Sci Fi games

[Dalton]

I played a game called Gear Head a while ago. I don't remember much about it, but I remember liking the concept a lot. You were a mecha pilot guy and after stocking up on space suits, space rations, guns, boomerangs, knives, etc you would get in your mecha thing and fly off to space stations and asteroids and planets, and dismount and go through these "dungeons".

I remember hating the extremely complex controls, especially in regards to piloting the mechas. But I enjoyed the idea of guns, aliens, randomly generated missions, piloting vehicles, etc. What other modern or sci fi roguelikes are out there? Preferably ones that really pull it off well, not just act like Angband but the swords are renamed "light sabers", the plate mail is renamed "powered armor", and the crossbows are renamed "blasters".

[getter77]

GearHead 2, Transcendence, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, Lost in Flatspace 1 and 2, Xenocide is trying to come along, DoomRL, AliensRL, Prospector is coming along I think, Blast Tactics is in early dev...then I pretty much run of out stuff though I'm sure there's some I'm forgetting outside the likes of the Jaunt Trooper series.

[Fenrir]

I'd recommend Privateer: ASCII Sector and DoomRL. Privateer has everything you want except aliens. You get to fly from planet to planet and do whatever you want, be it getting random missions from the fixers in bars, trading goods, dogfighting pirates in your ship, preying on merchant vessels, or just shooting random civilians and taking their cash. DoomRL has the linear levels of usual roguelikes, but it has an impressive array of weapons. There's shotguns, chainguns, chainsaws, rocket launchers, and all other manner of death-dealing devices.

Roguebasin has a whole "futuristic roguelikes" section.

[Dalton]

Thanks for the advice, I'll try a few of those out when I'm done with my current Oangband run. I've got an Elf Assassin that so far, has made it leaps and bounds farther than any character I've ever attempted before. I might be able to kill Morgoth. ^_^

Fixers! That reminds me, I gotta dig through that database you linked me to and see if there's any Shadowrun roguelikes. I played Decker for a while, that game is great if you like the Shadowrun Matrix. By default you can save and load infinitely (lame) but I had a programmer friend of mine edit it so that if you die it kills your save files and makes you start over. ^_^

[Fenrir]

I gotta dig through that database you linked me to....

It doesn't look like you need to do much digging; there's only seven games listed there. Almost none of the games we mentioned here are listed. Sorry about that; I really should check first before linking you places.

I'm also going to do a little wiki editing....

EDIT:
Until I get the wiki updated, here are some links.
Privateer: ASCII Sector - http://www.asciisector.net/
DoomRL - http://doom.chaosforge.org/
Transcendence - http://neurohack.com/transcendence/

I'll hunt around for the rest of the games mentioned by getter77. If you're not familiar with the roguebasin wiki, here's the link for that too: http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/

[getter77]

Unfortunately, like so many other rulesets that SCREAM for it, there are no Shadowrun Roguelikes out there.  I do recall seeing that the rights were reclaimed proper again though awhile back and a new game of some sort is in dev, hopefully a proper RPG this time---but who's to say?  If by some amazing quirk you've just played the SNES Shadowrun, I heartily recommend the vastly different Sega Genesis one as well----spent many an hour in the Matrix in that one all those years ago.

3059/3069 are also pretty substantial...with the latter even jumping out into first person Ogre3D for some unknown and hopefully amazing reason in the near future.

[Dalton]

Unfortunately, like so many other rulesets that SCREAM for it, there are no Shadowrun Roguelikes out there.  I do recall seeing that the rights were reclaimed proper again though awhile back and a new game of some sort is in dev, hopefully a proper RPG this time---but who's to say?  If by some amazing quirk you've just played the SNES Shadowrun, I heartily recommend the vastly different Sega Genesis one as well----spent many an hour in the Matrix in that one all those years ago.

3059/3069 are also pretty substantial...with the latter even jumping out into first person Ogre3D for some unknown and hopefully amazing reason in the near future.

I never liked the SNES Shadowrun, but I played the Genesis Shadowrun to death.  If you like the Matrix I really, heartily recommend you download Decker and give it a run. That game is, in my opinion, how the Matrix SHOULD have been. After playing Decker, the Matrix in the Genesis Shadowrun feels childish and shallow by comparison.

But now that you mention it I remember hearing a while ago about somebody making a Shadowrun fan project and Microsoft lawyers coming down on them like piranhas.

[magellan]

There is of course also the
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=List_of_roguelikes_by_theme#Science_fiction
page with a bit more stuff in it.

.... why are there two lists for this?

[Z]

... and you can do a IRLDb search for roguelikes with "Sci" or "SF" or "futur" theme, obtaining quite a big list. (Unless a Sci Fi game is not in roguebasin at all, has no theme listed, or has the theme specified in a weird non-standard way like "cyberpunk" or "postnuclear" or "robots". Anyone willing to standardize so that only one search theme is required? I have noticed that IRLDb misses sort-by-theme, that's bad, but can be done by entering "javascript: sortBy(5)" in the address bar.)

IRLDs has its problems, but it makes other lists on roguebasin (RLs by year, RLs by theme, futuristic RLs etc.) obsolete (as long as they are only random selections with no added information).

The original question from this thread is asked quite frequently. That's why there are so many lists of Sci Fi games on Roguebasin. I created "RLs by theme" myself for that reason, before discovering that IRLDb would be a better idea.

[getter77]

I just found another nifty Sci-fi one I posted up in Announcements.  :tips hat at Fenrir should he do any wiki editing as I think we all missed this one:

[Fenrir]

I'll put it up there tomorrow, getter77. The overall organization of the wiki could use an update too, so I might try to correct that later. If I do, I'll likely present my plans here before messing around on the wiki.

EDIT: I'm currently trying to figure out if there's a way to put games on the theme page automatically, based upon the theme listed on games' pages. Unfortunately, the category pages list the pages in a category alphabetically and I've not yet seen a way to get around that. I'll keep looking.

EDIT AGAIN:
Sorry I didn't make any changes today; I got a little distracted with roguelike development and it was my mother's birthday. If I don't find anything tomorrow that permits what I'm trying to do, I'll just throw the things up there manually.