Oh, you rogue!
I’ve been reading and playing a lot of “roguelikes“ lately, mostly on the Nintendo DS. So I thought I’d talk about them a bit…
A roguelike, as the name suggests, is a game a bit like “rogue“. Rogue is essentially a turn-based dungeon game where the aim is to kill stuff, collect loot, and reach a certain depth in the dungeon to receive an artifact, typically the Amulet of Yendor.
Roguelikes are typically displayed using text (being as they are, from a time of mainframes and dumb terminals), so enemies are letters of the alphabet, the @ symbol represents the player and the other items are depicted with various symbols like ! for potions, % for food etc.
Most roguelikes written today use graphical tiles instead but usually include a text-mode to keep the purists happy.
The Nintendo DS has had a fair few roguelike games turn up lately, the most mainstream of which is probably the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, the two most recent ones however are Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja and Etrian Odyssey both of which are more serious in tone and both have extreme learning curves as the difficulty at the start of both games is high. Both of those titles have been getting a lot of play at the moment too, with Etrian Odyssey having the wonderfully geeky bonus of having you map the dungeon yourself on the touchscreen, genius!
Anyway, I’ve been playing a LOT of a really cool homebrew Nintendo DS roguelike called POWDER, it’s written by Jeff Lait and was originally designed for the GBA (but has versions for the DS, Linux and Windows too). It’s a much more traditional take on the roguelike, owing an awful lot of it’s character to Rogue and Nethack and is WELL worth a look! It’s VERY actively maintained with new releases VERY frequently.
I highly recommend you take a look, no matter what system you own.
Tags: homebrew, nintendo ds, roguelike
