ABSTRACT
November 2006 This time out people are going to cover the state of the roguelike genre, covering as many of the most notable games as people can at one time. There are the “big three” games, the ones with their own Usenet groups that have decent traffic, which are NetHack, Angband and ADOM, and their variants. While Angband’s item discovery is but a shadow of NetHack’s, or even Rogue’s, it does take one of Rogue’s features to heart far more than NetHack does. ADOM’s quest structure means that players effectively have an itinerary while playing, a set of places they either have to go at certain times/levels or else miss out on meeting/helping/killing various people. There’s Brian Walker’s Brogue, an interesting game that people talk about later, which is intended as a kind of update of Rogue, but without many distractions common to RPGs, such as experience points and levels.
