What is your current favorite Roguelike? [Or all things roguelike]

EDIT: It is a mere 4 and half years later and roguelike have taken the fuck off!!! There is a 40-60 chance I will update this OP soon. :)

I have played DF*, ADOM, ZangbandTK, and am currently playing Dungeon Crawl: The Stone Soup edition. So, currently, that one is my favorite. Played a few other minor RLs, but nothing worth mentioning. Never tried the D&D-ish (EDIT: Incursion) one that we had a thread about here or the LotR-ish (TOME) one. I am thinking during the busy season at work I am in at the moment, these games are going to have to be my fix.

Just curious how often people still play these, which ones have stuck with them, what sites they visit to keep up with them, etc. Thought maybe this thread could serve as a general repository for all things roguelike.

*I realize everyone loves the Dwarf Fortress. I like Roguelikes because I can get in and out of them and while I do enjoy DF, I have to come at it from a whole different angle when I want to play. This is especially true if I have not played in a while and need to re-familiarize myself with the game. Now that I know how deep it is, it seems even more intimidating to jump into.

EDIT: I love these kinda threads, but when they get long or links are not provided, you have to search harder when you want to go back and dive into somethingorother you vaguely remember talking about a week ago. So, if the thread continues for any amount of time, I will try to update this original post with links.

Resources

Rogue Temple

GameSetWatch - RogueLike Column

RogueBasin - RogueLike Wiki

2010 7DRL [7-Day Roguelike] Competition

Current completed listing for the 2010 challenge.

Classics
[Many of these are actually descendants of others mentioned here, but I have yet to take the time to review the family tree to get the references right. A thousand pardons.]

Rogue - The original in Java

Nethack - Classic roguelike

ADOM - old stand by favorite

Angband - the original which seems to have spawned the most variants

TOME - Tales of Middle Earth - Oft mentioned favorite that is next on my list. Descendant of Angband—>Zangband.

Moria - Almost forgot this one. Angband’s Mom and Dad.

Favorites

Stone Soup[Dungeon Crawl] - early lead as “current” Qt3 favorite

Dwarf Fortress - the one all the kids are talking about that is really the favorite

Spelunky - relatively new roguelike platformer

Unreal World - simulation of wilderness living in Finland (more fun than it sounds)

Ragnarok [Valhalla] - DOS roguelike circa 1992

Sword of Fargoal - includes link to download of original 1983 Commodore 64 version as well as PC and Mac remake. 2011 Update: iPhone version released.

Incursion- Heavy D&D influence

Zangband TK - Angband descendent with fancy graphical interface

IVAN- endorsed by peacedog who says you suck if you are a RL fan and have not tried it

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer- DS roguelike for people with less patience and/or no imagination. EDIT: Now that I have a DS, I can temper my sarcasm as it is a fun game. :)

Legerdemain - Epic adventure within the hallucinogenic realm of Phenomedom where you assume the role of an imprisoned dissenter seeking to learn the nature of your captivity. Sounds cool to me.

Gearhead - MECHS!!! Also there is a Gearhead I and II

Doom RL - “Pretty fun as well”.

Slash’EM - Nethack variant with lotsa extas and graphical tile set

Elona - Wacky and deep graphical roguelike with good translation from Japanese. Does NOT have permadeath, but does have death penalties after level 6. You can build a house and buy shops and invest in others. Fun!!! Dedicated thread brought to you by Mrs. Gallant.

RLs written by Qt3 members or their family members, but not yet considered a favorite

MetaCollider- Written by our own Tim James’ brother

Family Tree -until I find something better:

Rogue (1980)
Moria (1983)
Hack (1985)
Larn (1986)
NetHack (1987)
Omega (1987)
Angband (1991)
Zangband (1994)
ADOM (1994)
SLASH’EM (1996)
Linley’s Dungeon Crawl (1997)

Ill admit it, Ive only played DF and Spelunky. I`m interested in the others but they all seem to have such a high entry cost I only want to cover one at a time.

On that note… does anyone have any tilesets they`d like to recommend for Nethack?

I’m not an expert in roguelikes, as I could never get the hang of ascii graphics and obtuse interfaces. But I really loved Shiren and Stone Soup is really great as well : with tiles the graphics are clear, and the interface is very easy to use.

I never went very far in the dungeon, but i like to fire it now and then.

i agree Morberis and while I love the hidden depth and strategy involved, few of them lead you by the hand and ease you into the game. Stone Souphas a very nice TileSet and help details. As I am just digging back in, I really have not looked at all of the information contained within the program itself since its most recent update, but it is relatively easy to jump into and just learn as you go. Plus, I believe it is still being regularly maintained. That is why I started back with it.

Dungeon Crawl (the vanilla version) is the only one I still play semi-regularly. Does Stone Soup have something new besides the tiles?

ADOM is worth playing for anyone interested in the genre, but it gets very formulaic after you play it a lot, since the world map is always the same and the first few dungeons always play in pretty much the same way.

Put me down for Shiren. I never could get into roguelikes on the PC, but on the DS, it works, because “pick up, get in, get out” is pretty much the DS motto.

Also, SNES-era retro graphics are more interesting than ASCII retro. I mean, I played as much Kroz as the next guy, but ASCII never quite resonated even then.

Still ADOM for me, though I haven’t played it in years. I think it’s the best overall achievement of the roguelike type.

Elona does not impress me, nor does Dwarf Fortress, and that’s getting so far afield from the base type it’s probably not even a roguelike, really. Zangband was OK (not updated in 10 years or more) but I can’t tolerate Moria or any of the 'bands at all without hacking them for a special feeling every level and no waiting between feelings – makes the game go much quicker… Nethack is too mechanically easy when you know its tricks.

I enjoyed playing urogue long ago on one of the rare systems on which it could be convinced to run – srogue and urogue were surely some of the worst-written programs ever, one would think that Bill Joy must have hacked them.

I think original rogue was really one of the better games of its type, despite the simplicity. I was really pleased with myself the day I finally beat it – version 4.2 as I recall.

I was amused that just a couple of days ago someone sent me a linked-in message because they were planning to hack some kind of flash version of omega. I think at least a dozen people have tried over the years to update omega, and most have given up in despair… I believe it was once used in a CS class as an example of how not to do data driven programming. My excuse is it was my first C program.

I have only seriously been interested in ADOM. I don’t have much to add since the Internet wisdom about it is pretty clear (the static overland map has its advantages and disadvantages) but it has always been the most compelling one to me, being a Roguelike-RPG hybrid.

My brother recently wrote a Roguelike called MetaCollider with some interesting gameplay that I plan to get into.

Well, I never played the vanilla version, but it has targeting for ranged attacks. That does not SEEM like something that would have been programmed into the original format. So, my answer really should be, I have no idea. :)

There are just so many out there and I would like to try them all because it seems like there is probably one with enough variants, RPG features, and item management features that I would fall in love and impregnate it if it so desired.

The Unreal World

Is there a good ADOM tileset? I also prefer SNES era graphics to ASCII (maybe its a nostalgia thing)

Edit: Oh hell yeah I completely forgot about UnReal World, fantastic game.

I picked up UnReal world and played for quite a while, but the travelling and searching and coming back to my camp and trying to find new and interesting stuff began to wear on me. Maybe I was missing something. I have also not gone back to it since the middle of last year when I played, so I am still do some updates as I paid for the “Update for a year” version rather than the full, update for life version.

Kill and eat innocent people, then I guarantee something interesting will happen.

[I]

[B]

You’ll be fighting the gods![/B][/I]

I second the question about ADOM. I’ve been thinking of trying that game for a while, but I couldn’t find any tilesets for ADOM and dislike playing with ASCII.

Pretty sure the developer never relinquished the code as it was his baby. He did not care to add tilesets so there are none. He is supposedly (and has been for some time) working on a graphical version called Jade. I think I read on his site the other day, that he is coming around to the fact that he may never do any work on ADOM again and may release it for others to mess with.

Biskup’s Blog

Emphasis mine.

Discussion of a possible release of the ADOM source code. No, that’s not an announcement or a promise. But let’s face it… it’s rather unlikely that I will any time soon work once more on ADOM, no matter if I would like to or not. The investment in time probably would be too high. So releasing the source code might be an option in order to let ADOM survive. But I’m completely undecided if (a) I really want to do that, (b) I just want to do it to get someone else to fix bugs (he, quite egoistic, isn’t it?), (c) really start a development community for the future of ADOM. Let’s face it… I still would hate to see the “Angband effect” of dozens of variants with all kind of silly stuff… that’s just not what I want. But how would another model look like… ?

Stone Soup is pretty much a fork of Crawl that turned into the main development branch – there’s a lot of new stuff in there, but the integration of the tiles code (which used to be a totally separate fork) is the thing most people notice.

We started off using Stone Soup as sort of a side project to collect the UI improvement patches that were circulating while Crawl’s main development languished (the lead developer kept delaying new releases and promising that the next version would be out Any Day Now), but ended up kinda plowing ahead when the main development branch finally died.

By now there’s a lot of UI work even in the non-tiles ASCII version along with a ton of play mechanics changes, new dungeon branches, class/character reworking, etc, etc.

If you like the old version of Crawl, I bet you’ll like Stone Soup more.

Stone Soup for me. I suck at it, as I do with most Roguelikes, but this one has a lot of neat stuff that Crawl didn’t, like the ranged targeting.

Huh. Several of you have mentioned this, and I admit it’s been a while since I last played, but I vividly remember Crawl letting you target monsters in any direction for ages now (by cycling though nearby enemies). Or am I just mixing up memories from several different roguelikes?

I always thought you could shoot in a certain direction, but that if I monster was, say 10 squares north and 1 east of you, you couldn’t hit it.
It could very well be that I didn’t know how to target properly.

One of my favorites from way back is Ragnarok / Valhalla, and I still dig it out every now and then.


rezaf