Rogueism

This is kinda similar

The faggoty manga people thing is still in full effect, however

The shrieker shrieks!
The rust monster hits! Your boots rust.
The rust monster hits! Your boots rust further.
The rust monster hits! Your boots are completely rusty.
The Olog-hai wields a glaive. The Olog-hai hits!
You die...

F@RT

Also, it's not like the other FF games haven't had turn based fighting systems and strategy elements. And there's a strong emphasis on plot in FFT, developing and playing the roles of characters in an intricate story. Is the isometric grid alone enough to make it a strategy game? I don't think so, especially when the aesthetic is so clearly RPG oriented. but I'd be curious to hear what other people think.

What Laura H said... Plot, characters/story levelling up, job classes, random quests and jobs you can take to get rewards and experience. It is much closer to final fantasy games and rpg's in general than strategy games like romance of the three kingdoms or rome total war, i am unsure of any strategy game it is like tho it has some elements from strategy games. Strategy-RPG is a good definition i guess although surely all rpg's or pretty much all games need 'strategy'.

Final Fantasy X and X-II got rid of the world map for linear location to location travelling which gets rid of a lot of exploration, still exploration of dungeons and towns but no world. Azure dreams only has one town and one dungeon but it's still an rpg.

OUR HOUSEHOLD

http://www.squareamp.com/features/gallery/Group/sephiroth_Aeris.jpg

Those pictures are the funny.

People sick of the press-A-til-you-get-a-CGI nonsense should play Atelier Iris for the PS2. It's totally big eyed otaku shit but fairly deep with next to no cutscenes and decently fun random encounters.

(Isn't rogueism kinda maybe about difficulty? So FFT but not FF, which is 'easier'?)

I gave up on Final Fantasy when I got to the one with the dude who talked like a surfer and wore half-jams.

FYI: voiced by John DiMaggio, who also did Bender from Futurama and Smiling Jack in VTM: Bloodlines.

some rubicons are better off not crossed.

with that said, Sierra games always lagged Lucasarts.

xpost

no, i do not like HORRID titular puns! we all have our own pun threashold, past which men fear to tread against an insanity not achievable without truly comprehending in full the awesome pervese nature of a Cthulhu-like being.

okay, maybe i've had too many beers tonight...

100% linear, strategy guide publisher's wet dream, and highly dependent on graphics quality for the experience.

FREQUENT DEATH does not a roguelike make

Portable systems are perfect for rogueist gaming, anyway. Why not more randomly generated maps with hundreds of weird creatures for the GBA/DS?

I think rogueism also does not accept level grind, instead, you just go hunting for more and better equipment and figure out better ways to use it.

http://bastardpenguins.com/shtml/pics/dragonwarrior/slime.gif

He wants a hug!

you control the game with his dangly bits

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v418/PavingMAntis/01.jpg

we got some HATS now, muthafuckas!

"Rogueism" as described above doesn't necessarily equal complexity so much as difficulty. Things can be really, really difficult (and frustrating) without being very in depth (Ever played Ghosts N Goblins?). Also, lots of later RPGs were very complex and sophisticated (Materia? Conditional turn-based battle systems?). I'm not saying they were always good in every instance, but they weren't EASY--it's not like you sat around mashing buttons between cutscenes as some people who have never played them imply. Strategy is indispensible in any truly "fun" RPG.

Also, I think level grind is inevitable in RPGs, at least to some extent. 2D RPGs were not immune to this either, though perhaps it is a matter of degree. Wandering around "hunting for more and better equipment" sounds a lot like grind to me, at least when you spend long enough doing it.

yup. soooo many memories of doing this even back in the Ultima days.

i wonder when Lord British is actually going to back a decent american game again, anyway...

i mean moria was pretty straightforward.

I would say the depth with which rogue-like games (again, specifically Nethack) leverage the inventory aspect is much more a part of the identity of the category than anti save game trendencies or permadeath (which are both really the same thing, aren't they?). Sure this is true to some extent of all RPGs of any sort, but while many console RPGs for example assign each character a specific weapon and armor type which have very clear-cut levels of quality (rainbow blade is better than steel is better than copper), and arrive at relatively pre-defined points during the course of the game (you start with the wood sword and never get the steel sword before getting the copper one), the player of a rogue-like game has to develop a deeper understanding of their inventory relative to a lot of other game factors. Part of playing the game is learning not only which armors grant you a better AC, but balancing that against the weight of the armor, special resistances, tendency to rust, stuff like that; and this is true for every single type of item in the game!
(really though, I don't know why we have to talk about "rogue-like". It seems to me that no other rogue-like game comes within leagues of Nethack in any aspect. It's just better than all the rest.)

I think Zangband is good and some of the nethack clones are also.

The most roguist thing I have ever seen isn't Nethack at all, but rather this faq for a now-abandoned MMORPG - check out the answers to the pvp, spawning and gods questions!

Kinda like Metroid, then, HUH.

Diablo and games like Fire Emblem or FF:Tactics are 100% linear or very nearly so - is extensive exploration really required to be rogueist? I can't figure it out because the linearity of Sierra adventure games really ticks me off, but the games above don't. The Baldur's Gate game I played through on PS2 was totally linear and pretty difficult at times, especially some of the "puzzles."

I'm not sure if I appreciate sheer difficulty as being Rogueist, though. I think perhaps the difference should lie in the puzzle solving. Dragon Warrior games are completely Non-Rogueist because seriously people it's nothing but level grind and a-button mashing. Earthbound/Mother is probably the exception. Diablo vs. Dragon Warrior, though - wtf is the difference besides realtime combat?

I'm way too fuckin' ontological for my own good.

I think Dan's point about inventory weighage-up vs copper->steel->rainbow stuff is useful here but like Diablo is hardly the paragon of roguishness anyway! Linearity seems like kinda a red herring to me, I mean both extreme linearity and extreme non-linearity strike me as potentially positive values, in rogueism...

do the "perfect run" movies circulating on the net represent rougeism?

pls tell me if you do!!

Completely, if they were in fact made in one single take. I'm sure a lot of people take their best times from seperate levels and paste them together into one video as if it were playing through as normal, though I have no proof of this.

and I've read the whole thread... sorry guys

For me, both permadeath and 'having to save all the time' are (at least potentially) rogueist bcz they represent rogueist response to the "problem" of "well, people can save, does this not trivialise the challenge of our game"? So one dude says "we shan't let them save!" while another says "right! well, we'll make them save ALL THE TIME THEN, so it is still challenging!". Whereas a non-rogueist response wld be "yes, but they probably won't save all the time, because that is No Fun"...

x-post yep!

Both roguists and non-roguists like Katamari, because the idea is simple and good and unsullied, and also it is really fun!

"- anti save game trendencies
- permadeath
- etc"

necessarily equal "beautiful ideas" or that more modern RPGs do not. I see it as more of a accommodating vs. ascetic binary, or even indulgent fantasy vs. gritty "realism" (e.g. you die, you DIE). There are plenty of games with "beautiful ideas" but also beautiful visual execution of those ideas, which are not "rogueist." In fact, are rogueist games even allowed to be pretty? Anyway, I have to catch a bus now, later.

yeah I think that's my problem too... I didn't start playing RPGs until like last week, so I got no references

Also where did this idea that playing rogue-like games isn't fun come from!? They're very enjoyable, and not in a masochistic liking-it-because-it's-hard sort of way, but because it is all intricate but makes enough sense w/r/t itself that an accumulated set of knowledge (preferably gained from playing but sometimes from spoilers, I admit) can make one a better player.

Dude you have a job now, I got the whole fuckin' Battle Chest for $19.99 at GameStop!

If you play the game a second time, nothing changes. You don't have much of a leg up, because the "leg up" you get in the game is entirely how many hours you put in, level grind and cashflow being based on pseudorandom combat encounters in which the primary decision you have to make is the timing of your potion drinking or whatever. Additionally, if you're not even given the option to pick the classes of your characters, or where they stand in a formation, or anything like that, you've REALLY got nothing. This also goes for games where you are given an "illusion of choice" like my experience with Front Mission 4, yeah I can customize the shit out of these mecha, but there's clearly one best configuration for each character since their skill path is fixed and bigger guns are bigger guns, for fuck's sake.

In Rogueist games, even though a game might be turn-based and thus require no application of reflexes, you get a "leg up" from additional knowledge acquired AS A PLAYER, so that right from the start you know how to do things better and know about mistakes you have to avoid besides the "I wandered into a desert full of high-level monsters before finishing the 4-hour level grind session in the imp forest" mistake, because that one's bullshit anyway. Knowing the map and where you get your ass kicked (enabling you to MAKE speed runs) isn't about being given valid choices.

I'm on my second attempt at Fire Emblem for GBA and I've already gotten a very different experience that's a lot less riddled with errors than my first one. FE lets you achieve lots of different solutions to the problems it presents and basically forces you to live with your bad decisions by autosaving after every phase of each turn. It is 95% linear in plot and geography, but by omitting the illusion of choices in that regard it makes room for more complicated options in the field.

That's Rogueist, to me. Having to micromanage my peeps' inventories and try carefully to not get them murder death killed is part of it, but mostly what Dan said about being able to be a "better player" on repeat attempts, besides just knowing the map and story chronology.

Roguists would prefer there to be more games that are based on ideas that are beautiful. Non-roguists believe that this is anti-fun, and are maybe right.

(Laura)
I think that's a really romanticized notion. I don't know how

"- anti save game trendencies
- permadeath
- etc"

necessarily equal "beautiful ideas" or that more modern RPGs do not. I see it as more of a accommodating vs. ascetic binary, or even indulgent fantasy vs. gritty "realism" (e.g. you die, you DIE). There are plenty of games with "beautiful ideas" but also beautiful visual execution of those ideas, which are not "rogueist." In fact, are rogueist games even allowed to be pretty?

Okay, you are right to call me on this, I meant a very specific type of beautiful idea, beautiful is maybe even the wrong word rather than say "pure". An example I can think of is Loom (which is pretty much straight-up LucasArts except instead of inventory manipulation you have to cast "spells" by playing "music" on yr distaff to solve puzzles, you learn more as you go etc). Anyway anyway, Loom has a normal and a hard mode, in the normal mode when spell stuff happens you get coloured lights and the musical letters show up etc so you can be all "oh right that's untangle". But on hard, all you hear is the notes, you have to have music-type pitch-hearing to do it.

Ok so, to be to me this type of "hard mode" is fundamentally different to the hard mode on say Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance where there are just more monsters and they have more hitpoints etc - if both games were released with only hard mode, BADA would be "difficult" whereas Loom would be "rogueist" because the hardness would be an *effect* of a decision to choose pureautiful idea over unfrustrating play...

1) Roguelikes: Roguelikes :: Rock : Rockism (a videogame rockist: Tim Rogers!)

2) In a DROD-style puzzlegame, to alter a puzzle from allowing five wrong moves to allowing three is not rogueist. To alter it from allowing three to allowing one is.

Also I should sound less like a wanker, throughout.

Your Loom analogy is elegant.

What about platformers, though. Are there any that even qualify as having roguelike qualities? I remember Clash at Demonhead having a great deal of ridiculous, challenging shit going on, and not letting up for even a minute, but really just being able to choose your own route to the end game a la Mega Man isn't all it takes, is it? It's still the same game over and over, knowing the map is about the only trick you pick up.

Remember in the DOS Red Baron on 5.25" disks the "Realism" settings that would make your plane have all sorts of quirks and shit. Totally!!!!!!

This is what I think, too, and I think Rogueism isn't just about simulation being accurate in the confines of a very small set of circumstances, but letting you find lots of different solutions to the problems in the game. Exploring can take lots of different forms, my idea is that some kind of exploration being allowed (and rewarded) is the key. A simulation that beats you about the head with total "realism" in the context of one complex activity doesn't let you explore jack shit. Gran Turismo is all about whatever kind of garageload of ridiculous vehicles you want to build yourself to drive around whatever tracks you please, within the confines defined by gear ratios, tire wear and $$$$, which is why I put it forward.

...

thom jesus west (4:55:14 PM): oh dear. nethack-you just got killed.
thom jesus west (4:55:21 PM): you killed and ate some gnomes first tho.

I'm not saying it isn't I'm just asking cos I'm not sure I have a clear handle on what rogueism is still but I want to learn

What I though Tom was talking about here is the distinction between, say Kingdom Hearts, where you can wander around the beginning level for two or three days and get to lvl 100 before you start out, and Zelda, where if you don't have the next hot item, no amount of running around hitting things is going to get you past the next dungeon, so get to it! Actually Zelda has an out, it has rupees and things you can buy with them, but before I ever saw it I saw Alundra on the PS2 which was totally hardcore like that, and stunned me when I first realised.

Players can always impose rogueishness on a game, through speed runs/initial equipment/etc.

This is humans for you, give them something to do and they'll organize and innovate on it.

zing

Who knows; maybe generation algorithms have improved in 12 years.

Also, has anyone found a better interface for nethack -- isometric or 3d? I'm sick of the awful OS X keybindings....

LucasArts Desktop Adventures roffle

I think you can polymorph into burrowing monsters.

http://drgamelove.blogspot.com/2009/06/permanent-death-episode-1-inasupicious.html

http://www.above49.ca/2009/06/far-cry-2-on-permanent-death-bandwagon.html
http://bigapple3am.com/2009/06/permanent-death---far-cry-2-part-1.html

is pokemonism the opposite of rougeism (i.e. between the possibility of "collecting them all" and the forcing of hard choices which result in vast differences on each playthrough and of which none is clearly "superior"?)
― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, November 28, 2005 12:25 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh the innocent days before permadeath pokemon was 'a thing'

mainly i revive this thread because there wasn't one for ftl

i have spent like 48 hours playing ftl in the past week

i hate myself

The ROGUE-LIKE Thread

but wait - there's permadeath in pokemon now?

http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Nuzlocke_Challenge

not, like, hard-coded or anything

i couldn't find this because i searched for "roguism" and i couldn't find the other one because i searched for "roguelike", next time i am just going to revive my doomrl thread that no one else posted on

so FTL is really well balanced except i. you kind of need a teleporter to beat the last boss ii. as soon as you prioritize getting a teleporter you realise it breaks the whole game

and yet now i've realised that instead of having fun i'm trying to get all the achievements and beat it with all of the ships, no discovery any more, efficient runs only, quit on making a mistake, go to the wiki every time i come across a new event, go videogames

i hate myself

― attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or (thomp), Monday, January 7, 2013 12:08 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

let's face it, if you like Rogue-likes, it's kind of a given, dawg (myself included) - it takes a certain amount of stubbornness and self-hatred to enjoy this genre

woo! i beat FTL on normal!!

oh huh neat

regular ship or one of the unlocks? i have been starting lots of normal games and rage-quitting when i forget to turn off the artillery beam and blow up a ship with my boarding crew on it by accident

with the cruiser obv

I think I was only able to unlock like 4 ships.

Still FTL is awesome for having that kinda experience I can run on my work/travel laptop. Saving the universe from an airplane seat!

I wasn't aware of this until a week ago, but ADOM ran a successful Indiegogo campaign and is back in development.

let's face it, if you like Rogue-likes, it's kind of a given, dawg (myself included) - it takes a certain amount of stubbornness and self-hatred to enjoy this genre

Maybe? After playing a roguelike for a couple hours stretch I start to lose the sensation that I'm interacting with orcs and dragons and feel instead that I'm surfing a wave of digital information, like a Tetris game you can actually win

i beat it with the type 2 kestral xxxxp

basic laser x4! interesting

let's face it, if you like Rogue-likes, it's kind of a given, dawg (myself included) - it takes a certain amount of stubbornness and self-hatred to enjoy this genre

Maybe? After playing a roguelike for a couple hours stretch I start to lose the sensation that I'm interacting with orcs and dragons and feel instead that I'm surfing a wave of digital information, like a Tetris game you can actually win

― friday goodness thank it's (flamboyant goon tie included), Tuesday, January 8, 2013 2:40 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

mm this is the same point i have got to when i say this:

and yet now i've realised that instead of having fun i'm trying to get all the achievements and beat it with all of the ships, no discovery any more, efficient runs only, quit on making a mistake, go to the wiki every time i come across a new event, go videogames

― attempt to look intentionally nerdy, awkward or (thomp), Monday, January 7, 2013 1:43 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's something about roguelikes that make this transition way more central to the experience than when you play, like, god of war

probably that it's 50% preparation and meticulously-gained knowledge and experience through countless deaths, and 50% deluded gambler-rage against random number generation

basic laser x4 is OP until around sector 5 imo around which you've really got to upgrade to some ion weapons and/or bombs.

ultimately the best way to go about it in my experience is disabled medbays and sending boarding parties. i'm sure there are other successful strategies too but that's worked best for me.

i'm still finding a tough balance between exploring enough to get resources and running out of gas / money

thom jesus west (4:55:21 PM): you killed and ate some gnomes first tho

i stand by that

i have ~oddly vivid~ memories of my nethack-addicted period, normally in remembering videogames i remember what transpires on the screen, nethack i remember that i was listening to the first marnie stern album on a loop basically the entire time and the particular movements of my hands on the keys, or rather how my body felt in space and it felt to be ~interfaced with the machine~

that was then and this is now and thats that

a friend of mine saw i'd left my laptop running ftl and she said "whatever that is, it makes me feel very sorry for you"

haha

she should feel happy for you. ftl is awesome. i beat it on normal w/ the stealth ship yesterday!

i finished it on normal with the cruiser |:

woo! beat FTL w/ the Mantis cruiser, unlocked its second form, and I think I've got all the ships unlocked except for the Crystal one.

oh man playing w/ the basilisk is so much fun - 4-person teleporter ftw

my highest score yet - basilisk w/ 5395 points (also set my personal most ships defeated: 47, most scrap collected: 2406, most combat kills - 88, and most piloted evasions -281)

:( stop tempting me with this obviously addictive and awesome game

there's something about roguelikes that make this transition way more central to the experience than when you play, like, god of war

There's something also odd about people who post some of the FAQs, like "Hey I transformed this interesting game into a joyless grind / an OP faceroll, let me show you how and validate the hours I spent on this!!!".

Which I definitely will do if it's falling into the category of games that I like for the story (so, er, not very many roguelikes - is this one of their defining features, that it's less "the story" than "the stories, that your character would tell in the local inn for years"?) rather than the actual gameplay.

Andrew I've said here and elsewhere that the specific feeling that Roguelikes create is closer to the experience of playing Tetris. You're manipulating a stream of circumstance into a potential endgame, it's like surfing

Yeah I can definitely see that, though I think the complexity makes some difference - I've never finished a game of Tetris and wished that there was someone there to talk to about what just happened. Also most roguelikes aren't real time.

They're real time in that they eat up your real life

I mean, I tend to play as quick as possible because I want to achieve some sort of transcendent state of character cultivation within a reasonable time frame. It's about quick keystrokes and just-hubristic-enough game plans

Whenever I read a victory post (Skyrim included) and it involves a tonne of herb gathering, smithing, farming or repetitive skill development I am reminded as to why I only play this shit when I'm sick and bed-ridden

what on earth is an "OP faceroll"

OP = overpowered, as used upthread.

faceroll = er actually possibly slang local to WoW - it indicates that a class is so easy to play you could perform adequately just by binding their spells to random keys, resting your face on the keyboard, and rolling it around on there.

Achievement Unlocked: Your Own Fleet

well ... done?

thx! :)

crystal ships are super easy mode

how many hours have you spent on this dare i ask

idk I didn't time myself. Its a great game bc u can play a little bit whenever u have some spare time

Also the more you play the better you get at it

c'mon man. steam. show us the numbers.

do iiiiit

i haven't been playing it on steam. i can tell u tho that i've apparently played 295 games and i have 9 total victories. i just realized time played wouldn't make a lot of sense for this game bc i often leave it running in the background while i do other stuff anyway.

SHOW US

or i may have to contact mordileaks

i would happily share my hours played since they are surely fewer than my has-played on WoW, but i cannot!

fuck myself forever for ever decrying the non-rogue-iness of this awesome roguelike, btw. I hate this game for existing and hate myself for playing it for two hours this morning

i miss this game

anyone played brogue? https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/

(now available for ipad! https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brogue/id613921309)

Oh cool - seems to work okay.

I love Brogue! The most beautiful ASCII game ever!
It's impossible, though

just unlocked the godhead in binding of isaac

is desert golfing roguist

if you fail to meet par do you have to start over from the first hole?

lol that is a great concept. someone bang that out pronto. ilx games release #1. can't be hard to procedurally generate golf holes.

no but if you fail to meet par you have to live with that _forever_ which seems like the compliment of the same idea

http://i58.tinypic.com/2nk45sy.png

i've never been prouder

congrats that is excellent work

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/05/22/encrypted-rougelike-release-date/

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/15/may/encrypted.png

Eventually the 'rougelike' misspelling is going to be universal

egad, why would someone make this...

happy birthday to me just picked up a copy of invisible inc

encrypted looks quite gorgeous imo. lol ilx wont let me put the tag in