Like interactive fiction, ASCII-based roguelike games still have their own following.
It might be a little strange to the modern gamer to load a game and realize they're in control of a little "@" symbol and have to hunt down little "d"s, but for one group of gamers, that's the way it's supposed to be.
Welcome to Roguelike games. This is a genre of video games where all the graphics are created using the ASCII character set. The @ is the hero you control. All those green letter Ts you see, those are trees.
And the greater-than symbol(>)? Well that's a staircase leading down.
Believe it or not, this old style of video game still has a following today. In fact, roguelike magazine, an online zine for devotees of the genre, launched at the end of the March.
Confused? Have a look at Ancient Domains of Mystery, one of the many free offerings of the genre.
Although text-based, it's not a text adventure, though interactive fiction is also still around.
Aside from using ASCII characters for the graphics, the other hallmark of roguelikes is the gameplay. Generally similar to pen and paper based role-playing-games like Dungeons and Dragons, you start off creating a character, based on race, alignment and class, then play with stats.
Then you control your @ through dungeons to kill monsters and get loot. In fact, Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo is seen by many fans as a modernization of the genre.
Very Brief History
So what's with the name roguelike? Simple, they're like a game called Rogue.
Rogue was a UNIX-based game in the 1980s that became a phenomenon at colleges. Similar games like Hack and Omega followed.
Although it was not the first computer RPG using the ASCII character set and revolving around a dungeon, it was the one that caught on, inspiring most of the games that followed.
Why They're Still Popular
The next question is, why is such an archaic style of gaming still around? The answer: complexity.
While the graphics are incredibly simple, the gameplay is not. Commands are issued using every available key on the keyboard and sometimes more with combinations. You don't just pick something up. You pick it up quickly or slowly, both with their own pros and cons.
Plus, with the processing power not be using on graphics and sound (the usual resource hogs in games) many other things are possible.
Bay 12 Games' Dwarf Fortress takes things to a whole new level. It's an ASCII graphic-based strategy game where an entire world with distinct civilizations is randomly generated for each new game. A feat that's still beyond the home PC's technology if you added in 3D graphics.
With so many roguelike's out there, most available for free, it's worth a shot to cure some boredom. But with such massive worlds, beware their addictive quality.
