OT: Re: [wplug] old PC games? semi-OT

Bryon Gill bgtrio at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 13 10:41:51 EST 2007


Hear hear!

Angband is the best game ever for so many reasons. It's a really well thought 
out dungeon crawler.  Like all the roguelike games, it makes no apologies for 
its lack of graphics (a young dragon is 'd', an ancient one is "D", albeit in 
color), but you know what/ There are lots of pretty games that are no fun. 
This game is all fun.

You run around the dungeon killing monsters and finding artifacts, killing a 
looong series of bosses at each level.  Most of the unique monsters and 
artifacts are derived straight from Tolkien, including 9 unique ringwraiths, 
the dragons Smaug, Glaurung, and Ancalogon the Black, Shelob the spider, Grima 
Wormtongue, and even Farmer Maggot's dogs.  You can play humans with blah stats 
but fast XP gathering, or a High Elf  with amazing stats but a severe XP 
penalty.  Or play a gnome and start the game with built-in free action.  Lots of 
choices.

The best thing about the turn-based element of a minimal graphics game is this: 
you can play as fast as you want.  There's no waiting for the screen to refresh, 
no long walks from Ironforge to Dun Morogh, etc.  When you do something the game 
is updated instantaneously.

The other unique thing about it is that there's no resurrection.  When you die, 
that's it.  You can cheat but you're only cheating yourself.  This makes 
high-level combat surprisingly tense.

The game is free as in beer under a pine-style license (it was made before the 
BSD and GPL licenses were popular) and the source is clean, well documented, and 
easy to tinker with.

Give it a go.

Bryguy


On Tue, 13 Mar 2007, Michael H. Semcheski wrote:

> On 3/12/07, Matthew J Hughes <mhues_2k at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 
>> What is your favorite Open source time killer? Either open source
>> program, or program that runs on open source platform?
>> 
>
> Hands down, the one that ends up killing the most time for me (which is not
> all that much anymore, but back when I was a kid before the weight of the
> world... just kidding)
>
> Angband.
>
> Moria is pretty good too.  I've spent way too many hours slaughtering cave
> trolls and celestial balance dragons and lesser balrogs.
>
> And honestly, when I did finally get to level 100, and I saw the big grey H
> coming at me...  Well, you wouldn't think a turn based text game could get
> your blood pumping, but it can.
>


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