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| - The roguelike genre of computer games is characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, ASCII graphics, and turn-based movement. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environment features. Death is frequent and often avoidable. Many roguelikes employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game, Rogue.
- The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue.
- A roguelike computer game is one that resembles Rogue. See Gameinfo:Roguelike. The original Rogue game featured a thief who entered the dungeon to steal the Amulet of Yendor. A free clone called Hack retained the Amulet, but introduced some features including a pet dog and multiple roles (classes). The six roles in Hack are Tourist, Speleologist, Fighter, Knight, Cave-man, and Wizard. The game NetHack has added several features to Hack, including both the Rogue class and the Rogue level.
- Roguelikes are a particular subgenre of Role Playing Games, so named for being like Rogue, a very early computer game. The most traditional roguelikes have the following characteristics:
* Roguelikes are centered around Dungeon Crawling through randomly-generated environments randomly stocked from a huge list of monsters and items. Some (such as ADOM) also have a static overworld and/or special levels, but even those games rely on random content in other places. This means that memorization is not enough to win a roguelike, and walkthroughs as such cannot be made for them, but they have increased replayability.
* Roguelikes take Final Death to the extreme. When your character dies, that's it - he's dead for good. Saving the game is often possible, but it is only used for having a pau
- Roguelike is a genre of games characterised by key gameplay elements pioneered by the 1980 game, Rogue. Spelunky is not a 'pure' roguelike. It is a cross-genre game (also known as a 'Rogue-lite' or 'Roguelike-like') that is partly defined by roguelike elements, but differs from the genre in certain aspects. Spelunky's roguelike elements include: Ways in which Spelunky differs from traditional roguelikes include:
- There is a genre of Roguelike computer games starting with the original Rogue. Before 1980, computer games tended to be text adventures. In 1980 appeared Rogue, a game where your character explores the dungeon filled with dangerous monsters, trying to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. Players experienced Rogue and later Roguelike games as ASCII art, somewhat like this: ----------- ###+..@......| |.......k.+ |.........| -----------
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| - The roguelike genre of computer games is characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, ASCII graphics, and turn-based movement. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environment features. Death is frequent and often avoidable. Many roguelikes employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game, Rogue.
- Roguelike is a genre of games characterised by key gameplay elements pioneered by the 1980 game, Rogue. Spelunky is not a 'pure' roguelike. It is a cross-genre game (also known as a 'Rogue-lite' or 'Roguelike-like') that is partly defined by roguelike elements, but differs from the genre in certain aspects. Spelunky's roguelike elements include:
* Permanent death — games can't be saved/loaded, and death means you must start from the beginning of the game.
* Procedurally generated levels that are wholly unpredictable.
* Relatively high difficulty, with frequent deaths and short runs.
* It's a dungeon crawl, which takes place by progressing along rigidly defined 'levels' of the cave. Ways in which Spelunky differs from traditional roguelikes include:
* It's a side-scrolling platformer, rather than a top-down Dungeon Crawl.
* Events are displayed graphically, rather than described by text.
* Gameplay takes place in real time, rather than being turn-based.
* Few RPG elements, limited to hit points and a rudimentary inventory.
- The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue.
- A roguelike computer game is one that resembles Rogue. See Gameinfo:Roguelike. The original Rogue game featured a thief who entered the dungeon to steal the Amulet of Yendor. A free clone called Hack retained the Amulet, but introduced some features including a pet dog and multiple roles (classes). The six roles in Hack are Tourist, Speleologist, Fighter, Knight, Cave-man, and Wizard. The game NetHack has added several features to Hack, including both the Rogue class and the Rogue level.
- There is a genre of Roguelike computer games starting with the original Rogue. Before 1980, computer games tended to be text adventures. In 1980 appeared Rogue, a game where your character explores the dungeon filled with dangerous monsters, trying to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor. Players experienced Rogue and later Roguelike games as ASCII art, somewhat like this: ----------- ###+..@......| |.......k.+ |.........| ----------- Yes, that is an underground room in the dungeon; # represents a dungeon corridor while + is a door. The human-controlled player is @, thus the commercial at sign is often a symbol of roguelike games. Here, K must be some kind of monster. For those first Rogue players on those BSD workstations, this was an innovation: previous games used textual descriptions, like "You are in an underground dungeon room. You see passages to the west and to the east. There is a kobold here!" Programmers started to create similar games, and some of the Roguelike games gained more features; some even switched from ASCII text to color graphics. Roguelike games tended to attract fantasy elements, thus programmers had ideas to add Tolkien elements from The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. There was a free Rogue clone called "Hack", because the player could hack monsters to death. A team of developers on the Internet created a derivative called NetHack including features inspired by several sources of literature. Among the monsters of NetHack are Hobbits, Mordor orcs, and Uruk-hai. Among the items, there is an artifact weapon called Sting and several types of Mithril armor. However, NetHack includes monsters and objects from many other sources; it is said that the Elves of NetHack, being chaotic in nature, are very different from Tolkien's elves. A different Rogue clone, the Game of Moria, borrowed more from Tolkien. In The Lord of the Rings, Moria is the underground city, formerly inhabited by dwarves but destroyed by a Balrog. In the game of Moria, the player does not search for the Amulet of Yendor, but instead enters the dungeon called "Moria" to kill the Balrog at the bottom. It is the Game of Angband and its variants, though, that have the most features from Tolkien's Middle-earth. Angband started as a modified version of UMoria, the Unix version of Moria. In this game, the ultimate enemy is also the supreme bad god of Tolkien's universe, Morgoth. The goal, though, is to kill Morgoth deep inside the dungeon, not to destroy some One Ring. The well-organised Angband source code spawned many variants, including ToME, for "Troubles Of Middle-earth".
- Roguelikes are a particular subgenre of Role Playing Games, so named for being like Rogue, a very early computer game. The most traditional roguelikes have the following characteristics:
* Roguelikes are centered around Dungeon Crawling through randomly-generated environments randomly stocked from a huge list of monsters and items. Some (such as ADOM) also have a static overworld and/or special levels, but even those games rely on random content in other places. This means that memorization is not enough to win a roguelike, and walkthroughs as such cannot be made for them, but they have increased replayability.
* Roguelikes take Final Death to the extreme. When your character dies, that's it - he's dead for good. Saving the game is often possible, but it is only used for having a pause from playing. Save Scumming is thus flatly disallowed.
* Roguelikes have only a single controllable character, with a turn-based engine in which everything moves at the same time. Some allow you to have allies or pets, but they can't be directly controlled, only given general orders. The power of your character, companions, and items are crucial, so roguelikes tend to be extremely heavy on Level Grinding and Min-Maxing.
* Confounding the player's need for Level Grinding, most Roguelikes have some kind of built-in time limit that requires the player to push on into harder content. The original Rogue, for example, required you to eat food every so often or starve to death, and it was nearly impossible to find more food on a dungeon level once you'd cleaned it out -- but going down to the next dungeon level meant fighting tougher monsters.
* Most roguelikes have randomized appearances for items. In one game, for example, potions of healing might be green potions, and in another purple. Items must be identified either by blindly using them and see what happens (beware of Poison Mushrooms) or by careful observation - or by using scrolls of identify. It's typical, after dying, to be revealed that you had an item which could've saved you, but was unidentified at the time.
* Roguelikes, especially the well-known or popular ones, have often been under continual development for many years, making them extraordinarily large and complex. Many have to use both capital and lowercase letters to have enough inputs for their commands, and some go even further. Interactions are also often very intricate; The Dev Team Thinks of Everything is named for a catchphrase among the Nethack community.
* As a result of the above points, roguelikes are mostly very hard. Death is expected to be fairly frequent, enough so that the community has developed the acronym "YASD," for Yet Another Stupid Death. It is easily possible to play many roguelikes for years without even coming close to victory.
* Most roguelikes have little more than an Excuse Plot. Some have less. A rare few have more.
* Traditionally, most roguelikes have ASCII or similar text-based graphics, although support for graphical tiles has become increasingly common. Roguelikes can be roughly classified into a few different Subgenres that occasionally overlap:
* Hacklikes, influenced mostly by Nethack. They mostly focus on Dungeon Crawling, and have mostly finite resources to force the player to manage them well.
* Bands, influenced by Angband. Bands usually feature a non-permanent dungeon, infinite resources and very tough bosses, so the games are focused on taking levels in badass until the player is ready to punch dragons to death.
* Open worlds that typically have content beyond simple Dungeon Crawling, such as multiple quests and a nontrivial plot.
* Coffee break Roguelikes are Roguelikes that are simple and easy to pick up and play for a while. Though they have a very steep learning curve, many roguelikes are incredible time sinks, which is only exacerbated by the fact that most of them are entirely free. Although roguelikes are more readily associated with Western RPGs, oddly enough the gameplay style is much more popular in Japan, resulting in quite a few Eastern roguelikes as well. See also Multi User Dungeon (MUD) for a related genre of RPG with its roots in Text Adventure games.
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