I’ve starting this new blog to document my curiosity. For a long time, I have been interested in certain role playing games that are termed “roguelikes”. These are single player games, usually with a fantasy bent, that have been around since the late 1980s. In them, you name and create a player who you send into a dungeon, using different skills to fight monsters, survive, and find better armor, weapons, and magical items to help you (potions, scrolls, wands, rings). At the bottom of the dungeon is either a final powerful monster to kill, or a specific item you need to bring back to the surface, in order to win.
Two of the main games in this genre are Nethack and Angband. Unlike nearly all commercial games, the source code that goes into these games is freely available for people to read and modify if they wish (this is referred to as “open source”). Because of this, each one has several variants. Angband has over 30 that are considered stable or “beta” (playable with practically no bugs), while Nethack has about 5 or 6. I really haven’t found much information online about the differences among all these various games, so I decided to learn them first hand.
Roguelikes have many advantages over commercial games, but do have one major disadvantage: they have ascii-based graphics (or sometimes small tiles). If the lack of pretty graphics doesn’t bother you, there are several features that make roguelikes better than even today’s games:
* They are free, unlike most games today that are often $40 to $60 dollars when first released, and yet they offer hundreds of hours of playtime.
* They are single player turn-based games, so you can take your time choosing your next move – although you do have to pay attention!
* You never need to be online to play them, although some versions have been made for internet play.
* They are fairly small in size, usually under 20 megabytes, and include help files within the games (and a Guidebook in Nethack’s case).
* Because the graphics are so low-tech, it’s pretty much guaranteed that any computer (PC or Mac) from the last 8 years will be able to play these games, no matter what graphics card you have. They also run fine on netbooks, and some have been ported to the iPhone and Android phones.
* The game developers have spent their time making it possible for you to use most items in nearly any way you can think of (which is why the controls are keyboard based). You can open locked doors in different ways, mark the floors, fall down stairs if you are overburdened…
* Their content is generated anew with each new game, which makes them extremely replayable – even with the same character class and race, the dungeons are never the same layout.
Roguelikes also are known for ‘permadeath’, which means that although you can save the game at any time, if your character dies you have to start the game from the beginning (the save file is meant for taking a break from the game, and will be deleted once the game loads the file). Taking notes on what monsters there are, and how to best defeat them, is essential. Even though ‘spoilers’ exist online for the main games, you will still have to be mindful of all your items, think of innovative ways to use them (especially in Nethack), and not get careless. This feature is the other reason why the genre remains a niche – not everyone can deal with losing a character for good that they’ve invested hours in, and who may be very well equipped to win the game. But the danger is what gives them their appeal for other gamers; each dead character teaches you tricks and cautions for the next attempt.
There are, of course, a lot of other games in the roguelike genre besides Nethack and Angband. But these are two of the oldest ones, and the only ones with significant variants that are still available to play. I may look at other games in the future, but wanted to focus on them first.
The playing styles of these 2 main branches is a little different – in Nethack and its variants, you start on the top floor of a 50 level dungeon with a pet, and must descend to the bottom, retrieve the Amulet of Yendor (a difficult task), and then ascend to the first floor again, leave the dungeon, traverse several more levels, and finally offer the Amulet on your god’s altar. Shops to buy and sell items will be found occasionally in the upper half of the dungeon. When you create your character, you choose their class/profession first, then the race. Finally you choose an alignment (lawful or chaotic), if your class choice doesn’t restrict you to a specific one. Each class has some useful skills they gain as they level up, and a small set of starting gear.
In Angband, you start in a town of 8 shops (and 1 home that you can store items in). You have no pet. The game is won by killing Morgoth, who dwells on the 100th floor of the dungeon. You can leave the dungeon at will to buy or sell items at the various shops. In these games, you are only trying to gain better armor, weapons, and skills with which to survive the descent, reach Morgoth, and kill him. When creating the character, you choose your race first, then a class (different races have different options here), and finally you choose the skills that your character starts with. Another difference from Nethack is that while both games let you go up or down dungeon levels, in Angband each level and all items in it will be lost once you leave. When you return to the same level, Angband creates a new one (while in Nethack the whole dungeon will always be there during any single game). This has an effect on playstyle, although I’ll explain the details later.
I’ll be playing both of these, along with their variants, over the next few months. I will be using the website RogueBasin as my primary source for information on these different versions, along with the list found at the official Angband site and the Variant list at the Nethack wiki. Because both games have lots of “spoiler” information, I may hide certain paragraphs in blog posts that describe game play, which you can open up if you are an experienced player.
One Day, I Will Ascend 