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Angband 4.2.2: A free, single-player roguelike dungeon exploration game
- vr46 5y agoHappy to see this. I mean, I haven’t played it seriously since the early 2000s, but this and Moria are wonderful.
- 7thaccount 5y agoOnly played for like a half hour. Fun, but brutal lol. So easy to die.
- DylanSp 5y agoThat's a classic roguelike for you.
- philsnow 5y agoSee https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Losing https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Losing and in particular the comic linked from there, https://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png https://dwarffortresswiki.org/images/4/40/FunComic.png
- fred_is_fred 5y agobackup your save game if you don't mind cheese
- mthwsjc_ 5y agoI played this ~23 years ago. I'm amazed to see it!
- lr4444lr 5y agoThose louses... You have to kill them immediately before they multiply out of control!
- dang 5y agoSince this project doesn't seem to have been discussed on HN before, I've switched the URL from https://github.com/angband/angband/releases/tag/4.2.2 https://github.com/angband/angband/releases/tag/4.2.2 to the main project page.
- floatingatoll 5y agoNote for the confused: They haven't finished releasing 4.2.2 yet, so the release notes aren't yet live: http://rephial.org/release/ http://rephial.org/release/
- throwawaybutwhy 5y agoYou have eaten a Mushroom of Clear Mind. You are no longer confused, and you can build the game from source (either from tag 4.2.2 or the master branch on Github, if you're feeling adventurous).
- throwaway1239Mx 5y agoI realize this is a bit late, but Rephial is no longer updating - http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpost.php?p=152370&postcount=1 http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showpost.php?p=152370&postcount... Most activity is on the forum at oook.cz or the github releases page, though Rephial was once the official source. A new landing page is probably in the works...
- dang 5y agoIs there a URL we could switch to that would be better than https://github.com/angband/angband/releases/tag/4.2.2 https://github.com/angband/angband/releases/tag/4.2.2?
- mrtweetyhack 5y agodungeon crawl stone soup is the best
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pianoben 5y agoI played this all through class during sophmore year, then dropped it. Picked it up again last year on my bus commute and FINALLY beat Morgoth. Twenty years it took! I don't think I've ever been so satisfied to finish a game as with Angband.
- munificent 5y agoI also spent about twenty years of off and on play before I beat it. This game is so deeply woven into the story of my life, it's crazy.
- fractal618 5y agoLove this game. Also cataclysm dda
- DylanSp 5y agoIf you're not familiar with Angband, https://lparchive.org/Angband/ https://lparchive.org/Angband/ is an excellent screenshot Let's Play that's a good overview of how it plays.
- munk-a 5y ago1/10 points - contains too few Amulets of Yendor and doesn't allow you to play as a tourist. (If you've never played Angband seriously give it a go, it's quite memorable, even if you're a veteran of Moria, Rogue and Nethack)
- prosaic-hacker 5y agoI have played this game for months at a time and then abandon it. I have a backup file of a Level 66 character on one of my backup keys from 2014 . Maybe time to continue the game.
- twiddling 5y agoI originally played Moria, including the U.W. VAX hosted multiplayer version. I love the fact that Angband, the spiritual successor, is still kicking it!
- danielvinson 5y agoTried playing on my Macbook, but ran into problems since it requires an Esc key in a bunch of places, which Apple has for some reason basically removed completely. It looks cool though.
- pmontra 5y agoHow does vim work on a Mac?
- danielvinson 5y agoVery pooly, the only easy option is to rebind Caps Lock to be Escape, but Apple doesn't let you rebind any key or combination, just Caps/Control/Option.
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoIf you have a Mac that has a physical escape key, great. :) (My impression is that escape-key-free Macs are an anomaly that Apple is now quietly trying to sweep under the rug; AFAIK, all current Macs have physical escape keys, and there are persistent rumors the whole Touch Bar idea is being replaced by a new revolutionary Apple invention called "function keys".)
- Evidlo 5y agoYou can use Ctrl-C, alternatively.
- zvr 5y agoDoesn't Control-[ work?
- danielvinson 5y agoI've never heard of that combination, I can try it out. I googled this yesterday and searched for solutions and never saw that mentioned anywhere.
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- trzeci 5y agoReading the landing page 4th time, and all the time when I see 4.2.2 I have flashback working with Android Jelly Bean // I know of topic, I wish the game all the best!
- whartung 5y agoI've been playing Angband off and on since the mid 80's when it's ancestor, Moria, hit the DECUS tapes and we'd run it on our VAX. I can't speak historically as to what it may or may not have pioneered in roguelikes, but it's varies dramatically philosophically from the likes of Nethack and its bottomless trivia and tricks. Angband is more straightforward. Angband, with its Tolkien theme, has large maps, hordes of monsters, frightening uniques, a large amount of ancient artifacts and has its gameplay centered around a town that you routinely travel to in order to refresh and reload. There are lots of variants from "Vanilla" as its called. Different themes, different mechanics, different character classes. I don't follow the space to know if there are a lot of Nethack variants the like that Angband has spawned. In a game that favors cautious advance (it's not uncommon to fully recover after an encounter), the recent edition introduced a new Blackguard class that's more momentum based in that once in combat, you'd like to sustain combat to get more powerful, and stronger. It's a nice change of pace from the classic characters and play styles. It's actively maintained and has a passionate community.
- ducttapecrown 5y agoThere are lots of Nethack variants! There's a Nethack tournament called Junethack going on right now where competitors can play like at least 10 different variants or something.
- Accujack 5y agoI've been playing since the same time. My favorite version on the PC was called I think something like "ultimate" angband... it had code to procedurally generate vaults - larger open rooms that were oval, round, or other non rectangular shapes (within character set limits) with various geometric side chambers - on random levels that were stuffed with both out of depth monsters and out of depth treasure. Deciding how and when to approach those was an exercise in itself, and the rewards were worth it. It also had monsters that would breed explosively, as in between your moves. In the time it took you to take three steps toward a pile of louses (lice), they would multiply from 5 to 12 total. Fun stuff.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
- ptero 5y agonethack, angband, tome -- I spent long hours playing each of those. I was copying my macros (hit closest monster with the main attack spell; hit previous monster with same spell; rest until fully recharged; forgot the fourth main one) on a new Linux account at the same time I copied the .bash_profile :)
- andretti1977 5y agoI used to play adom in ascii mode https://www.adom.de/home/index.html https://www.adom.de/home/index.html
- bobmichael 5y agoSame here. Brings back good memories of sprinting down the UD to get to a certain mountain town...
- ridiculous_fish 5y agoAngband was the first software I ever released! I loved the game so much, but it was not OS X native. I set out to "carbonize" Angband to run natively, and later I even rewrote it in Cocoa, with better text rendering and other goodies. The Cocoa rewrite got merged as the Mac front end. http://ridiculousfish.com/angband/ http://ridiculousfish.com/angband/ https://github.com/angband/angband/pull/64 https://github.com/angband/angband/pull/64
- olivierestsage 5y agoAny recommended guides for newbies?
- e12e 5y agoGood question. I think part of the joy is exploration, actually. I recall looking through some spoiler-files in the 90s - but I recommend just diving in. There should be some rudimentary help in-game (bound to "?" I think?). If you don't have a num-pad you might want "rogue" keybindings - and remember to wear/wield armor and weapons, bring food (and eat it) and a source of light...
- ashton314 5y agoDive deep and fast. (Obviously, there’s a balance to strike here.) The deeper you go, the better the treasures are. The Word of Recall scroll is your friend: always have at least two on you. You can read it, and get transported back up to the village after a few turns. I like taking multiple with me down into the dungeon, just in case one gets destroyed by, say, an acid trap. If you read this scroll from the village, it will transport you to the lowest level you have visited. Rest frequently. There’s nothing wrong with running away from a fight.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago> There’s nothing wrong with running away from a fight. Definitely that. The trick is recognising when you are utterly outnumbered, and the level is lost. Damm white louse replicating like crazy have killed me too many times.
- pianoben 5y agoSomeone else covered diving deep and fast and WoR scrolls. The other major notion is to learn and remember what monsters can do. What they're weak to, what they can do to you. Part of the thrill (and the agony, honestly) is when you're deeper than you've ever been, and something you've never seen before just one-shots you. The game has an interesting memory mechanic. When you first start, your character's "monster knowledge" is nil. As you meet and fight monsters, it gradually fills in. When you die and start a new character, you retain this "ancestral knowledge". It's absolutely vital to your survival. Same goes for items and artifacts. You can always look stuff up online if you want. It makes the game more predictable, certainly.
- ashton314 5y agoWARNING!!! This game may be highly addictive! Adult supervision advised! Super fun game. I had to put it down to focus on an important project. Now that that's done, however, maybe I can pick up where I left off...
- jamesgeck0 5y agoWe're in a new golden age of traditional roguelikes right now. Here are a few of my other favorites: Brogue: Community Edition - A modern spiritual sequel to the original Rogue. Very tightly wound; every item and monster has their own niche. Excellent UI, and a striking ASCII-style with light and shadows. Golden Krone Hotel - The best roguelike for folks to to the genre, imho. A good interface and lots of intelligent streamlining of the genre. Transform between human and vampire repeatedly as you manage blood and seek (or avoid) sunlight. Cogmind - A robotic crawl through a living mechanical dungeon. Big focuses on trying not to attract too much attention and equipping parts you've blown off enemies. Caves of Qud - Weaponized sci-fi weirdness. Open world. Reputation and culture systems for every species. Potions that can grant intelligence to anything. There is an achievement for wearing your own severed face.
- tmountain 5y agoCaves of Qud is amazingly fun, and I've spent far more time with it than I ever planned to. +1
- exo-pla-net 5y agoI've played most of these, but my favorite remains Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's actively developed with a dedicated community, and you can even play online, where a peanut gallery will often appear if you make it deep into the dungeon.
- philsnow 5y agoI've been impressed by DCSS's dev team's ability and willingness to make unpopular decisions and make radical changes to the game. They seem to be principled in their decision-making. I read somewhere that, since I stopped playing, they removed the food mechanic! To my own surprise, even though food clocks are a very archetypal roguelike mechanic, I agree with that removal. I haven't really played it since maybe 2012, but at that time dealing with food was mostly a chore, hardly ever a problem, and you were set for life after you went through the hive and picked up scads of royal jelly. This is not to say that I don't like food clocks; I think Brogue's is an excellent example of a well-tuned food clock. Brogue has item vaults where you have to pick one out of 4-8 items, and you don't know what's going to be lying around on the ground over the next few levels, so you have to take a risk and pick what you think is best. I used to keep careful notes about what else was in each vault so that I could backtrack if I found a duplicate of what I picked up in a vault, until I noticed that I was dying to the food clock a lot. This is not to say that I enjoy my characters starving, but Brogue's design pays particular attention to trying to never make you bored / making nearly every keystroke meaningful (whereas vanilla nethack can be mind-numbing).
- vmception 5y ago"Rougelike" is such an obscure name for an obscure subculture, even google trends confirms that this isn't Baader-Meinhoff syndrome for me as nobody was using this term and still aren't. Its proof that all the favorite "relatable" reviewers on youtube and twitch were fed a script for Returnal because now Rougelike is in their vocabulary as if it was in the gamer lexicon the whole time. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rougelike https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rougelik... but anyway, I guess there is no better simple term for it. Even saying "Groundhogday-esque" just replaces a game-that-tried-a-concept with a movie-that-tried-a-concept.
- kuang_eleven 5y agoWhat? Rogue-like has been in the gamer vocabulary for years, certainly well before Returnal. Returnal might be one of the few AAA rogue-like games[1], but the term is very common in indie video game circles. Common enough to warrant sub-terms like rogue-lite and plenty of digital ink has been spilled trying to narrow in on what it actually means. 1: One could make a very reasonable case that the Diablo series is a rogue-like or at least a rogue-lite, but I don't know how much the term was applied to it at the time of release.
- philsnow 5y agoMy understanding is that the term "rogue-lite" came about sometime around / after the Berlin Interpretation of what it means for a game to be rogue-like was agreed upon. It's called the Berlin Interpretation because it was discussed during the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin in 2008. So, Diablo and Diablo 2 being released in 1996 and 2000, they pre-date at least common usage of the term "rogue-lite". edit: see http://www.gamesofgrey.com/blog/?p=403 http://www.gamesofgrey.com/blog/?p=403 for a critique of the Berlin Interpretation as written.
- kuang_eleven 5y agoIt also help if you spell correctly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=roguelike https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=roguelik...
- anthk 5y agoI prefer Slashem and P.R.I.M.E =) A pity P.R.I.M.E is non-free.
- bryondowd 5y agoSince a few people are just throwing out roguelikes they like, I figure I'd like to mention a couple that had an impact on me: Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King The mechanics, skills, classes, etc are basically ripped from DnD, which I've never had the opportunity to play, so I found it engaging. The author was touting the game as a sort of prequel/sample, just a single 10 floor dungeon, with the intention of using the engine to create a more expansive campaign, but then he moved on to other things, open sourced the project and abandoned it. Someone else forked it, but only to fix some bugs and improve playability, not to continue the grand vision. I think it still stands on its own as a worthwhile game, but its always been a disappointment that the full idea was never realized. DoomRL This one was actually a finished game. It did a good job of getting the feel of a fast paced shooter while still being a typical turn based roguelike. Things like being able to decrease the enemy's chance to hit you by moving perpendicular to their line of fire were a nice touch. I think they eventually started to get some pushback from the owners of the Doom IP, and pivoted to a new game called Jupiter Hell, that's supposedly the same feel with a different scenario, but I've never gotten around to checking it out.
- 1_player 5y agoDoomRL is tight, fun and has a great tileset that was designed by Derek Yu, the designer for Spelunky.
- techwizrd 5y agoI spent so many hours in high school playing Angband. It introduced me to roguelikes and I always found it to be straightforward to understand and play (in comparison to nethack, which is also quite good). I love that it is still being updated after all these years.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoMy brother beat Angband without dying or cheating with backups. I believe that he is still on the Angband ranking pages somewhere. He was extremely proud of the feat...You have to have a lot of cognitive control, because it is so easy to get sloppy and die.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoIt's strange maybe I like to use the mental landscape, but I prefer the ASCII character graphics than use any tileset. The game is terribly addicting and the tactics can be quite deep. And you die, so easily. It's just a great game. And I love the whole scene with all the variant games.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> It's strange maybe I like to use the mental landscape, but I prefer the ASCII character graphics than use any tileset. The ascii graphics are vastly superior purely in terms of the amount of information you can display on the screen at once. Tiles are huge and fat, which prevents you from being able to see anything. Expect to die frequently to attacks from monsters that can't be shown onscreen. "Modern" ToME tries to work around this by having a graphical tile be much larger than the space alloted to it on the ground. Thus, you get overlapping graphics that are very difficult to understand. I'm not sure what the appeal of the tiles is supposed to be. The downsides are enormous.