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Roguelikes will teach you your ABC too, great for a young kid

All kidding aside, Angband is one of the best games I've ever played to date still. After about 1000 tries, I did an ironman noupstairs win.

The learning curve is moderate to learn all the keystrokes and commands, but the game itself is really indepth and pure fun if you know what depths to get your resists. Make sure you download a version of Angband that has autosquelch in it. The guy who wrote autosquelch did it mostly out of a kind gesture for me! It shows you how cool Open Source guys can be. I wish I had his name, but I don't because I lost that data with a hard drive crash. I thought it was Dr. Andrew White, but Angband's page is saying: Dave Blackston.

I actually encountered something REALLY cool in Zangband once. I charmed some monsters who were spawning and polymorphing themselves. So half the dungeon was a bunch of monsters I owned, and the other half was a bunch of monsters that spawned as enemies. It was like one giant war around me. I have been making video games on my own, on the off chance I can recreate the scene, because it is incredibly... interesting.

Of course Angband's learning curve is about too much for anyone under 9. But if you've never played it, you can find it Here. It is the predecessor to games like Torchlight. Compared to Nethack, you actually do a lot more hack and slash in Angband because you're fighting tons of monsters. If you want ez mode imo, go half-troll/warrior.

As the original gamer generation(s) age, they have an ever expanding sense of what a videogame can acceptably look like. While a gamer of a more recent generation may (tho not always, of course, god bless them) find it difficult to make the visual transition to ye olde games, older gamers in particular often find they are as happy with decades-old depictions of a gameplay evironment as some more cutting edge.

With that in mind, may I recommend a brief smattering of games from genres or eras that we often forget:

The good old days of insane fast paced simple, straightforward multiplayer FPS, Sauerbraten: http://www.sauerbraten.org/
Incredibly deep dungeon creation/management simulation, in glorious ANSI, Dwarf Fortress: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Straight-up honed turn-based hack-n-slash roguelike, Angband: http://rephial.org/
Kooky realtime multiplayer roguelike dungeon crawl (yes, multiplayer and realtime) MAngband: http://www.mangband.org/


After decades of gaming, I think many of us come to realize that its the quality of gameplay that matter far more than fidelity of depiction. ASCII kobolds and twitch rocketlauncher firing FTW!

I think the project you are lookingfor is mAngband (multiplayer Angband). It is an expanded and refined rougelike game that has been extensively rewritten for mutiplayer play. Specifically Angband is based or Moria and uMoria which was based off Rouge. I believe Nethack forked off from Moria as well so it could go a different direction. The official site for vannila Angband is http://rephial.org/play [rephial.org] An out of data page with a number of Angband variant listed is at http://thangorodrim.net/ [thangorodrim.net] and http://www.mangband.org/ [mangband.org] is the homepage for multiplayer Angband

What I saw...

blah blah blah blah ROUGE blah blah blah blah ROUGELIKE blah blah blah blah

ROGUE DAMNIT! ROGUE!

I think the project you are lookingfor is mAngband (multiplayer Angband). It is an expanded and refined rougelike game that has been extensively rewritten for mutiplayer play. Specifically Angband is based or Moria and uMoria which was based off Rouge. I believe Nethack forked off from Moria as well so it could go a different direction. The official site for vannila Angband is http://rephial.org/play An out of data page with a number of Angband variant listed is at http://thangorodrim.net/ and http://www.mangband.org/ is the homepage for multiplayer Angband

I know it's been mentioned before, but here are the actual links to the game and the literally hundreds of variants.

A couple of notable features are the AI is very good and the game has the only truly fully random number generator in it that I know of, so every game really is unique and odd things can occasionally happen.

My son plays it and has been known to hit the screen in frustration. :) Not bad for a game that will run on most any machine out there. There are also versions that run as a self-playing screen saver. Quite possibly the most interesting screen saver that I know of.

http://www.thangorodrim.net/
Older files, but then again, not much has been changed in the last few years, either.

http://www.zangband.org/
The most popular variant out there that I know of.

http://www.simugraph.com/simutrans/iso_angband/download.html
3D isomorphic version.

http://rephial.org/
This was mentioned before. Get the newer version here, though you likely will have to compile it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToME_(video_game)
http://www.t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0
The most recent surviving variant. Well worth your time to read these pages and ask around on the forums.

Angband http://rephial.org/ is all the kids will ever need. Just kidding, but it is an awesome game if kids get past the fast that it is ASCII character-based.

Personally, I love both Nethack and Angband. Why limit yourself to just one? ADOM deserves mention here, too, as do the *band variants (ToME, ZAngband & Enteroband are all personal *band variant favorites).

There's no reason you can't play them all. Some, like ADOM, are very well-developed. It has the most 'plot' of them all, IMHO. But I wouldn't want to be limited to playing just one of them!

So far, I've beaten everything except Angband (unless you count watching that Borg winner, but the Angband Borg is another story, and a very cool bit of AI!)

I linked all those variants up for you because I want to encourage people to play these games. And if you're stuck, I like to read spoilers. Some people help that, but they REALLY help you appreciate the depth of the games, IMHO. If you don't like that, though, don't read them. But there are lots of crazy things about what resistances you need, or what gear is important, or even what to wish for that are really hard to figure out. I mean, how many would notice that herbs grow in a pattern according to Conway's game of Life? That's important if you want to farm them (what did you think farmers were good at, other than polearms?).

Anyhow, these are rich & fun games that shouldn't be ignored just because you think text based interfaces are too retro. Good times, all around :)

Really? I wasn't at all aware of that. It's not like I actively maintain an Angband variant... And I think you'll find Angband development has kicked off again, whereas ToME doesn't look in danger of releasing a beta quality release of ToME 3 for some time. But hey, the roguelike community is small enough we shouldn't be kicking each other in the shins.

Or Angband.

I haven't worked on it much per se, but I really like the code in Angband. The style is generally consistant and easy to look at, not to mention quite well commented. Of course, it's also the first C code I ever looked at, so I'm probably a touch biased.

Angband.