Something Different

I ran across a couple Roguelikes today that were alternative. The first was The Dungeon. In this game, the player is controlled by the computer. You can control the monsters. It is shipped as an executable which is nice. There is a cool ASCII art splash screen to start. The player moves really fast and kills monsters with ease. Apparently the player can cast ice and lightning spells. The player also seems to be able to jump over monsters in a narrow tunnel. The player wanders around a lot.

Next I took a cook at cboy. This is an abbreviation of cowboy. The game is only shipped as source code? It comes with data files for items, players, and entities. The source appears to be written in the C programming language. It uses ncurses. The code also comes with a VIM shell script that opens up all the source files. I did not bother to try to compile this thing. It felt like it was meant for UNIX.

Finally I tried out Gore Grounds. It extracts directly to the folder where you download the zip file. I liked that. Normally the zips extract into a separate folder I need to navigate to. This was written in python. The author volunteered to fix bugs that people found. You start off as a square smiley face that seems to pulse with a heartbeat. Monsters drop a lot of stuff when killed. The initial room is tiny. Walking over the stairs takes you down them. Commands are always displayed on the screen. Not sure what to do with the door on level 2. The game displays the following message when you quit - "What a terrible place to perish".