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Penny Arcade - Comic - High On One's Own Supply
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - High On One's Own Supply
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
+4
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Makes me wonder which one payed for Snap Ship Tactics...
Writer's Block feels more like a Japanese RPG to me in gameplay.
Powers &8^]
Words change; language evolves. Irregardless of how much it might bug you. Language couldn't possibly care more.
Thanks for the patronization, but that doesn't explain what the definition of the word has changed to.
Is there a reason you immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was complaining?
Powers &8^]
Is there a reason you immediately jumped to the conclusion that I was patronizing you rather than complaining about stupid ways the language has changed that I hate?
Does it have permadeath? Maybe. Procedural generation? Maybe. Progression across runs? Maybe.
I think it does mean something. I think it's hard to label something "rogue____" if you aren't repeating a vast portion of the game loop after every death. And yeah, you could say "Then how is that different from Super Mario Bros.?" and I'd have to say procedural generation. I know you said "maybe" but I don't see that being the case. Maybe there are a bunch of a new crop that I haven't seen yet, though.
I feel like at this point the hardcore "almost exactly like rogue" community need to come up with their own label. Maybe that label is just "a rogue". Maybe they've already come up with this label and since I'm not part of it I never saw it.
But in terms of genre, it's not too surprising that genres expand. Look at metroidvanias. There's been a lot of variety in that space, including moving it into 3d (Metroid Prime being the first good example). And once they expand, you get debates, like "how is Zelda not a metroidvania?"
Roguelike: You start out the same every time. Ex: Spelunky
Roguelite: There is some kind of character advancement. Ex: Rogue Legacy
They are marketing labels to help people decide if a game is worth looking into. The Roguelike diehards are acting like it's some kind of One True Faith.
To me they will always be "Beneath Apple Manor Likes"
I think there's also the intent of the game design: A roguelike/lite expects you die repeatedly in the process of reaching game completion and learning the systems and interactions as opposed to dying repeatedly because things are tuned to make you spend more coins. Procedural generation goes with the territory since it makes you learn the systems instead of memorizing level layouts.
Strict adherence to the many aspects of ASCII graphics era roguelikes is less and less meaningful if for no other reason than gamers old enough to have played the original Rogue in its heyday are a smaller and smaller percentage of gamers and even then most won't have actually played Rogue/Nethack/Angband/ADOM/etc. Even if "First Person Shooter" had never been coined and we still called the genre "Doom clones," I doubt we'd expect strict adherence today to things like colored key hunts, secret doors, map completion scores, etc.
Edit: I also remember when Elona gained some popularity and some people debated whether it counted as a roguelike because it didn't have permadeath. No one really listened to the people who said it didn't count as one because of that change because the game had a pretty standard roguelike control scheme, stuff like being able to throw potions or dip items in them in addition to drinking them, etc. and it still punished you by having you drop items on death that you then had to go out and retrieve (assuming you didn't die in one of the dungeons that resets floors when you leave). It also didn't necessarily feel like the reviving made the game easier so much as gave the developer free reign to make more ways to hurt the player, e.g. a xenomorph bursting out of your body while you're in town might not end your game but now you need to figure out how to deal with a rapidly spreading xenomorph infestation in that town. So even permadeath turned out to not necessarily be required for a game to be considered a roguelike.
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Well, yes. You quoted me specifically, addressed the post to me, and told me something I already knew.
But now I see you used "irregardless" deliberately, as well as the unusual construction "couldn't ... care more" instead of "couldn't care less". I apologize, then; the humor was a bit too subtle for me to grasp.
Powers &8^]
No grudge held. A failure of a joke is on the joke teller.
Although even that is a sliding scale, with high value factors and low value factors...
And just to throw another cat in with the pigeons: is Rogue a Roguelike? Can something be said to be like itself?
(I say yes, the same way that a hare is part of the order Lagomorpha, which is Greek for "shaped like a hare")
Roguelikes
Roguelites
Roguelitelikes
Pseudoroguelitelikes
Games with pseudoroguelitelike features
The rougelikes?
Rogueomorphs.
Or Covert Fashion
A rogue rougelike