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Penny Arcade - Comic - High On One's Own Supply

DogDog Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin

High On One's Own Supply!

Penny Arcade - Comic - High On One's Own Supply

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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    V1mV1m Registered User regular
    Now let's be fair: he's right to be suspicious

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    see317see317 Registered User regular
    V1m wrote: »
    Now let's be fair: he's right to be suspicious

    Makes me wonder which one payed for Snap Ship Tactics...

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    LtPowersLtPowers Registered User regular
    If Writer's Block is "roguelike" then I apparently don't understand what "roguelike" means. I thought it was a game like Rogue, where you wander procedural dungeon levels and encounter traps, monsters, and treasure chests.

    Writer's Block feels more like a Japanese RPG to me in gameplay.


    Powers &8^]

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    dennisdennis aka bingley Registered User regular
    LtPowers wrote: »
    If Writer's Block is "roguelike" then I apparently don't understand what "roguelike" means. I thought it was a game like Rogue, where you wander procedural dungeon levels and encounter traps, monsters, and treasure chests.

    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.

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    LtPowersLtPowers Registered User regular
    dennis wrote: »
    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^]

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    LttlefootLttlefoot Registered User regular
    To me, a roguelike has random upgrades / random choice of upgrades, but there is no way to save your progress, you either win or die with what you’ve got and your next run will be completely different

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    dennisdennis aka bingley Registered User regular
    LtPowers wrote: »
    dennis wrote: »
    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?

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    cckerberoscckerberos Registered User regular
    Roguelike has fundamentally ceased to have any meaning whatsover. "This game has roguelike elements" tells you nothing.

    Does it have permadeath? Maybe. Procedural generation? Maybe. Progression across runs? Maybe.

    cckerberos.png
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    dennisdennis aka bingley Registered User regular
    cckerberos wrote: »
    Roguelike has fundamentally ceased to have any meaning whatsover. "This game has roguelike elements" tells you nothing.

    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?"

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    PyrianPyrian Registered User regular
    Would now be a good time to bring up Dead Cells, the Roguelike-Metroidvania?

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    YoungFreyYoungFrey Registered User regular
    Typically Roguelike and Roguelite both have permadeath. Which. as was pointed out, is just any arcade game. But with complicated systems overlaid so there is a near endless depth you can plumb. There are many things you associate with the name, but in my experience these are by far the strongest features.
    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"

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    RatherDashing89RatherDashing89 Registered User regular
    This is why video games should adopt the board game convention of treating mechanics as tags or keywords instead of categories. Of course, that's how games are actually sorted on Steam, but in our conversation we tend to try to describe one category for a game, when really a game can be an RPG and an FPS and have permadeath and procedural content or whatever.

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    Steel AngelSteel Angel Registered User regular
    edited July 2022
    YoungFrey wrote: »
    Typically Roguelike and Roguelite both have permadeath. Which. as was pointed out, is just any arcade game. But with complicated systems overlaid so there is a near endless depth you can plumb. There are many things you associate with the name, but in my experience these are by far the strongest features.
    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.

    Steel Angel on
    Big Dookie wrote: »
    I found that tilting it doesn't work very well, and once I started jerking it, I got much better results.

    Steam Profile
    3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
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    dennisdennis aka bingley Registered User regular
    And not just quarters. Console games were often designed to just eat time, because the complexity that could be put on a cart was limited. So the solution was a lot of cheap deaths so you had to start over.

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    LtPowersLtPowers Registered User regular
    dennis wrote: »
    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?

    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^]

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    dennisdennis aka bingley Registered User regular
    LtPowers wrote: »
    dennis wrote: »
    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?

    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.

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    Rhesus PositiveRhesus Positive GNU Terry Pratchett Registered User regular
    Let us return to the glory days of the Berlin Interpretation

    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")

    [Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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    LttlefootLttlefoot Registered User regular
    Defining a genre too narrowly can help people not miss what makes it good but also leads to cookie cutter development. Proc gen of some kind is essential, but it doesn’t have to be a physical map you’re exploring. Brotato and SNKRX are played in small rectangular arenas, you explore the build-space by rerolling the shop between waves

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    Rhesus PositiveRhesus Positive GNU Terry Pratchett Registered User regular
    We just need more genres: that will solve everything

    Roguelikes
    Roguelites
    Roguelitelikes
    Pseudoroguelitelikes
    Games with pseudoroguelitelike features

    [Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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    V1mV1m Registered User regular
    Roguesque

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    DjiemDjiem Registered User regular
    What about all those make-up flash games?

    The rougelikes?

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    LttlefootLttlefoot Registered User regular
    Try covet fashion if that’s still around

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    dennisdennis aka bingley Registered User regular
    We just need more genres: that will solve everything

    Roguelikes
    Roguelites
    Roguelitelikes
    Pseudoroguelitelikes
    Games with pseudoroguelitelike features

    Rogueomorphs.

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    Rhesus PositiveRhesus Positive GNU Terry Pratchett Registered User regular
    Lttlefoot wrote: »
    Try covet fashion if that’s still around

    Or Covert Fashion

    A rogue rougelike

    [Muffled sounds of gorilla violence]
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    RatherDashing89RatherDashing89 Registered User regular
    Is Thief a roguelike?

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    LttlefootLttlefoot Registered User regular
    Ironically pickpocketing in skyrim is the opposite of roguelike, since it requires constant save scumming

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