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Angband.

That's true. FreeBSD is not for people who want to play games. These people need to use a PlayStation, GameCube, or Xbox.

And, heck, Angband is actually (mostly) FREE SOFTWARE for crying out loud! Doesn't that fit with Slashdot's mission? ;^)

Yes, I'm just kidding. But there is a grain of truth... :^D

Ever try to read the Silmarillion ? It's full of tons of different names and places and all kinds of stuff, and it can be tough to wade through it. But after playing Angband for a while, so many things were taken from the Silmarillion, when I finally read the book, the names had a familiarity to them as I try to connect them to what I saw in the game, and in the process, the very dry book becomes interesting. And when I played T.o.M.E., the geography of Middle Earth became much more interesting, because I had to navigate it myself in the game.

Another example: Robo Odyssey. This game was written back in 1984, and it teaches the player about logic gates and electronics design. I wish there were a more modern implementation of something similar (anyone out there know of anything similar?) that let you wire with logic gates to solve puzzles, but it really got me interested in doing logic design. I never did beat the game, and it had bugs, but the concept is great for teaching logic and electronic design.

Part of the reason I play Angband instead. Constantly dying from starvation compliments of Nethack's RNG was too damned frustrating.

Angband's home page can be found here, but for some reason ther's currently just a placeholder up.

Not a MUD, but in terms of text based games, I still play Angband on a regular basis, just as I played Moria, Larn, Omega and Hack before it. And no, I don't use any of the new fangled graphic tiles that are available for it now. It was always a great game when it was text only, and I see no reason to change that. A large part of the appeal is the depth of the game. Modern games are too shallow, and too easy to complete. Angband is an immensely detailed and immersive game, and there's nothing in the modern era that compares. Diablo was a blatant ripoff of the game style, but had all of the depth and variety removed, and was *way* too easy.

Huh? Diablo... fun? I thought it was boring drivel. They'd removed all the gameplay, and dumbed it down so there was no depth to game game at all. Have you never played the real thing?

• FreeCiv - free Civ 1/2 clone
  
• Tux Racer - downhill racing game
  
• Tux Typing - typing tutor
  
• IceBreaker - Jezzball clone
  
• Maelstrom - networkable, cool Asteroids clone
  
• Angband - best dungeon crawl ever!
  
• Chromium BSU - neat-o OpenGL 2D shooter
  

Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.

Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.

Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.

Lets consider some others:

zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...

Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.

Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:

Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.

Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.

Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.

There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)

Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.

While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.

There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)

Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.

There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.

Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.

Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...

These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.

Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot :-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.

Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.

Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.

Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.

Lets consider some others:

zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...

Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.

Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:

Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.

Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.

Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.

There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)

Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.

While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.

There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)

Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.

There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.

Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.

Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...

These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.

Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot :-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.

The official site is http://thangorodrim.angband.org

You can spend days or weeks playing a single character.

However, if you're planning on playing on a laptop (which I guess the guy would be doing, since it IS on a plane), I would strongly suggest that you get an external keyboard or keypad.

Damn, this is a time-sink: Angband

Wrong. Does it have games? Minesweeper? Nope

Are you trolling, or just misinformed? The kdegames package (included with every distro that includes KDE) has "KMines", which is a Minesweeper clone. GNOME has "gnomines". Both these are included under the "games" tab in the K menu ("Start menu") in an installation of SuSE 8.0, and I'd certainly be amazed if Mandrake didn't put them in a similar place.

Diablo?

There's no Diablo for Linux, so it's not on the installation CDs for any distro. You can install Falcons Eye Nethack for something arguably better than Diablo, or Zangband for, again, something arguably better than Diablo.

Falconseye Nethack is on many distro CDs, Zangband is not.

MS Paint? Right. Paint Shop Pro for me. The same goes for default shipments of Linux

GIMP comes with every distro, and is as good or better than PaintShop Pro. Curiously, you haven't mentioned any Linux applications in your half-formed rant, only Windows applications. What, praytell, are some examples of applications you think you need that aren't included in a recent distro CD or aren't available via Sourceforge/freshmeat.net ?

Angband... been playing it every day in my cube after I finish lunch. Even though I've been through countless characters, and never been down past 2000', it never really gets old.

For those of you who have never tried Angband, check out Thangorodrim.

Wait, wait. How do you define "computer-illiterate?" I am a diehard home Mac user, and I use it to... run my web browser, email software, and games, and also a couple other things (AIM, IRC, iTunes).
I'm very computer literate: I can go on and on to you about the guts of this li'l G3 iMac I own, lamenting about its cons and praising its pros; I'm getting fairly good at the UNIX stuff because, damnit, I want to know all my computer can do (go OS X); I'm an avid reader of /.; I know PHP and Perl; I co-run a fucking comic based on Angband, of all things.

Now. While I said I could go on and on about the guts of my iMac, I don't really _care_ beyond wanting it to run this game, or this application faster. I picked up most of my hardware knowledge from reading /. comments at -1, nested.
Does this make me one of the clueless herd?

I'd use any innovation that made my computer more of a joy to use, be it hardware or software.

I've used both voice recognition and a 3D UI (I'm discounting the gesture recognition in Black and White), and, well, they sucked.

I'm sort of rambling here because, well, I'm fairly unable to find your point. =) You seem to be saying that because most Mac users (and don't forget PC users) don't want to technology that--at a consumer level, anyway--is nowhere near helpful when bought at a consumer-level price, they are "computer-illiterate." _I_ think that most of 'em are like me: They'll try just about anything, but if it doesn't make the experience better--either through bad design or because it's not sufficiently advanced--they won't use it.

dalamcd

> You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game", you need smart game designers. Nice visuals is icing on the cake. Sadly, many game design companies these days make the same mistake: they assume that great graphics makes for great game play. In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents--the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.

I play Angband with the graphical display, but otherwise I agree with the gist of your post. I used to keep a Windows partition for the sole purpose of booting up to play a game now and then, but in the mid-late 90's I bought several games in a row that had first-rate graphics and fourth-rate play, and I simply lost interest in commercial games. (Actually, even more recently I bought Lokisoft's CivIII for Linux, and found that the trend has continued: the graphics are dazzling, but the game is boring as hell. I find myself playing crappy-graphics Freeciv instead.)

Like so much else in IT (and as some of the other replies to your post seem to tacitly admit), marketing has taken the driver's seat in commercial game design, and products have suffered for it.

1. Ben wanted Angband to become parameterizable, that is, he wanted as much of the game's monsters and world to be provided by external files. So, he wanted any future mantainers to understand what exactly is hardcoded and what is being read in dynamically.
2. IIRC, the current code tree decended from an old Macintosh port of 2.4.frog-knows. Since most developers were used to the PC 1.4 and Unix 2.4 versions at the time, the coding style may have been too different for most C coders to grok easily. Ben made this decision, I believe, since the then current Mac port most abstracted/separated the game logic from the UI.

It's from the wonderful dungeon crawling game Angband. If you've never played angband before and can afford to take a GPA hit, go for it.

I've learned that the best deals now a days are comming more and more from simply having connections

Angband is the master of everything.

• Marathon, Marathon II & Marathon Infinity

  Back when Doom was the big thing, Marathon came out. You actually had to aim up and down. Enemies would float down on you from above and behind. There were real puzzles. And the story! Never have a played a game with as engrossing a story. Marathon II took things up a notch, but wasn't as revolutionary. Marathon Infinity was a whole new story--a troubling and confusing one, at that. And Marathon still lives. There are tons of interesting mods (Tempus Irae, a Rennaissance Italy mod, is one of my favourites), and even an open source (yes, that means Linux!) version. Marathon II had a Windows version; all other commercial version were Mac-only; the open source is Mac, Linux, Windows and BeOS.

• Escape Velocity

  Want an exploration game? Want to be a space trader (remember trading games?)? Want an arcade space combat game? Want to conquer the galaxy? Escape Velocity allowed one to do all that and more. An incredible engine, not in terms of graphics, but in terms of capabilities. Truly outside-the-box thinking, it was one of the real greats. It is Mac-only.

• Angband

  First there was rogue. Then there was Moria. And then there was Angband. Expandable, extensible, just plain fun. It was winnable, too, which I cannot say for NetHack (which is in many ways a superior game, except that I spend all of my time on the first 6 levels) or Omega (I've just not played it enough).

• Descent

  Another one that came out right around Doom. Doom (and Marathon) had a boring map type--walls went straight from floor to ceiling; all floors and ceilings were parallel. The player ran around killing things. Descent changed all that by offering a FPS with true spherical movement: the player flew through tunnels, able to turn in any direction, control pitch, yaw and elevation. The gameplay was incredible. I'm not certain why this genre has not caught on. In many ways, it's similar to a flight simulator, but with an arcade flavour. A ripping good time; I'm playing Descent III on Linux these days. Descent was originally offered for Mac and Windows boxes.

• Contra

  I'm not certain why, but Contra was one of those games I could just play for hours and hours without end. I loved it deeply, and was awful at it. But man was it fun!

Incidentally, when's slashdot going to support <dl>?

If you think most /. readers are excellent coders, maybe you should get them to work on some of the open source projects around, most of which are appallingly coded. There's more to coding than being able to write a few lines of Perl that nobody else can read.

For a near-perfect example of good coding, check out the latest version of Angband.

For an example of probably the worst I have seen, look at libmcrypt.

There isn't anything well thought out, or neatly crafted.
Did I mention that Angband is totally lacking in a plot? If you want a plot, go read J.R.Tolkien. Or watch Final Fantasy IIV, you know... that game that makes you play few parts in order to get to the really boring plot FMVs?

Everything has an air of ill-concieved pseudo-randomness
Did I mentioned that I've been playing since '96. I know ppl who have been playing longer than that. That pseudo-randomness guarantees that you will never get the remotiest chance to play it the same way twice.

You walk around killing D's for $.
By the time your killing D's, you shouldn't give a damn about $. You should be worring that you've got free action, see invisble, and getting resists.

This is anouther thing I like about Angband; just when you get get used to one style of play (killing o's for $) it changes. Its no longer worth your time to buy anything, and you spend your time scouring the dungeon for the randomly and pseudo-randomly generated items that really count.

--Cam

Turn Based RPGs aren't gone, they're just hiding.

Angband is possibly the best game ever. Granted the plot is totally lacking, but I can distribute the complete file on a floppy; and I judge every game against it. Its graphics are simplistic, yet convey more information than most gaming interfaces today. The controls require some learning, but allow the user to execute any command without delay or mouse movements. I've been playing it since 1996. Did I mention that it was Open Sourced in 1984, before the GPL was thought of, and can run on ANY OS that came out since then.

But its strongest aspect is that it is turn based. I can stop, walk away, smoke a cigerate, come back, walk a step, then go to the bathroom. Or I can run down a hall and assult a vault in less than 30 seconds. Because it is turn based the game runs at MY speed. I never feel that I had to make a split second decision. When I'm getting my ass kicked, I can slow down and analyze the situation.

The game kicks ass. I have wasted many a day playing it. I lost a keyboard when my HDD crashed and killed my best character. Check it out, read the help files, read rec.games.roguelike.angband and get hooked:-)

--Cam

I hate Cheat Sheats. If I use it, I'm admitting that the game is to hard to play, and that I'm not smart enough. I hate to admit that. So you can imagine that I never play games like Final Fantasy 7,8,9... the game is to hard. There are to many random items with little or no way to find out what todo. The world is to big with to few clues. And the plot line is to strange to be understood; I love surprises, but they have to be something I shoulda seen coming.

Which is anouther thing. I'm here to play a game. If I wanted to watch a movie I'd use the VCR. When I spend more time watching the game than I do playing it, its not worth my time. Soul Reaver:LoK was a good game with an exellent plot. It had me on the edge of my seat trying to figure out who was pulling Kain's strings, without ever getting the way of playing the game. Metal Gear Solid had a good plot that moved the game play along, and made sence of it all.

A good game that had a weak plot was Castlevania. But it was excellent for anouther reason. I spent more time exploring the castle and finding items than I did beating the game. And that was after I beat the game.

When I play a game, I want something I have to think about. I want something that gets my addrenaline running. And sometimes I want something that my fingers can play without me there. I don't want something that is more of a challenge to me than it is my wallet.

The shiney graphics are cool, but don't sell me a demo of the 3D abilities of the card I've already bought. Use the eyecandy to enhance the story and gameplay. My favorite game of all time is Angband. Writen in 1984 and constantly updated through the years, the graphics have been updated to color, and nothing else. Yet I can come into a new situation, and with just a glace at the screen, know my situation, recognize any of the 800+ monsters that could be attacking me, and be up todate on the game. It has no plot, but that ensures that you never play the same game twice. I'm still playin it after 6 years:-)


--Cam

Being an angbanding (and proud) member of UMass Lowell, i'm very pleased by this innovation coming out of one of the UMasses.
See? this proves that poor, drunk, and underrated students/researchers can come up with useful tech.
(HAHA! in your *face* MIT!)

;P
James
KB1FJQ
[Bond] on irc.worldirc.org - #angband

Of course, you're going to see some of both, but I think the 'bazaar'-style projects would usually have to be simple enough for the average coder to at least understand and modify parts of it, with a positive effect on the codebase. Otherwise, they'll just do something else, and leave the hard stuff to a core development team (cathedral-style) or let the code rot.

However, I think Angband is a good example of some free code that has mutated as people have changed it. There are a few main developers, and they do accept patches, but there are also tons of forks, and some healthy, nifty add-ons. (Zangband, Mangband, the Angband Borg...)

I would love to see the Tk version finally back-ported to Unix, or for that matter, any graphical front-end on top of X would be nice... If I have some more time, I'll try to work on that. I have messed with the Borg code before, and it wasn't that hard to do; I got it to use (and not sell) my Rod of Restoration, and to value items more like a Mage and less like a Paladin...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'm not sure on the others, but on Angband, the currect copyright is:

Copyright (c) 1997 Ben Harrison, James E. Wilson, Robert A. Koeneke

This software may be copied and distributed for educational, research,
and not for profit purposes provided that this copyright and statement
are included in all such copies. Other copyrights may also apply.

The license isn't open source, as open source's popularity wasn't widespread when it came out, but it is effectively so, since you can get the code for almost any version of it easily. The current maintainer is also in process of trying to get the licence switched to a dual license with GPL, and wants as many people who've contributed to Angband's code over the years as possible to e-mail him giving permission.

If you've contributed any code to Angband, you might check at
http://thangorodrim.angband.org/ope nsource.html

I hate it when I forget the http.. above link should be thangorodrim.angband.org

Nobody cares!

Indeed, particularly when the Diablo games are such poor implementations of the original roguelike genre. If you want that sort of game, go an get a copy of angband/zangband/*band from http://thangorodrim.angband.org.

Instead of supporting Blizzard and their franchise, you could check out some great opensource projects that Blizzard basically repackaged, made real-time, added fancier graphics, and sold to Joe Consumer.

Rogue is the grandaddy of everything. Including Diablo. See where it all began.

Angband is my favorite Rogue-like. It has incredible depth, hundreds of monsters, and hundreds of magical items. #angband on Othernet usually has at least one developer in it.

There are also a number of Angband variants such as Zangband and Pernband. Zangband even includes a multitude of quests, for those who like a little story-line to their dungeon crawls. These can all be found at the Angband link above. Graphical Tcl versions of Angband also exist, for the graphics-needy.

Others include Nethack (a light-hearted, often humorous Rogue-like), ADOM , and Moria

So, instead of marching to your local EB, why not download one of these (I heartily recommend Angband) free games and save the 40$ that Diablo 2 would cost you? You could even contribute to the project, play with the source, or add your own monsters, items, and spells. Have fun!

Bah! Pretty pictures and stereo music! Today's gamers grow soft and reliant on their mice! Back in my day, we all played Angband. Er, wait, we still do.

John

Hey! I play ZAngband, so I still eat ancient multi-hued dragons for breakfast. Or was that just a capital 'D' that kept changing colors?

Paah! Multi-hued dragons are for wimps! I eat the Serpent of Chaos for breakfast! Muahahah!

Diablo (and all its graphical predecessors) took the mindless dungeon crawl out of the Alphabits era and into eyecandyland. Here's hoping the sequel is worth the wait and has more depth to the story.

This is one area where I'm still not convinced that the graphical RPG has surpassed the older character-graphic Rogue-like games. In terms of longevity and replayability, I still rate games like Angband and it's many variants (Sangband, Zangband, Omega and others) more highly than a lot of the modern 3D/isometric eye-candy experiences. Hey - I even turned off the 16x16 graphic tiles and went back to the colour font displays because they are clearer and easier to analyse quickly. Maybe DungeonSiege will finally provide the immersive fantasy world with enough depth to keep the 'one more try to slay the X of Y' replayability but for the moment I'll stick with Zangband.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Hey! I play ZAngband, so I still eat ancient multi-hued dragons for breakfast. Or was that just a capital 'D' that kept changing colors?

Paah! Multi-hued dragons are for wimps! I eat the Serpent of Chaos for breakfast! Muahahah!

Diablo (and all its graphical predecessors) took the mindless dungeon crawl out of the Alphabits era and into eyecandyland. Here's hoping the sequel is worth the wait and has more depth to the story.

This is one area where I'm still not convinced that the graphical RPG has surpassed the older character-graphic Rogue-like games. In terms of longevity and replayability, I still rate games like Angband and it's many variants (Sangband, Zangband, Omega and others) more highly than a lot of the modern 3D/isometric eye-candy experiences. Hey - I even turned off the 16x16 graphic tiles and went back to the colour font displays because they are clearer and easier to analyse quickly. Maybe DungeonSiege will finally provide the immersive fantasy world with enough depth to keep the 'one more try to slay the X of Y' replayability but for the moment I'll stick with Zangband.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Hey! I play ZAngband, so I still eat ancient multi-hued dragons for breakfast. Or was that just a capital 'D' that kept changing colors?

Paah! Multi-hued dragons are for wimps! I eat the Serpent of Chaos for breakfast! Muahahah!

Diablo (and all its graphical predecessors) took the mindless dungeon crawl out of the Alphabits era and into eyecandyland. Here's hoping the sequel is worth the wait and has more depth to the story.

This is one area where I'm still not convinced that the graphical RPG has surpassed the older character-graphic Rogue-like games. In terms of longevity and replayability, I still rate games like Angband and it's many variants (Sangband, Zangband, Omega and others) more highly than a lot of the modern 3D/isometric eye-candy experiences. Hey - I even turned off the 16x16 graphic tiles and went back to the colour font displays because they are clearer and easier to analyse quickly. Maybe DungeonSiege will finally provide the immersive fantasy world with enough depth to keep the 'one more try to slay the X of Y' replayability but for the moment I'll stick with Zangband.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/

Check out the links page for various "Rogue-like" games, many of which have Linux ports and most of which are ASCII. Several are also Open Source and often under the GPL or a variant thereof.

Although there are plenty of games there, a lot of them are incomplete; it's really only worth looking at those with subsidiary sites (in light blue on the page).

My personal favourites are Crawl, Zangband, and, of course, Nethack. But there are a heap to choose from.

I wonder what the Queen would do with the Amulet of Yendor?

For reference, info and source for angband and about 10^3 variants can be found at thangorodrim.angband.org.

I have the source somewhere. I'll see if I can dig it out. From what I remember, though, it's not freely distributable. Other than that, you may want to check out zangband. It's an enhancement of angband, which in itself is an enhanced version of moria, a rogue-like game. Yes, it has graphics if you want them, but I always compile it without them. Nothing like the good-old text based interface. More details at http://thangorodrim.angband.org.