Re: wanting more
Posted: Tue Oct 02, 2012 10:30 pm
There are modern roguelikes with tilesets to be less retro. And they aren't just about orcs and elves. In fact, there is a spaceship roguelike kind of like FTL and it's free. It's called Prospector RL. Or you could try Cataclym RL for a zombie survival roguelike.
Now, as for what a roguelike is, people usually get all hipster and are like "that isn't/is a roguelike!" but, in general roguelikes are
-Randomly generated
-Have some form of RPG elements
-Turn based
-Can have straight up ASCII or graphics packs, called "tilesets" that replace symbols with pictures.
-Feature perma-death
-Are very hard
A game that has some of these elements, but not all, is known as a roguelike-like. Minecraft, the binding of issac, and FTL are good examples of roguelikes-likes. The original roguelike was called "rogue" hence the title. Some big-names are
-Dwarf Fortress (Adventure mode is the true roguelike, fortress mode is more of like super-hard-sim-city)
-Prospector RL (Spaceships, similar to FTL)
-Liberal Crime Squad ( set in Modern times)
-Nethack (this is one of the originals back from 1980's, its a dungeon crawler)
-Rogue (of course)
-Crawl stone soup (Wizards and orcs again)
-Unreal world RPG (Set in 1700's finland)
-Rogue Survivor (Zombie survival)
-Cataclysm RL (Zombie survival- this one is 1000000000x more complex than Rogue Survivor, and has more than just zombies to haunt it)
and the list goes on and on... I'm sure I forgot some good ones too.
These aren't like Zelda because they don't have any "twitch" reflexes involved, per se. You pick your choices turn-by-turn, full of strategy and thoughtfullness. Due to the lack of graphics, you can have amazingly detailed combat and other stuff (like Cataclysm RL's open vehicle construction that lets you build a working vehicle in almost ANY configuration you can imagine). My absolute favorite would be Cataclysm RL, with Unreal World RPG at a close second. But they are all fantastic games, and they are all free except Unreal world which costs 3 dollars.
Now, as for what a roguelike is, people usually get all hipster and are like "that isn't/is a roguelike!" but, in general roguelikes are
-Randomly generated
-Have some form of RPG elements
-Turn based
-Can have straight up ASCII or graphics packs, called "tilesets" that replace symbols with pictures.
-Feature perma-death
-Are very hard
A game that has some of these elements, but not all, is known as a roguelike-like. Minecraft, the binding of issac, and FTL are good examples of roguelikes-likes. The original roguelike was called "rogue" hence the title. Some big-names are
-Dwarf Fortress (Adventure mode is the true roguelike, fortress mode is more of like super-hard-sim-city)
-Prospector RL (Spaceships, similar to FTL)
-Liberal Crime Squad ( set in Modern times)
-Nethack (this is one of the originals back from 1980's, its a dungeon crawler)
-Rogue (of course)
-Crawl stone soup (Wizards and orcs again)
-Unreal world RPG (Set in 1700's finland)
-Rogue Survivor (Zombie survival)
-Cataclysm RL (Zombie survival- this one is 1000000000x more complex than Rogue Survivor, and has more than just zombies to haunt it)
and the list goes on and on... I'm sure I forgot some good ones too.
These aren't like Zelda because they don't have any "twitch" reflexes involved, per se. You pick your choices turn-by-turn, full of strategy and thoughtfullness. Due to the lack of graphics, you can have amazingly detailed combat and other stuff (like Cataclysm RL's open vehicle construction that lets you build a working vehicle in almost ANY configuration you can imagine). My absolute favorite would be Cataclysm RL, with Unreal World RPG at a close second. But they are all fantastic games, and they are all free except Unreal world which costs 3 dollars.