Looking for a roguelike like this

[Rya.Reisender]

I have a very specific taste when it comes to roguelikes, I only really like very few of them, but some I really love a lot and I wondered if I can find more games that fulfill the follow criteria:
- they are easy to get into, that means you don't need to learn a hundred keys, preferably they only require moving and two buttons (confirm/attack and cancel/menu), but up to 6 keys is still fine; they can be hard to master, but I'd prefer if they aren't "too hard"
- they have 2D sprite graphics, even if the quality isn't really high, I neither can get used to ascii graphics (which usually also means they don't feature a well-designed menu) nor do I like 3D graphics too much
- length doesn't really matter, preferably they are longer and include a save feature, but shorter than one hour without a save feature is fine too
- either free to download or at least still available in some shop (I don't mind paying money but I hate ordering online directly from the creator, buying on amazon/similar is fine)

Some roguelikes I really loved so far are:
- Fatal Labyrinth
- Dragon Crystal
- Lufia 2 Ancient Cave (it's a minigame inside Lufia 2, but it's pretty awesome)
- Shiren the Wanderer
- Rogue Planets (yeah I got addicted to my own game, poor me)

[corremn]

IVAN

[getter77]

Azure Dreams  GBC, PSX, and a Tao's Adventure DS game
Izuna series on DS
Baroque PS2/Wii
Taloon's Great Adventure PSX
Chocobo Dungeon Wii
Chocobo's Mystery Dungeon PSX
Nightmare of Druaga PS2
Fushigi Dungeon: Torneko no Daibouken  (fan trans) SNES
Pokemon Mysterious Dungeons series on DS with one version on GBA
Shiren the Wanderer III coming in 2010 in the USA on Wii

The maybe pile:
TileRogue
LambdaRogue
Scallywag: In the Lair of the Medusa
Mines of Morgoth
Triangle Wizard
Upcoming 100 Rogues on iPhone
(All of the above may or may not contain some degree of 3D and/or unusual stylings versus 2D tile....really comes down to your own preferences....)

Enjoy and feel free to comment so I can see if anything else jars my head loose.

[Rya.Reisender]

Thanks for the suggestions.

Hm... too bad most don't work for me, as I either know them, or they are for handhelds (screen too small for my taste) or they aren't released in Europe. :-/

Azure Dreams -> It was nice but I hated the monster catching aspect in it and it seemed to require a hella lot grinding.
Baroque -> Interested me at first, but I saw it's actually fully 3D and doesn't even look step based? Also I read it's hella hard, though I guess any non-roguelike-fan would call any roguelike hard.
Chocobo's Dungeon -> I like that one a lot, but it lacks in the design category a lot (I mean really all the floors look basically the same) and Shiren is much better with almost similar gameplay anyway.

I still need to checkout the maybe pile, though. Some of them look rather too unusual.

IVAN looks like what I'm looking for even though from the screenshots don't tell me how easy it is to play.

On some other forum Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Tile Edition was suggested to me, though I think that's probably too hard to get into (I read it's the hardest roguelike of all!?).

[getter77]

Hmm...

-IVAN is good stuff, you'll definitely die lots and lots of different things to do, but it is all in good fun.

-Crawl Stone Soup Tiles is utterly fantastic, I'd say that while the game is pretty hard...it also has just about the best user interface and whatnot to allow people to figure and enjoy things.  Plenty of harder Roguelikes than Crawl to boot---afterall, Crawl at least has abundant spoilers and wiki's abound.

Other maybe's...even maybier than before:

3069
Plague
Elona
Nazghul
MageGuild
Spelunky
POWDER
ChessRogue
Lords of DarkHall

In general, most of the PC Roguelikes are big into lots of keys to reckon with and such versus their graphical console/handheld bretheren---so it is tough hunting outright.

[Z]

I think you miss a lot if you restrict to non-ASCII only... it's just a matter of getting used to it, after which you will play each new ASCII roguelike with less hesitation than a new game with poor graphics. I started my roguelike experiences with tiles, then moved on to ADOM, which was very good, but had only ASCII graphics.. its ASCII was unappealing for me at first, but now it is a normal thing, and when playing e.g. DCSS, I prefer the ASCII version.

Although most ASCII games, like ADOM, are likely to be hard to get into (still, they have lots in common, so in this factor learning one makes learning others easy too)... but e.g. DoomRL should be OK.

[getter77]

Another few I forgot that might work well:

Meritous
Kamyran's Eye 1 and 2

[Rya.Reisender]

Tried out Crawl Stone Soup Tiles. It's quite okay, but I didn't like the controls too much, yeah I know you can play it completely with mouse, but having to pick up all the items and using a different action for bodies to get food (which required the usage of a keyboard after all) got annoying pretty fast. I started to skip all the items and just went forward and then I died on some overpowered girl monster, oh well. Crawl really puts too many things into one game for my taste, but I can see someone thinking it's the best roguelike if he's more into hardcore roguelikes.
But it's not directly what I was looking for.

I'm more the person that likes to 'bash through' the levels and instinctively do the correct decisions and not think after every step, and using 50% of the playing time for browsing item menus.
If you played any of the games I mentioned which I love I think you'll understand what I mean (or you can just watch youtube videos of them).
I'm not really looking for big lists of good roguelikes, but rather for one or two games that really fit into this pattern. I'm not even sure if there are any that I missed.

Oh but Spelunky is fun indeed.

Also it's not like I directly dislike ascii graphics, but if I want to see what items are lieing around and what monsters are there. I don't want to spend hours just to memorize that ( is a weak monster while ) is a stronger one. And it's generally harder to play "instinctive" without more detailed graphics. Plus all the ones with ascii graphics I know require lots more than just 2 buttons and are the opposite of "intuitive" and "context-sensitive controls".

Edit: Tried Crawl again... this Jessica kills me every single time... lame.

[getter77]

Those last 3 I mentioned might especially work as they are very streamlined in terms of things you have to keep up with and whatnot as well as keypresses needed to do stuff.  ChessRogue is well....Chess-based so that makes it about skills rather than having to worry about loot and such.

One other that you MIGHT like, as it is kinda a Roguelike meets Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past is Dicin' Knight...fan translated.  Or stretching even further back, Ragnarok/Valhalla.

Like I said though, it is kinda a narrow bit you are after even as just graphical Roguelikes are a distinct minority amidst the myriad ASCII ones...I own or have played all the original ones you listed for many an hour as applicable(well, save Rogueplanet as it is on my todo list someplace), same as I can't handle ASCII ones outside of the way Triangle Wizard uses it for some reason.

Hopefully one or more of these strikes a fancy somehow or another though.

[Rya.Reisender]

Tried Ivan but requires too many keys for my taste. I mean I even need a special key just for talking to people, neither clicking nor walking against them works. There is no menu system at all. Not really what I'm looking for either.

There were quite many games mentioned here, but do I really have to check them all out just to see they don't fit into the criterias I mentioned? :-/

I also ordered Baroque even though it doesn't seem like something I was looking for either (I prefer step-based), but it did only cost 10€ so I'll give it a chance.

I looked at Meritious but it's only for Wii and I think I'd need internet connection on my Wii to get it.

Crawl Stone Soup is still my favorite so far, but it has often monsters that I can't seem to kill that it's really frustrating. I hardly ever get to Floor 2. What are you supposed to do in the game if an overpowered monster appears? Running away doesn't seem to work usually. Also sometimes monsters just instant kill me. It's almost what I look for, though. Remove the body chopping and other unnecessary actions (all except moving, pickup and using) and remove the overpowered monsters (at least on lower floors) and then it would be exactly what I'm looking for.

Alright on to the next games from the list...

[getter77]

Meritous is a free PC game, not a Wii one....main key is the Spacebar.

http://www.asceai.net/meritous/

Sorry about having a substantialish list.      I've tried my best to keep in mind your criteria, to the tune that all of them SHOULD have at least one or more of the elements you are looking for lest my memory fail me.  Since finding perfect fits beyond what many of the ones in your original post seems nigh impossible, my hope is to remember some that'll be "close enough" to work well.  In terms of cheap, Druaga on PS2 should be as cheap or moreso than Baroque, and is step based.

You can find gameplay video out there on youtube for gameplay on POWDER, Kamyran's Eye 2 and Mines of Morgoth if that helps since many Roguelikes don't have much of a presence along those lines.

In terms of Crawl:  The early floors are among the hardest due to some luck involved respective to your starting class and whatnot.  With your general style, I might recommend a Troll Monk or Berserker so as to fight very well with Unarmed combat and not have to juggle the complexities of all the weaponry around---Ghouls and Vampires can also work somewhat in this manner.  For the early floors, it works best to fully explore each floor in turn  for exp and item discoveries, then if you see something you've learned to be troublesome, you can either try to flee to another floor and take a different set of stairs or expend/try your wands/spells/ranged weapons to weaken/kill/disable the offender before taking the fight up close and personal.  Those that worship Trog can get through many situations that are otherwise dire through just application of Berserk Rage in melee situations.

Lots of different classes though, some highly non-standard like Healers, so experiment merrily away as you think to and it is likely some things will eventually click somehow or another.

[Rya.Reisender]

I'll give Meritous a try.

Yeah don't worry. I know my criteria are very strict but that's exactly the point. I mean I only want ONE game that I can enjoy and play forever and not 100 games that are "okay". I don't really have hopes to find one actually. I mean the whole reason why I made Rogue Planets was because I didn't think there was a roguelike like that I really wanted to play such a roguelike.
I wish they made a sequel to Fatal Labyrinth.
Oh and yeah Druaga is pretty awesome, but was never released in Europe and since we have Pal format the US version won't work on my PS2. I played the Druaga mini-games in various Namco games (Tales of Destiny and Baten Kaitos) and they were really fun.
Also money is not actually a large issue. I mean for a sequel of Fatal Labyrinth I had no problem to pay 50€ but for a game like Barogue which already reminds me of Dark Cloud 2 which I found pretty boring I wouldn't pay much more than 10€.

Also is Lufia Ancient Cave the only roguelike with a party and battle system?

In Crawl I lately only used the mummy as it apparently doesn't need to bother to take up any items other than scrolls (no food or potions usuable). When I took Vampire my starting location was different and the first monster did one-hit kill me. How do you go for unarmed battle? Just unequip all weapons? Is it plausible? I never really found a weapon/armor ingame that's stronger than the starting weapon/armor so I stopped bothering picking them up. How do you activate berserk rage again? I know I read it in the tutorial but I forgot.

[Vanguard]

Give Ragnarok a shot.  It's graphical, all of the commands are available as either keypresses or mouse buttons on the interface, and it is, of course, free to download.

[getter77]

I'll give Meritous a try.

Yeah don't worry. I know my criteria are very strict but that's exactly the point. I mean I only want ONE game that I can enjoy and play forever and not 100 games that are "okay". I don't really have hopes to find one actually. I mean the whole reason why I made Rogue Planets was because I didn't think there was a roguelike like that I really wanted to play such a roguelike.
I wish they made a sequel to Fatal Labyrinth.
Oh and yeah Druaga is pretty awesome, but was never released in Europe and since we have Pal format the US version won't work on my PS2. I played the Druaga mini-games in various Namco games (Tales of Destiny and Baten Kaitos) and they were really fun.
Also money is not actually a large issue. I mean for a sequel of Fatal Labyrinth I had no problem to pay 50€ but for a game like Barogue which already reminds me of Dark Cloud 2 which I found pretty boring I wouldn't pay much more than 10€.

Also is Lufia Ancient Cave the only roguelike with a party and battle system?

In Crawl I lately only used the mummy as it apparently doesn't need to bother to take up any items other than scrolls (no food or potions usuable). When I took Vampire my starting location was different and the first monster did one-hit kill me. How do you go for unarmed battle? Just unequip all weapons? Is it plausible? I never really found a weapon/armor ingame that's stronger than the starting weapon/armor so I stopped bothering picking them up. How do you activate berserk rage again? I know I read it in the tutorial but I forgot.

What you mentioned about Lufia reminded me:  While I think there are others with similar megadungeons, one that is kinda similar that DOES come to mind is Evolution Worlds which is on the Gamecube and kinda the Dreamcast.  party based, has a big random area, special attacks not unlike the IK stuff in Lufia games...MIGHT to the trick.

I do agree that Dragon Crystal and Fatal Labyrinth have a good thing going that would merit more tinkering.  One of my eventual secret projects is actually to do some bug fixing/fine tuning and possibly an "unofficial" sequel to Fatal Labyrinth.

In Crawl, yep, unequip weapons for hand to hand combat...Troll Monks don't even begin with weapons so you just bash as you go and don't even need a knife to eat.  IIRC, Berserk is "a" for abilities then whatever letter it mentions...been awhile since Crawl for me even though I've been meaning to get back since the brave new world of 0.5.x arrived.

[Rya.Reisender]

Hm Ragnarok is kinda old and doesn't run on Vista at all.

I tried Meritous and it's really fun. Best one so far.

Oh yeah I actually own Evolution Worlds. The problem with that game was that I didn't figure out how to save inside dungeons. Completely exploring a dungeon took like 6 hours and I didn't have enough motivation to play that long in one go. I'm not even sure if it's possible to quick save there, I couldn't find something in the manual.