just as much of the game in NetHack is finding out what your stuff does and whether or not it'll kill you if you use it as killing monsters. There is a lot of arbitrary death in NetHack. I've got a pretty promising barbarian who just killed Medusa. There's a hella useful wiki here.
ANGBAND: The other main branch, Angband is almost exclusively about hitting fuckers with swords, shooting them with arrows and blowing them up with spells. Dungeon levels are way the hell bigger than in Rogue or NetHack, there's a lot more item variety, and you generally don't have to worry about not having access to basic shit like food and ammo thanks to the shops at the top level of the dungeon, which you can easily get back to from wherever using scrolls of recall. It doesn't have the same oh-hey-that-gnome-had-a-wand-of-death-i-guess-I'm-fucked kind of arbitrary difficulty that Nethack does, and there's way less weird interactions in general, but that doesn't mean NetHack's harder. Deep down in the dungeon, you can get killed if you make a single wrong move, but 90% of the time if you die, it's because you fucked up. I've won a couple times, and killing Morgoth as a dwarf fighter is probably the most difficult videgame thing I've ever done. Here's some artifact and monster spoilers. There are also about a million variants that change the game in tons of different ways, the most popular is probably TOME, which I haven't really spent enough time on to talk about.
ANCIENT DOMAINS OF MYSTERY: NetHackish single-screen dungeons and general interface, but with the addition of skills besides weapons, and an overworld map. It also has a huge number of classes and races to choose from and is generally pretty awesome. If anyone knows of a wiki or a spoiler page for ADOM, lemme know and I'll put it here.
DUNGEON CRAWL STONE SOUP: This is a cool game, more in the Angband vein than NetHack. It's easier than either of them by a pretty good amount I think, but "easy roguelike" still translates to "oh Jesus this is hard." The coolest thing about Crawl is the auto-explore key. You press it and your guy zooms around the level exploring, stopping if he comes across a monster or an item. It takes a lot of the tedium out of playing a game where the dungeons are a bunch of screens tall and wide with lots of windy corridors. Wiki
DOOMRL: On its face this sounds completely retarded. An ASCII version of Doom, which is a game where all you do is run through corridors and rooms and kill mons...ohhhh. Seriously, it sounds dumb but it's hugely fun. It's short, only like 25 single-screen levels, but it distinguishes itself from other roguelikes by being predominantly about shooting rather than melee. No stats in the same way that other roguelikes have them besides health and armor, but there's a skill tree that's pretty awesome. My last game I ended up leveling into a skill that made rapid fire weapons like chainguns and plasma rifles not take any ammo. Wiki
IVAN: This is the roguelike equivalent of putting your dick in a blender. Every single goddamn thing is potentially deadly. I hope nothing makes you throw up, because your stomach acid will dissolve your skull and murder you! I hope you don't get near an explosion while you're carrying wands, because the wands will explode and murder you! IVAN is everything that's bad about NetHack, presented in tiles instead of ASCII. Is there a wiki? I don't even know. I think the developer stopped updating awhile back.
DWARF FORTRESS: Here's kind of an odd duck. There's a roguelike adventure mode which is both ridiculously fun and horrendously broken. You can do stuff like rip a goblin's arm off and use it as a club to beat him and his buddies to death. There's no magic to speak of, and at this point you can't do a lot as a single dwarf, but the developer has plans to allow a dwarf adventurer to set up a modest home for himself, which might attract other dwarfs, at which point, hey, you're playing the real draw of Dwarfort, which is the fantastic fortress building mode. Now this isn't strictly a roguelike. It's in realtime and you don't actually have direct control over anything, but I don't care. It's fantastic and you should play it. Hot dwarf wiki action
EPIC DUNGEON: Indie game on 360. It isn't strictly a roguelike cause it's realtime, but it has random levels and loot, and permadeath. It's like a buck and totally worth it.
INCURSION: Pretty cool game that uses the 3rd edition D&D rules. Lots of different ways to play with good descriptions of combat if I remember correctly, it's been awhile since I played it. It hasn't been updated in like two years but the dude who made it says he's coming out with a version that has a lot of shiny new shit in it, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
DESKTOP DUNGEONS: A cool-ass roguelike disguised as a puzzle game. You go through a dungeon as one of a bunch of different race/class combos and kill monsters, natch. But most of the monsters will kill your ass dead when you first start, so you have to work your way up from the weak ones until eventually you're strong enough to kill the boss on the level. You have to be careful about what monsters you kill in what order, because besides healing potions the only way to keep up your strength is uncovering tiles you haven't been before. So a lot of walking around without killing anything will screw you in the end. Checking out the site it looks like they're gonna start selling a version with a bunch of bells and whistles that weren't in the version I've played, but they're gonna keep that version up for free still which is pretty cool.
DIABLORL: Now here's an interesting thing. It's a roguelike (made by the dude who did DoomRL) based on a game that was based on roguelikes. I only just found out about it so I can't say whether it's good or not, but in the half hour I've been playing it it's been fun, even if it's basically piss easy so far.
If there're any games I missed you think I should add, post that shit. ROGUE IS KING. ALL HAIL ROGUE.
edit: fixed anti-hotlinking image
Roguelikes!
It all started with a little game called Rogue, way back in the day in 1980. Some nerds wanted to take the rules for randomly generating a dungeon in AD&D and turn it into a computer game you could play by yourself. The computers at the time couldn't handle much of what we would call Graphics, so they used ASCII instead. Your dude is represented by a white @ who travels in a turnbased manner around rooms and corridors rendered in beautiful ASCII, collecting money, thwacking monsters and upgrading gear. Oh, and when your dude dies, that's it. You gotta start over. You can save, but if you get fucked by hobgoblins, the game deletes your save. This is cool because it encourages you to be smart about shit. If there's a fight you have no chance of winning, you're more likely to run away and prepare more if you've invested fuck knows how many hours in a character that is just as mortal as you.
So after Rogue took the nerd world by storm, a bunch of different groups of enterprising souls took the premise and extended it in a bunch of different directions. One of those groups made a game called Hack, which added stuff like stores, and also expanded the shit out of Rogue's list of items and monsters. This started one of the two major roguelike branches, because a couple years later Hack turned into NetHack, which is the game most folk who know about roguelikes think of when they think of the genre.
The other main branch came a couple years later with a little number called Angband. Thematically it's all Tolkien shit, you can be an elf or a dwarf or a hobbit, in your travels you run into Gollum and Saruman and Smaug. Your ultimate goal is to get to dungeon level 100 and kill Morgoth's punk ass.
Here are some roguelikes you should play.
ROGUE: even though it's like 30 years old, it's still playable as shit. If you're used to Nethack or Angband it's gonna seem pretty simple; there's only like twenty different kinds of monsters and a handful of different types of equipment. There're no character classes or races, and your only visible stat is Strength. However it is hard as balls even by roguelike standards. There's a flash version you can play here and here's a bunch of info about mechanics and how to keep alive
NETHACK: Its predecessor mostly isn't really worth playing because this game has everything good about it plus a fuckload of other stuff. Basically NetHack takes Rogue's basic concept and expands on it hugely. Dungeon levels are still one screen big always, inventory works basically the same way, et cetera. Just as much of the game in NetHack is finding out what your stuff does and whether or not it'll kill you if you use it as killing monsters. There is a lot of arbitrary death in NetHack. I've got a pretty promising barbarian who just killed Medusa. There's a hella useful wiki here.
ANGBAND: The other main branch, Angband is almost exclusively about hitting fuckers with swords, shooting them with arrows and blowing them up with spells. Dungeon levels are way the hell bigger than in Rogue or NetHack, there's a lot more item variety, and you generally don't have to worry about not having access to basic shit like food and ammo thanks to the shops at the top level of the dungeon, which you can easily get back to from wherever using scrolls of recall. It doesn't have the same oh-hey-that-gnome-had-a-wand-of-death-i-guess-I'm-fucked kind of arbitrary difficulty that Nethack does, and there's way less weird interactions in general, but that doesn't mean NetHack's harder. Deep down in the dungeon, you can get killed if you make a single wrong move, but 90% of the time if you die, it's because you fucked up. I've won a couple times, and killing Morgoth as a dwarf fighter is probably the most difficult videgame thing I've ever done. Here's some artifact and monster spoilers. There are also about a million variants that change the game in tons of different ways, the most popular is probably TOME, which I haven't really spent enough time on to talk about.
ANCIENT DOMAINS OF MYSTERY: NetHackish single-screen dungeons and general interface, but with the addition of skills besides weapons, and an overworld map. It also has a huge number of classes and races to choose from and is generally pretty awesome. If anyone knows of a wiki or a spoiler page for ADOM, lemme know and I'll put it here.
DUNGEON CRAWL STONE SOUP: This is a cool game, more in the Angband vein than NetHack. It's easier than either of them by a pretty good amount I think, but "easy roguelike" still translates to "oh Jesus this is hard." The coolest thing about Crawl is the auto-explore key. You press it and your guy zooms around the level exploring, stopping if he comes across a monster or an item. It takes a lot of the tedium out of playing a game where the dungeons are a bunch of screens tall and wide with lots of windy corridors. Wiki
DOOMRL: On its face this sounds completely retarded. An ASCII version of Doom, which is a game where all you do is run through corridors and rooms and kill mons...ohhhh. Seriously, it sounds dumb but it's hugely fun. It's short, only like 25 single-screen levels, but it distinguishes itself from other roguelikes by being predominantly about shooting rather than melee. No stats in the same way that other roguelikes have them besides health and armor, but there's a skill tree that's pretty awesome. My last game I ended up leveling into a skill that made rapid fire weapons like chainguns and plasma rifles not take any ammo. Wiki
IVAN: This is the roguelike equivalent of putting your dick in a blender. Every single goddamn thing is potentially deadly. I hope nothing makes you throw up, because your stomach acid will dissolve your skull and murder you! I hope you don't get near an explosion while you're carrying wands, because the wands will explode and murder you! IVAN is everything that's bad about NetHack, presented in tiles instead of ASCII. Is there a wiki? I don't even know. I think the developer stopped updating awhile back.
DWARF FORTRESS: Here's kind of an odd duck. There's a roguelike adventure mode which is both ridiculously fun and horrendously broken. You can do stuff like rip a goblin's arm off and use it as a club to beat him and his buddies to death. There's no magic to speak of, and at this point you can't do a lot as a single dwarf, but the developer has plans to allow a dwarf adventurer to set up a modest home for himself, which might attract other dwarfs, at which point, hey, you're playing the real draw of Dwarfort, which is the fantastic fortress building mode. Now this isn't strictly a roguelike. It's in realtime and you don't actually have direct control over anything, but I don't care. It's fantastic and you should play it. Hot dwarf wiki action
EPIC DUNGEON: Indie game on 360. It isn't strictly a roguelike cause it's realtime, but it has random levels and loot, and permadeath. It's like a buck and totally worth it.
INCURSION: Pretty cool game that uses the 3rd edition D&D rules. Lots of different ways to play with good descriptions of combat if I remember correctly, it's been awhile since I played it. It hasn't been updated in like two years but the dude who made it says he's coming out with a version that has a lot of shiny new shit in it, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
DESKTOP DUNGEONS: A cool-ass roguelike disguised as a puzzle game. You go through a dungeon as one of a bunch of different race/class combos and kill monsters, natch. But most of the monsters will kill your ass dead when you first start, so you have to work your way up from the weak ones until eventually you're strong enough to kill the boss on the level. You have to be careful about what monsters you kill in what order, because besides healing potions the only way to keep up your strength is uncovering tiles you haven't been before. So a lot of walking around without killing anything will screw you in the end. Checking out the site it looks like they're gonna start selling a version with a bunch of bells and whistles that weren't in the version I've played, but they're gonna keep that version up for free still which is pretty cool.
DIABLORL: Now here's an interesting thing. It's a roguelike (made by the dude who did DoomRL) based on a game that was based on roguelikes. I only just found out about it so I can't say whether it's good or not, but in the half hour I've been playing it it's been fun, even if it's basically piss easy so far.
If there're any games I missed you think I should add, post that shit. ROGUE IS KING. ALL HAIL ROGUE.
edit: fixed anti-hotlinking image
from each according to his ability, to each according to his need
hitting hot metal with hammers
hitting hot metal with hammers
Typhoid Manny on
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(this is only because i know a shit ton of spoilers and obsessively played it for a while, dungeon crawl stone soup is probably the best general roguelike)
i can't seem to get to their site. do you have a link? because holy shit a wu tang roguelike.
hitting hot metal with hammers
hitting hot metal with hammers
it's definitely harder than nethack
but i agree, for its simplicity its surprisingly fun
hitting hot metal with hammers
I liked angband a lot but it just started to drag later on with the exp required to level and sheer number of monsters/items on a level. Nethack is my favorite I've gotten pretty good at it
but im lazy
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
I really have to disagree with the assertion that nethack just kills you. Even though it may seem like that, there are people who ascend every attempt (or close to). You might just not realise what you did incorrectly.
There are telnet clients (pretty sure they're telnet based) that let you play nethack online on their servers (you can also watch other people play). These places host tournaments fairly often where they play for best streak of 7 games. All the top entries are always 7 ascensions, so it goes by speed (I'm almost certain it is speed, could be points but is unlikely).
Although I always agree with the statement: Commercial games want you to win, Nethack doesn't care if you win or lose and SLASH'EM wants you dead.
I think I made it to Gehenna a few times in Nethack but never finished.
My brother has a win as a tourist though, which he was happy with. He also won SLASH'EM I think as a ranger.
So he focuses on Dungeon Crawl where I think he was 1 rune short of the sort of 'bottom of the dungeon' event. Not too sure on the specifics of DCSS.
once you ascend a couple times
you can probably ascend every single time you play, given that you play fully alert at all times
it's just that while you're learning to ascend, most of your deaths are going to feel like bullshit
although looking back you'll be amazed that you got yourself into situations or didn't take the necessary methods to get out of situations
i dunno, i think its a valid claim for most players that some of your deaths will be out of your control, because you got into a certain situation that an experienced player just wouldn't get into
2008 results for one such tournament
Their rankings website and leaderboards are a bit shit to navigate and the link to 2010 results points to 2008 and backwards.
easy way to get item colors and also everyone in the irc can laugh at your deaths!
edit: yeah healer is probably not entirely ascendable every game, but i think most are -- if you take your time
speedy ascensions are a different matter
a what
You're getting into the bad spot because you don't know what you're doing, not because the game is forcing you into the bad spot.
So you might not be doing well, but it is down to your lack of experience not the game.
I'm not trying to call people out on sucking, I'm not great at all. But 99.9% of the time whether you win or lose is in your hands.
I cannot remember which buttons do what, and the readme file...opens the Mass Effect 2 launcher.
Glaring so hard at my computer right now, why is it doing this to me?
gnome with wand of death in the mines is kinda dickish the first time it happens though, no way around it
while carrying the amulet on your way back up
Approximately 1300 players and 22800 completed games.
Winner: 13/13 ascensions.
Most ascensions by one player: 18
Fastest Ascension (turns): 8035 (04:59 realtime)
Fastest Ascension (realtime): 02:20 (22931 turns)
Lowest Scored Ascension: 24920 points
Highest Scored Ascension: 74525676 points
While the latter was an accident it was still far more painful because it's the one death the game fucking editorializes on ("unwisely ate the corpse of Death")
Type of file: File.
THIS HELPS ME NOT AT ALL, OK?
Yeah it is sucks, but it is your own fault entirely :P
I had a few experiences on the plane of fire trying to figure out how to escape lava. not the best way to be doing trial and error
*going deeper and trying to get stronger and dying a horrible death.
<aioli> i hope whoever invented the mysterious force gets his or her penis caught in a gear
<raxvulpine> Your attempt to be gender-neutral there only sort of worked.
It makes me sad.
Steam: Chagrin LoL: Bonhomie
ADOM was my first roguelike. i got it from download.com when my dad first decided to get internet in like '96. i kept dying over and over and over and didn't even really understand what was going on until a bunch of years later, but it still has a soft spot in my heart.
also! it took me until like two years ago to figure out that if you lead the insane carpenter to the healer in the quest the village elder gives you, the healer teaches you a skill that like triples your natural regen
hitting hot metal with hammers
This link works.
welp
nevermind
it's giving me a 404
hitting hot metal with hammers
Seriously though I love it and you all gotta try it. It's the only roguelike I've played that does projectiles in a sane way and the combat isn't just "get next to the monster and then keep trying to move into it until it dies". Well there is that too, but there's chainsaw sounds :P