Elderlore

Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - a look at Square Enix's chocobo-starring, Rogue-ish Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon for Nintendo's Wii.]

We looked at Shiren the Wanderer for the Wii a little while ago. Interestingly, that is only one of three roguelike or quasi-roguelike games for the system. The other two are Baroque, which we'll be looking at shortly (so everyone in the comments can be patient a little while longer) and Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon.

Chocobo's Dungeon is a sorta-sequel to Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon, a Playstation roguelike originally developed by Chunsoft, the Mystery Dungeon people who also made the Torneko games and Shiren the Wanderer. Chunsoft has made many roguelikes and quasi-roguelikes licensed to other companies using their properties.

This is what brought us the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, which are breathtakingly boring but still, among their audience, remarkably popular. Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon was a similar kind of thing. While the Chocobo's Dungeon games have been developed by Square (and later instalments by h.a.n.d.), the first two at least were supervised by the president of Chunsoft, so at least some know-how is behind them.

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time -- a look at how randomization of game elements - so popular in Roguelikes - works to draw in the player and provide replayability.]

Roguelikes are the genre of game most associated with randomization of game content. Some other games, especially classic games, feature substantial random elements, but most of them use them as an afterthought, or in an ineffective manner, or without fully realizing how they change the dynamics of their game.

As an example I offer a Gamecube game, Nintendo's Pikmin 2. One of the advertised features for the game of the randomized dungeons that players would enter during play. I consider that the original Pikmin, which had little or no random elements, to be brilliantly designed.

It forced players to make wise use of their actions within a strict time limit (30 game days), and yet the limit was short enough that mistakes were duly punished and players had a disincentive to grind for additional troops. Yet, it wasn't really so difficult that it took players more than one or two attempts to win. And really dedicated players could win surprisingly quickly; the shortest possible time to win was nine game days out of the thirty allowed.

But some players, and more importantly game blogs, complained about the overall time limit, so it was removed in the sequel. Further, for the random dungeons which were advertised as the major addition to the game, the day timer is disabled. Each floor's layout is not actually randomly generated: instead, the maze layout, the treasures to be found, the resources provided, and the enemy opposition are all static, predetermined for each floor. Without the timer, there is no pressure that might force players to move on without having found everything.

The only real randomness is in the locations of all these things. Scrambling the start location too helps a little, but not much. Thus, the only effect that the randomness has on the game is the order in which things are found and the relatively small variable tactical challenge that comes from fighting enemies under differing terrain conditions. For all the promise that randomization maps held, it really barely made any more sense to scramble object locations than to keep them static too.

When does it make sense to randomize? What benefits does this provide to a computer game? Here are a few. (I should warn you ahead of time, this is one of the more "out there" columns in the sequence....)

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - an interview with Rodain Joubert about the buzzed about Desktop Dungeons.]

Desktop Dungeons is a quick-play freeware PC dungeon exploration game that has been enjoying tremendous popularity over the last few months. Each game involves a single screen of a dungeon, and is typically less than thirty minutes to complete. Yet it provides an abundance of races and classes to play as, and special dungeon types to explore, that endlessly remix its small number of basic elements into completely new challenges each time.

As comments in blog posts about it tend to point out, Desktop Dungeons is not technically a roguelike game. It doesn't have tactical combat, has no identification features, and it's simulation of time is fairly simplistic. And yet, it has some fairly strong ties to roguelikes that definitely brings it into the purview of a roguelike column.

It is a game, ultimately, about gaining levels and making good use of limited resources, it's quite difficult and yet also has a strong sense of balance, where a decision made half the game ago can suddenly be what pushes you over the edge at the end. Also, live or die, each game is usually less than thirty minutes, so bad decisions don't drag you down. If it turns out you can't win, you just retire and try again. Really good players can tackle one of the challenge dungeons, or even participate in ranked games the scores of which get uploaded to an online scoreboard.

The game seems to be pretty popular on the gaming blogs right now. In this interview with South African creator Rodain Joubert, alias "Nandrew," we discuss the game's creation, its great, sudden popularity, its inspiration in Dungeon Crawl, and a little bit about goats and orcs.

[Note: I forgot I had Derek Yu's custom tileset for the game installed when I took a couple of the screenshots. I'm leaving them in, however, because his set is great. Not that the originals are a slouch mind you....]

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - a detailed look at Atlus' Shiren The Wanderer for the Wii.]

“Shiren the Wanderer” is Atlus' name for their U.S edition of the two-years-old most recent Shiren game released in Japan, for the Wii game console. More properly the name is applied to a whole series of games, some of which I've mentioned here before. The games are of varying quality, but even the weakest Shiren game possesses awesome features and wonderful gameplay entirely absent elsewhere in the JRPG field.

This is a game of survival, of improbable escapes from tight situations. Once you learn to play a Shiren game well, you will constantly amaze yourself with the scrapes you get out of. Until you learn to do this you will die a lot, but no dungeon is really very long so you can always try again.

They really are something special. So special that I have already spent four whole columns talking about them, three on the Super Famicom game [Journal 1, Journal 2, Final Problem] and one of the recent DS port [here], the first Shiren game ever to officially make it to the United States. The Wii game which I cover now is the second game to make it here.

I talk the game up here at the beginning because, while good in a good number of ways, compared to the DS game, Shiren the Wanderer for Wii is not as good. Instead of the big single-dungeon structure that tends to work best for it, this edition is split up in a number of smaller dungeons, somewhat in the style of Pokemon Rescue Team. Further, most of these dungeons are set up as being one part of a longer journey, so Shiren retains his character level between them instead of starting from scratch each time. The high score and rescue features that were in the Japanese version have all been excised from this one, an unavoidable detriment to a wholehearted recommendation. And don't get me started on the cutscenes.... But even with all these problems, it is still the best (and nearly the only) game of its type for the Wii, and one of the few commercial console roguelikes to see release in the U.S. that is really worth playing.

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. Check out previous columns for other entries in this series on breakout Roguelike variant Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.]

One thing new players to Crawl may find dismaying is the sheer size of the dungeon. Rogue, Nethack and ADOM have dungeon levels that fit on a single screen, but Crawl's maps are much larger, many more screens in size both vertically and horizontally. They aren't as large as Angband's, but Angband has transient levels anyway; once you leave a level, it is completely forgotten and cannot be returned to, so in a sense they are disposable.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup's levels are big enough that they pose challenges of information management for the player. And if a player has a good enough memory to handle them, or a pad and paper for writing things down, that works well, for a while at least. The game did little to help the player to keep track of it all for a while. In fact, the addition of the Travel Patch marks the root of the Crawl code fork that would become Stone Soup. (The Travel Patch and its role in Stone Soup's origins are detailed in a post at crawl.develz.org.)Since its introduction, Crawl has acquired an amazing array of automated play aids, far beyond the call of duty and unique in the roguelike world.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza, Part 4: Travel Functions & Play Aids" »

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

Following Part 1 and Part 2, we are continuing our discussion of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, the popular variant of Linley's Dungeon Crawl that has swept the roguelike world by storm.

One special feature of the game is that nearly every one of the game's many races can also play all of the classes in the game, and vice versa, and do so in a reasonably consistent way that exposes interesting gameplay options. Unlike other games, Dungeon Crawl has found a way to keep classes differentiated, requiring different play styles, even into the late game, without actually preventing classes from doing anything. It is possible for a fighter type to learn magic and vice versa, but is it wise to put in the effort in doing this? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.

This column looks at some of the many interesting combinations of race and role in Crawl, and their available paths (or lack thereof) to success. The specific combinations looked at are: Spriggan Enchanter, Deep Dwarf Paladin, Hill Orc Priest, Human Wanderer and Minotaur Chaos Knight of Xom. (I'm sure some of you may have your own favorites, and I'm looking forward to seeing your suggestions in the comments for this one.)

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza, Part 3: Beogh Liturgical School For Orcs" »

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time, he continues a length series on roguelike Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup by examining its intriguing - but complex - skill-based gameplay system.]

In Part 1 of this article series, we examined the experience and skill advancement system of that rising star of roguelikedom, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It’s a mixture of a straight-forward level gaining mechanism and a practice system that balances out the problems with characters doing something over and over just to gain skill by requiring he kill monsters to provide the fuel for advancement.

Like how Nethack, in many ways, is best experienced playing via telnet, with a community score list to place on and player ghosts to encounter, so is Crawl (although it tends to make Crawl games harder rather than easier, due to ghosts being so much more dangerous there). The two primary places you can play Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup online is at crawl.akrasiac.org for the current stable version and crawl.develz.com for the current development version. Both versions are ASCII only, and Windows users will probably have to install PuTTY. Helpful instructions can be found on the akrasaic site.

(Warning: This is a full examination of all of Crawl's many skills. This article is quite lengthy!)

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.] This is the beginning of a sequence of articles on the popular roguelike game Dungeon Crawl. We've covered it once before, but considering the game's importance and continued development we have not discussed it nearly as much as it deserves. Hopefully this and the next few articles will go some way towards remedying this tragic situation! Of the five major roguelikes (Rogue, Nethack, Angband, ADOM and Dungeon Crawl), Crawl is both the most recent addition the list and the one undergoing, by far, the most intensive development. A favorite of the Goons over at Something Awful, it possesses a very strong design which is difficult to exploit, and provides tradeoffs and drawbacks for most important actions. In this it sticks closely to Rogue, and other than the original Hack it is probably the popular roguelike that best recognizes its forefather's great strengths. These articles are written based on the as-of-this-writing most current stable version of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, 0.5.2. Much of the information herein was gleaned through perusal of the Dungeon Crawl Wiki at http://crawl.chaosforge.org/index.php?title=CrawlWiki, and the spoilers found at http://www.normalesup.org/~grasland/Crawl/. It should be noted that a new version is under development as v0.6.0, and that a development build of this version is available for download.

Continue reading "COLUMN: @Play: Crawlapalooza Part 1, Skills and Advancement" »

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time - a look at definiting Roguelikes through 'The Berlin Interpretation'.] Last time when covering Dungeon Hack, I noted that it doesn’t quite fit up to all of the most common definition of a roguelike. While it has random dungeons, hack-and-slash gameplay, and even items that must be identified, it is a first-person game. And not even an Ultima Underworld kind of first-personness, but the same kind of discrete, right-angled rotation, corridor-centered perspective and step-based movement used in the Wizardry games, which were many years old by that point. And it was a real-time game, too! For me, the game is obviously rougelike enough to be covered here, since we’re more concerned with what it is that makes roguelikes fun to play than adherance to a laundry list of similarities. But for those who are interested in such classification, we have the Berlin Interpretation. Arrived at last year at the International Roguelike Development Conference, starting from a document over at Temple of the Roguelike, the Berlin Interpretation is a set of feature descriptions that fairly well encapsulates what a lot of people consider when they think of roguelikes. It covers both graphical and gameplay elements, and has the added advantage of not being posed as a mere checklist. They recognize that some games that are probably roguelike do not meet the exact description presented by the list, and so it is divided into High and Low value factors. We’re going to take the game through several unusual cases we’ve covered in the past: ToeJam & Earl, Shiren the Wanderer (SNES version) and Dungeon Hack. We’ll also compare Nethack, Dungeon Crawl and Diablo to the list as controls. Let’s have a look! The original text of the Berlin Interpretation can be found at RogueBasin.

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Source: GameSetWatch Column @Play

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre. This time around - a relatively unknown official D&D license in the genre is explored in-depth.] Roguelike games have been around for a good while, and from the very start many of them have cribbed system rules out of the Dungeons & Dragons books. Many of Rogue's items (especially equipment) come from that game, and Nethack goes so far as to retain the idea that armor class counts down, possibly the last game still in development to retain this convention; D&D dropped that back in its third edition. But there is one roguelike, or close to it, that adheres to the Dungeons & Dragons rules out of necessity, because it is actually an official Second Edition AD&D computer game product! Dungeon Hack was created in 1993 by Dreamforge Intertainment, a company that developed several other official D&D games for TSR back in the days when SSI still held the license. I mentioned way back in some of the earliest columns that Rogue's inspiration was likely the hack-and-slash play of old-school D&D mixed with the thinking (if not the actual geomorphs) behind the random dungeon generation tables in the 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Perhaps partly due to these roots, Dungeon Hack is actually a fairly good game. It's not nearly as complex as Nethack, but that fact works in the game's favor as much as argue against it. However, some superficial aspects of the game may cause one to conclude that it does not deserve to be called by the term "roguelike."

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