Title: Roguelikes
Date: 20190412
Tags: games retrocomputers
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I was never into Roguelike games until I discovered Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead.
An amazingly complex game where, as a beginner, you should expect to die. Even
as an intermediate player. Death is just part of the learning experience.
Turns out, that's pretty typical of the genre.
I think I never got into roguelikes before because I never liked the
medieval/magical fantasy genre in any medium. I never got into such books or
movies, nor ever had a chance to play D&D in my impressionable years. The only
thing close that I got into was Diablo and mostly Diablo 2. I played a lot of
Diablo 2. Cataclysm DDA was appealing because it takes place in sort of modern
day after a zombie apocalypse. It also includes a complex crafting tree but
without much need to grind to build skills or unlock recipes.
Having gotten into retro-computers, namely an Altair 8800 and an RC2014, I
needed to find things to use them for. Neither have graphics and OS options are
limited. Rogue was made for text displays and works over serial without
graphics so I gave it a shot as there is a CP/M port.
The CP/M version of Rogue is great fun. Simple to play but randomized and
complex enough to be deeply fun. It demonstrated the idea of death being an
inevitability in the same way as Cataclysm DDA. I thought I was doing pretty
good by hitting level 15 or so of the dungeon.
Rogue was initially developed for UNIX so I thought I'd look for a version I
could run on OpenBSD. I found Rogue 3.6 and 5.4.2 and got both to compile.
Holy smokes! Talk about inevitable death. I haven't gotten past level 3 of the
dungeon. :D
OpenBSD has Hack in the base system, a follow up to Rogue. It was recently
fixed to be compatible with OpenBSD's current security posture (no more setgid
to write a global scores file) so I thought I'd give it a go to see how it
differs. Hack has a bit more complexity such as eating corpses, a pet dog,
character classes, more armor types, and so on. It's just as fun, but I still
can't get past level 3.
