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Roguelikes: the Misnamed Genre

Posted by Soulskill on from the addictive-frustration dept.

ZorbaTHut writes "I've been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup lately. It's a great example of a roguelike (and open source, too). But I can't stop thinking that perhaps 'roguelike' is the wrong term for the genre. 'Roguelikes aren’t about dungeons. They’re not about text-based graphics, or random artifacts, or permadeath. ... Roguelikes are about using an unpredictable toolkit with complex interactions in order to overcome unpredictable challenges.'"

2 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Nethack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Roguelikes are about incomprehensible control schemes utilizing every single key on your keyboard, twice!

    1. Re:Nethack by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      So vi and emacs are roguelike?