What is your current favorite Roguelike? [Or all things roguelike]

[peacedog]

Thanks for the info and explained some of the sentiments I've seen elsewhere about Angband's different "style" of play (grind).

I wonder if something like Quickband is worth playing: 12 levels, only a few hours. Or perhaps for backlog and historical understanding purposes I should just try a bunch of variants and not worry about beating them necessarily, after I get the gist of what they do.

I've never tried Quickband. I'll have to check it out. And have you never tried IVAN? It's a shorty, but a goody.

You'd probably like Angband once you got comfortable enough to go diving.

[Tyjenks]

It's rare that I actually make this effort. Usually I download everything and resume my plodding along the backlog rather than sampling out of order. The nice thing about RLs is you can usually get the gist of them right away, and with this coffeebreak games you can finish one in a few hours (though I didn't even spend that much time).

I agree. I am sure that is the reason for my shift to simpler games like this that still have some meat to them. Time availability. There is a reason Diablo did so enormously well. Simple gameplay based on RL's with a ton of replayability do to randomization. I think there is room in PC gaming for further expansion in this and similar genres with the graphical addition. I sure have not seen many efforts to make anything other than a straight clone. Well, maybe Titan Quesst, but it was similar enough that I still got bored of it more quickly than a lot of the rest of the folks here.

[Adam B]

Wow, you guys weren't kidding about elementals. My wizard is a freaking death machine now. The staff of wizardry I found is unbelievably good. Think my next magic user will try to avoid conjurations, though...they're good for weak monsters but it seems like you get a lot more bang for your buck out of summons and enchantments and such.

[Tim James]

I decided to play ADOM for a few hours and everything came flooding back.

The absolute terror in the early game, even from opening doors. The relief of finally making it to the Dwarf city level and being mostly invincible at that point. Then coming across a corruptor in an out-of-level vault who hits you enough to make you start teleporting at random, without a means to control it.

The chaos stuff in the game is infuriating sometimes. It's a wonder anyone plays the game for years like I did. :)

[peterb]

I (and another Qt3er) am on the Stone Soup devteam.

For the record, I've never won. I always get overconfident. But it's the best roguelike I've played since UltraRogue way back in 1986.

[Tyjenks]

I decided to play ADOM for a few hours and everything came flooding back.

The absolute terror in the early game, even from opening doors. The relief of finally making it to the Dwarf city level and being mostly invincible at that point. Then coming across a corruptor in an out-of-level vault who hits you enough to make you start teleporting at random, without a means to control it.

The chaos stuff in the game is infuriating sometimes. It's a wonder anyone plays the game for years like I did. :)

Man, I was so awfully terribly bad at ADOM. Still played quite a while.

I (and another Qt3er) am on the Stone Soup devteam.

For the record, I've never won. I always get overconfident. But it's the best roguelike I've played since UltraRogue way back in 1986.

Hah! As I thanked the other Qt3er (nlanza, right?) let me also thank you. NExt time you are in town, I will buy you a beer as well.

[lesslucid]

Yeah, let me add my thanks to both of you. For years now, Crawl has been my go-to game when I've lost interest in everything else.

[Tim James]

Oh "good," now I have an excuse to stop playing ADOM. Spent a couple hours trying to get crowned by my deity with my wizard but because I'm an elf I ended up with a long bow. Fuck you!!

But see, I actually appreciate being told by the RNG to stop playing so I can resume my proper backlog. :)

BTW, I've been reading a couple articles of @ Play over lunch each day and it's generally excellent, although the guy plays mostly NetHack.

[Warren]

Tyjenks, I gotta say that when you first started this thread, I thought it would be good for a while then die a lingering death. But this has had "legs", and more importantly, it's been a great resource for trying out new RL's. Thanks!

[Tyjenks]

Tyjenks, I gotta say that when you first started this thread, I thought it would be good for a while then die a lingering death. But this has had "legs", and more importantly, it's been a great resource for trying out new RL's. Thanks!

I had the same fear, but I knew I wanted some info gathered in one place, so at least I was going to be able to look it back up again.

Of course, I also had intended to try 20 new roguelikes as a result of suggestions and my own research (like Tim has), but I had just begun to seriously play Stone Soup....I was not expecting to continue to enjoy it as much as I have. I never would have dreamed that once I finally got a DS, my first game would be a Roguelike.

Obviously, the genre has elements that we all look for in games in general. Randomness allowing replayablitly, relatively simple rules you can easily jump into it, tons of features to learn along the way....the biggest is that it is incredibly challenging and even when you lose you want to immediately play again. I think that is the most important one that is the result of the combination of the other factors. Not many games do that nowadays.

[Adam B]

Let me add my thanks to you, peterb (and nlanza of course but he already got his), for your time and effort making Stone Soup the awesome game that it is.

Playing on CAO has taught me one thing: the default OSX Terminal app is godawful. Yeesh. Thankfully Google pointed me toward iTerm with little fuss.

[Gendal]

Playing on CAO has taught me one thing: the default OSX Terminal app is godawful. Yeesh. Thankfully Google pointed me toward iTerm with little fuss.

And yet cmd.exe makes it look like a thing of beauty.

[Tim James]

Speaking of cmd.exe, I seem to have Windows in an odd state where if I launch ADOM directly it will use small fonts even under full screen. I'm able to configure cmd to look right but can't find the Windows properties tab to fix the scaling when launching an executable directly. The fonts seem to be set to the right size but the screen takes up less space than it ought to.

[Chris Nahr]

To edit the display properties of a console application, you must first launch the applicatin, then click on its system menu (the icon in the upper-left corner), then select Properties. The display properties aren't on the right-click menu of the executable for some reason.

[peterb]

OK, taking the thread in a different direction, here's my one or two sentence summary of all the roguelikes I've played. I may edit this afterwards if I remember one that I forgot. I'm deliberately not including Dwarf Fortress because it's its own thing.

Rogue: super-simple, super-hard, in the end each game is too much alike.

UltraRogue: A probably copyvio "Rogue With Stuff". Awesome, fun, huge amount of items, spells, even unique artifacts a la the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. The best of the "true rogues" but impossible to actually find (and building it requires some porting work).

SuperRogue/Advanced Rogue: Basically the same as urogue, with different feature sets. Also hard to find.

Hack: Rogue with a dog and more interesting dungeon layout. Harder.

NetHack: Hack with the kitchen sink thrown in. Easier than vanilla Hack, and also more interesting. This probably ties with Stone Soup as my "If you could only have one roguelike on a desert island" winner. Biggest criticism of Nethack: too many obligatory "set pieces" that are nothing more than overwrought geek jokes (eg: the Sudoku levels). Descriptions of monsters (with quotes) are great.

ADOM: I tried to play this, but was overwhelmed by the keybindings, and irritated the fact that it is (was?) Windows-only, and by the fact that source code isn't public. Someone else will have to opine on it.

Omega: Too buggy to finish, but is probably the first roguelike with a full-on wilderness/overland map, and so is of historical interest. Also in addition to character levels it had a very rich town area, complete with guilds in which you could indepdendently advance.

Moria: VMS-originated precursor to Angband. First roguelike that I'm aware of that broke out of the "one screenful of rooms" paradigm. First appearance of "breeding" monsters. Ends up feeling a bit too sparse to be tons of fun.

Angband: Solves the Moria sparseness problem by adding tons of unique monsters and unique weapons, all with a Tolkien flavor. To a new player, this is basically a huge hit from the crack pipe. A close runner up to NetHack. The big drawback is the difficulty curve has a number of steep spikes which basically amount to "appear on level, die instantly without any chance to react," so it ends up being an exercise in frustration. Best feature IMHO: the "monster memory" which reveals, in addition to descriptions, various tactical information about monsters and uniques, built up over time as you meet them.

Zangband: Angband with even more stuff added in. While in some sense this is "ooooh, more crack!" my personal opinion is it destroys the balance of the game. And I don't care if I never see another stupid fucking Zephyr Hound for the rest of my life.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: Tries hard to achieve the right balance between "lots of interesting things to do" and "not too many special rules." Moria-like scrolling dungeon, Nethack-like monster interaction, comparatively few insta-kills early on, interesting (if opaque) skill exercise system, neat religion system. Monster descriptions not as good as Nethack or Moria, but we're trying to improve them. Great magic system. Biggest problem IMHO is that the first 4 or 5 levels of the game can be brutal if you get an unlucky spawn. After you make it to the Ecumenical Temple, though, failure to survive typically means "you didn't run away enough."

Larn and UltraLarn. This one was sort of interesting. The dungeon levels were a "one big room" sort of maze, and you had a time limit ("make enough money to buy the potion to cure your daughter's illness.") If I recall correctly, there were 10 dungeon levels. More than any other game on the list, Larn was really winnable without necessarily being "easier" - mostly it was simply "smaller". Larn is worth seeking out to try if you've never played it.

Random obscurities you'll never play:

BOSS: Moria In The Big City With Mafioso and Guns. VMS-only, was eventually ported to MacOS Classic. Cute idea, but sort of brittle.

862 Different Angband Variants: Most of these are not worth bothering with. Sorry.

ToME: I tried to like this about 4 or 5 times and failed. The sort of brutally literally adherance to specific Tolkien mise-en-scenes really kind of annoyed me, and I hate, hate, hated his choices for some of the geography (floors should be "." Always. Anything else hurts my eyes.) I'd be interested in hearing from someone who is a fan of this how one can play it and like it.

[tiohn]

People still need to give Legerdemain a shot. It is a bit less hardcore in that you can save your progress in inns, but it's very highly polished and is very story oriented.

[Tim James]

From reading @ Play, there definitely seems to be a style of Roguelike player that simply doesn't care for ADOM. The closed-source aspect is inexplicably (to someone like myself, who only plays the games) common, the complicated keybindings (?), and also complaints about the quests and a gameworld with a plot in a permadeath game. These people are also usually very Rogue/NetHack focused. I started with ADOM because its RPG elements interested me as a crossover, but haven't played the other classics yet.

peterb, you really ought to invest some time into it if you're on the devteam of a major roguelike. It is still one of the Big 3 modern roguelikes, after all, despite Crawl's inevitable rise into that spot. I have to admit I don't get why people wouldn't give it a try rather than playing another dungeon diver that simply does things a little differently or better than the last, but again, I think there is a style of players that prefer the variant / basic core gameplay roguelikes.

[Tyjenks]

From reading @ Play, there definitely seems to be a style of Roguelike player that simply doesn't care for ADOM. The closed-source aspect is inexplicably (to someone like myself, who only plays the games) common, the complicated keybindings (?), and also complaints about the quests and a gameworld with a plot in a permadeath game. These people are also usually very Rogue/NetHack focused. I started with ADOM because its RPG elements interested me as a crossover, but haven't played the other classics yet.

Every now in then the dude will pop up on his blog and talk about is molasses-like development of a graphical ADOM. He has FINALLY mentioned that as he has become further removed from the original, he actually may, just may release the code now. At his activity rate, however, I would give it another 5 years before he actually lets go of his baby. As far as the graphical ADOM, I would give it DNF chances of being released.

[Tim James]

He has stated he doesn't want to work on the game anymore. He talks about JADE occasionally but that's pretty much vaporware. I would love to see an organized team take over maintaining ADOM but don't really care for now (more than enough for me to do considering I haven't beaten it legitimately yet).

[Chris Nahr]

ADOM: I tried to play this, but was overwhelmed by the keybindings, and irritated the fact that it is (was?) Windows-only, and by the fact that source code isn't public. Someone else will have to opine on it.

You must be thinking of some other game. Adom was not only never Windows-only but the developer actively hates Windows and has a friend doing the port. I'm not sure how the keybindings are worse/different than other Roguelikes, either. I found Adom quite fascinating for a while but eventually got tired of the extreme difficulty level and of the relative lack of randomization.

[Tim James]

I decided to fire up rec.games.roguelike.adom since I have viewed it in 5 years. Brought back lots of memories. Mostly spam now but apparently there was some controversy over a bot and also an "improved guidebook" that includes extra information from the official one but also basically copies that whole cloth.

The community seems to have a philosophical need to respect some arbitrary rules like diving into hex code to determine spoilers. Perhaps they prefer their game at least slightly mysterious since there is no source code out there. Fair enough, but I want to win dammit!

I see adom.de has a forum now, will have to browse that a bit on breaks today.

I mean, no.. I certainly wasn't visiting Argentina to play ADOM last night.

[Tim James]

On possible open ADOM source, posted Dec '08.

Ok, here's the quick summary:

1. It's rather unlikely that I'm going to continue to do much development about ADOM.
2. It would be a shame to let ADOM vanish with time.
3. The release of the source code might be an alternative.
4. But I'm completely undecided if (a) I really want to do that, (b) I just want to do it to get someone else to fix bugs (he, quite egoistic, isn't it?), (c) really start a development community for the future of ADOM. Let's face it... I still would hate to see the "Angband effect" of dozens of variants with all kind of silly stuff... that's just not what I want. But how would another model look like...

Thus here is a new forum in order to discuss viable options or alternatives, ideas, etc. I'm curious to hear what you think...

Naturally it will be 5 years before anything happens. Also, he said elsewhere he likes closed source additionally to keep at least some things secret. *shrug*

JADE, if it ever gets made (he says he's not bored but complains about lack of funds to quit work and code it full time), will have open APIs to allow some mods.

[Miramon]

I decided to play ADOM for a few hours and everything came flooding back.

The absolute terror in the early game, even from opening doors. The relief of finally making it to the Dwarf city level and being mostly invincible at that point. Then coming across a corruptor in an out-of-level vault who hits you enough to make you start teleporting at random, without a means to control it.

The chaos stuff in the game is infuriating sometimes. It's a wonder anyone plays the game for years like I did. :)

If you play an orc barbarian or something like that, and you reroll a few times to get good stats, the early terror is not so bad. There are of course several guaranteed anti-corruption items in various places, but yeah, teleport control is very important. That's what blink dogs are for, as I recall.... Anyhow, I've won it a number of times, but never had the diligence to actually complete a true alignment ending.

[Tim James]

Anyhow, I've won it a number of times, but never had the diligence to actually complete a true alignment ending.

Oh well look at the great roguelike player! :)

I got a wizard (I think) to the last level without any scumming but died on that level and had to revert to the one backup save I made specifically for D:50. If I recall correctly it took me quite a few tries to beat it so it wasn't just bad luck, but my character sucked. Also beat it once as a tour with lots of scumming.

But everyone stop talking, the urge to play it all weekend is becoming overwhelming.

[Miramon]

Oh well look at the great roguelike player! :)

Well, gee, I actually beat unix rogue, and that's harder than any of these newfangled games with characters and stories and tiles and world maps and things like that.

[Tim James]

Let me guess, it was at a university too!

[Miramon]

Let me guess, it was at a university too!

Win! And that's where I wrote omega too, my first C program.

[Tim James]

To edit the display properties of a console application, you must first launch the applicatin, then click on its system menu (the icon in the upper-left corner), then select Properties. The display properties aren't on the right-click menu of the executable for some reason.

Finally got it, took a few different tabs to get things to stick. Wonder how I got into that state, kind of funny.

Win! And that's where I wrote omega too, my first C program.

Now you're just showing off.

[Flowers]

I just played Elona, it's pretty good. Varied scenery, nice graphics, there's a bit of a grindy aspect to it, when you need to finish quests to get platinum coins in order to raise you skill and stat caps.

There is also an area, pets, a pet arena, random dungeons, semi-random dungeons, static dungeons, a fame system, home and shop ownership, collectible items, and a worship system.

The other downsides are the difficulty and extremely high requirements for faith levels before you start to see benefits from having a patron deity.

[Miramon]

Finally got it, took a few different tabs to get things to stick. Wonder how I got into that state, kind of funny.

Now you're just showing off.

Yes, indeed :)

I am almost prouder of contributing some monster descriptions to ADOM though, all things considered. Omega source code was once used in a university course explaining why data driven code is good, giving the game as an example of how not to do it.