The gigantic poll for teh best roguelike of 2009 has finished at Ascii dreams, and the undoubted winner is…. Doom: The Roguelike!

This comes to no surprise as this popular coffeebreak roguelike has broken free from the roguelike niche into the indie world, spawning an active community and attracting heaps of people into our roguemundi!  Congratulations to Kornel and good luck with all his endeavours!

Following are the 10 first games:

1. DoomRL: 227 votes

2. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: 170 votes

3. Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King: 69 votes

4. POWDER: 48 votes

5. Elona: 32 votes

6. GearHead 2: 27 votes

7. Angband: 24 votes

8. Unangband: 21 votes

9. Privateer: ASCII Sector: 19 votes

10. Triangle Wizard: 18 votes

Congratulations to all developers!

One of few fantasy roguelikes set in norse mythology. Once a commercial product, now a forgotten freeware gem. The game starts when Fimbulwinter strikes. It is sure sign of incoming Ragnarok. Chaos engulfs known world while Jotuns and Valkyries prepare for the epic battle. Gods benevolent to mankind are outnumbered and underarmed. Norns have proclaimed their defeat. However, legends tell about a human hero who shall help the Aesir fight and perhaps tip the scales of battle. Thus your journey begins.

Click to read the full review

Typical roguelike game has wide array of commands to remember, plethora of stuff to use and multitude of mysterious creatures. Add ASCII graphics with several other minor gameplay quirks and you have succesfully scared away another newbie. Over is largely unfinished but it has core elements of roguelikeness implemented. Just a few keys, almost no complexity. This makes it ideal to recommend for newcomer to the genre.

Click to read the full review

…Notably MPRDB bears quite a lot similarites to Rogue. Dungeon is discovered in exactly same fashion. One square of visibility in corridors while whole rooms are revealed upon entering. Dungeoneering hero is described by only two main attributes: body and agility.

Read the full review.

Time runs out!

ASCII Dreams, Andrew Doull’s blog made famous by its “Designing a Magic System” series, is holding a poll for the roguelike of the year 2008!

The list was taken from the roguelike releases announced on the Rogue Basin news section between January 1st and December 17th 2008 and from the list of Actively Developing Roguelikes maintained by Jeff Lait. There are a record 75 entries this year

It is time to vote, less than 3 days until the poll closes! Go hither!

A young talented hacker desires fortune. He has a plan how to earn it but it needs time and is going to take a lot of work. Unknown and underequipped but slowly making himself someone in this world.
Money is earned by completing contracts. A client demands that a number of objectives is met upon leaving the target system. Then you get paid, sell any additional valuable information you gleaned “by the way” and your reputation gets slightly changed. If the contract was challenging you also receive skill points.

Read full review

The International Roguelike Database, by Mr. Z (a.k.a. R2) is a tool linked with Roguebasin, via which you can search roguelikes with different criteria and filters.

Check it out at http://www.roguetemple.com/irldb

Mr. Mario Donick has released the 1.0.0 milestone of his project, LambdaRogue, to commemorate two years into the project. Happy birthday LambdaRogue!

Over two years have passed since I started to develop a small little program where an @ could be moved on the screen. After lots of unfinished versions with lots of bugs and problems, and after a break of nearly one year, I again accelerated the development process, which resulted in the 0.3 tree in early 2008.

To celebrate the 2nd birthday of my project, I decided to give the next “big” release the version number 1.0, because the version improves again many things and makes everything more stable and polished.

Now, I am happy to announce the release of LambdaRogue 1.0.

Mr. Mario Donick, whom recently got back to roguelike development mode after a somewhat long hiatus, has released version after version of LambdaRogue, his main roguelike project.

Since yesterday’s release of version 0.3.0.2 of LambdaRogue, the game itself could be considered as nearly finished. All necessary quests are implemented, all textual content (except one textfile) is written and the game is winnable (technical and balancing-wise). So besides optimizing the existing content, fixing possible bugs and delivering the missing textfile, I could stop the whole thing and call it 1.0.

As you can see on by his own words, the game is finished. If you are a roguelike developer, you know how hard it is to call your game finished, specially if your scope is not 7DRL limited, or a proof of concept. If you are a roguelike player, there you have it, a complex, easy to play, indeep new roguelike, yours for the taking!

So, I recommend you to take a look at his game, it is interesting, important and not obsolete. Go forth, and look for the book of stars!

Corremn keeps working on his sewerjacks project with SewerJacks 0.8.6

I have released another version. This one has a new interface and a few new features. All creature icons have been changed to Nick
Kelsch’s blood bowl icons. Thanks Nick. And allies are more “team” based so you can now control a mob of blood-thirsty orcs or angry
dwarfs and go crazy. Hopefully this adds to the atmostphere.