Roguelikes: the Misnamed Genre 201
ZorbaTHut writes "I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately. It's a great example of a roguelike (and open source, too). But I can't stop thinking that perhaps 'roguelike' is the wrong term for the genre. 'Roguelikes aren’t about dungeons. They’re not about text-based graphics, or random artifacts, or permadeath. ... Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.'"
Nethack (Score:3, Funny)
Roguelikes are about incomprehensible control schemes utilizing every single key on your keyboard, twice!
Re:Nethack (Score:5, Funny)
So vi and emacs are roguelike?
Re:Nethack (Score:5, Insightful)
I know it is a joke, but the connection is there. The original rogue is vi-like, adopting the cursor keys of vi.
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You can't tell by my UID, but I was actually AT Berkeley when Rogue and vi came out. The ADM-3A terminal (which was by far the most common terminal there, and lots of other places) had a left arrow on the H, a down arrow on the J, a up arrow on the K and a right arrow on the L. Not cursor keys per-se, but a dang strong hint.
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And we didn't need them either! Now get off our lawn!
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the keyboards at the time Rogue (and vi) came out didn't _have_ cursor keys
Not quite true. At the time of Rogue and vi, you would use a "dumb terminal" to connect to a multi-user ("time-sharing") computer. Most dumb terminals had arrow keys; the most popular dumb terminal of all time, the VT100, certainly did.
But there was a common terminal, the ADM-3A [wikipedia.org], that did not have arrow keys. As others have noted here, it did have little arrows drawn on the H, J, K, and L keys, respectively left, down, up, and rig
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Only because keyboards of the time did not routinely have arrow keys. And even today there's no standard way of encoding these keys that you can get via getchar(). VI used those keys because HJKL keys on some keyboards had arrow symbols on them (ie, adm3a), and that key system was used by people who didn't even know what vi was.
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Plus a butterfly for the latter.
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Amen.
You know, there are always debates raging online about whether keyboard and mouse, or controllers are a better control scheme. And while keyboards have advantages, you have to admire how the restricted amount of buttons on a controller forces designers to rationalise their control schemes.
Keyboard based developers on the other hand never really have to face the problem of running out of buttons, and as such tend to designate every command to its own button, sometimes without any thought at all. Sometim
Re:Nethack (Score:4, Informative)
NetHack isn't that bad, once you get used to it. Sure, you might think that q is an entirely random key to choose for drinking a potion (and you'd be right), but there's an mnemonic associate with it -- quaffing a potion. Once you start thinking in terms of the mnemonic, it's a lot easier, rather than struggling to remember which key is for drinking. The same is true of z, used for activating a wand. Again, this must seem entirely random, and you'd be right. However, the associated mnemonic is zapping a wand. Other commands are less defensible, such as Z, used to cast a spell. Once you've become familiar with zapping wands, however, it makes a little more sense.
Play enough times and it'll become second nature to you.
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The same is true of z, used for activating a wand. Again, this must seem entirely random, and you'd be right. However, the associated mnemonic is zapping a wand. Other commands are less defensible, such as Z, used to cast a spell.
My mnemonic for zapping a wand versus zapping a spell is that it's less effort to "zap" a wand than to "Zap" a spell (hitting shift as well). It also carries over into dropping one item or many ("d" vs "D").
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Roguelikes have a long history and some of those old decisions don't fit well into the modern computer environments. For example vi-keys (although almost all modern roguelikes support numpad) are such a case. Without tradition, developers probably would use a solution base on the nowadays more common WASD.
But there's also a reason for not changing. You've already got a lot of people familiar with certain concepts.
As a NetHack fork developer I don't want to alienate the large Vanilla player base by introduci
Re:Nethack on handhelds (Score:2)
I've tried
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There are several ports of NetHack on Android and iPhone. But in any case just search in the market places / app stores of your device. Don't expect an official version from the DevTeam.
But especially with NetHack the amount of keys normally used is a real problem for a good port. NetHack's interface isn't easily translated on a hand held device.
You might want to try POWDER [zincland.com] for a NetHack inspired roguelike that has been designed specifically for running on consoles. Which made it much easier to port to hand
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I have been rather disappointed with the lack of rogue-likes on handheld devices such as the Palm. Blackberry, Android, et al. The early reasoning was that there was not enough memory and processing power on a handheld to handle nethack. But that can't be true anymore today. I mean nethack is an old game, having been played on 486s. Handhelds today have a lot more power than that and more memory than my first 486's hard drive (especially when the handheld is paired with a flash memory card). I've tried Dweller, and it's a nice, short, easily winnable, small feature set, but random levels game. I've tried some of the others and they aren't even up to Dweller's feature set. How hard would it really be to port nethack to these devices? (Hard enough I suppose, as it hasn't been done yet.)
Isn't the fact that handheld devices don't have proper (or any but software) keyboards somewhat of a drawback?
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The hardware keyboard on my LG Ally makes playing the android port of nethack rather pleasant. Both the GP and you have need of purchasing cluefullness.
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The best mobile port of nethack I've played is for the DS. Requires a flash cart, but it's really nice. Much better than the wince and ios ports, imo.
The DS is a pretty good platform for roguelikes. Shiren the Wanderer, Izuna, and the Pokemon Mystery Dungeons are commercial roguelikes. Shiren's probably closest to the form.
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Nethack is actually a perfect example of why all those keys are so useful. If you actually sit down and play it, before long the keys just become muscle memories. You don't have to remember whick key is what, and where it is. You just think 'pick lock' and it happens. I assure you, when it comes to beating nethack, memorizing the control scheme is a negligible part of the challenge.
Rogue likes on consoles (e.g. Powder on the GBA) on the other hand force you to scroll tediously through menus. What else
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One essential question... (Score:2, Interesting)
Diablo and its derivatives, Diablo 2 and Torchlight - are they Roguelikes?
Quite crude for roguelikes, but the generated landscape changing with each game, varied monsters, levelled dungeon with ability to backtrace, random-generated items, and generally quite a bit of roguelike elements...
I think the thing that could make them apart from the genre is lack of "turn-based" mode, kinda like an active pause - even entering the inventory does not pause. But is it enough?
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That's actually a good analogy!
Diablo is to Rougelikes as RTS games are to Chess.
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Only in that Diablo and RTS games are real-time while roguelikes and chess are turnbased. The analogy falls apart when you realize that Diablo's mechanics are much simpler than roguelikes', whereas RTS games tend to have more complex mechanics than chess.
That's why you should always use a car analogy. No one here understands them, so you get away with it much more easily.
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There is no effective Chess equivalent to a Zerg rush. (Thing's like the Fool's Mate don't count, they require active participation of both players.)
It's been a while since I played chess, as it was mainly in middle school and high school. However, I'm pretty sure that there IS an analogue to chess's complexity in an RTS. Let's talk more about Starcraft 2. Some tactics work well against poor players (like me), but skilled players know that there are a variety of openings, all of which you need to be able to defend against. There are several mid-game branchings of technology trees (magine if you didn't know whether your opponent was developing Bishops or
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Someone should really make an RTS ruleset for Chess now.
I remember, as a kid, me and a friend tried to combine Monopoly with Risk just so we could have "troops in the Baltic". It eventually spanned a full notebook, and got so convoluted that even we couldn't keep track of the rules.
Everytime you passed Go, you could collect up to 5 troops, or collect $200. When landing on a space you own you could place up to 5 troops, and you could have only 5 troops follow your piece. On landing on an occupied space (o
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In particular, it's inspired by Angband and Angband variants. There's not much of Nethack in there.
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Yes they are. Same gameplay mechanics, same addiction rates. They are just to user friendly and too fun for ordinary person to be considered one by fans of genre.
Fun fact: Diablo 1 was actually turn based in early stages of development.
On the other hand Dwarf Fortress ( http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html [bay12games.com] , http://df.zweistein.cz/ [zweistein.cz] ) is also sometimes labeled roguelike. It seems like anything in text mode and arcane controls can get this label - even sims crossed with simcity.
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Diablo, Torchlight are Hack and Slash action RPG games.
-Are not turn based.
-Theres not permadead.
-You "unlock" all the skills of your class... on a roguelike you grown in power, until you die.
So, no, are very fart apart from roguelikes.
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- Most have "hardcore mode" which is permadead.
- in single player there is pause, which allows for pretty much same thing as turn-based.
- unlocking skills of a class (spending exp at will) vs growing in power randomly is more like a flavor than a defining characteristics.
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Pause isn't the same as turn-based at all. In a real roguelike, you get infinite time to consider your next move. And then you press a key and get exactly the move you wanted. This is the main reason why you can't have a multiplayer roguelike.
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Multiplayer roguelikes have been around since roguelikes first appeared.... Use a vt100 terminal and log into the unix server and check them out. I used to play online with my buds back in 91, and they were pretty well advanced back then.
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complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.
diablo 2 -
complex interaction = reapeatedly left click on monster
unpredictable challenges = the same monsters that always spawn in that area
Those are actually the key gameplay features that make a roguelike great, and the gaping holes in gameplay that make diablo 2 substandard.
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Roguelikes no not need to be turn based. The online versions of nethack, rogue, etc have all been real-time, and they've been around for decades this way.
Also, Diablo does have a permadead mode, it's called hardcore, and is VERY popular.
The games are very similar. Diablo is basically a commercial roguelike.
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The Horadrim Cube from Diablo 2 or the Alchemist from Torchlight?
Sure they were SIMPLE comparing to most Roguelikes - and Nethack is one of most complicated of them. There are some roguelikes comparable in simplicity to Diablo too.
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The first Diablo was actually originally developed as turn-based. It was converted to real-time relatively late in its development cycle.
maybe to you... (Score:4, Insightful)
To the rest of us, rougelikes are just that, clones of rogue. Clearly Star Trek isn't a roguelike, yet it's "about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.", no?
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not the $%^& series, dolt
"Roguelike" means "like Rogue" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Roguelike" means "like Rogue [wikipedia.org]", no more and no less. There's no need to try to seek some deeper meaning in there. If the game has top-down view, intricate RPG-like stats, but mostly consists of slaying things rather than heavy NPC interaction and advanced storyline, it's a roguelike. All of these are necessary components - e.g. Stonekeep is not a roguelike, because it's first-person.
As for the "new" definition in TFS/TFA, it's so vague as to be meaningless. Heck, it's broad enough to match contraption games (like Crazy Machines).
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What about Dwarf Fortress?
In the "adventurer mode" it is a clear-cut roguelike with a vast world to explore.
In the "fortress mode" it becomes a strategy game (freely switchable between RTS and turn-based.) But still it utilizes the same game mechanics, the same world (to a degree where your adventurer may find and explore your fortress), and generally is just a different mode of the same game.
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The adventurer mode is underdeveloped (to put it mildly) compared to the fortress mode.
Re:"Roguelike" means "like Rogue" (Score:5, Informative)
"Roguelike" means "like Rogue [wikipedia.org]", no more and no less. There's no need to try to seek some deeper meaning in there. If the game has top-down view, intricate RPG-like stats, but mostly consists of slaying things rather than heavy NPC interaction and advanced storyline, it's a roguelike. All of these are necessary components - e.g. Stonekeep is not a roguelike, because it's first-person.
As for the "new" definition in TFS/TFA, it's so vague as to be meaningless. Heck, it's broad enough to match contraption games (like Crazy Machines).
While I mostly agree with your definition, I'd have to add 'random dungeon generation' as a key point. In some ways THE key point, more so I'd argue than 'top-down view'. (Although 'what will the red potion do to me this time?' was always fun. Also for those who think permadead is critical, I'll point out that there were workarounds....)
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I'd say that the the definition of "Roguelike" has evolved to mean a game developed by a self-appointed "dev team" who are too "elite" to communicate with mere mortals and have marked 468 bugs(*) as "fixed" while not releasing a single line of source in over 7 years.
(*) Yes, I counted.
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You're right - at least thinking of those roguelikes that I have played, they always had a strong random element when it came to maps (not necessarily 100% random everywhere, but certainly the majority of visitable locations).
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"Like" implies "more or less". Don't you know SQL?
Something "like Rogue, but no more and no less", should be roqueequals, not roguelike.
Nailing down the second argument of LIKE (Score:2)
"Like" implies "more or less". Don't you know SQL?
In SQL, LIKE is an infix operator that takes a pattern as its second argument. To continue your analogy, the article is about nailing down the pattern of what kinds of interactions are "like Rogue".
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Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.
Ah, so like Portal 2 and Angry Birds, right?
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Ironically, I also considered making a point by giving Angry Birds as an example. But then I thought that, possibly, it's not quite unpredictable enough.
Portal is spot on though.
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"Roguelike" means "like Rogue [wikipedia.org]", no more and no less. There's no need to try to seek some deeper meaning in there.
It's a silly problem, really, in which there's an organic development of forms, and then someone decides to justify their personal preferences by making up some abstract definition after the fact so that they can claim that things they don't like are objectively inferior to things they do like.
Full disclosure: I enjoy playing the Android port of Angband [android.com] on my T-Mobile G2.
wtf is roguelike? (Score:2)
"I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately. It's a great example of a roguelike [short definition goes here]
Maybe im asking a bit much from slashdot though. who knows.....
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Except for "hack and slash" none of those have any relation to roguelikes. In fact it's ridiculously hard to define roguelikes briefly, which is part of why they're still called roguelikee.
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Is it technically permitted for someone to read Slashdot and not know what Rogue is?
I'll define Roguelike for you: "You have died. Would you like to play again?" There's no other definition which is short and adequate to summarize the roguelike experience.
(If you're at a loss here the answer is YES.)
This is a SPAM submission (Score:5, Interesting)
Its a dupe from an earlier submission that was not deemed fit to become a story
http://games.slashdot.org/submission/1543364/Roguelikes-The-Misnamed-Genre [slashdot.org]
So its actually someone writing a story and then spamming the slashdot submission to get it in here.
Sadly it's not better then the last time this sad story was submitted - can it please die - don't comment please.
Not even a mention of the new release (Score:2)
It seems to be an attempt to promote links to his blog, yeah.
The submitter didn't even bother including such details like yesterday's release of a new major version of Dungeon Crawl with a crapload of goodies. This is what I'd promote. Ok, ok, I do happen to be a member of the devteam so I might be a little biased too :p
Re:member of the dev team (Score:2)
Hiya, Member of the Devteam!
What is Stone Soup and why did you folks make "DCSS" sound a lot like "DeCSS?"
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It wasn't really a major part of the story - I had a focused thing to talk about, and a new release of DCSS wasn't on-subject.
Congratulations on the release, though :)
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That's odd - I only submitted it once, to the best of my knowledge, but I was having browser trouble at the time so something funky might have happened. However, I can guarantee that if it got submitted twice, they were both at roughly the same time.
Are you sure that's not just what Slashdot does when a story is submitted?
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The guy wrote a reasonably interesting article on his own personal blog and submitted it to /. twice.
I'm failing to see why you're so butthurt over this.
"Fucking hard", RPG? (Score:2)
The first thought that came to mind was "fucking hard". The next was RPG (that standa for "role playing game", not a term from a FPS that starts with "rocket").
Someone asked if Diablo is a "roguelike". Well, Yes? No.
The "roguelike" that I've played the most of is Nethack. Even when cheating outrageously (save scumming, fiddling with bones files, all the tricks in the book), I still can't win. It's just too fucking hard! But, I've played a lot of other RPGs (e.g. Exile and Avernum from Spiderweb Software), w
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I enjoyed the Doom roguelike much more then nethack, it's easier to play (less options/buttons) but still a very good game.
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I'm a huge fan of Tome4 (Tales of the something-something).
I'm sure a lot of die-hard fans will get annoyed though, since it predominately tiled graphics and not text. And has a somewhat fixed map/structure with large randomly generated dungeons. There are different death options too, with hardcore being the most roguelike of them (perma-death, barring some hard to get items), but you can also have limited lives. I like it since it bring lots of modern conventions to the genre, and makes them a bit less
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Nethack
hard
No. It's actually not that hard. Most games tell you to attack everything headfirst. 2 important tips:
1. Don't ever melee more than 1 enemy unless you are 100% certain you can take them all. Narrow corridors and wands are your friend.
2. http://nethackwiki.com/ [nethackwiki.com] specifically http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Identification [nethackwiki.com] learn to do this
You can practice in explorer mode by typing capital X. Get to the point where you don't die much at all.
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Nethack isn't really intended to be winnable without spoilers. DCSS is, though, but still a good deal of the fun is talking about it, exchanging strategies and ideas.
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I disagree. It is entirely possible to win nethack without ever reading a guide or cheating, it just requires repetition. I know these day's it's considered horrifically bad if you can't win a game the first time you play through it but, thankfully, this poison has not spread to most roguelikes. Go, play, die. Keep learning, keep repeating until you understand what to do and what not to do and can survive to the end.
If you didn't want to play that kind of game I can recommend a number of fluffy web games wi
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Without any sort of spoiler, how many people do you suppose actually independently discovered how to properly complete the invocation? Nicking the amulet, ascending, and sacrificing it are all reasonably obvious steps. But learning the steps to [spoiler alert]open the vibrating square[/spoiler alert] even in wizard or explore mode is not even close to trivial.
I don't remember the list of what hints are from fortune cookies and the oracle, but I have a feeling you'd go through a lot of cookies even if the r
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There's a 1/19 chance that the Oracle, if paid enough for a major consultation, will give a hint about the invocation ritual specific enough that the correct sequence would be discovered in two or three tries, if not first time. I don't consider that to be particularly sufficient, but if you play enough to even get to that point in the game unspoiled, you'll likely have heard the consultation in question by then. (Disclaimer: I'm working on my own fork of NetHack because official development seems to be unl
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>It's just too fucking hard!
I think the "giant's drink" game in Ender's Game is nethack.
I could be wrong. But I've never seen the balrog so I can't say that the balrog is /not/ the giant.
--
BMO
Re:"Fucking hard", RPG? (Score:4, Interesting)
Roguelikes don't have anywhere near enough roleplaying (none whatsoever, generally) to be RPGs. They're basically simple hack & slash games, but what makes them interesting is the tactical problem solving. You encounter a monster, swarm of monsters or other situation that's just too hard to overcome by your usual methods, so you need to think of something clever. You need to think, and you need time to think (which you don't have in an action game).
This is something all true roguelikes (nethack, moria, angband, adom) have in common. They are incredibly challenging and almost impossible to win. (I only managed to finish adom once through outrageous save scumming.) They require thinking and creativity. They need to be turn based and have a ridiculous number of options. They have to be fucking hard. It's about overcoming the challenges, not about experiencing some story (because there is none).
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Of course rogue-likes have a story. It's just that you write the story as you play, and it's different every time.
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It's a pretty lousy story, though.
"I met a goblin and I killed it. Then I met an orc and I killed it. Then I saw a troll and I ran away. My dog got killed."
If that's a story, then there's no game that doesn't have a story. Maybe nearly dying and escaping from a deadly situation is dramatic enough for a story, but the same could be said about any game where you snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.
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"I met a goblin and I killed it. Then I met an orc and I killed it. Then I saw a troll and I ran away. My dog got killed."
Go back to the Country Music Channel!
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I totally agree. I tend to call computer RPGs "CRPGs" to distungish them from real RPGs, but the name still contains the word "roleplaying", which rarely plays much of a role in those games.
There are exceptions, mind you. In Planescape: Torment, the entire story revolves around you, who you are, who you were, and what you're going to do about it. Great roleplaying potential (pointless though it seems to roleplay alone with a computer). The Witcher featured lots of hard choices that define where you stand in
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Nethack is absolutely beatable. If you're already cheating, go ahead and read the spoilers. Memorize them. For every way you can die in Nethack, there's a way to avoid it. Learn to avoid crises before they happen. If you're not 100% sure something is safe, don't do it.
Once you figure out how to stay alive long enough to piece together most of an ascension kit, the rest of the game is pretty straightforward.
Perhaps you don't know what a true roguelike is... (Score:2)
If you're not searching for the amulet of yendor, it doesn't count. It all started going wrong with nethack...
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Why? Because simply finding the AoY deep in a dungeon is good enough? Let's not make it more difficult by requiring you to actually ESCAPE the pits of hell with the amulet. /sarcasm
I played plenty of rogue, nethack, moria, angband and even a little bit of larn back in the day. Nethack was far and away the best of them, balancing fear of insta-death, inside jokes, variability of game-play, etc. However, moria and angband were solid games in their own right. I particularly enjoyed how easy it was to fidd
That's not what roguelikes are! (Score:3)
Roguelikes are games that are like Rogue [wikipedia.org] both in game play and in appearance (IMHO graphical tiles and even isometric or 3rd person 3D are allowed, as long as it doesn't affect game play, though purists may disagree).
The summary tries to imply there's some deeper meaning behind the word, but really, there isn't.
Other genres (Score:2)
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For the record, Toejam & Earl count too.
What roguelikes are (Score:4, Insightful)
That the term "roguelike" is vague is a well-known fact, but there are definitions around much better than the one in the article: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=What_a_roguelike_is [roguelikedevelopment.org]
The distinguishing features of roguelikes are random world generation, permadeath, complexity of item interaction, RPG-like stats, killing scores of monsters, grid-based motion, turn-based mechanics and arguably ASCII interface. A game may be a roguelike and not have all of these, but if it has, say, all but two, it is undoubtedly a roguelike.
The reasoning in the article that leads into calling "Super Smash Bros Brawl" a roguelike is just ludicrous. Of course there is no limit to how one can redefine a term, but one should not expect to be taken seriously after saying that every animal with four paws should be called a dog. Saying that "Super Smash Bros Brawl" is a roguelike because it is complex in some way goes against the common use of the word. The author of the article should find a different name for what he means.
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Did you read the part of the article where I say that I need a different name for this new concept? :P
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I did, but then the problem is not with the term "roguelike" or its name. You want to define a totally different concept, which is orthogonal to "roguelikeness". So the term "roguelike" is not a misnomer.
That's funny (Score:2)
Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges
I thought rouguelikes were for proving I had more of Teh Nerd than the next guy.
Roguelike? Huh? (Score:2)
Is it really a misnamed genre if no one has heard of it?
rogue (Score:2)
Play rogue [hexatron.com]
If you play another game, and it seems a lot like rogue, then it's roguelike.
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