I had mentioned doing a "R is for RIFTS" post on my Palladium Books post then I got a feeling that something was not right. I checked out some information on RIFTS and, sure enough, it seems that it was released in later 1990. Since RIFTS would not fit into my theme of gaming in 1980's, I chose a new topic for this post...
Rogue
Several members of our gaming group took an introductory computers course together in high school. I honestly remember very little of what was taught in that class; with time passing and things changing it is a whole new world when it comes to computer programming. The one thing I do remember from that class is discovering the computer game Rogue. One of the guys in the class brought it to school on an old floppy disk. A few minutes later and it was loaded on to every computer in the class room. One by one, people immediately started it up and began playing the game. Some people did not care for it but most of us enjoyed playing and would do so every spare moment we got in class. At first, we would just show up early and sneak in a few minutes of game play before class started. Then we started sneaking in some play time after the teacher gave us our assignments and retreated to her office. There were a few times that one or more of us got caught playing when the teacher returned and we could not get the game shut down quick enough. I have downloaded a new version of this game recently and it has a "fake DOS" button that you can push to avoid that issue. That sure would have helped out years ago.
Rogue is not overly complicated in presentation or game play, as you can see from the picture above. It is just an old fashioned dungeon grind with a small slice of a story. Your character enters the randomly created dungeon collecting gold, fighting monsters, and improving in other ways. The goal is to find some sort of amulet and escape the dungeon. I do not know whether you use the amulet on some sort of monster boss or just escape with the amulet to win. I do not even know what the lowest dungeon level is in the game. I do know that none of us ever reached it. Maybe next time...
You could have done Raiders of the Lost Arc. It was a great 2600 game.
ReplyDeleteI do remember playing that. Unfortunately, I never owned a 2600 so I really couldn't give any good information on the game.
DeleteTotally agree on Raiders. I got that the Christmas after release and stayed up almost two days straight playing that sucker. Even though the ending was truly vile, I loved it.
DeleteA Rogue posting is great, though (in my humble opinion). I had heard of the game over the years, but had never seen it. It is nice to finally have a face to it.
Thanks, Charlie. Excellent post, as usual.
Cool. Thanks, Eric.
DeleteIf you want more information about Rogue and other Rogue-like games you can go to...
http://rogue-life.ourden.org/
or
http://thelist.roguelikedevelopment.org/
Holy Cheese Monkeys!! I remember this game!! I loved it! Why can't games be awesome like this anymore?
ReplyDeleteIf you search for "rogue" or "rogue-like games" you can find a version that should work on modern computer systems.
DeleteJust popping in from the A to Z Challenge. My husband and I love to game. I confess, I've not heard of Rogue, but my husband knows it. Love all these old games in your posts.
ReplyDeleteCool! Thanks for stopping by. I am going to visit your blog now...
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