The Game That Doesn’t Die
I’ve experienced a major upswing in roguelike activity lately. Turn based strategy games are really the only ones that ever held my attention, and of those the most enduring love affair was always with ADOM and its brethren. I pretty much haven’t consistently played ADOM since 2001 or 2002, when I got my first laptop, and thus lost the numpad. That smaller keyboard has actually had a pretty dampening effect on my roguelike activity since then. You can write new keyboard cfgs for ADOM, but doing all that swapping always was a project I had just too little time for. Some day, I’m sure.
But my interest has, ever since that point, periodically swelled back, and I’ve periodically gone around the web to see what other roguelikes there are to find. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that in the last 7 years web searching technology has also gotten much more effective. Now there’s roguelike wikis, roguelike blogs… and surprisingly, a very active roguelike community.
So I’ve found a couple new ones and I’ve been enjoying the heck out of them. The best two are Incursion and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. The former is based pretty deeply on the D20 Dungeons and Dragons system, and so it has a lot of the same monsters and classes and stuff. It isn’t chock-full of crazy creatures and items and flavor text, but the really thorough, well-thought out nature of the system makes up for it. Crawl is kind of the opposite; it has far fewer weird actions and isn’t really concerned with the ability to, you know, dip a knife in a potion and then put the knife in a trap and automatically have a monster trigger it and get stabbed or whatever, and only three attributes (ST, INT, DEX), but it’s got a really good, low-barrier, combat-centric system worked out, and a really satisfying array of stuff, like crazy gods and classes and species. A little more Diablo/Gauntlet-y, I guess.
But in both cases, what’s probably the one reason that I’ve actually been playing them is that they natively support rogue-style navigation keys (HJKL), which means you can play them on a laptop. And as a vim-man, it’s an easy step for me. One of these days I’m going to stick my toes back in the Angband pool and see how it feels.
