This 1987 roguelike game is still great

boing
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Cool. And now I know I need to start expressing myself through the medium of gelato.

22

gelato is good; there are other options.

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It’s not a roguelike, probably, maybe, but let’s not forget @anon50609448’s crime simulator.

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Oh wow, I remember nearly shitting myself with terror at age 7 or so when I came around a corner and THERE WAS THE FUCKING MUMMY! AND THE MONKEY STOLE THE FUCKING SCARAB!

MONNNNNKEEEEEEEEY!!!

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I loved this game! Now if someone could find the similarly-aged Mac game that involved operating on someone with appendicitis…?

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Almost certainly <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_%26_Death">Life and Death, although that wasn’t exclusively a Mac game but was on all major platforms of the late 1980’s.

27

Sometimes that’s just wankery. Other times, it’s from an unpleasant experience of expecting one thing and getting something quite different.

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If it was, the version I played was a much earlier one - it was black and white, and you could only do appendectomies. Some of the description at that site sounded familiar, but not all of it.

ALSO I sat up until 4am last night playing Scarab of Ra. Not one of my better decision-making moments. Thanks Boing Boing! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Besides, how else am I going to feel smug and superior when some idiot calls Napalm Death metal?

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The curious part to me is that I’m seeing roguelike used more often as a description of games, as the original Rogue becomes a more distant memory. I mean, I played computer games on Unix boxes in the late 80s, and Rogue had already been superseded by games like Nethack and Moria. I occasionally play Angband now, but it’s distinctly an indulgence in nostalgia.

It’s pretty easy to understand why you’d describe Angband as roguelike – you’d have to be pretty familiar with Angband and Rogue to tell which one is which from a screenshot.

There were a lot of dungeon crawl games I vaguely remember from the 80s – the original Bard’s Tale, for instance – which at the time, I wouldn’t have thought to call roguelike. I do remember when the original Diablo came out that Angband fans on Usenet were talking about how it felt similar in many ways.

It makes sense that, over time, different related genres of games could cross-polinate ideas enough that they’d converge into a single category. It’s just surprising that the common term settled upon is roguelike, rather than “dungeon crawlers” or “Diablo-like” – I suppose the latter is ruled out by trademark issues.

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