Lots of randomness + permadeath = fun, strangely enough. I found client and server software for a multiplayer version, but it's the clunky vanilla Angband with the crappy ASCII graphics. I've never seen anyone else on any of the servers during my brief forays. A shame, really. With just the moderate amount of polish exhibited by ZangbandTK above, it would have made a nifty little low-end free MORPG kit.
"You're just a dick who quotes himself in his sig." -- Schild "Yeah, it's pretty awesome." -- Me
The roguelikes, like Zangband, are really just distilled hack'n'slash goodness.
And I would say that Diablo 1 and 2 are the modern renditions of this style of game (and are fun in very similar ways).
The permadeath aspect is interesting. You could save your game, but only as a sort of prolonged pause. You could never (without cheating) reload a game that you had died in. But you have to balance that with the fact that you typically invested very little in your character. You would probably play out a whole life in minutes or hours. It did give these game a very addictive quality and lots of replayability as you would try for that perfect run where the stars aligned and you made it down to the last level, killed the foozle, and made it out alive. But it existed completely in a realm of zero persistency. Really roguelikes offer is the ability to spawn off countless singleplayer epics. D1 and D2 allow you to redo certain levels and offer very limited multiplayer facilities which partially bring this genre into the multiplayer domain but with severe limitations.
I reread that and I realized I was rambling. I guess I'm trying to say:
a) Roguelikes rock. Everyone should stay up playing one until 5am at least once. b) They have seen modern treatments with some multiplayer capabilities (a.k.a. Diablo). But I think a lot of difficulties come up when you start to add that functionality.
Well the original Grim died like a n00b on level 2 of the dungeon. Grim II died on an ill-advised foray down to level 5. But Grim III has been down to level 7 and is still going strong at character level 20. I'm taking it real slow, but with a somewhat developed character and my refusal to cheat, can you blame me? I have three or four members of my UO guild playing this game, and using Ventrilo to laugh at them when they die is half the fun. I can't give them the chance to reciprocate as they all move on to the 5th and 6th versions of their own characters. :-D
"You're just a dick who quotes himself in his sig." -- Schild "Yeah, it's pretty awesome." -- Me
Are those games like Telengard for the C-64 or Tunnels of Doom for the TI-99?
Telengard is directly related to DND which may or may not be the first computer role playing game made in ~ 1972, so in some ways Telengard could probably be said to have helped spawned Rogue.
"You have all recieved youre last warning. I am in the process of currently tracking all of youre ips and pinging your home adressess. you should not have commencemed a war with me" - Aaron Rayburn
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