Bonus: A score of games after a score of games

Ten days of games makes for about 20 titles, which lets me take advantage of the word “score” as a counter, and show another 20 that didn’t make the cut.

Like I said a few days ago, there are enough rogue variants and evolutions to make an entire blog of its own, and probably have enough content to survive a few years on one-a-week, if not more.

There are a lot of sites that do that though, and I’m not going to harass their niche by pursuing the genre much further. I leave it to them to follow every title. 😉

There are some other programs here that aren’t necessarily roguelikes, but might be. Most that follow are just games that have either passed to the digital afterlife, or just passed me. 🙄 (Unless otherwise specified, I relied on the Arch or AUR package to build these. Your distro’s version may work better.)

• aliensrl: A roguelike patterned after the Aliens movie franchise. I could build and start this, and I heard background music, but nothing was displayed in my terminal.
• asciipacman: I only have a link to a Freecode page, and from there all the links are dead.
• asciisoccer: The idea of ASCII robot soccer sounded great, in the same way a B-movie with a snazzy title sounds great: “Attack of the Killer ASCII Soccer Robot Clones!” Unfortunately, this wouldn’t compile for me, which I kind of expected since most of the dates regarding the project stretch back to the mid-1990s. 😦
• brogue: brogue built for me from the AUR package, but segfaulted any time I tried to start a game. Interesting graphics, but I didn’t get much farther in than the title page.
• bunny.py: It’s just an animated bunny. No, I won’t be evaluating it on its merit as a console application.
• connect4: Reaching back to 1988 for this one; just finding a working source link might be a challenge. Working with a “shell archive” was a new experience for me. The .Z file just needs to be gunzipped, and after that, sh connect4 was enough to start the build process. But that’s where it crashed and burned.
• diablorl: As you might have guessed, a roguelike intended to duplicate the atmosphere of the Diablo video game. Consistently segfaulted at startup. I don’t know if I have much faith in this anyway, since the system requirements for the original Diablo game are trifling, and I always remember Diablo as an action frenzy. Perhaps one day I will see.
• dsol: LGDB makes reference to this game, but I can’t find a source file or home page, so it might be gone. Apparently it was an ASCII solitaire game. I see references to something called “dsol” elsewhere on the Internet, but it appears to be related to Java.
• gnusay: a lot like cowsay, but GNU-ish. Wouldn’t compile for me, GNU matter how I tried. … 😆 😛
• goblinhack: I am consciously putting goblinhack on this list, even though there’s nothing really wrong with it. goblinhack uses SDL and OpenGL and plays as a smooth-scrolling 2D dungeon crawl, along the lines of Gauntlet. I built it in Arch from a clone of the git repo, and had no problems. As a matter of fact, it was quite fun. I definitely give it a thumbs-up. But strictly speaking, it’s a graphical application, even if it does represent something of a hybrid. Definitely give it a try. 😉
• intricacy: Intricacy is a lock-design puzzle game and looks quite impressive. It’s written in Haskell though, and my track record for getting Haskell-based software to work — even through cabal — is about 999 failures to one success. 😦 Not in Arch/AUR or Debian.
• mlrogue: A roguelike game written in Ocaml. Won’t build via AUR because it relies on camlp5, which won’t build against the newest version of Ocaml. Which is odd, because apparently the author of mlrogue is also the author of camlp5 … ?
• moria: Or umoria, as the case may be. A roguelike that stays close to the original game. The Arch version would build but wouldn’t run. The Debian version works fine of course, but I was trapped by the key commands, which expect you to have a full-size extended keyboard and number pad for movement. I don’t have any laptops with number pads right now, which meant I would have to dance around the Fn and NumLk keys just to play. 😕
• pacmanascii: Couldn’t compile.
• portile: Something Portal-ish, but there doesn’t seem to be a source code file that will work with Linux (the Mac one didn’t work for me). If you have a Mac or a Windows machine, you might want to give it a spin; at first glance it reminds me of ASCIIPortal, but the home page claims it’s different.
• pytris: Not the same as the last pytris game. I find a home page link, via Freecode, but it 404s. This seems to be a recurring theme with some of these smaller games. … 😕
• spacezero: An RTS game for the console. Personally I think a well-built, well-designed RTS game for the console, along the lines of StarCraft or Age of Empires, is long overdue. Regardless, the source for spacezero won’t compile in Arch, and the Debian version wouldn’t run outside of X, which I thought odd. Perhaps it was never meant as a curses game.
• steamband: angband, done over in steampunk. Not really to my liking, but wouldn’t build for me from AUR either, so no harm done.
• vagabondo: I don’t remember where I got this one. It will build and run, but the character set is completely indecipherable and I haven’t a clue what’s happening in the game. This might just be a locale issue, but I’m at a loss. 😦
• wanderer: A Boulder-Dash-ish adventure game … I think. This would compile for me (from the BSD version, I might add), but neither that nor the prebuilt executable (in the Linux version) displayed anything when I ran it. I was just randomly tapping keys and getting nothing in the way of visual feedback. Oh well, I tried. …

As always, seeing a title here doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Try these yourself and see if you have any more luck than I did. And if you do, please let us know about it. 😉