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A roguelike is a computer game that borrows some of the elements of another computer game, 1980's Rogue. A roguelike is a superficially two-dimensional dungeon crawling computer game, usually with simple text or ASCII "graphics" and many with "tiles" which replace the rather limited character set with a wider array. The genre is named after Rogue, although some features of Rogue existed in earlier games, notably: Adventure (1975), Dungeon (1975 for PDP-10 mainframes), and dnd (1975, written for the PLATO system on CDC computers). Unlike Rogue those games all had pre-scripted scenarios that were largely the same each time they were played and which players could grow tired of, with only some random variations. In Rogue the dungeon is randomly regenerated each time the player begins the game, creating a new challenge each time and remaining fresh for the player. Becoming widely available with the Berkeley Software Distribution version of Unix, Rogue became the most popular dungeon crawl game yet created. * Typical gameplay These games present an absolutely overhead view the components of which were originally characters on a teletype. Traditionally, the hero is represented by an "@" sign, which can be seen as a head and shoulders view from above. Other characters (usually enemy monsters) are represented by letters of the alphabet. Rogue itself only made use of capital letters, but modern roguelikes utilize different capitalization of letters to represent different monsters. A dog, for example, may be represented by the letter "d", and a dragon by a "D". Also, to further distinguish various creatures, a modern roguelike game will display different colored letters. For example, a Red Dragon might be represented by a red "D", whereas a Blue Dragon might be represented by a blue "D", each with their own abilities and required strategy by the player. Further dungeon features are represented by other ASCII (or ANSI) graphics. A traditional sampling is below. Though many Rogue "purists" scoff at the idea, it is becoming increasingly popular to make use of graphics in roguelikes. Numerous graphical versions are available for most of the traditional games; and it is very common for the newer roguelike projects in development to use graphics, sometimes even sound. The hero is controlled by short commands of one or a few keypresses rather than using a mouse or typing long sentence-like commands. For example, in NetHack a player would press "r" to read a scroll, "d" to drop an item, and "q" to quaff (drink) a potion. Though they may seem like trivial games at a first glance because of their simple graphics and interface, roguelikes usually provide a much greater gameplay detail depth than average commercial games. Instead of spending a lot of time on the graphics and 3D engines roguelike developers focus on advancing gameplay. There are many online communities dedicated to roguelike games, most notably the rec.games.roguelike hierarchy on Usenet. There also exist a few paper-based roguelikes; one is in fact called "Roguelike". "Adom the RPG" is another. The computer game Diablo is thought of as a modern, graphical RPG adventure with a similar premise to Rogue: players slash their way through increasingly difficult monsters and attain treasure while traversing to deeper and deeper levels of the dungeon and completing quest objectives. In light of this, Diablo is referred to by some as a "Roguelike", even though the actual gameplay is wildly different. Usual features It is also worthy of note that there are some modified roguelikes which use party or encounter systems which greatly deviate from the normal roguelike gameplay in those regards, but still conform in many other respects. Roguelike family tree Roguelikes branched in three main directions: Note that there are other attributes that distinguish branches; for example, starvation is a major threat in Hacklikes, while in the others it is rare to die of starvation. Major roguelikes Modern roguelikes (which are still supported and/or widely played) Classic roguelikes (influential early roguelike games) See also | |||||||
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