you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2

On the first networked, Unix-based computers, your gaming options were severely limited. You could play the Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure game (one of those text-based ones with a parser that accepts commands like “go north”, or “throw stone at ogre” or “examine your navel”); simplistic AI-based games like a chess game where you’d have to play a physical board, enter your move in chess notation, and the AI would give you its move in chess notation in return; quiz games of all stripes; or maybe even a Star Trek based game (which I remember playing on my Tandy 1000 EX, my first computer, and is admittedly pretty fun as a strategy game). In 1980, though, the first graphically represented, heavily D&D-influenced RPG came into the picture and completely blew the rest of the RPGs at the time, out of the water.

Of course, by graphically represented, I mean it used ASCII characters used to display text on the console to represent the player, the dungeon, items and monsters. Turn by turn, you’d move an @ symbol one space at a time — and for every space you move, the monsters on each floor of the randomly generated dungeon if they are awake and roaming, or know where you are, would either wander aimlessly or come after you with relentless tenacity respectively, hoping to put an end to your spelunking career. Meanwhile, you ran around grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down, like gold for points so you could get on the high score list, or weapons, scrolls and potions to make killing these ne’er-do-wells easier (thus facilitating your staying alive to get more gold).

The below example was stolen directly from the Wikipedia article on Roguelikes:

roguelike

Jeez! Look out for that Dragon, it’s just one step away! My advice: ready some kind of weapon with ice properties this turn, so you can hit it by walking into it on the next. Stopping and thinking about your actions, and especially retreating when necessary, pays off in this kind of game, whereas being a meathead and grinding through the enemies will only earn you your gravestone screen and a probably-low spot on the high score board.

Now, the earliest versions of Rogue didn’t have color, because the terminals you were playing on were limited to green or amber on black (and maybe, if you were lucky, a few shades thereof), so you couldn’t tell what kind of Dragon that was until it started gnawing your f@ce off. Newer games emulated and expanded on the genre that Rogue started, porting it to new systems and making use of extended ASCII unicode “graphics” (e.g. NetHack), adding color when monitors and video cards were capable of it, adding shops to make use of the otherwise useless point system that gold was in its original incarnation, adding a town, or multiple towns, an overworld, quests, events, and Tolkien or Zelazny references, one of the Tolkien based adaptations even going so far as to create the entirety of Middle Earth.

Once computer UI’s got graphical, you’d think that would be the death knell for roguelikes, but the old games got facelifts, with specialized ports that include tilesets, isometric graphics, and once computers were capable of such things, even took away the turn-by-turn nature of the game. You’ve probably played this particular example — it’s called Diablo.

Roguelikes aren’t limited to computers though. If you have a Wii, you have a number of options for dungeon-diving, like getting Baroque or Chocobo’s Dungeon, or you could use the Bannerbomb executable loader (basically, a memory overflow hack that may be patched against in future Wii upgrades, so if you want to do this, do it now). Then you can install the Homebrew Channel and Homebrew Browser, so you can download and play the several Roguelikes that have been ported, including POWDER and Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.

Though, admittedly, without a keyboard with which to issue commands with a single keystroke like ‘l’ook, ‘r’ead, ‘q’uaff (that’s actually where I learned that word!), ‘m’agic, ‘p’ray, ‘E’at, ‘e’quip, ‘^e’ngrave… the interface gets pretty cumbersome with the panoply of commands at your disposal, unless your console comes with a keyboard or a million buttons on its controller.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go grind some more — my level 5 warrior can barely survive the Barrow Downs’ second area. It’s just absolutely shameful! I’ll never recover the shards of Narsil and face Morgoth in Angband at this rate!

PS – in honour of this post, and of you reading through the whole thing, I’ve implemented an easter egg on my site. Those of you who know anything about video games and secret cheat codes (or with any minor ability to read website source code, I guess) ought to know what to do to access this easter egg.

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you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2
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8 thoughts on “you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2

  1. 2

    ADOM is great — just pure awesome. I remember playing it on a borrowed 286 for one of the summers I spent working back at my dad’s, and that was basically the only thing I had to play all summer long.

    The corruption system is crazy though. The one character I played that actually won (due to my relentless cheating with the save systems — I built a series of batch files to back up my saves on load), ended up so horribly corrupted on the last level, like, one notch away from death, that in beating the game he turned into a cruel and evil malevolent king.

  2. 3

    I have to say that I love the easter egg. Konami FTW!

    I recall setting up (Colossal Cave) Adventure on a VAX/VMS system many years ago where I was a simple user who had found ways to do a lot of cool things on my Fortune 500 Company employer’s system. It was a lot of fun. I remember contacting the guy who compiled it (it was a binary package) to find out the “debug” code that was set during compile-time. (It was “BEAR”, for those who might wonder.)

    My wife and I spent a lot of time playing ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery) on my Amiga 500. There were some very interesting and unforeseen events when you did certain things. I once pickpocketed a little girl in town, prompting her to hit me. A baby water dragon, Blup, witnessed the girl hitting me, but not the pickpocketing, prompting him to start attacking the girl (and, subsequently, the rest of the townspeople). Needless to say, that event made certain parts of the game unplayable. Bug or feature? Probably neither; just something the developer hadn’t thought of.

  3. 4

    “…due to my relentless cheating with the save systems”

    LOL! At least I’m not the only one who did that. There was a problem playing on my Amiga. The temp file generated while playing would grow increasingly larger, and memory use would increase as well. I found that if I played for a fixed length of time, saved and quit, then copied the save file and restarted, everything would be okay.

    I also did some binary editing of the save files to figure out how certain things worked, and to make myself god-like if I chose. I’m such a cheater. ADOM, Bard’s Tale, Baldur’s Gate, etc. all had interesting save files to play with.

  4. 5

    I can’t say I was a huge cheater, but I didn’t like permadeath.  There’s something about having twenty hours of playtime invested in a game and having it all wiped away because you mistook a grey mold for a death mold.

    Now, console games, I cheated all the time, be it with debug codes (like rubber-banding the left arrow and A button on controller 2 for Megaman 3!), or with a Game Genie.  Mostly because I was only renting them for the weekend and I damn well wanted to get my money’s worth and see the full game.  If it was good enough to replay, I’d buy it, usually without cheats, but most games just aren’t good enough to replay.  The one NES game I keep going back to, to this day, though — River City Ransom.  I owned that cart and still have a tattered manual hanging around someplace.

  5. 7

    Scrolls of cure corruption were a sort of default wish for me in ADOM once equipment needs were met. Bless them before using, of course. If your character could handle the Blue Dragon caves you could generally get sufficient scrolls and wishes to use for scrolls to overcome end-game corruption–those caves produce obscene amounts of loot. There were also some guaranteed scrolls available. Corruption took some planning and luck to deal with, but usually could be managed.

    ADOM’s a great game and I still break it, and Angband, out every now and then, consulting the ADOM guidebook as needed when I forget the spoiler details needed to make my way through the game. I’m eagerly awaiting the completion of ADOM II.

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