Roguelike
A roguelike computer game is one that resembles Rogue. See Gameinfo:Roguelike.
The original Rogue game featured a thief who entered the dungeon to steal the Amulet of Yendor. A free clone called Hack retained the Amulet, but introduced multiple roles (classes). The six roles in Hack are Tourist, Speleologist, Fighter, Knight, Cave-man, and Wizard.
The game NetHack has added several features to Hack, including both the Rogue class and the roguelike level. Somewhere in each dungeon, below the Oracle but above Medusa, is a special level that emulates Rogue. Actually, all of NetHack is roguelike, but this one level is more like Rogue than the others.
Here is a list of traits from the older Hack and Rogue games that you can also find in NetHack.
- All monsters are uppercase letters. (NetHack achieves this by not spawning any lowercase-letter monsters at this special levels. It is still possible to bring lowercase-letter monsters like pets from other levels to this level.)
- Doors, represented by +, act like open doorways, meaning that you can not walk diagonally through them. There is no way to close or destroy these doors.
- There are no DECgraphics or color. Rogue and Hack lacked those features. NetHack, at least when playing the tty port, disables those options during the special level.
- Stairs are percent signs %. (Hack uses < and >, like NetHack normally does.) In Rogue, there was always one stairway: down if you had not found the Amulet, or up if you found it. Hack and NetHack introduced an innovation where old levels were saved to disk, allowing you to freely travel up and down. Thus, the roguelike level of NetHack contains two percent signs.
- Food is colons :. (Hack uses %, but NetHack uses : for food and corpses at the roguelike special level. Thus, NetHack players might sometimes confuse food and corpses at this level with newts or other lizard-like monsters.)
List of roguelike games
- Rogue (game)
- Moria
- umoria
- Angband
- ZAngband
- Dungeon Crawl
- NetHack
