A Sense of Humour

One thing about roguelikes is that they tend to have a sense of humour.  NetHack, for example, is famous for all its tailor-made messages, from stupid causes of death to obscure stuff, like reading a scroll of amnesia while named MAUD.  If I ever get around to finishing my review of TOME, I have a few examples there that caught my eye.

But this year, I've been playing a lot of Crawl, and a couple of things caught my eye enough to want to share.  The first is a minor thing.  The 'p' command prays to your god, having a different effect depending on which god you are worshipping.  If you have not yet chosen any god, you instead get a short message about contemplating the meaning of life... unless you are undead:

The other thing that amused me happened when I found a unique weapon, the Singing Sword, which sometimes renames itself the Screaming Sword.  And which apparently thinks it is an angry halfling...

Someone on the design team has good taste!

Brogue

It's been a long while since I last reviewed a Roguelike.

Part of the reason is that I meant to review the "Big 5" of Roguebasin first, then move on to other games in time.  So on more than one occasion I mentioned that I'd review TOME4 in the near future.  The problem is that I can't really get into TOME4, despite its merits, for a number of reasons.  And I don't even have ADOM installed on my current laptop.  So I've barely scratched the surface of these games, not nearly enough to comment on them in any reasonable way.

So, the obvious solution finally comes: review games I actually play.  And we start today with Brogue.

New Angband Release

My brother came to visit over the holiday season, so I missed the exciting announcement of the release of Angband 3.5.0 on Christmas Eve!  It apparently has the longest changelist in the history of the game, and marks the end of the current lead and the start of a new one.

Roguelike of the Year

Over at Ascii Dreams, there's the annual vote for Roguelike of the Year.  The correct vote, of course, is for Sil, though it looks like ToME 4 will win again.  I do still plan to get around to talking about ToME, but it's clear I'm not as fond of the game as most people.

Another look at NetHack

So, nearly a year ago I offered my thoughts on NetHack, one of the classic roguelikes.  I wasn't a big fan, much preferring Angband, and indeed pretty much all the roguelikes I've tried.  However, after playing a lot of Crawl last year I decided to give NetHack another try.  I found both games to be similar even within roguelikes, and thought I'd see if my experience with the former helped me with the latter.  I had, after all, struggled to make any progress through the Mazes of Menace.

Well, I have changed my opinions slightly.

A Roguelike Overview

When I started this blog, I had several things I wanted to discuss.  Things like atheism, feminism and particle physics are fairly serious subjects, and writing about them demands time.  So I threw roguelikes in as a more light-hearted subject, figuring that I could write posts about them when I wanted something quick and easy.

Well, that's not how it turned out.

Crawl

All right.  Let's do this.

Way, way back in March, I talked about Roguelikes in general, and gave my opinion of one of the main examples of that genre of game, Angband.  I followed this up with a review of probably the most famous example, NetHack, in April.  I originally intended to these reviews a regular series, and planned to review another major variant, Crawl, a week or two later.

Well, only six months late.

Return to Angband

It's been a long time since I talked about a roguelike, hasn't it?

I do intend to get back to reviewing more examples of this fun class of games; indeed, I hope to get one of Crawl out soon.  That is not what this post is.  Rather, I want to go back and talk about Angband again.  I want to go into the mechanics in more detail than in my original post, and also offer some strategy and tips.  This will be the first post in a short series looking at Angband; if this goes well, I might give NetHack the same treatment.¹


Before giving my own opinions, let me mention some other useful places to look around the web.  First off, the official forum is one of the best places to get information, strategy and reports of games.  The ladder can also be helpful; in particular, you can see what kind of gear winners tend to have.  You can also look into the spoilers, either in the /lib/edit/ subdirectory or online here.

NetHack

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about Angband, my introduction to Roguelikes and the iconic *band.  However, the most famous descendent of Rogue is probably NetHack, which is derived from Hack and is the iconic Hacklike.  It is renowned for the huge number of item interactions, powered by a flexible and powerful control system.  As a simple example, in Angband, the only things you can equip as weapons are actual weapons---swords, maces etc.  In NetHack, you can equip anything as a weapon; and there are times when you'll want to.

I'll be honest.  I'm not a huge fan.

Angband

I was first introduced to roguelikes through Angband.  About three years ago, a friend lent me an old laptop on a long-term basis that eventually became a donation.  (It was a really old machine.)  I found Angband hidden on the hard drive, and started playing it; it wasn't long before I was hooked.

Roguelikes

Yesterday, I blogged about something older than me that I spend a lot of time thinking about, the Standard Model of particle physics.  Today I'm going to do the same thing, this time talking about roguelikes.

Roguelikes are a class of computer game imaginatively titled because they are like Rogue.  Rogue, released in 1980, was a dungeon crawler with an excuse plot---enter dungeon, find magic item (the Amulet of Yendor) and return without dying.  The game was very popular for its time, likely in part due to its user interface: while most similar games of the time where text-based, Rogue had primitive graphics:

You, the player, are represented by the @.  (Image source: wikipedia, released under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.)