In which I go Rogue...like

This week on a very special episode of Brought to you by the letter 'd' we will be discussing Roguelikes. Mostly because I'm playing Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer on the DS and it is awesome. If you can locate a copy (it took us a few stores) you can pick it up for around $15 and I recommend you do so. Unless you hate fun. But there are a few things you should know first so you don't come crawling back to ol' letter 'd' complaining about how this isn't fun. (In which case I will tell you that you are wrong and then go back to playing.)

Roguelikes are a genre of video game based upon the game Rogue. For they are Rogue like. You see? Simple. Typically they are a dungeon crawl in which you, the poor wandering fool, are attempting to reach a goal so many levels into said dungeon. You will encounter treasure and random dungeon layouts and monsters. Occasionally in that order. In the Shiren games they are turn based so that for every move you make, the monsters in that level of the dungeon also get to make a move. Oh and if you happen to get killed (you will) you are sent back to the beginning minus your levels and items. You get to start over. Armed only with the knowledge you acquired and a pithy statement about how you died at the hands of a Rice Boss.

Additionally the Shiren games let you make small adjustments to the world over time. You will encounter people that may become allies. You occasionally find storehouses where you can leave things for your future self to take and so on. But yeah, you'll get terribly familiar with the first few areas as you learn how things work and so on. Good fun. There are several roguelikes available for trying out. Nethack is one of the more famous ones, although I've heard it can be pretty difficult to dive into without some knowledge about how it works. Angband is another one with a Tolkein bent. This here column talks about roguelikes in some detail. Also Episode 9 of Active Time Babble talks about them at length.

In other news a decent three day weekend was had as casa del 'd' visited friends way up North. We watched the Percy Jackson flick (it was good if wildly different from the book) and played some games. Tobago is indeed better with 3-4 players. But that will most likely get its own post once I get some pictures. Really not good at the taking and posting pictures.