Roguelikes that rose above expectations

[dopefish7590]

Hey guys, long time since I was last here... Anyways, we all probably had 'em, a game you think will be terrible, you try it, and you love it. This is a topic on what those games are, and what your thoughts are on these games. Anyways, mine are:

The original Rogue:
When I first played this game I was still quite young and I was just downloading all the small games off of dosgames.com and putting them on a floppy for my old 486 PC. Most of these games were just terrible, so I didn't have high expectations for "Rogue" but wow... Was I ever wrong. This was the only decent game I got that was about it's size on that little floppy disk, and I played it a LOT. The farthest I ever got was the 18th floor on the way back up.

ADOM:
At first look, this game looked way overcomplicated and I thought it would be nothing more then a sad attempt to make a text adventure game... I guess I should have learned from Rogue to never underestimate a game because of it's looks. This is still my all-time favorite Roguelike. I've never gotten past the Tower of Eternal Flames yet, but I've gotten the rest of the orbs and such. And if you havent read it, I'd suggest reading ADOI (An amazing ADOM parody comedy that is sure to cause you to bust a gut laughing at least once or twice.)

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of time: (Cue finger pointing and laughing.)
This game looked terrible when I first looked at the screenshots, but after reading a few reviews that said that it was a "Suprisingly good" roguelike, I decided to give it a try... I played the game a bit, there was decent character development and an ok Storyline... After playing for a few minutes, I was having fun... No really, it was an odd feeling to think the exact opposite about a game after playing it, this is the first game to do this. It has randomly generated dungeons, a backstory, non-linear missions (Except for the story-based missions) and a "Privateer-style" Job system. This is actually the game that got me into the Pokemon franchise.

What are your games that rose above expectations?

[Ex]

What are your games that rose above expectations?

Crawl. I'd heard a lot about it, but always assumed it wasn't as good as something like ZAngband. But then I played it, and now I play it all the time. I definitely should have not have assumed it wasn't good when I knew a bunch of people who play it. I'll probably play Crawl tonight even.

[getter77]

Crawl as well for me, but for a totally different reason.

Discovered Crawl, thought it "nifty" and little else...played for a decent while.

THEN

I randomly discovered Crawl Stone Soup.

Hoo boy...

[Anvilfolk]

Well, I started with Nethack, that didn't have any kind of theme: monsters that didn't fit together at all, random mythologies, etc etc. It was OK, and that was all I played for quite some time. Then I found ADOM, which was somewhat more static, but a little more "themed", and your skills actually went up (as opposed to nethack, where they would take AGES). That was a big revelation for me, and I thought it was much better than nethack.

Then there was IVAN. Don't get me started on IVAN. Just PLEASE give it a serious go. That is one of the most hugely underrated roguelikes ever to exist... It's got a fair bit of theme (doesn't get more themed than you being a banana grower with a dog nammed Kenny (OMG, they killed Kenny!) from the banana growing town of New Attnam). It has a whole lot of personality and fun stuff, like drinking urine and eating cerumen (earwax) from big creatures, stepping on broken bottles to increase your physique, and fighting with banana peels to get better at using whips. Things interact more than I've seen in any other roguelike, and skill improvement is much more of a continuous process than in other roguelikes, where you go up by levels/chunks. Not to mention a limb system, whereby you can lose them (battle or leper from zombies) or gain them (by praying, for example... "You pray to <sissy god here>. You grow a new left leg made of expensive fabric!"). The feature list just goes on and on...

Then, of course, Crawl. I don't know what it has that is so special, because it has, I believe, quite a few less features than IVAN. What I think it does is take the roguelike genre as seen in rogue and nethack to a higher level of perfection. It just polishes, and polishes, and polishes it, until it's so shiny you can't get enough of it

[Krice]

Then there was IVAN. Don't get me started on IVAN. Just PLEASE give it a serious go. That is one of the most hugely underrated roguelikes ever to exist...

It's really hard. I tried to play it some years ago, but always died in the first dungeon level! It's also one of the few examples of C++ (OOP) roguelikes, although when I tried to read the source code it seemed to be pretty abstract and hard to understand. Maybe I could understand more now, when I have more experience in C++.

[getter77]

Then there was IVAN. Don't get me started on IVAN. Just PLEASE give it a serious go. That is one of the most hugely underrated roguelikes ever to exist...

It's really hard. I tried to play it some years ago, but always died in the first dungeon level! It's also one of the few examples of C++ (OOP) roguelikes, although when I tried to read the source code it seemed to be pretty abstract and hard to understand. Maybe I could understand more now, when I have more experience in C++.

Ever make any successful inroads on that IVAN3D project?  I also enjoyed IVAN way back when but as I understand it further development has been kinda knocked off track for a good while now, kinda like that Helherron game.

[PaulBlay]

It's also one of the few examples of C++ (OOP) roguelikes

There are 45 roguelikes written in C++ mentioned in RogueBasin.  That's 12% of the total number of games there.  I daresay C++ will gradually overtake C in new roguelike games / variants.

[Z]

IVAN3D is not a big project, it just maps the graphics already in IVAN into three dimensions. Well, it also does some other things, like minor interface improvements, and sound effects. But no changes in gameplay are intended.

There have been several variants of IVAN created, LIVAN seems to be the most popular of these. See: http://www.attnam.com/downloads.php?show=variants

The original developers of IVAN seem to have disappeared, and we have no leader who would be motivated and skilled in programming enough to unite the quarelling tribes and to continue the kind-of-official IVAN development, probably by incorporating all the good stuff from all the existing variants. SirReal's IvanX was a good project, but I think it has been dropped also.

[getter77]

Thanks for the links Z,  I really need to dig around in that further as I think last I saw of that site it'd just started up and nothing was really there.

Another big surprise?  LambdaRogue.   Granted, the excellent trailers game me some indications as to what to expect, but it really does seem to have a killer edge to ultimately become something very special---if not already and not enough people are working on figuring it out.

[jim]

Started playing around with LIVAN. I'm not enough of an IVANphile to recognize the added content out of hand, but playing it again makes me remember just how much IVAN surprised me. There are so many subtle things to enjoy, like the way that certain items sparkle in your inventory. I don't know exactly why I like that so much, but I do. It lets me know that I'm in on a private joke of some sort, I think. And the sardonic, morbid tone of the game (complete with anti-imperialistic themes!) gives the experience a really caustic edge, which I enjoy greatly. Add me to the list of folks who say that IVAN's maybe the best "sleeper" roguelike around.

[Vanguard]

I was really impressed with DDRogue from the last 7drl competition.