['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he continues a length series on roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup by examining its intriguing - but complex - skill-based gameplay system.]

In Part 1 of this article series, we examined the experience and skill advancement system of that rising star of roguelikedom, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s a mixture of a straight-forward level gaining mechanism and a practice system that balances out the problems with characters doing something over and over just to gain skill by requiring he kill monsters to provide the fuel for advancement.

Like how Nethack, in many ways, is best experienced playing via telnet, with a community score list to place on and player ghosts to encounter, so is Crawl (although it tends to make Crawl games harder rather than easier, due to ghosts being so much more dangerous there). The two primary places you can play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup online is at crawl.akrasiac.org for the current stable version and crawl.develz.com for the current development version. Both versions are ASCII only, and Windows users will probably have to install PuTTY. Helpful instructions can be found on the akrasaic site.

(Warning: This is a full examination of all of Crawl's many skills. This article is quite lengthy!)

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza Part 2: What's With All These Skills, Anyway?" »

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

This is the beginning of a sequence of articles on the popular roguelike game Dungeon Crawl. We've covered it once before, but considering the game's importance and continued development we have not discussed it nearly as much as it deserves. Hopefully this and the next few articles will go some way towards remedying this tragic situation!

Of the five major roguelikes (Rogue, Nethack, Angband, ADOM and Dungeon Crawl), Crawl is both the most recent addition the list and the one undergoing, by far, the most intensive development. A favorite of the Goons over at Something Awful, it possesses a very strong design which is difficult to exploit, and provides tradeoffs and drawbacks for most important actions. In this it sticks closely to Rogue, and other than the original Hack it is probably the popular roguelike that best recognizes its forefather's great strengths.

These articles are written based on the as-of-this-writing most current stable version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, 0.5.2. Much of the information herein was gleaned through perusal of the Dungeon Crawl Wiki at http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=CrawlWiki, and the spoilers found at http://www.normalesup.org/~grasland/Crawl/. It should be noted that a new version is under development as v0.6.0, and that a development build of this version is available for download.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza Part 1, Skills and Advancement" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - a look at definiting Roguelikes through 'The Berlin Interpretation'.]

Last time when covering Dungeon Hack, I noted that it doesn’t quite fit up to all of the most common definition of a roguelike. While it has random dungeons, hack-and-slash gameplay, and even items that must be identified, it is a first-person game.

And not even an Ultima Underworld kind of first-personness, but the same kind of discrete, right-angled rotation, corridor-centered perspective and step-based movement used in the Wizardry games, which were many years old by that point. And it was a real-time game, too!

For me, the game is obviously rougelike enough to be covered here, since we’re more concerned with what it is that makes roguelikes fun to play than adherance to a laundry list of similarities. But for those who are interested in such classification, we have the Berlin Interpretation.

Arrived at last year at the International Roguelike Development Conference, starting from a document over at Temple of the Roguelike, the Berlin Interpretation is a set of feature descriptions that fairly well encapsulates what a lot of people consider when they think of roguelikes. It covers both graphical and gameplay elements, and has the added advantage of not being posed as a mere checklist. They recognize that some games that are probably roguelike do not meet the exact description presented by the list, and so it is divided into High and Low value factors.

We’re going to take the game through several unusual cases we’ve covered in the past: ToeJam & Earl, Shiren the Wanderer (SNES version) and Dungeon Hack. We’ll also compare Nethack, Dungeon Crawl and Diablo to the list as controls. Let’s have a look!

The original text of the Berlin Interpretation can be found at RogueBasin.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: The Berlin Interpretation" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time around - a relatively unknown official D&D license in the genre is explored in-depth.]

Roguelike games have been around for a good while, and from the very start many of them have cribbed system rules out of the Dungeons & Dragons books. Many of Rogue's items (especially equipment) come from that game, and Nethack goes so far as to retain the idea that armor class counts down, possibly the last game still in development to retain this convention; D&D dropped that back in its third edition.

But there is one roguelike, or close to it, that adheres to the Dungeons & Dragons rules out of necessity, because it is actually an official Second Edition AD&D computer game product! Dungeon Hack was created in 1993 by Dreamforge Intertainment, a company that developed several other official D&D games for TSR back in the days when SSI still held the license.

I mentioned way back in some of the earliest columns that Rogue's inspiration was likely the hack-and-slash play of old-school D&D mixed with the thinking (if not the actual geomorphs) behind the random dungeon generation tables in the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide.

Perhaps partly due to these roots, Dungeon Hack is actually a fairly good game. It's not nearly as complex as Nethack, but that fact works in the game's favor as much as argue against it. However, some superficial aspects of the game may cause one to conclude that it does not deserve to be called by the term "roguelike."

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Dreamforge's Dungeon Hack" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time -- a look at the art of item design in Roguelikes.]

It has been a little while.... This column is an in-depth examination of some of the most popular items within the two most-common categories: potions and scrolls, both of which we might term "one use" items for the fact that utilizing them consumes them.

Exploring a monster-filled dungeon is not what we might consider a healthy activity. If the game were just about looking around, mapping territory, and killing monsters until the player's inevitable demise, the game might be interesting in an simplistic kind of way, but it wouldn't have that roguelike spark. No, the player must get something out of the exploration. That something is treasure.

Treasure is the carrot held in front of the player's face, leading him on into ever-more dangerous situations. The majority of treasure in most roguelikes is found laying around the dungeon. Some of the treasure is food, and the need to find more is what prevents the player from building levels indefinitely on the easier levels, but the good stuff is what pushes him downward. Unlike the trend in most RPGs these days, equipment is often a larger component of player power than experience level in roguelikes, and it is randomly generated.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Item Design, Part 1: Potions and Scrolls" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This month, impressions of the Japan-only Mystery Dungeon game Fushigi no Dungeon: Furai no Shiren Gaiden: Jokenji Asuka Kenzan!]

There are quite a few Mystery Dungeon games, but they can generally be divided into two categories, being the licensed ones, and the unlicensed ones. While there are more licensed games, and in fact the first game in the series starred Torneko/Taloon from Dragon Quest IV, the more interesting ones from a roguelike enthusiast's perspective are the unlicensed games, which for whatever reason tend to have more challenging gameplay, harder consequences for losing, and are just more fun in all ways.

The unlicensed Mystery Dungeon games are also called the Shiren games, after the starring character, a wanderer in a straw hat with a talking weasel named Kappa and a distinctive striped cape.

Off the top of my head, and I am open to correction on this,I believe there to be nine games in this series: one for the Super Famicom, two for the Gameboy, one starring a younger Shiren and Kappa for the N64 (which I like to call Jim Henson's Dungeon Babies), one for the Sega Dreamcast, one for Windows, one for the Wii, and two DS remakes, of the SNES and first Game Boy games.

Of them all, only one has been officially released in the U.S., the first DS remake. Atlus, I would think in order to make up for the lackluster Izuna games, plans on releasing the Wii version. Time will tell if they do their usual sterling localization job or decide the game needs "fixing" in some way.

But this is off the subject, which is the Dreamcast game. This is essentially a roguelike with 3D models for all the monsters. And some of the artwork is among the best seen in the series. Of course, our focus is more on the gameplay than the visuals, so I leave it to the screenshots (taken off an actual television!) to show off the look of the game. It actually doesn't star Shiren at all, but a young woman named Asuka. Despite being unable to read Japanese I've been playing this game for a couple of days, with the aid of the handful of item translation FAQs available on GameFAQs:

Continue reading "Column: @Play: A Date With Asuka" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This month -- 100 Rogues is a promising commercial roguelike for the iPhone with an abundance of whimsical personality and unique gameplay, due for release in a couple of months. In this Q&A, I ask the game's lead designer Keith Burgun about the game and its inspirations.]

JH: First off, tell us about yourself, your company and your team.

KB: I'm Keith Burgun, lead designer at Dinofarm Games. We're a four man team consisting of myself, Jonathan Bryan (producer, programmer), Blake Reynolds (artist) and Wesley Paugh (programmer). Our publisher, Fusion Reactions, and its office are in Rochester, NY. Blake and I both live in Westchester however, so we end up making many long trips.

JH: Your project is called 100 Rogues (the Facebook page has a gameplay video, for those interested in seeing more). Would you like to tell us generally about the setting of your game?

KB: The setting is a mysterious, scary, yet silly dungeon. The mood or voice of the game can be best explained as "fantasy by guys who don't know fantasy, and who are pretty strange". I get a lot of inspiration from teaching children's art classes - some of the stuff kids come up with is just so outrageous and hilarious, and I would love to see a game with that kind of spirit. So we have a basic fantasy dungeon setting, with your standard fare: skeletons, ghosts, rats and the like.

But we also have a cowboy-ish looking Bandit, a flying baby with bat wings, and quite a few other oddities like that. Also, it's a class-based game, and we've been working hard to make sure that the classes all have not only their own style of play, but also a personality. Not enough personality in games these days, if you ask me.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Q&A with Keith Burgun of iPhone Roguelike "100 Rogues"" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - a discussion of using Python to make Roguelike games.]

So let's talk a bit about Roguelike development languages.

Traditionally, the One True Roguelike Language has been C. All of the current "major roguelikes," Nethack, Angband, ADOM and Dungeon Crawl, are either written in it or in C++. (Nethack makes use of bison and lex, and Angband used to use Lua for scripting.)

The genre's origins on Unix systems, its ties with the curses console library, its reliance on a console in general, and the fact that when the genre got started C was basically it as far as serious programming languages go, all these things combined to identify the genre somewhat strongly with C.

This is not as much the case now. As this year's 7DRL competition demonstrated, new roguelikes are now written in all kinds of languages, ranging from Java to MOS6510 assembly. A few were even written in Python, a language that has historically been regarded as more of a scripting language. I mean, scoff scoff, what business does a "real game" have being written in something like Python?

Continue reading "Column: @Play: The Python Strikes! You Are Being Squeezed!" »

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

We've discussed the information-heavy balance of the game Nethack before. How, once the player learns enough about the nature of the game world, all of the difficulty turns out to be front-loaded, before the player has had the chance to build up experience levels and equipment.

Recently, a couple of variants have arisen in order to remedy this perceived problem. Two years ago was the release of Derek Ray's Sporkhack, and only this past month saw the release of another, UnNethack, created by Patric Mueller.

Nethack's mysterious Dev Team is presumably aware of the problem, and though it is known that they're still around, updating bugs and answering email, and thus we assume are still working on the game, it has been a very long time since the last version. It has been over five years since the release of Nethack 3.4.3, the latest version of the game.

A rising current of opinion on rec.games.roguelike.nethack is that the Dev Team has abandoned the game. Even if they haven't, a few of the more irksome characteristics have survived for multiple versions, long enough that it begins to look like the Dev Team is perfectly happy leaving them in.

Both are games that, to the many characters who die in the earliest regions of the dungeon, seem almost unchanged from the original game. While not any unfriendlier to a new player than vanilla Nethack, most of the changes in these games are aimed at the experienced hacker. Unlike uber-variant Slash'EM, neither seems to be interested in radical reinvention of the game.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Introducing Sporkhack and UnNethack" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - an analysis of an intriguing mid-period console Roguelike, Sega's Fatal Labyrinth.]

Torneko no Daibōken: Fushigi no Dungeon was released in 1993, and kicked off the popular (in Japan) Mystery Dungeon series of console and portable graphical roguelikes. Provided you don't count the Diablo games, they are by far the most popular commercial roguelikes yet made. And judging just from the quality of gameplay, the second game in that series, Shiren the Wanderer, should probably be numbered among the best roguelikes of all, commercial or not.

How did roguelikes become (to some degree) popular over in Japan while they remain a niche in the U.S., land of their birth? Their roots clutch deep in the soil of old-school Dungeons & Dragons, more so than Dragon Quest, presence of Torneko (a.k.a. Taloon) and a bunch of classic monsters notwithstanding. Now D&D did become popular in Japan, so I hear, but it seems to have been even more a faddish thing there. While a number of classic D&D-derived CRPGs (especially Wizardry) continue to sell in Japan, you don't hear much about the prevalence of D&D itself there any more.

Anyway, some time after Rogue, the original roguelike, was first distributed, someone ported it to Japanese. I know next to nothing about this version of Rogue. It seems to be the lineage traced by the PS2 roguelike "Rogue Hearts Dungeon," billed as a sequel to the orignal game although it seems unlikely they obtained the permission of Toy, Wichmann and Arnold to make it.

That home computer version of Rogue may be the original exposure of Japanese popular culture to the genre, and Mystery Dungeon sparked the drive of popularity and a wave of imitators, each adhering to the concept with varying degrees of fidelity: Azure Dreams, Dragon Quest Monsters, Monstania, Estopolis II/Lufia II, Climax Landers/Time Stalkers, and many others besides, they all owe some debt to these games. But what happened between those two games, Rogue and Mystery Dungeon? Was there nothing at all between them?

It turns out, no. The Sega Genesis roguelike Fatal Labyrinth was first released in 1990, two or three years before the first Mystery Dungeon game was published, and interestingly, unlike that series, it did see release in the United States.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Fatal Labyrinth, or, "LOOK! A PIT!"" »

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

Finally, here we are, at the end of our treatment of the 2009 7DRL competition. It's been a month since the last installment! If it seems like I've been procrastinating here... well, that's probably a fair observation. I hesitate to say that any of the winning games were unsuccessful.

7DRL places greatest importance on development speed; so long as the game compiles and is playable, even if only in a technical sense, it's counted as a success. I consider this to be perfectly valid. Congratulations are due to all winners. Even the failed attempts, by my lights, are all honorable failures.

But the purpose of these columns is not just celebration, but reporting on their worth as games, regardless of the strictures of the challenge. Some of the games, including one covered this time, Jacob's Matrix, turned out amazingly well. They'd be worth playing, as-is, even if it had taken the developers years to write them. That is the magic of these kinds of forced-creation challenges; sometimes they produce wonders.

Sometimes. Some of the others, well, are more interesting as programming feats than as games. It's not to say they're not salvageable, but they don't seem quite done yet.

The games covered this time out are Truegod, Escape From Lab 42, dL1, Fist of the Rogue Warrior, Pink Ninja, Jacob's Matrix, Nyctos and Whispers in the Void.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part Three" »

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

Perhaps no genre of computer game has as as close a tie to the open source community as the roguelikes. Eric S. Raymond, noted open source booster, both wrote the guidebook to an earlier version of Nethack and wrote the oft-read argument for open software, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," in which Nethack is mentioned.

Angband's source is so open that it's become one of the most-permuted computer games of all time. Linley's Dungeon Crawl picked up new life when the Stone Soup guys started developing their variant, which is now recognized as pretty much the premier version of the game. And all of the 7DRLs are open source.

An interested observer could be forgiven for assuming all roguelikes must be open, but they aren't. None of the Japanese commercial roguelikes are. The source code of one of the big ones, ADOM, remains closed.

(This fact means the game is falling out of prominence now since all changes must be approved by the game's creator, Thomas Biskup, who has moved on to other things. But it also means it's the most mysterious of the major games.)

But the first closed-source roguelike is the first of all of them.

Continue reading "Column: @Play Special: The Rights to Rogue" »

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

While writing another article, I'm sorry to say I got sidetracked off of completing the overview of the 7DRL games this time out, which unfortunately will have to wait another couple of weeks. My apologizes to you, and the remaining game authors.

In the meantime, please accept this hopelessly spoiler-tastic strategy guide for Nethack. The object here is to aid players who have played the game somewhat but always thought that winning was out of their league. It doesn't cover everything in the game, far from it, but with some practice it should get people up to the endgame.

Some time in the future I hope to put up more of these roguelike strategy guides. I hope I don't have to say this, but everything that follows the jump is spoilers of an even greater variety than the usual ones presented here. It's been a while since we've had a big Nethack column, so I hope this keeps everyone interested. It's really long.

Much of the information here has been checked against (and sometimes cases, gleaned from) the Nethack Wiki.

Continue reading "Column: @Play: How To Win At Nethack" »

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

Pixel Journeys is taking a break this month while I continue my reviews of all 25 of this year's in-challenge 7DRL winners - here's the first part.

I should mention, before we resume, that I was preceded in this by the guys at Cymon's Games. If I had known that they had done this when I started I probably wouldn't have bothered, heh. I agree with most of what they say, and where our opinions differ I at least can see why they differ. Each of my own 7DRL reviews contains a link to the page on their site so you can quickly see their take on the game. And to the folks at Cymon's Games, please allow me just to quickly say: good work.

This column's a week late, so let me waste no further time in getting to the games. This time, we look at Cypress Tree Manor, Domination, Backwards Gravity, The Favored, Persist, TetRLs, Expedition, and SpiritsRL.

Continue reading "Column: @Play: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part Two" »

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

Every year, the halls of the Usenet group rec.games.roguelike.development play host to a strange event.

They begin, each of the participants of this bizarre rite, to write roguelike games, in whatever language they choose and for whatever platform. 168 hours later, one week of development time, they call an end to their efforts and post it to the group. The only requirement is that, by the end of that time, the game be playable by some basic definition of the term. Some continue to work on it beyond the week, and some pick a different week, but by the rules of the challenge they must have something playable to show for their efforts by the end of the seventh day.

The participants of NaNoWriMo ("National Novel Writing Month") have long known that, when a person is forced to create something within a limited period of time, sometimes amazing things happen. And likewise, the participants in the 7DRL, or "7-Day Rogue Like" challenge, sometimes look at their monitors at the end of the development period and find that they've created something unique and awesome.

According to the Roguebasin report page, around 45 people participated in the challenge this year during the main challenge period, and 25 were successful.

Over the next three columns, we will take a look, as far as we are able, at all 25 of these games. In this column we examine nine games: DungeonMinder, Epic! Monster Quest: Hyper, Underbooks, Excitable Digger, Decimation, DDRogue, Fortress of the Goblin King, Fruits of the Forest and chickhack.

Continue reading "Column: @Play: 2009 7DRL Winners, Part One" »

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

Once again with the aid of the work of the Roguelike Restoration Project (link, sometimes unstable), let us return to the early days, when Rogue was the big thing in campus Unix labs and its several imitators became the first roguelike games. This is the second article on the RRP. The first covered the game of Super-Rogue.

Two games in particular concern us this time. Advanced Rogue was developed from 1984 to 1986 by Michael Morgan and Ken Dalka. It was a considerable expansion of the original game, with different monsters, multiple artifacts, trading posts and other ways to buy things, and a lot of other new features.

It introduced many features that Hack and Nethack would later pick up and run with, such as a three-level curse/bless system, a basic form of shops-as-rooms, charmable enemies and many kinds of enemies. This is also the game that introduced items of "miscellaneous magic," which brought to the game many different things that were explicated in the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons DM's guide. Those items include gauntlets, boots, chimes, bracers, and other objects, and probably form the inspiration for Hack's many equipment types and tools.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play - 'XRogue Has Not Yet Ceased To Be'" »

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

"Probably the easiest way to describe Spelunky is that it's (kind of) like La Mulana meets Nethack - every time you play the levels, items, monsters, and so forth, are all procedurally-generated. [...] My goal was to create a fast-paced platform game that had the kind of tension, re-playability, and variety of a roguelike. In roguelikes, the gameplay tells the story, and I wanted to give Spelunky that type of a feeling... but make the player rely on their reflexes rather than their brain (or knowledge of what 50 billion command keys do!). If there's a best of both worlds, that's what I was trying to go for."
-- Derek Yu, introducing Spelunky on TIGSource Forums.

Spelunky has been talked about on a fairly substantial number of blogs in the short month of its public existence. Considering that its aim is to bring some of the unique characteristics of the roguelike games into a different genre, I figured it was fair game for examination here. The result is quite a clever little game, highly addictive and quick to play. Death is incredibly frequent, but that should come as no hindrance to us, right?

Right?

[Note: This is @Play's fiftieth column. At the end is an overview of topics already covered and a list of links to them.]

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: 'Spelunk, Spelunk, Spelunk'" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, a look at the roguelike Incursion with a side trip into Vancian Magic.]

This column has been requested in comments several times now. While not one of the better-known in its genre, the freeware roguelike Incursion seems to have a fairly rabid community, and examination shows it to have some rather addictive play, a good attention to detail, and one of the most "realistic" dungeons yet seen in the genre..

(To clarify something I see as important.... In this column I refer to the game as "Incursion," because it seems to me to be the best thing to call it. It is projected, however, that this game is actually a prototype for an even-more-ambitious roguelike, which will be called "Incursion: Return of the Forsaken.")

For starters, Incursion is the only roguelike of which I'm aware which follows D&D 3rd Edition rules. Well technically that's "Open Gaming License" rules, the format by which Wizards of the Coast, custodians of the D&D brand, made them available for others to build their own products off of.

Of course, most roguelike games have always been based off of Dungeons & Dragons, though usually a much simpler, older version and not "officially." 3rd ed. D&D does have its interesting aspects that lend interest to such a game, and there is nothing in the third edition rules that prevents it from being used in an old-school, roguelike dungeon-crawling context.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Cause For Incursion" »

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

I've said this about first-person shooters before, but in the interest of fairness, I admit it's completely appropriate to say it of roguelikes too: from one quite valid point-of-view, they're all the same game.

Of course when you look at the games up close this assertion falls apart. This perspective completely discounts Crawl's razor-sharp play balance, ADOM's surprising expanse, Angband's epic struggle against the odds, and Nethack's amazingly complex, interlocking gameplay features. But the core of what makes roguelike games was invented back in Rogue, and a big part of that is the item system practically all the games share.

Many of these items are randomly scrambled when a game begins. If the player saves his game (thus ending his session) and loads it back in later (which erases the save), items will retain their identities. Purple potions will still do whatever they did before the save. But if a new game is started, it will have re-randomized items, and if the player dies, all the item identities figured out are completely lost.

Here is an overview of the primary item categories, with an eye towards a closer examination of each in the future. (Afterwards, we'll have a brief recap of the winners of the 2008 devnull Nethack tournament.)

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Objects of Collection" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. Following a profile of the devnull Nethack competition, here's an interview with the competition organizers.]

November 1 marks the beginning of the tenth-annual devnull Nethack tournament. A couple of days ago we provided an overview and took a look at the trophy structure. I asked a few questions of the co-creator and primary maintainer of the tournament. Here are his answers. Thanks to the Bandy brothers for taking time away from the tournament preparations to give us the story!

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Robin Bandy, I'm 37 years old and married; my wife has played NetHack, but is not exactly excited about how much of my time the Tournament takes each year though she's been extremely patient about it. I grew up on a ranch in southwest Colorado, but I've lived in the hills in east Oakland, California, since '97.

Though my college degrees are in anthropology and history, I've been a professional geek since '94 and have been freelance since '97; most of my work these days is as a consultant running the server farm that runs 1up.com, gamevideos.com and mycheats.com for Ziff Davis Media.

My other main interest after my wife and my geekery is making hard apple cider (and a variety of other fruit wines as well as a small amount of beer); we're fortunate to live in a part of Oakland that was an orchard 100 years ago, so most of our neighborhood has semi-wild apple trees which are great for ciders. Cider bottling time is usually about halfway through the Tournament, which tends to liven things up a bit. ;-)

His brother, who runs another tournament server and has been involved with the running since the beginning, adds:

My name is Matt Bandy. I am Robin's older brother. I have a PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley and am an archaeologist who works in Peru, Bolivia, and the United States. I live in Boulder, Colorado. I had the idea for the tournament many years ago and co-wrote the code (with Robin) for the first few years. Robin has since taken the over maintanance and development of the tournament and it really is his baby and it has been for at least five years now.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Ten Years of the devnull Nethack Tournament, Part 2" »

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['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he presents a Halloween special in honor of devnull's Nethack tournament, which begins at midnight!]

The most impressive thing about devnull's Nethack tournament is its longevity. This is the tenth consecutive year it's been run. It's old enough that it's spanned multiple Nethack versions. It's been said that it could be the oldest-running computer gaming tournament in existence. It's a difficult claim to prove, but it may will be true.

Despite the great obstacles to making roguelikes work as multiplayer games they have long had a substantial online presence, and a big part of this is the relative ease in setting up terminal-based, ASCII games for playing over the internet via telnet, SSH, or some other form of remote console.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Ten Years Of The devnull Nethack Tournament, Part 1" »

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

It's incorrect to think that the Mystery Dungeon games are the first exposure to Japan of roguelike gameplay. It wouldn't have made sense for Compile Heart to release Rogue Hearts Dungeon (a remake and expansion of Rogue itself) in Japan if (a few) people hadn't been familiar with the original game. The Mystery Dungeon games do appear to be Japan's primary exposure to the genre, however, and have been a surprising influence.

Besides the many many games ChunSoft's made in the series, one occasionally finds other games that seek to duplicate its successes (and failures, too). The Izuna games are an example of this. And while it's hard to be sure, it's possible that the Super Famicom game Monstania is another. This is a look at that game, or more accurately a look at the English version, produced by famed translation group Aeon Genesis.

Monstania is an anime-inspired, character-centered soft of game, along the lines of Grandia but a bit less developed. The story is nothing to really write home about, but no matter. We're interested solely on its essentially-roguelike tactical gameplay, so I won't waste another word on it.

They discarded just about everything random about Rogue other than to-hit rolls. It's all painfully static: areas are designed instead of random, all monster encounters are set, there is no exploration, there's no money or shops, and there's very little loot-finding within an area. The characters don't even earn experience points. Instead, they just gain a level at the end of every area.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play - 'Much About Monstania'" »

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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.]

A month ago I was roaming the Dealer's Room aisles at Dragon*Con, the foremost convention for those who can't make it to PAX. At that particular moment, I was looking at the wares of the dice guys: some store who rents one side of an entire aisle side and fills it with all, yes all, kinds of dice. d100s, studded like golf balls, alignment and class choosers, corridor determinants with different dungeon hallways on each of 12 sides, and others still. They even made customs with a special dice burning machine.

For someone with an greater-than-usual interest in randomness and how it relates to gaming, it was awesome. But right across the hallway was something better. I nearly missed it, and probably would have if it hadn't been for the eyes of fellow 'Con-goer Matt Chew, who said aloud while I gawked at the dice: "Huh, roguelike?"

In these situations, I tend to keep my expectations low. I can hold forth on a dozen topics that no one will ever expect me to hold-forth-upon anywhere other than the internet. And Dragon*Con, despite being one of the largest fan conventions in the United States, has a relative dearth of game-related booths due to being scheduled for the same weekend as PAX. So hearing someone bring up roguelikes unprompted is a unique experience for me, and it took a few seconds before I turned around to see what it was.

It was the booth of Nathan Jerpe beneath a banner reading "Roguelike Fiction," selling deluxe packages of his game Legerdemain. He had a table with a laptop set up demonstrating the game, with its output directed at a projector to show it off. And despite the fact that the game, written in Java emulating a console, is available for free from the game's website, he was selling packages containing a CD, a map and a hintbook for $20 a pop. The packages were contained within Ziploc bags in such a way that brought fond memories to this player who barely remembers the days when the first commercial CRPGs were sold in similar plastic bags containing cassette tapes and xerox'd instructions.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Phenomedom, Da Dee, Da-Dee-Dee" »

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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.]

Here's a look at a roguelike game that some of you might not quite be familiar with. The graphics are very well-done, at least.

It's got an isometric view, fairly detailed character and monster art, and decorated room walls and floors. Looked at with unfocused eyes, it even begins to resemble Diablo. So what game might this be?

Of course, it's Nethack.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Eye of the Vulture" »

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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.]

Here's a bit of hopefully-useful insight into a topic that every roguelike designer has to cover eventually: how to simulate variable rates of movement on the game's essentially integral, Cartesian grid.

One of the most distinctive aspects of a roguelike game is time-equivalency of actions. Moving a step, picking up an item, dropping an item, hitting an opponent, drinking a potion, reading a scroll, wielding a weapon, putting on or removing armor or a ring, and zapping with a wand: all of these things take the same amount of time, that is to say, one turn.

This is a subtly powerful concept. If the player swings at an adjacent monster, it uses up the player's turn so the enemy can get a hit in. If he's adjacent to an armor-degrader, taking off his armor to protect it still takes a turn in which the monster can get a swing in first. If he's wielding a weapon ill-suited to a foe, like a bow when fighting an adjacent monster, it'll take him a turn to change it, again giving the monster a free opportunity to hit.

And significantly, so long as a player and monster are the same speed and adjacent to each other, the monster is impossible to shake. The player must use some special item or ability to get away, because no matter what direction he steps, the monster will be able to match it. Since the player can't get away, once a same-speed monster gets adjacent melee combat will, barring special effects on either side, always be tit-for-tat, attack-trading affairs. The player can run in order to pass time, hopefully regenerating hit points, but that gives other monsters the chance to join in pursuit.

All the actions that change the player's state consume a turn. There are a few commands, particularly Inventory, that never take up a move. It should be noted that this is not realistic. A real person rummaging through his pack for a particular item will probably spend more time unslinging it, setting it down, opening the flap, and getting out the needed item, than it would take him to walk across one space's worth of dungeon floor. Giving him this action for free is a concession to playability. If there were a game penalty for looking to see what you're carrying, then it would be advantageous to keep notes on paper of your inventory instead of relying on the command, and a game that pedantic would probably scare away even the most devoted of @-signs.

But concerning those actions that consume time, there are two major types of speed systems for handling them in roguelike games: player-centered, and world-centered.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Modeling Motion on a Dungeon Grid" »

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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.]

Usually, when I talk about roguelike games here, it's in the context of being a kind of old-school Dungeons & Dragons simulator. This is an awesome thing all to itself, for reasons covered previously. Yet there are other attributes of the games that differ from D&D, or indeed any other RPG, either pen-and-paper or computer.

One of the most entertaining of these, if one has followed the evolution of the genre far enough, turns out to be a direct result of one of roguelike gaming's major limitations. While some have moved on to using simple graphics to represent the dungeon and its inhabitants, most roguelikes still at least have the option of using ASCII characters to represent the playing field. And the method of representation is one of the aspects of the genre that ties it back to Rogue: line-drawing characters for walls, an at-sign for the player, and letters for the monsters.

Letters for the monsters. Oh, the troubles that spring from this simple idea.

First problem: there are only 26 letters.

One of the many tiny, sparkling shards of awesomeness embedded in Rogue's thick hide is how it turns the limitation on monsters into a theme. The first level of rogue has a handful of monsters: Bats, Jackals, Snakes, Hobgoblins and Kobolds. Every level after the first introduces one new monster until Dragons enter the game on level 22. I submit that it is no coincidence that the Amulet of Yendor appears on level 26.

But Rogue, for its coolnesses, is still a fairly short and simple game. Most games these days want to offer more opponents than just 26. And so the great bestiary proliferation began.

Now those games that offer more than 26 monsters have to come up with some way to represent the new monsters. There are three ways this is done. The oldest, going back to the lost roguelikes, is to treat uppercase and lowercase monsters as different species. Nearly all of them do this now, but it still limits the opponent types to 52. The second was is to use different colors to distinguish between monsters, and this is also pretty common. A DOS-style terminal is capable of displaying 16 different colors, although one of them is black. 15 * 52 is 780 beasties, which sounds like a lot, although for other reasons we'll get to shortly still isn't enough.

The final idea was to allow a few symbols in there to add a few more creatures to the mix. Nethack uses @ symbols to represent humans and ampersands (&) for demons, along with a few others. In that game colons are lizards, semi-colons are sea monsters, and apostrophes are golems. We are not quite sure what system was used for assigning these; the secretive Devteam hasn't said anything about it, although there is certainly a chance that there is some pattern at work. Fiendishly, both Nethack and Angband use the same symbols as game terrain to represent hidden monsters. Nethack ghosts are represented in-game by spaces, and Angband trappers use the same character as the floor. Angband mimics use the same characters as object types lying on the floor.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Brought to You Today by the Letter.... " »

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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.]

That first generation of games in a new genre tends to not look too critically at the source material. Depending on how charitable one's feeling, this could be considered to be either because of a cynical exploitation of that material or a genuine enthusiasm for it. The "lost" roguelikes mentioned last time were like this.

The second generation is made by people further removed from the seed concept. Sometimes they may not even know of the idea's source, or they might view it in a less enthusiastic light. People start trying to fix what are perceived to be problems in the game. Sometimes these are actual problems, and sometimes the apparent flaws are a result of an incomplete understanding of the design. Often it's both at once; the designers fix things that are only problems from their point of view.

When the third generation comes around the same thing happens, then again, and again. Minor things are misunderstood to be essential to the design, and important things are forgotten. Eventually the genre solidifies around the aspects that are copied the most, and the Platonic ideal becomes something iconic that may, or may not, have a great deal to do with the original.

When the cycle crosses a cultural divide, there often occurs a much greater disconnect between the original ideas and their mutations. When Yuuji Horii created Dragon Quest, he was directly inspired by Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, which he discovered on a trip to the U.S. Later on there was Final Fantasy, which bears unmistakable marks of Dragon Quest's influence but less of Wizardry.

The cycle can also be seen when Chunsoft created the first two Mystery Dungeon games, Torneko and Shiren, both games that crib from Rogue, but not, directly, Dungeons & Dragons. Then other games were inspired by Mystery Dungeon while being ignorant of Rogue, each taking the core ideas and pulling them in a different direction.

Now, there are two main types of JCRPGs that draw from Mystery Dungeon. The more-common is the generic random dungeon game, the influence can be seen in full games (like Time Stalkers and Persona 3) and as a special area or mode in more traditional games (two that come to mind are in Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals and Parasite Eve). The other, rarer category is a game that is more recognizably roguelike, but produced by people who have never heard of Rogue itself. This is what brings us around to Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @ Play: 'Izuna, Legend of the Roguelike Ninja'" »

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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.]

Rogue was certainly not the first CRPG. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord probably made it out months ahead. Before then, there were interesting, relatively unknown Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games for the PLATO computer network, and which might get looked at themselves here, eventually. But Rogue's take on the basic concept adapted some aspects of Dungeons & Dragons that usually got ignored by the others. As D&D evolved, in fact, that game itself abandoned the very ideals that Rogue took to heart: discovery, player improvisation, and the amassing of tremendous piles of loot

Rogue was not a niche game at this time. It was one of the most-played games in campus timeshare computer labs, a genuine phenomenon among its audience. Rogue keeps a score list because it was designed to be played in this kind of environment, with lots of people shooting for a spot on the board; later roguelikes lost that sense of competition and community, but kept the score lists anyway. These days, unless the game is played on a public internet server like alt.org, roguelike score lists tend to fill up with the same player. Back in Rogue's heyday however, competition for the top spots could be fierce.

Soon after Rogue's original release, a number of similar games began to make the rounds of these computer labs. They were the original roguelikes, games that took inspiration from Rogue itself more than even Dungeons & Dragons. Some of these games incorporated Rogue's name in its own: XRogue, Ultra Rogue, Advanced Rogue, Super-Rogue.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @ Play: Super-Rogue, Banished to the Deeper Regions" »

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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.]

I've beaten the drums pretty loudly for roguelikes here, I suppose. They are a style of role-playing game that has much to teach game designers, in its tactical depths, its subtle incorporation of logical puzzles, its open-endedness, and the sheer variety in them. As said last time, nothing in computer roleplaying games so preserves the spirit of 1974-vintage, Original Dungeons & Dragons as roguelike games do. I've cheered for roguelikes so much, in fact, that I believe I'm allowed a bit of pessimistic contemplation here. Roguelikes are great, yes, yes, but they are not perfect. There are some things lacking with them.

In this, I'm not talking about the kinds of things dredged up by many game reviewers when they're forced to comprehend a roguelike for the first time. Like the absences of: a central narrative; scripted events; clumsy metaphor; and amnesiac fourteen-year-olds somehow seeking absolution for their dark pasts while saving their generic fantasy world from empires fueled by the corrupting forces of Chaos with the aid of a dozen anime stereotypes.

Roguelike games do not lack for these things, because they never wanted them to begin with.

But if viewed in the light of classic Dungeons & Dragons, of a semi-adversarial game between players and a referee set in an ancient dungeon filled with all manner of tricks, traps and treasure, there remain some important things that roguelike games lack.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @ Play: Towards Building a Better Dungeon" »

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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.]

As you may have figured out by now, roguelikes are one of my favorite types of computer games. It's not that I hate other kinds of games, or even other RPGs. But roguelikes, good ones at least, provide essential gaming nutrients unavailable nearly anywhere else. They're games of skill instead of patience, which is rare for CRPGs. They are difficult but, once one knows how to play, often fair. And they and are set in a world of wonder and amazement balanced by great danger.

The possibilities there seem endless. You could play Rogue a hundred times and not experience two games that are similar to each other. You could play Nethack or ADOM for years and still encounter a new aspect of the game from time to time. Dungeon Crawl is more than just a game: it is dozens of games, each class and race playing surprisingly differently from the others. Just being a roguelike doesn't make a game good, of course, but the best are among the greatest games ever made.

I believe that, someday, eventually, the tide will turn in the public perception of roguelike games, or at least the core ideas that drive them. This is not due to any magical quality bestowed by turn-based movement or grid-based game worlds, which are a superficial determination of roguelikeness but doesn't get to what makes them interesting. No, one plays a roguelike to explore an unknown world, relying on uncertain resources, figuring the rules out along the way, and learning the underlying logic of the game. And of course, when people start talking about procedural content generation, they are unknowingly calling upon the ancient monster-deities of the Dungeons of Doom.

But these ideas did not originate with roguelikes. It must be remembered that approximately half of what makes roguelikes interesting as computer games was invented years before, in a pen-and-paper game created back when teletype machines roamed the earth.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Roguelikes And OD&D" »

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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.]

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''" »

Posted by John Harris at 4:03 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.]

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'" »

Posted by John Harris at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['@ 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'" »

Posted by John Harris at 12:04 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.]

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'" »

Posted by John Harris at 12:04 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.]

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'" »

Posted by John Harris at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

['@ 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" »

Posted by John Harris at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['@ 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" »

Posted by John Harris at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

['@ 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" »

Posted by John Harris at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

['@ 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" »

Posted by John Harris at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

['@ 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 (11)

['@ 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 (17)

['@ 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 (12)

['@ 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 (14)

['@ 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 (2)

['@ 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 (3)

['@ 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 (34)

['@ 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 (5)

['@ 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 (43)

['@ 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 (21)