Ive been wondering if anyone plays a game called Angband here on TL?
For a little background about the game, Angband is a Roguelike game with an ASCII graphical interface. Its an old school dungeon crawler based on Lord of the Rings lore. Basically, you choose your race and class, start out in town, buy your shit, and start diving into the 100-level dungeon. There are tons of unique artifacts that you can find as dive deeper into the dungeon, along with many unique "boss" monsters that you can fight throughout the game. Your ultimate goal is to get strong enough and find a powerful combination of equipment to kill Sauron and Morgoth, who are on the 99th and 100th levels.
It is ridiculously addicting, but also one of the most difficult single player games ive ever played. The most distinctive trait about the game is the fact that if you die, your character is done. The file is automatically deleted and you everything that you put into it. This coupled with the fact that there are many, many monsters that can kill you in 1 shot from range and out of sight (if you arent careful) can be extremely frustrating. Still, the game is very beatable and very gratifying, especially considering the fact that its all text based.
I heard that games like Diablo pretty much based all their gameplay on games like Angband. I just beat this game a couple minutes ago (after losing like 3 strong chars too...) and was just so damn pleased with myself that I wanted to see if there were others who play this game that I could share this with lol.
Wow, I played this game like 20 years ago, so darn fun but hard! I never got past lvl20 or so but of course I was eight or nine and didn't know much English. Do you have a d/l link? I'd love to give it a go now when I can figure out what the heck is going on.
On February 27 2011 23:51 Longshank wrote: Wow, I played this game like 20 years ago, so darn fun but hard! I never got past lvl20 or so but of course I was eight or nine and didn't know much English. Do you have a d/l link? I'd love to give it a go now when I can figure out what the heck is going on.
I never played the original Angband, but I've played Zangband quite alot, which is the same except with more content as far as I know. I haven't played in awhile now, but I think they're still developing Zangband.
I played ZangBand a while back, it came as a part of a retrospective PC Gamer bonus CD. It was quite fun but I didn't really figure all of it out so I only got like 2 floors into the dungeon.
On February 28 2011 05:24 Ian Ian Ian wrote: I can't pick up a long sword that i found
Inventory full? Might need to drop something.
Angband is awesome for the soul-crushing difficulty. I finally beat it about a year ago after trying off and on for 4-5 years. Amazing feeling. Haven't really played at all since. :p
Its a nice, helpful community (TL is better of course /buttkiss), but the only problem is that everyone there is so knowledgeable that it might be assumed you know things that you dont. Dont be afraid to ask though.
Oh, and you can check out the spoiler sections if you want help on identifying what certain monsters and artifacts can do. Some diehard purists might consider that cheating, but even the guys on the forum don't really care about it.
Heres a general "game manual" that can be pretty damn useful when starting out. Itll go over general basics and have some tips too.
And to answer some of the questions about specific controls, press "q" to use a potion, press "g" to pick up an item youre standing on
Edit: I think its pretty tight that theres people here giving it a go for the first time! Be careful of the frustration of death though. I can tell you from personal experience that each time I lost my char that I spent 20+ hours on, I hated the game and vowed never to play again lol. Gratification on learning from mistakes and eventually winning is huge and well worth it tho (imo)
A basic tip that is counter intuitive is to keep diving and going down deeper and deeper into the dungeons. If you stay up on higher levels too long, you wont get as strong of treasure or as good of exp. Most importantly though, you might get complacent. Since you will start being able to kick everyones asses up at the higher level, youll go down in the dangerous portions of the dungeon with the same mentality. This will get you killed. Stay conservative, dive as deep as you can without killing yourself.
Any other questions, just post em here and Ill do my best to answer!
I played vanilla, Zang and some other variant that i forgot (Eyangband?) and I killed morgoth in ToME. ToME may be a little easier though, as you can find randarts that add to your attacks per turn. Stack rings of extra attacks to turn into a life sized blender.
Mac is probably right. there will always be tons of shit littering the dungeon floor, and a common beginner mistake is to try to pick everything up.
Its been a while since I played a roguelike that isn't dwarf fortress fortress mode, but one thing I suggest people use when playing angband is the extra windows. My memory is quite fuzzy but you can create new windows and tell the game to display information on that window. Just move your eyes and you can see your inventory, the description of the thing you're looking at, etc. The "hud" is very customizable which I wish more games had. it improves the interface a lot if you have a decent sized monitor.
Macros are also great later on but I don't remember much of what I did with those except autodestroy bad and average equipment when my pseudoidentify abilities are good enough.
I have a question Supamang. What do you think is the best variant to play right now?
Not sure. Ive only played Vanilla and Moria, which was a less in-depth variant way back in the day. I heard ToME and Zang were pretty fun, but then again they all seem pretty awesome.
EPT
