<p>Community member <em>shihonage</em> wants you to know that there's some dude out there in the internets who loves rogue-likes and <a href="http://www.gearfuse.com/unevenly-distributed-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the/" target="_blank">wrote an article</a> about it.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is why I love <em>Nethack</em> and other rogue-likes so much. Rogue-likes form a genre of game that embraces the limits of what can be conveyed symbolically in ASCII text and turns those limits into strengths. By making a far greater assumption of a player’s imagination than most games — requiring that a gamer will imagine an azure equal sign to be a ring of frost, or turn a rouge semi-colon into a piranha, or a accept a lower-case p as a prancing pony, for example — rogue-likes free themselves of the development overhead that both suffer and limit other forms of video games. Money and man hours can be ignored. Rogue-like developers don’t have to draw, render, animate and give voice to every new monster, item, location or player action in their games; all they need to do is program it and assign it an alpha-numeric symbol.</p>
<p>Rogue-likes aren’t for everyone. They require imagination to play,, true, but they also require a morbid and self-deprecating sense of humor. Even so, if you can make your way past the turn-based interface, simplistic graphics and devious malevolence, you will find more <em>game</em> packed into the scant few megs of your average ASCII rogue-like download than a triple-A company like Blizzard could cram into a title with a hundred top-notch designers. Why? Rapid prototyping and the freedom that comes of allowing the player’s imagination to be the game’s renderer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few megs contain more game than current triple A titles? That's the gist of it, modern games are all about the graphics.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is why I love <em>Nethack</em> and other rogue-likes so much. Rogue-likes form a genre of game that embraces the limits of what can be conveyed symbolically in ASCII text and turns those limits into strengths. By making a far greater assumption of a player’s imagination than most games — requiring that a gamer will imagine an azure equal sign to be a ring of frost, or turn a rouge semi-colon into a piranha, or a accept a lower-case p as a prancing pony, for example — rogue-likes free themselves of the development overhead that both suffer and limit other forms of video games. Money and man hours can be ignored. Rogue-like developers don’t have to draw, render, animate and give voice to every new monster, item, location or player action in their games; all they need to do is program it and assign it an alpha-numeric symbol.</p>
<p>Rogue-likes aren’t for everyone. They require imagination to play,, true, but they also require a morbid and self-deprecating sense of humor. Even so, if you can make your way past the turn-based interface, simplistic graphics and devious malevolence, you will find more <em>game</em> packed into the scant few megs of your average ASCII rogue-like download than a triple-A company like Blizzard could cram into a title with a hundred top-notch designers. Why? Rapid prototyping and the freedom that comes of allowing the player’s imagination to be the game’s renderer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few megs contain more game than current triple A titles? That's the gist of it, modern games are all about the graphics.</p>
<p> </p>
