When I was in high school, two decades ago, I discovered this fantastic game called Hack. I was a @, and with my d I went down into dungeons in search of pillage and plunder, while trying to avoid O and K and, especially, k. That damn k! Hack was part of an entire genre of games, that went back to some of the early terminals. It all began with a game called Rogue. And from Rogue there came Moria and Hack. Moria evolved into Angband, Hack evolved into NetHack. I never really got into the Moria or 'bands, and NetHack is a wee too complicated for me. The game I liked the most? Larn. If you've played Diablo or Champions of Norrath, you've played a very modern Roguelike. Recently, I found some Hack executables, and I've been spending an hour or two a day in the dungeons, looking for the Amulet of Yendor. (In NetHack, that actually leads to an endgame. In Hack, it's just an artifact you can find.) Anyone else have fond memories of the Roguelike games? Anyone still play these text-graphics games?
What I find interesting is that in Japan, the genre (in the traditional turn-based sense) is still fairly popular. On the handhelds, there seems to be a few roguelikes released every year. The only one I sort of got into was Legend of the Red Dragon 2, a BBS game from way back... but other than that, the genre didn't really grab me. I don't know why, because having everything be "slow paced" somewhat appeals to me. Maybe it's my obsession with narrative or something.
Wow, no mention of ADOM ? One of my favourite games of all time and one that I still reguarly play. The ambitious successor to ADOM has been in the works for years now and a beta shouldn't be too far off (I hope...)
Hell yes! I used to play this years ago (like, 10 years ago) when it was called Falcon's Eye. Don't forget Angband and its various incarnations, too. For more modern Roguelikes, the Sacred series is pretty good. Pretty much follows in the Diablo tradition.
I've had some good times playing DoomRL which puts Doom into a Rogue-Like game, it works a lot better than I would've thought.
I recently stumbled across Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which is a traditional roguelike with "graphics" and some mouse functionality. link There's also the option to play the ASCII-only version, if you so desire. I've played it a bit here and there when I'm not playing Warcraft or writing. I've made it as far as level 5 before I was killed by an orc mage.