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Other Announcements / How do you name your hero?

« on: January 10, 2011, 04:24:17 AM »

Just curious how anyone else decides to name their character when playing a rogue-like. Do you always use the same name? Make up simple names off the top of your head? Use your own name or your friends names? Characters from books? Use adjectives? Just first names or last names too?

I almost always use to use my own name, but then it started to bug me that high score lists would all have the same name so it was harder to remember which what happened on particular adventures. Now I usually try to make up something at least a little interesting or a combination of rockstars and fictional character names.

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Other Announcements / Re: Anyone play Roguelikes with a gamepad?

« on: January 10, 2011, 04:19:51 AM »

Are you a laptop user? I guess that if your computer does not have a full keypoard and the roguelike does not require you to often use lots of non-directional keys, then a gamepad indeed should be better than other options (playing on the laptop keyboard itself or attaching a full/numerical keyboard).

Yeah, I'm using a laptop. The lack of numerical pad is the main reason I tried looking into using a gamepad.

What do you do if the game requires you to use a non-directional key? I guess you can also map the most frequent ones to the gamepad (like fire in DoomRL), but what about other keys?

I map all the keys needed to the gamepad with xpadder. a logitech dual action gamepad gives 12 buttons total and each direction of the analog sticks can be set to a different key. You can also set a specific button to switch between different key maps. so in the first key map, button 1 could be used to pick up items. Then I could press the button to switch key maps, and button 1 will do something else. Then switch back. I usually use the two left shoulder buttons as the "shift" key and a button to switch key mappings.

I don't bother with every single key, but the majority of them.

Using a gamepad is very comfortable and I prefer it to keyboard now. It's also fun when using a gamepad and hooking up my laptop to my tv o play on a bigger screen. like playing a Rogue on a game console. The only tricky part is trying to remember which keys are mapped to which button at first but eventually it gets memorized.

xpadder is a free program that lets you emulate keyboard and mouse to a gamepad in case that wasn't clear before.

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: "Party" Roguelikes

« on: January 09, 2011, 06:54:35 PM »

http://lnl.sourceforge.jp/en/   Labyrinths & Legends is technically probably the longest developed one, aiming to incorporate some Wizardry-esque sensibilities.

It SHOULD be playable in English, though it seems some fiddling is needed else it might not quite be graceful thus far.

This one looks really interesting. I love wizardry. Shame this one isn't in English though.

Oubliette isn't really a rogue-like, but it is another fun text mode dungeon crawler that's very similar to Wizardry. I think it actually inspired Wizardry.

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Other Announcements / Anyone play Roguelikes with a gamepad?

« on: January 09, 2011, 06:26:35 PM »

First, I know it sounds like a silly idea, but it does work.

Just curious if anyone else had ever tried this. I use the program xpadder and map the keys to a logitech dual action gamepad. It works really great for  Doomrl. I map all orthogonal movement to the d-pad and the diagonal movements to the left analog stick so that way I don't accidentally go up or to the side when I want to go diagonal.

I haven't tried more sophisticated games like nethack or Angband with it yet though. But it works nicely with doomrl, Berzerkrl, Frozen Depths, and Rogue.

The Alpha grip controller looks ideal for roguelikes, but it's around $100 and not available again till Feb.

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Other Announcements / Re: Do you listen to music when playing Roguelikes?

« on: January 09, 2011, 09:33:53 AM »

I find the hellraiser soundtracks including the unreleased one from Coil and the Quake soundtrack are my favorite music to listen to when playing rogue-likes. Nice dark, ambient atmosphere to them.

I'm a huge classic metal and heavy rock n roll fan but find ambient and instrumental music best for playing rogue-likes. The zork ps1 soundtrack is also pretty good to play to.