Doom - The Roguelike

[Darkspire]

Following the links from the Dungeonmans post, I found this, very old school and a real tribute to Doom, if you played Doom when it first came out then you will really enjoy this, I managed level two in the hellpit before I got eaten  ;D

Look up the keys first, it lists them as you go but there a few and it would have helped had I known the main ones before I started.

http://doom.chaosforge.org/

Darkspire

[Nefaro]

Definitely a fun game.  My only gripe was that, being based on Doom, there isn't a whole lot of item or monster variety.

[Huw the Poo]

Definitely a fun game.  My only gripe was that, being based on Doom, there isn't a whole lot of item or monster variety.

Same here, I didn't play it for long.  It was very amusing for a while though. :)

We should get a thread going on roguelikes in general.

[Gusington]

I see the term thrown around a lot recently but I don't really know how a roguelike differs from a stealth-game. It's like 'roguelike' popped up overnight and now it's everywhere.

[donkey_roxor]

I see the term thrown around a lot recently but I don't really know how a roguelike differs from a stealth-game. It's like 'roguelike' popped up overnight and now it's everywhere.

A "roguelike" is not a game specifically featuring rogues or roguish characteristics (e.g., stealth); it's a game that is similar to the 1980s game Rogue (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)). One of the most famous is Nethack (http://www.nethack.org/).

Some characteristics associated with roguelikes include random generation, ASCII-based graphics, permadeath, and turn-based gameplay (as opposed to real-time).

More info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

[Gusington]

Thanks...never heard of Rogue until now either!

[Nefaro]

Thanks...never heard of Rogue until now either!

Give Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup a try sometime as it's relatively refined, with a good amount of content, yet it's gameplay is still as Roguelike as it gets.  That means you should plan on dying, but there is a lot of different stuff you can find and use so you'll end up making many different kinds of characters to do so.   It has tile graphics, and not the old ASCII crap you need to interpret.  And.. it's FREE.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

That is... if you want to check out a relatively user-friendly Roguelike game of the classic kind.

[jomni]

Deleted

[JudgeDredd]

lol - 100MB

Original Doom was like 4 wasn't it?

And thank you for the link - enjoyed for a while.

[spelk]

I see the term thrown around a lot recently but I don't really know how a roguelike differs from a stealth-game. It's like 'roguelike' popped up overnight and now it's everywhere.

Check out this definition by the rogue-like(RL) illuminati over at Temple of the Roguelike

http://www.roguetemple.com/roguelike-definition/

Then you could do worse than look over my round-up of RL's listing out a few 'Accessible' Rogue-likes..

http://sugarfreegamer.com/?p=83125

Theres a LOT of gaming potential in RL's, and for FREE most of the time, but theres such a lot of them out there it can be bewildering at first, and you really need to try a few of the more popular and polished ones, to tailor the "fun factor" to how YOU like to play!

TOME (Tales of Maj'Eyal) and DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) are quite large and complex, but quite easy to start off with.

If you want a very quick playing simple 'coffeebreak' RL, then my go to game would be QuickHack. It's so easy to play, yet quite satisfying, and a game can take about 10-20mins to play.

[jomni]

My take on the RL phenomenon.

RL has been around for a long time. Back in those days, you were constrained by limited graphics processing, storage and RAM. So random experiences conveyed through simple graphic gives the player a lot gaming hours per byte. It's not really a genre itself.

Improvements in computing hardware enables us to experience more elaborate story telling through gameplay and graphics. The randomness was mostly dropped so that stories and plot lines can be developed more.

With the advent of MMO rpg's,  story lines aren't as prized as during the Ultima and Baldures Gate era so RL came back into vogue.  These are easier to make for indie developers as opposed to mainstream games.

It's interesting how this genre gets it's name from a name of an old game instead of the type of game play. Imagine have other genres called, civ like, Pac man like,  shogun like.

[Nefaro]

TOME (Tales of Maj'Eyal) and DCSS (Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup) are quite large and complex, but quite easy to start off with.

Also don't forget the commercially popular Dungeon Of Dredmor (on Steam, cheap).  I have over 200 hours of play time into that one, which is more than I can say for any other game on Steam and quite possibly more than any game I've purchased in the last few years.  Hell.. I've only beat Dredmor on the 'Dwarvish Moderation' difficulty, and that due to an old DoT bug that has since been squashed.   

It's gameplay is more of the traditional RL style than TOME - comparable to Dungeon Crawl but with a modern interface which is quite nice.

[Gusington]

Thanks guys...new, weird territory for me.

[Faux]

I can certainly recommend Dungeon Crawl. It even has nice graphics for those who can't stand ascii. Being the most actively developed and with the largest playerbase it's basically the World of Warcraft of roguelikes so the community is quite sizable.

Also everyone getting into roguelikes should definitely check out Brogue. It's probably what Rogue would be if it was still developed. The game design is very simplistic and tight, meaning it's easy to pick up and learn but hard to master. Every item and monster in the game has its purpose and the strategic and tactical depth is great. The more you play, the more you begin to understand how awesomely well the game is designed.

You can get Brogue here https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ or if you can't stand pure ascii you can also try the semigraphical tiles version with an oldschool vibe: http://oryxdesignlab.com/brogue-tiles/

[Nefaro]

Thanks guys...new, weird territory for me.

I only started playing these in the last couple years, when they had some with tile-based graphics.  The good ones really hit an RPG itch for me in that they're highly randomized, each run through is a new exploration & looting experience, and there are often many character combinations to be experimented with. 

Action RPGs like Diablo were basically a real-time evolution of roguelikes.  But I would still prefer the turn-based, all things being equal.  Less hack & slash, more strategy thinking involved with these.