Angband

Saw Dark Spire get brought up in the DSi thread....do any of you guys play Angband? It is based on exploring the dungeons of moria and encountering all the baddies in Tokien's work.

This game will kick your ass over and over and over and over. It takes no prisoners and the amount of stuff you can discover is immense.

Here is a link to my half-troll warrior that I finally won with:

angband.oook.cz/ladder-show.php?id=6338

Can be downloaded from the tab at the top of that page. I usually play in pure ASCII mode (much more fun than it looks), but apparently there is a new version out with supported graphics...

Ohh god, I used to play this shit out of this 10+ years ago. Real men play Iron man mode.

You've seen my post about it on the front page.

I've only recently weaned myself off the "Tk" interface which came with lots of bells and whistles and pretty graphics but was stuck in 2.9.2 and moved on to the proper, current version of 3.1.0. I like the changes a lot.

I'm something of an addity amongst Angband players. I almost always play Dwarf or Dunedain paladins rather than mixing it up, and I only really ever play Vanilla which is probably the least popular version now. I like the Tolkien theme and the relative simplicity of the play. I've dabbled with Z (I like the quest levels), but none of the other variants.

I've yet to win. I came pretty close once - got down into the last ten levels or so of the dungeon. Can't remember what killed me. My last game ended in disaster on Friday - a very promising looking character killed by breath from a Drolem summoned out of depth. Very annoying - nothing I could do about it, fighting a slightly OOD creature which then went on to make a very OOD summon which immediately breathed something I couldn't resist on me

The first roguelike I played was Moria, 20 years ago. It's funny, despite my love for fantasy, I had never read Lord of the Rings, and so never put the two themes together. Man, did I spend a lot of weeks playing that back in school. I still remember when Diablo came out, my first thought was "this is Moria with graphics". Which, of course, it is. And both are hopelessly addictive, despite the essentially nonexistent story.

Around five years ago or so, I got back into the roguelikes and played a lot of Zangband. I don't remember why I chose that version, probably because a) I love Zelazny's Amber series and, more importantly, b) there's more stuff in it than Angband.

I always make a backup of my character, and, if he dies, restore it. Yes, yes, I'm a pussy blah blah blah. Sod off. I want to see stuff. The good stuff. The cool spells. Etc. And while I appreciate running around the dungeon in a panic, and I do everything I can to avoid dying in the first place, I have no interest in starting over and over and over again. Forget it. Not my cup of tea.

Seeing your character really makes me want to play it again. Like I need any more games on the stack right now.

I played Angband a few times but my love was Nethack.

I still play vanilla as well. I have been trying to get a Hobbit Paladin going lately but keep dying; I always roll up a new character, but this one is starting to wear on me (I am running out of good names). Very frustrating.

Winning with the half-troll took me a long time. There is a range of dungeon depthsthat he struggled at because his non-existant magic abilities. I had to spend a long time getting stat potions before I could move down and almost got killed by a swarm of Hammerhorns (those gnat things that make you confused). As simple as it is, I was on the edge of my seat trying to get out of that predicament.

Those Drolems are nasty -- sorry about your guy

I played some ToME, but Nethack was my love, too.

I really enjoy roguelikes. I've played Angband, although I played Moria more, but still, Nethack is my favorite. Another really good one I enjoyed for a while is ADOM. Never won at any of them, but they're still fun

Latelty I've been trying console roguelikes like the Mystery dungeon series. I think the best of the bunch I tried is Shien the Wanderer, which plays the most like the old roguelikes I love (it's also hard as hell).

I find it really funny and strange that this genre was so popular in Japan that so many games including Pokemon spin-offs were released. I wish it was more popular over here so we'd see more releases. Reading some reviews of these type of games by people that never played a roguelike game was really funny...

Nethack was always my favorite, but the DoomRL is great too. Also spent lots of time on ADOM.

You know, I never really got into ANGBAND (or MORIA for that matter). For some reason those never interested me all that much. ToME is pretty good though.

NETHACK is the king daddy as far as I'm concerned of this genre. It's pretty much everything "roguelike" means, both good and bad. That being said, lately my go-to roguelike has been CRAWL (aka LINLEY'S DUNGEON CRAWL). It seems more fair than some of the others and it seems to be a little more manageable in the early game when death is always a keypress away.

SHIREN THE WANDERER is brilliant- it successfully bring the roguelike to a console and it brings along a few innovations I wish some of the other games had. I really like the "warehousing" feature, I like the more predicatable staging (where you don't sudenly run into something impossible to beat out of nowhere), and I like the more straightfoward interface. There isn't as much detail, and I don't like not being able to run different classes, but for twelve bucks at Gamestop you can't go wrong if you like these kinds of games.

And, oh, there's plenty of dying. Dying is so critical to the roguelike experience. You have to die to learn. That's what makes the games so great, the process of developing a retinue of knowledge about the game and trying to leverage that knowledge against its randomness and cruelty.

That DOOM RL is really fun. It seems easier than most, and it has a weird focus on ranged weapons you don't usually see. It's good stuff.

Oh- another you might otherwise miss- TRIANGLE WIZARD. It's ostensibly a roguelike, but it's very, very unique. Don't have the link, Playthisthing.com had it for a while.

One more- SPELUNKY. It's a 2D platformer roguelike (!!!). It's excellent. I'd love to see it hit the DS or even WiiWare/XBL/PSN

One roguelike I had a lot of fun with is Decker, which is a somewhat different structure than your typical dungeon delve. Instead, you play a hacker-for-hire who cracks into company machines (dungeons) with your programs to accomplish some task. Great fun, if you're looking for a different take on the genre.

Oh man, Angband is epically awespome. I've never beat it though, despite making backups of characters. I always managed to get my character into an impossible predicament and save over my back up. Whoops.

ToME is pretty good, but I find it way harder and I usually die in the early levels.

Oh, and playing in ACII graphics is the ONLY way to go.

I haven't played any of the console/handheld games though.