A roguelike or roguelikes – specially Crawl
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Linley Henzell’s Dungeon Crawl is a very interesting roguelike, it is widely played to this day in the form of its offspring Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
The roguelike is an interesting genre, and there were some cool ones popular in DOS days.
Henzell reportedly started Crawl after getting a PC with DR-DOS and a copy of Turbo C++, having previous experience with BASIC. That is a quite interesting dev story.
Never heard of this before. Seems to be a more in depth ZZT with RPG elements, and of course the rogue-like features. Will need to check it out, thanks!
Fun to see a recommendation for Crawl. 🙂 I don’t think there’s a version for DOS that wouldn’t pale in comparison with the more modern continuations though..
Many, maybe most, of the games in this club pail in comparison to their more modern continuations… that ought to be no excuse…
Well, in this case, Crawl has been continuously develop (well, Stone Soup is technically a fork I suppose..) Going back to old versions feels a bit painful. But maybe I haven’t realized the right spirit!
Last Stone Soup version with a DOS release is 0.5.1 from mid-2009 here: http://crawl.develz.org/release/0.5/
Fun fact: The source code for AlphaMan, a post-apoc roguelike from 1995, has just been released.
I enjoyed Linley Henzell’s Dungeon Crawl. I prefer it to DCSS
What do you think changed for the worse in DCSS, or what did you prefer as it is in the original LHDC?
Have you beaten either?
Would you have LHDC-specific tips?
It’s not that anything has changed for the worse in DCSS, it’s just a personal preference. LHDC appeals to me for a lot of the same reason I like Rogue, small footprint, minimal graphics.
I have never won either, but I do not play to win. I just play to play.
Interesting to see where this goes. I always thought AlphaMan was interesting, but it seemed a bit sparse. Still a good game though.
I want to add my support for an episode on pretty much any roguelike. NetHack and the Epyx release of Rogue in particular are ones I’ve spent time with. Rogue itself would make sense for its influence on later games, but the mechanical depth of NetHack would ensure that every participant has their own unique silly YASD stories.
I played some Dungeon Crawl briefly long ago the and some DCSS more recently. It’s my understanding that DCSS isn’t just a “better Crawl” but a significant departure in terms of design goals, so I think Dungeon Crawl may be interesting in its own right.
It could also be fun to cover some “proto-roguelike”. I’ve heard some say that Beneath Apple Manor is very rogue-like, and I learned just now that it had a PC release.
I also support the suggestion of (any) roguelike and perhaps original Rogue in particular. I’ve returned to it regularly for … I guess about 35 years by now and still never finished it.
I came here to suggest a roguelikes episode, and would definitely agree with Epyx Rogue, NetHack and Dungeon Crawl above – while all those games are available on other platforms too, they had a very distinctive look on a DOS text display.
To add another one, you could also talk briefly about One Hundred and One Monochrome Mazes – it’s a pure maze game rather than a roguelike, but it’s a very early PC game, and there aren’t very many games out there that are designed to only work on MDA…
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