['@ Play' is a kinda-sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

We've covered all of the current big-name roguelikes, at least nominally, at this point, so let's look at one of the older games. Released back around 1986, Larn was one of Hack's chief competitors for the title of successor to Rogue.

Hack was known for killing characters with distressing frequency, and dismaying glee, so Larn was popular for being a much a kinder game, although still not a pushover. It was one of the premier roguelikes on the Amiga side of the PC fence.

While it wasn't the first roguelike to use a town level (that was probably Moria), it was the first to give us multiple dungeons in the same game.

The Taxonomy of Larn

Roguelikes may be categorized into those that take after Hack (like Nethack) and those that take after Moria (like Angband), but Larn borrows from both. Like Moria, it uses menu shops, the character's experience growth is more important than the stuff he's carrying, item generation is weighted by dungeon depth, and there's a surface town that must be returned repeatedly.

But like Hack, levels are persistent, the dungeon itself has a kind of character, there are "features" in the dungeon that can be taken advantage of or cause problems, and there is a strong ethic of powergaming: of trying find ways to use the rules in such a way as to gain an overwhelming advantage.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Larn, Or, I Hocked The Car To Buy A Lance Of Death" »

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['@ Play' is a kinda-sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

(Note: screenshots from the Super Famicom fan-translated version.)

In recognition of the U.S. release, after more than ten years since its Super Famicom origin, of the DS version Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, our column again focuses on that game.

It's very long this time, and divided into three parts:
Part 1 is an introduction to the game for people who have never played roguelikes before. There have been so many negative reviews of this game, written by people who should really know better, that I think a little consciousness-raising is called for. That's what Part 1 is about.

Part 2 is a guide to first-timers to help ease their first trip through Kobami Vally and Table Mountain.

If this seems like rather a lot, well, it is. I was encouraged to see that it's finally available in local department stores! I hope this means that it's selling better than expected. It seems that there's already a Wii update of Shiren in Japan. That could very well be the coolest cool thing of all... just maybe, if the DS version does well, they might consider localizing that game too?

Well, let's not get our hopes up, shall we?

(This column is focused mostly on new players. If you're an old-hand with the Super Famicom game, here's a list of some of the differences between it and the DS version: Download file. Thanks to Teasel from the NeoGAF forums and Gabikun of GameFAQs for some of the items. Further thanks to Lord Gek for pointing me to Gabikun's list.)

Continue reading "@Play: The Delights Of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer DS" »

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['@ Play' is a kinda sorta bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

"Commercial games cheat for you and against the monsters: The unarmed orc falls to the ground, dying. 'Whirling Blades of Doom... backpack', he gasps. 'Barbecue sauce... left pocket.'

"NetHack plays fair between you and the monsters: The orc wins the race to the Whirling Blades of Doom. He seizes it, grins, and whirls it at you. You fall to the ground, dying. Your last sight is of the orc reaching for his left pocket.

"Slash'em cheats against you and for the monsters: Staggering and more than half dead, you advance to the slain monster. If you can use the Whirling Blades of Doom against the rest of the pack, you just might live through this.
...There is no weapon at the corpse. The Whirling Blades of Doom are an intrinsic attack, not a separate weapon. The next platypus in line opens its bill. This one is a fire breather. Thoroughly barbecued, you fall to the ground, dying. When you hit the ground, something breaks in your left pocket.

Rob Ellwood, writing sarcastically in rec.games.roguelike.nethack

Continue reading "@Play: Nethack Intensified" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

I've put this one off for a long time because of the sheer bulk of the game, and the time it takes to get good at a game this large as Angband. Nethack is pretty involved too, of course, but at least I have the advantage of having played it for many years. Still, something has to be said.

Unlike many of the other games we've discussed, especially Nethack, Angband is a moving target. The active development it undergoes really is active, and various things about the game may change in the future.

While it's possible that everything I've said about Nethack will be invalidated by some upcoming brilliant release by the DevTeam, few seriously believe it will happen. (In fact, I would be one of the most anxious to have my notes invalidated.) Thus it is that, everything I say here should be considered provisional, although I will attempt to stick with the more permanent facts about the game.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Angband - At Last!" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

There are the roguelike games that have closed source, which for the longest time included Rogue, and still includes ADOM and just about every commercial game out there. And then there are the roguelikes that are open source.

And of them all, there is one game that is particularly identified with open source. Of course, it's Nethack, which was effectively open long before it became fashionable. The game is old enough that its license, the "Nethack Public License," takes GNU Bison's as its model, not the GPL. In point of fact, Eric S. Raymond himself has contributed documentation to the game, and he mentioned it in his famous essay . It and the other open source roguelikes (Angband and Dungeon Crawl among them) offer the best hope that open source game development can work.

Development is one thing. Design is something else entirely. The model of many random people contributing patches often turns into a classic case of too many cooks. It takes a strong vision to avoid the game turning into an unplayable muddle, because it's so easy to wreck it by adding misfeatures. Computer games not only require strong software design but something else besides, and roguelikes rely on ideas that most other games abandoned long ago, that some surprising people will swear have no place in gaming. Last month David Sirlin, who possesses an excellent understanding of fighting game mechanics, made a series of blanket statements about game saving, using Dead Rising as his example, that would absolutely destroy roguelikes if applied to them. For some reason few commercial developers outside of Japan seem to get how roguelikes are supposed to work; even Blizzard's popular quasi-roguelike Diablo games didn't add permadeath until the second game, and went out of their way to say it was intended for "hardcore" players. Anyway, it succeed largely for reasons unrelated to being like rogue(6).

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: A Quick Look at the Nethack Sources" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Ah, this one took a while to put together! It's been a month since the last installment of @Play, but in the meantime I've put together not only a selection of DS homebrew roguelikes for you to seek your teeth into, but even a tutorial on getting them to run on your own unit!

I'm sorry to say we're light on pictures this time, due to the difficulty of taking acceptable screenshots on the DS. If anyone out there has any ideas let me know and maybe I can amend this later.

Following is a tutorial for getting homebrew software running on a DS if you're using something like Datel's Games 'n Music, which should be enough for you if you want to play these games yourself. It's a little off the usual stomping grounds for @Play, so if you're just interested in the roguelike reviews feel free to skip down a bit.

Continue reading "@Play: Homebrew Roguelikes On The DS" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Jeff Lait's POWDER, which name probably stands for something I don't know, is a graphic roguelike originally created as a homebrew Gameboy Advance game. Created as an entry in the 7DRL programming challenge, since its original release it has been steadily updated, and ports have been made available for Windows and Linux using SDL.

Despite its broadened horizons, the game is obviously intended to be a GBA game first; not only are the screen size and graphics the same across all platforms, but there is also the occasional video game in-joke to be found. The game complains, if the player tries moving off the top of the map, that doing so would "break the backlight." (Direct complaints that the original GBA didn't have a backlight to the developer.)

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: 'Starting Out In POWDER, Or 'Beware The Kiwi Bird, My Son''" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Other projects (specifically the Game Design Essentials series over at Gamasutra) have taken up a bit of time lately so this one's a week late, and kinda light besides. You may find it interesting, though.

We're going to start taking a look at some of the results from the 7DRL programming challenge, which asks participants to create a roguelike game in seven days or less. Many interesting games have come out of the challenge, such as personal favorite ChessRogue. This one's particularly interesting because it hews quite close to the pattern laid out by Rogue, as well it should, as it's made by one of Rogue's original creators, Glenn Wichman.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: '7DRL: Seven Day Quest'" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Nethack (and Hack) keeps coming up again and again in this column because, after the original, it is the most Rogue-like of them all. Rogue is a game with profound design: changing even the tiniest bit affects everything else.

Of all the roguelikes, the Hack games are those which most recognize that Rogue is an interesting game for reasons other than its turn-based tactical combat. Many of these games pay lip service to some of Rogue's more profound features, especially item identification, without really embracing them. In Angband, attempting to ID some things by experimentation is a really bad idea, because of the existence of items that can instantly kill a player who uses them, and anyway players can usually find all the identify scrolls they need through the town shops. Dungeon Crawl's maintainers admit that it downplays its item identification game. And all of these roguelikes weight item generation by level, which upsets the identification game by making it even more unlikely that very useful items will appear early on.

Nethack's deeper features tend to be extensions and elaborations of Rogue's: its identification game, its objects with heavily programmed functions, and the secret uses of many items. And these are the things that roguelike fans who don't like Nethack disapprove of. I maintain this is because they've been trained to enjoy "mainstream" gaming first, which tends to be devoid of real strategy, values providing the player with an "experience" more than being a game that can be lost, and are forgiving to the point where he can't really ever die: he can always return to a previous save, after all. The absence of those things allow precisely the aspects of Rogue that make it worth playing at all.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: 'Balancing a game that looks balanceless'" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

To wrap up our discussion of Shiren the Wanderer (here's Part 1 and Part 2), let's have a quick look at one of the more interesting parts of the game, the series of puzzle dungeons called Fei's Problems. In the starting town there is a building that contains a shopkeeper-looking guy called Fei, who's constructed a series of 50 non-random single dungeon levels he wants you to attempt.

Most of these dungeons are arranged so that there's only one way out of the situation presented. Some of them rely on obscure aspects of the game rules. Because of this, they serve as an excellent step-by-step tutorial for learning how to play the game. Only one can be tried on each "life," but they yield helpful items, occasionally very nice ones. The screenshots illustrate the solutions to three early, and very simple, problems, but later on they get quite diabolical. For example: there's one that relies on the fact that, if you're standing on money without having picked it up, it can be accessed using the Floor command and thrown at monsters for high damage!

But as far as deviousness goes the last problem tops it easily....

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: 'Fei's Problems'" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Here we continue into the second half of a particular long game of Shiren the Wanderer. Part one is available here.

Early in part one I had found one of the best objects in the game, a Far-sight Bracer, which reveals the locations of all items and monsters while it is worn. Few roguelikes offer items like this because such knowledge can be extremely useful in those game. Items are the primary reward for exploration in roguelikes, and knowing where they all are also shows the player when no more are to be found. Monsters are the primary source of danger, and knowing their locations lets the player know where to avoid. And both reveal, indirectly, the locations of rooms and corridors. Even Nethack's Amulet of ESP only works over the whole level if the player is blind.

Continue reading "@Play: 'A Journey to Table Mountain, Part 2'" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Last time, we showed some scenes from the SNES Torneko Mysterious Dungeon. The screenshots came from multiple games, but I think they illustrated what the game is like nicely. This time we're going to do the same thing with Shiren the Wanderer, the second Mysterious Dungeon game, and still a high point of the series. But this isn't a pieced-together narrative from multiple games. Everything you are about to see happened in one game, and a long one at that. Think of it as being like Let's Play, but with more death!

Actually, as an experiment I started a new file and started playing from scratch to see how far I could get. I didn't have the benefit of upgraded towns, or the "helpers" you can eventually earn. I didn't have the benefit of Staves of Bufoo, an extremely useful item that not only instakills arbitrary foes but turns it into meat you can gain special powers from. And most importantly, I didn't have the use of the equipment from my cleared game; when you win, you get to keep the things you won with, making the next game much easier if you choose to use them.

Continue reading "@Play: 'A Journey to Table Mountain, Part 1'" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

[Note: As far as @Play columns go, this one, which deals with a playthrough of the SNES prototype Roguelike dungeon crawler Taloon's Mystery Dungeon, is unusually long and graphics intensive, but I think it gives a good sense of the kind of strategy needed in a game like this.]

Continue reading "@Play: Taloon's Mystery Dungeon, In Great Detail" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

I've mostly been covering the traditional roguelikes of late, which are primarily terminal games with roots back to the very origins of computer gaming, to the neglect of the extensive Japanese console branch of the genre. They’ve had commercial roguelikes all over the place, thanks mostly to a little company called ChunSoft, known for the "Mysterious Dungeon," a.k.a. Fushigi no Dungeon, games.

The first game was a licensed game based off of one of the player characters in Dragon Quest IV, and since then it has crossed over with the Final Fantasy, Tower of Druaga, and even Pokemon franchises, as well as a "default" character, Shiren the Wanderer, whose games are usually the best of the series.

As ChunSoft has found inspiration from the roguelikes, so have other Japanese publishers found inspiration from ChunSoft, and so the Mysterious Dungeon games have quite a lot of imitators. Off the top of my head, there's Azure Dreams, Climax Landers (Time Stalkers in the U.S.) and the Ancient Cave segments of later Estopolis/Lufia games. Lufia: The Legend Returns for the GBC makes that the entire game.

Sega made a rather uninspired roguelike in the form of Fatal Labyrinth for the Genesis. The recent Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja is a fairly close example of the type, and the popular homebrew WonderSwan game Dicing Knight has some roguelike aspects as well. Even Parasite Eve has an optional random section in form of the Chrysler Building.

Continue reading "@ Play: Architecture of the Mystery Dungeon" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

One of the happiest things that can happen to a player in Nethack is being granted a wish. Wishes are one of those things that distinguish roguelike games like Nethack and ADOM from the vast category of lesser RPGs. Imagine if a Final Fantasy VI player were able to wish for the most powerful weapons in the game from relatively early on? That these two games now only allow this, but are not irretrievably broken because of it, speaks volumes about the care that was taken in putting their supposedly-chaotic designs together.

In ADOM the player can only wish for non-artifact objects, but in Nethack, a wish can give the player nearly anything, including artifacts and even one quest artifact per game. The only object types that can't be wished for in Nethack are your role's own quest artifact, and the four objects required to win, one of which being the Amulet of Yendor itself. But obtaining a wish is not easy, and knowing what to wish for is not obvious.

The ways you can get a wish in Nethack involve fountains or thrones (both very unlikely, and are highly dangerous to low-level characters), magic lamps (quite uncommon and it requires special equipment to maximize the chance of a wish), smoky potions (same as lamps, but much rarer) and wands of wishing (the least common item in the game). All these methods are rare, unintuitive, and/or dangerous enough to a new player that many people go for months without realizing that such things as wishes are even in the game.

But eventually, a player drinking from random fountains, generally an unwise move, lucks out and summons a water demon, who is grateful for release and grants him a wish. What to wish for?

Continue reading "@ Play: Spoiled for Options" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Nethack has gotten a lot of talk here, and it remains perhaps the most complex roguelike out there due to its profusion of object interactions, but it is by no means the roguelike with the "most to do." That is, the objective of Nethack, although more complicated than the old days where ultimately all you just had to get fire resistance, level teleport down to the Amulet, get it, then climb out, is still relatively straightforward. The game got a lot more complex in version 3.0, and more complex still in 3.1, but in this respect it really hasn't changed too much since Hack.

The roguelike with, by far, the most to do is ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery), which is perhaps the example of the genre that takes the most ideas from the world of other RPGs. Nowhere is this made more evident than when examining the game's complex web of quests. Nethack has four (although one is different for each character class). ADOM has dozens.

Here is a very small sampling, chosen for a mix of ease of observation by beginning players and raw cool factor.

Continue reading "@ Play: Things to Do While Visiting Ancardia" »

Posted by John Harris at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]
I'm back and fully rested after a break for column #20. And before you complain about the extra week, note that it took quite some doing to get play time in on this week's game....

Up until now we've mostly gone after fairly low-hanging fruit. We've discussed four of the five roguelike biggies: Rogue, Nethack, ADOM and Dungeon Crawl -- Angband is waiting until I can get a proper handle on it. We've also looked at Pokemon Rescue Team and ToeJam & Earl, which each have some roguelike qualities, and DoomRL, which is roguelike but very different in style. But all these games are fairly available. ToeJam & Earl is the hardest of this lot to find, and that was only until Virtual Console put it within the reach of nearly everyone with eight bucks and a Wii, although that may be small consolation.

But the thing about roguelike games is, the genre is seriously old. Rogue, a computer game with random dungeons, a full inventory and tremendous strategy, was created in 1980, a year before Pac-Man. In those 27 years since Rogue's birth we have seen a good many roguelike computer games, and it is no longer so easy to get to play some of them.

Along those lines, the Roguelike Restoration Project is the incredibly noble effort to take some of these ancient games and make them playable under common operating systems. Among the eight games that can be found there are three versions of Rogue, two of Advanced Rogue, and three other games with "rogue" in the title but that take increasing liberties with the play. Like Rogue, all of these are fairly playable today. Unlike Rogue (and like Nethack), they lose some of Rogue's clarity by adding so much to the game. But at least they still exist.

There are some other roguelikes it's getting harder to find nowadays. Moria, Hack, Larn and Omega were the first ones to branch further off from the tree, and there is little, if any, development going on in those branches now. None of these are so easy to find. At least Moria evolved into Angband, while Larn and Omega mostly stagnated. Hack, of course, would become the imposing Nethack, also called Gradewrecker and Thesisbane.

Hack, itself, inspired a few variants back in the day, and one of those is our focus this time: the game HackLite, a little-known variant that is most difficult to play these days because its main version was for Amiga home computers.

Continue reading "@ Play: Hack's Lost Brother" »

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['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

DoomRL is a game I did not expect to like.

As you may have guessed by now, I have pretty strong ideas as to what constitutes "roguelike," one that is more in line with the term’s original sense, as seen in games like Moria, Larn and especially Hack. These are all games with random areas and random items, where melee combat is the norm and distance attacks are fairly limited, where optimized exploration strategy is fairly important to survival. DoomRL has none of these things.

In case you missed the throwaway link last time, DoomRL is a roguelike game based on the classic first-person shooter Doom. Not based as in "inspired by." Based as in, if you ignore the overhead perspective and turn-based play, "pretty damn close to." It seems like it would be a quickie throwaway game, but the goofy premise hides rather a lot of interesting play.

Continue reading "@ Play: Doom, doom, doom, doom" »

Posted by John Harris at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

For 34 weeks now we've talked about all kinds of roguelikes, including many of the major ones and a few niche cases. These are games that can attract incredibly loyal fans, not loyal, perhaps, in the dress-up-at-DragonCon style, but fans who can nudge the system of an intrinsically chaotic game like Nethack to the degree that they can maintain incredible winning streaks.

Hmm, I said nudge there. That seems oddly appropriate; the game genre that roguelikes most resembles, in a sense, is pinball. Traditional RPGs are games in which the world is laid out beforehand, every encounter planned out. Other than the very earliest of these games, there is generally a way out of any situation you can get in. This is, in fact, more or less game design law these days throughout the industry: if the player is not dead or inescapably falling towards it (like, seconds away), then there must be a way out. Although one or two may strive mightily, there is nothing to prove that a roguelike is winnable every time. Notice that all the major streaks in the list linked to above have ended months ago.

Continue reading "@ Play: Storytelling, Bah!" »

Posted by John Harris at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Simultaneously among the most beloved, and most loathed, features of the popular roguelike game Nethack is its wide variety of jokes and anachronisms. Often, when people who dislike the game, but appreciate other roguelikes, discuss their dissatisfaction with the game, it's because it contains things like candy bars, quantum mechanics, credit cards, magic markers and fortune cookies within its vague fantasy setting.

There are those of us who dearly love all these kinds of things, and in case you haven't guessed I'm one of them. I find that far too many fantasy games, both the regular kind, and roguelikes too at times, take themselves too seriously. The most popular computer roleplaying games you can find don't care a whit about subtlety or humor except on rare occasions.

Even Zelda, the last time out, gave us a strongly-typed light-dark motif that, although they did try to overturn it during the course of the game, still seemed to buy into it more than discredit. Yet considering how the whimsical and joyous Wind Waker was the worst-selling console Zelda for a long while, it seems that most gamers are perfectly happy with this. I am disappointed in modern gaming for many reasons, but none so more as this.

You know the kind of games I mean. Games that throw around words like "darkness" as if they were going out of style -- and the sooner that happens the better as far as I'm concerned. Yet it is enlightening, perhaps, to note that other than a weird little tacked-on prologue before the game, we don't even know why Nethack's long succession of @-signs are braving the dungeon. It likely isn't to save the world; the player's god wants the amulet, but it isn't a pressing fight against the forces of evil. I've always seen it as more of a quest for glory kind of thing.

Of the other major games, Rogue's quest is important only so that Rodney can gain admittance to the local fighter's guild. (In light of that game's tremendous difficulty, I can only imagine that he'll be in scarce company.) Crawl players seek the Orb of Zot; we don't know why. Angbanders wanna slay Morgoth, the great foe of Tolkien's Middle Earth (Sauron's boss), but it doesn't seem like he's about to up and invade at the moment. ADOM, alone among the major roguelikes, puts the player in a world-saving (or conquering) role, and perhaps because of this it is ADOM's quest, which has far more storyline than the other roguelikes, that seems the most petty. To save the world is a noble thing, but come on, it's been saved millions of times by now. Can't the durn thing take care of itself for a moment?

Well I say, let the technicolor phantastic realm-kingdom in dire need of salvation take a running leap. This time, our focus is digressions. A listing of jokes in Nethack. Let's go!

Continue reading "@ Play: I Believe It Not!" »

Posted by John Harris at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

I figured what I should do before writing an article on Dungeon Crawl was sit down and give it a good shot at playing it. It has a tremendous reputation for difficulty, though, so my hopes were not high. So I was as surprised as anyone then, after what I estimate are 30 or so games, that I managed to get to the very deepest level of the game, Level 5 of the Realm of Zot.

I started out, as in most of my games of Dungeon Crawl, as a Hill Dwarf Fighter. I had heard that the more “dedicated” characters in Dungeon Crawl, the ones who are capable of doing one thing but doing it very well, are easier to play than jack-of-all-trades like Humans (no racial bonuses) and Wanderers (the “General Studies” class of the game). Since Hill Dwarves are very good fighters, with excellent Strength, but they don't have annoying drawbacks like Trolls' increased hunger, and Fighters are traditionally straight-forward, whack 'em from up close types who can take a few hits before dying, I fixated upon that combination. It seems like a good match, and this time it took me up to the very threshold of winning.

What follow are my observations on getting so far in a game after so little time. This is a very long installment, even compared to the usual, and I apologize for that. I have tried to distill most of what I've learned in playing this game. Some of this was gleaned from spoilers, and some is just hard-won discovery. Use, or ignore, it as you wish.

Continue reading "@ Play: Before Learning to Walk, One Must First Crawl" »

Posted by John Harris at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

While there are around a half-dozen major roguelikes, and dozens of minor ones, there are a good number of attributes they all share. They almost all focus on exploration of a regular grid with spaces blocked by walls and doors, and with opposing characters who also travel through the grid through mostly the same mechanism as the player. Sometimes either side may find objects with which to aid them in their goal, or they may have innate abilities that help them, but they all tend to follow the pattern laid down in that ancient game, Rogue.

Because of this, there is a basic body of information that can help players play any roguelike they may find. This week then, we present a travel guide, a document that may aid you in your journey no matter where you might end up, whether it be the Dungeons of Doom, the Mazes of Morgoth, or the Caverns of Chaos, any alliterative complex of rooms, items and monsters you might find--in short, any place worth being.

Remember: always find out the dollar-to-zorkmid exchange rate before embarking.

Continue reading "@ Play: Tips For Travel In Gridland" »

Posted by John Harris at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

This is a game that does things that sometimes defy belief.

Many people have wondered over the sheer range of possibility here. They see the huge array of random items. They see wishing and item transformation, altars and prayer. They see that players can eat dead monsters and gain (and lose) abilities from their meal. That items can be blessed and cursed, and have different effects depending on that state. The tremendous variety of monsters. That players can take potions of water, make holy water out of them at an altar, then use that to bless other items. They see that the game implements special rules on certain real-world dates, like Friday the 13th.

All of these things, as we've covered before, are true of Nethack. But now, we are not talking about Nethack. We're taking a look at a copy of Nethack that came to our world after falling through a wormhole from a mirror universe. We're looking at ADOM.

Continue reading "@ Play: ADOM, Nethack With A Goatee" »

Posted by John Harris at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

It is well known, among those who know of the genre at all (honestly if I see someone misidentify dungeon crawlers with roguelikes one more time I think I might break my tether and start trampling circus handlers*), that roguelike games have random dungeons, but it is not often that this is elaborated upon beyond just the statement. What does it mean to have a "random" dungeon? The meaning of this term is not as obvious as it first appears.

When people talk about a dungeon being "random," they rarely mean truly chaotic, but instead that the layout of rooms and passages, and their contents, are unpredictable enough between games that the player can be surprised to discover what lies in wait for him. This actually demands, not pure, nonsensical randomness, but a well-honed generation algorithm that can turn the output of the random number generator into something consistent and explorable.

Continue reading "@ Play: Mapping the Infinite Cavern" »

Posted by John Harris at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

In Giant Eel Stories, we examine the phenomenon of Usenet victory posts, in which players crow about games which were very interesting, often because of something that happened, or some conduct they upheld, or they won. This time we again focus on Nethack, although we may not in the future.

In this installment:

- We learn about a wizard who wasn't just content with killing a lot of monsters, but had to kill all the monsters....

- After than, we meet a Healer who won the game without killing anything at all, although it must be said a large horde of henchmen was seen following him through the dungeons...

- We have a look at the story of the Priest who did not win, but will still be remembered probably for years to come for getting the highest score. And when I say that, I mean she really got the highest score....

- We finish up with a look at a real story: a work of Nethack fanfiction. Yes, it exists. No, it is not as lame as you think it might be.

Continue reading "@ Play: Giant Eel Stories, Volume 2" »

Posted by John Harris at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

One of the interesting ideas that that sadly-vanishing class of amusement machine, the pinball table, brought over to the scene from its less-reputable kin, the slot machine, is that some aspect of the game could carry over between plays. Although modern pinball games, which take almost as much inspiration in their design from video games as video games took from pinball back in the late 70s and early 80s, tend to downplay this kind of thing, it used to be that that progressive jackpots were a common feature on pingames.

A progressive jackpot is an award that builds, not during just a single game, but over many, and when someone earns it it resets to a minimum value. This could be considered bad because the traditional concept of a score is of a measure of a player's skill, and this upsets that notion by potentially giving different scores to two jackpot-earning players who have had identical games, simply because one of them played when the pot was at a larger value than the other. It also seems nonsensical in that, unlike with gambling devices, the points awarded by a pinball machine are wholly arbitrary in nature. While a slot machine cannot dispense money indefinitely and thus progressive jackpots allow for a good balance between income and outlay, a pinball machine can mint points indefinitely.

But what progressive jackpots provide best is a sense of continuity between games. By introducing variables into the game that are not at a default or random state at the beginning of play, a sense is introduced that the game goes on even after the final ball is lost. Further, it draws in other players: if you play ten games and build the progressive jackpot up to a high value then walk away from the table, it will still be at that level when the next player comes along, and he could earn the whole thing. In that way, different players may contribute to a game in interesting ways, producing a collaborative effect, a truly meta kind of game. There is no real reason to put this kind of feature into an automated amusement device like a pinball machine or a computer game program, but it is still an oddly compelling idea. It injects an aspect of the real world into the play.

This idea, in a form, is used in Will Wright's upcoming Spore, which doesn't have literal multiplayer but does have in-game opponents supplied from other players' installations of the game, but beyond that it is interesting that so few other games proudly feature outside influences. They seek to simulate a world completely removed, or at removed as possible, from the real one, so every game begins from a zero-state. But of course, stories that feature Final Dark Sources Of Ultimate Peril Threatening Generic Fantasyland, at the end, do not stand up well if they recognize the existence of prior, or future, playthoughs. The game would be subtly suggesting the world doesn't need saving, silly user, you already saved it last time.

So... do roguelikes do this kind of thing? The answer, sometimes, is yes.

Continue reading "@ Play: I Never Meta Rogue I Didn't Like" »

Posted by John Harris at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

I ask you to halt your busy day for a moment and consider the challenges inherent in getting a computer to play a game. Not to sponsor a game for human beings, but actually play the game, itself. To manipulate virtual controls in order to successfully maneuver through a game made for human play.

There is at least one computer game made specifically for the computer itself to play, although it is really more of a joke. And there are ways to get the machine to play through the game itself and display the results. Some action games that have an ability to record demos, in fact, work by "playing" the game. When the user plays, the game software records the sequences of control inputs, in the order and timing in which they are made, and stores them in a file. When the demo is played back, the opponents and level structure are handled as if it were a real game, and the program substitutes the recorded control stream for a player.

One may object to this, saying that this is not really playing, but it is, from the computer's standpoint. If the game is the same every time, if there is no randomness, then the process of a human playing it is actually the process of discovering the essential control inputs needed to win, and once that sequence is discovered one need only feed that sequence into the world simulation, like stimulating a brain in a jar, to cause the computer to play itself.

But the process of discovering that sequence, that is really where the game lies, isn't it? Getting a computer to play back a recorded set of inputs is easy, but designing a program to examine what a human being would see, then send the game process the discovered control stimuli to play with no prior knowledge of the game world, that is much harder. In the roguelike genre of computer games, in which all dungeons are created randomly each time and even the identities of the items shift from game to game, it is much harder to create a computer program that can play well. So hard as to be impossible, one might think.

It is so impossible, it has been done twice.

Continue reading "@ Play: A Coward Dies A Thousand Deaths, My Computer, Several Billion " »

Posted by John Harris at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

/dev/null's annual Nethack tournament is, as I type this, winding its way towards concluding another successful year. While there have not been a good many surprises this time out (Christian "marvin" Bressler has already won Best of 13 again), there has been a fairly substantial surprise in the game itself.

One of the things that Nethack makes possible, and /dev/null takes advantage of in their contests, is for game administrators to provide customized games for their players. The level description files that Nethack uses to generate levels are separate from the game executable, and can be compiled separately from the main game without even invalidating old saves. The source code itself is also open, freely available on nethack.org, which over the years has made possible Nethack's handful of variants, including Slash'EM. One might think that a game in which all its secrets are laid bare in the source code would provide no surprises for a player, and it is true that the source itself is the primary Nethack spoiler, but since the source is not always easy to read, and much of the game is randomly generated anyway, this doesn't tend to ruin the game. (In fact, if anything, only spoiled players ever seem to win at Nethack....)

So what /dev/null has done is implement a "challenge," a patch to the game that is added each year to the source of their version of the game to mix the game up for long-time players. (There is an option to play without it as well.) This was begun last year, with an appropriately far-reaching mood set by asking players to go over to popular webgame Kingdom of Loathing, which includes a special theme area as an homage to Nethack, and complete a quest there. This year's challenge is entirely in-game, adding new monsters and items and a special procedure to be undergone concerning them.

[Click through for more.]

Continue reading "@ Play: Hack Hacks" »

Posted by John Harris at 1:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

This time out we are going to cover the state of the roguelike genre today, covering as many of the most notable games as we can at one time. I'm restricting this column to a fairly conservative definition of roguelike (I'm not even going to touch upon Mysterious Dungeon here), so surely, this won't take too long. How many can there be?

There are the "big three" games, the ones with their own Usenet groups that still have decent traffic, which are Nethack, Angband and ADOM, and their variants. Then there are up-and-comers Dungeon Crawl and Dwarf Fortress, the older games Larn and Omega, and the lost roguelikes that are finally beginning to emerge from obscurity. These are by no means all of the roguelike games there are to see, but this does include many of the more interesting ones.

There's a lot of ground to cover so let's get started!

Continue reading "@ Play: An View of the Field" »

Posted by John Harris at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

The venerable roguelike Nethack, the most popular of them all and possibly the deepest computer game ever made, is filled with a great many ways to die.

A popular spoiler some time ago was a listing of many of those ways, more than sixty of them, in which the game can end.

When a player in Nethack dies, the game prints an ASCII tombstone for him embossed with character name, cash on hand at game end, and the cause of death. This information also goes into the score list to be ranked against other players. One of the joys of playing Nethack on a multi-user system, in fact, is noting some of the unusual deaths experienced by other players and thinking to yourself at least it wasn't me that time.

[Click through for more.]

Continue reading "@ Play: Thou Art Early, But We'll Admit Thee" »

Posted by John Harris at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

As a special treat to our readers, this column contains.... screenshots!

Out in the distant reaches of interstellar space lies the appropriately-named planet of Funkotron, a world somewhat allied with the philosophy of George Clinton. One day a teenage Funkotronian, the red, three-legged, besneakered, cap-and-medallion-wearing ToeJam, out on a space jaunt in his Righteous Rapmaster Rocketship, allowed his friend Earl to drive it through the asteroid belt of a certain backwater solar system.

Earl wasn't a very good driver. They crashed.

When everything came to rest they found their ship smashed into ten pieces, scattered throughout 25 regions of the most unfunky planet in the galaxy, with a wide array of alien-hating natives out for their hides. The name of the planet: Earth.

[Click through for the full article.]

Continue reading "@ Play: ToeJam & Earl, The Roguelike That's Not An RPG" »

Posted by John Harris at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

The Fushigi no Dungeon games, the name translating to “Mysterious Dungeon,” are perhaps the greatest commercial success that roguelike games have found in the world. A Japanese series that began as a spin-off of Dragon Quest IV (that’s the one with Torneko, a.k.a. Taloon, the Merchant) the series soon grew past its licensed origins by introducing the character of Shiren the Wanderer, a very Japanese man living in a very Japanese world, and his talking weasel Kappa. Shiren’s fate is to forever wander forward through dungeon levels (and strangely maze-like fields, forests and swamps too), unable to travel backwards on his quest – just like Rogue, once a level is left it can never be returned to on the character’s current life.

Although Shiren is popular in Japan, and the Shiren Fushigi no Dungeon games seem to be the most like-rogue of the bunch, the series (and by association its developer Chun Soft) has been notoriously slutty about the licensed properties it’s tried to mold into rogue-likeness. In addition to DQ4, there have been Chocobo FnD games, a later game featuring Yangus from DQ8, and another with characters from Tower of Druaga.

Continue reading "@ Play: Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue & Red Rescue Team" »

Posted by John Harris at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (39)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

One of the best ways to learn about Nethack is from reading YAAPs ("Yet Another Ascension Posts"), descriptions of victorious games on the newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.nethack.

It may be an unusual impulse to write up a detailed report of a computer game, roguelike or not. It may be even more unusual to be interested in reading it, but it cannot be denied that they are fascinating. It is the same impulse, I believe, that causes people to want to watch speed runs. Most of them are typical wins (especially the first time someone prevails in this game infamous for its difficulty), but some are of difficult challenge, or "conduct" games. Some, such as the tale of Nightshade below, are written in the style of an actual story, with the player's character usually the protagonist.

In this first installment of Giant Eel Stories, we'll be looking at two classic victory posts of the past. Since many of you are probably not Nethack fanatics, I'll supply much of the necessary information needed to understand them, and understand why they're cool, including a brief glossary at the end of this article. All links are to the original post on Google Groups. Later Giant Eel stories may not necessarily be concerned with Nethack: these are, though.

[Click through for the full post!]

Continue reading "@ Play: Giant Eel Stories, Volume 1" »

Posted by John Harris at 1:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

I apologize for the fairly dry reading last time, but now hopefully now you'll all able to actually play these things, should you at some point develop the urge to try them. So now that we've gotten some of the basics out of the way, allow me to say a few words on behalf of the second roguelike game ever made: Rogue itself.

I say it's the second, yes. The first one wasn't a computer game at all. It was the random dungeon rules published as Appendix A in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide, way back in the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Ultimately, the play experience that roguelikes seek to duplicate is that of a hack-and-slash roleplaying game, like those improvised sessions of D&D, and most of them are steeped in it. Hack-and-slash has come under a lot of criticism as lacking in story and character development, but a well-designed game of the type brings much more to the table than just the killing of monsters. (Click through for more.)

Continue reading "@ Play: Rogue and its Inspiration" »

Posted by John Harris at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

This week, we are going to talk about something very basic, yet of vital importance to getting involved with these games -- hopefully including some of you. Whenever I've attempted to explain them, by far the most frequent barrier I've encountered in transferring my own enthusiasm to other people is not, as one may think, the graphics, the difficulty, or permanent death. Almost every time, the primary reason initiates find to categorize roguelikes as Other-People-Things is the control scheme.

(By the way, if you'd like to play along at home, I suggest beginning with one of the modern ports of Rogue. Rogue Clone IV and the Roguelike Restoration Project's conversion of Rogue 5.4 are among the foremost DOS/Windows versions. Debian Linux users can get it from the package bsdgames-nonfree. ClassicRogue is a port with a couple of extra features and both Windows and Linux binaries. You can also get Rogue for Java, the Sega Dreamcast, Game Boy Advance, and the Infocom zMachine!)

As noted last time, roguelike games haven't changed much in their presentation since the days of playing on dumb terminals in college computer labs. There were no mice or joysticks on those systems. Many of 'em didn't have a numeric keypad, and some had no cursor keys.

What they did have, I'm sorry to say, was vi.

[Click through to read the full '@ Play' column!]

Continue reading "@ Play: What the hell does Q do again?" »

Posted by John Harris at 5:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre..]

Before we kick off this column on the niche-but-awesome genre of roguelike games, it should help to define what is meant by that term.

Roguelikes are dungeon-exploration computer games, patterned after their classic namesake Rogue, and set in a randomly-generated world. They are known for their tremendous difficulty, unpredictability, permanent character death, and the large number of methods they use to inflict that death. They were most popular in college computer labs in the 80s, and while they never achieved widespread success, the genre nevertheless persists to this day, and its dedicated cadre of devotees will argue night and day that these are the greatest computer games ever made.

(Click through to read the full, inaugural column from Mr. Harris!)

Continue reading "@ Play: An Introduction To Some Rogue-s" »

Posted by John Harris at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)