Roguelikes and Rougelikes

Since coq only plays games that were or look like they were released 20+ years ago, I thought I'd throw him a bone with this thread. I only play roguelikes that have a tileset or some other sort of graphics. Also, both of these types are the story-less types (i.e. the kinds that did not descend from Angband).

My roguelike of the moment is Stone Soup, which is a slight variation on Crawl. It has a ton of classes, a ton of races, 12 gods to worship (each with their own unique set of abilities), and just a lot to discover. Unlike most other roguelikes, race plays a more important role than class, as class skills are leveled by using them (though, of course, you're most likely to level the skills that you start out with).

It attempts to mitigate the downfalls of other roguelikes, such as excessive grinding, cumbersome interfaces, etc. It's also damn hard: I have not been able to get past the 7th or so level.

And yes, it has a tileset.


Another roguelike that I was addicted to as a kid was Moraff's Dungeons of the Unforgiven/Morraf's
World. These two games are very similar, with Moraff's World predecessing Moraff's Dungeons, though it seems like most fans like World more (I beg to differ).

Both offer pseudo-3D graphics, in that your view is rendered each turn in Wolfensteinish 3D. They have a descent sense of humor, sufficiently interesting and annoying varieties of monsters so as to keep things interesting, and enough features to keep things interesting.

I played one called Elona recently, since I got addicted to Elona Shooter on Kongregate and wanted to see what the developer's other game was. It had pretty nice graphics for a roguelike and the gameplay was alright. It's easier than most roguelikes, but in the end it's still just continuous grinding so I've pretty much shelved it now.

I would consider Diablo to be a roguelike, but my experience with them is still pretty limited. Fatal Labyrinth (by grinding, it is really just killing everything on a level, not really all that tough), Moraff's World was pretty awesome and, of course, Nethack. You're right about the cumbersome interface, especially with Nethack. I can't say I have any real suggestions other than those, though. I'm going to give the ones you mentioned a shot, but you know.

Diablo's not a roguelike because it's partly an action game with real-time gameplay. That makes it very different from the turn based gameplay of roguelikes.

right, timing. aside from that, the defining feature is the one-dungeon crawl, but the only ones I can think of are so ancient there's no point in mentinoing them.

I used to play a vampire MUD a long time ago with some friends.
All I can remember is it was green writing on a black background and it was fuckin awesome and one time we got lost in a forest for hours and it was hilarious.

I wish I could remember the name of it.

I used to play a MUD called Realms of Despair when I was about 10 or so. It was remarkably fun, although I find the amount of grinding required to be onerous when I have pretty graphics, much less reading repeated text over and over and over and over and over again.