MAD WARRIOR

Bragging is, in general, pretty dumb, and bragging about being good at video games is specifically even dumber than that. As with most things, short of the truly rarefied heights “skill” here is largely just a matter of having the time to get good, which is a totally fine choice to make if you’ve got the requisite material privilege, but also, it’s no more inherently valuable than being really good at squash or knowing a lot about early 90s country music or being able to cook a killer vegetarian paella (OK, actually it’s much less inherently valuable than making a killer paella, those are great). And yet! Whenever the conversation turns to dungeon-crawlers, and especially to roguelikes, my toes start to twitch as I try to figure out how I can casually let slip that I’ve won Angband like ten times.

Angband is one of the classical trio of old-school roguelikes: we’re talking ASCII characters in place of graphics, permadeath, and a 100-level dungeon that takes something like 80 hours to work through even if you know what you’re doing. It’s objectively ridiculous, but for some reason it speaks to me in a way NetHack or ADOM or more modern, more forgiving roguelikes just don’t, and for a couple years in the late Obama administration I devoted more hours than I care to contemplate learning how dragons’ breath attacks worked (and which non-dragon monsters had them), to prioritize among the dozen or so elemental resistances, to run the odds on wand and staff failure rates, and how to take a deep breath in the middle of a high-risk, high-reward fight and see that it was time to cut my losses and run. These are not skills that are applicable to any other field of human endeavor (OK, maybe that last one is), and there’s no earthly reason anyone should care about this non-accomplishment, but still, I’m inordinately proud to have managed it.

All of this is just by way of establishing my bona fides in the sub-genre – not, I repeat not, a transparent excuse to casually let slip etc. – as we come to consider MAD WARRIOR. Bad luck for me, this is the second game in a row where the protagonist has been faced with the choice whether to execute a child, but at least here it’s all safely relegated to the backstory: you play the flunky to an evil overlord who finally reached you breaking point, and upon being cut down for your defiance, because you were such a bad dude the devil brings you back to life to work for him, with your first target being an archangel lurking at the heart of a consecrated stronghold.

Anyway of course none of that matters in the slightest, you start at the top of a dungeon and fight bats and skeletons and stuff. I would have liked a bit more of a commitment to the theme (Angband is an admittedly-inconsistent riff on Tolkien, but finding the Phial of Galadrial or working your way through the nine Ringwraiths definitely makes it more fun) but really, we all know how this stuff works, and MAD WARRIOR works that way… mostly.

There are weapon and armor slots, and HP and defense and attack values, and consumable items, and an inventory with limited slots and all the standard accoutrements of the genre, as well as only being able to save in specially-designated areas. And it’s clearly a text-based RPG rather than a piece of IF; you have a lot of commands for interacting with the various systems and bespoke verbs for different pieces of equipment, but comparatively few for engaging with the world. The dungeon has a tiny bit of set dressing, but the only interactive objects are monsters and treasure.

That’s all fine, even if personally I prefer my RPG/IF hybrids to be a bit more, well, hybridized. But there are a fair number of idiosyncrasies too, and unfortunately most of them make MAD WARRIOR less successful than a generic game of its type. For one thing, there’s some kind of omnipresent formatting error that makes each location description begin and end with a random jumble of numbers and symbols – since this is a DOS executable, I can’t imagine that there’s some formatting or rendering issue making this display oddly just on my machine, it seems like it must be an obvious, jarring bug. For another, it leans into the simulationist tendencies of roguelikes at the expense of playability, most notably in requiring you to have your carryall open before you can take loot or use your inventory, but then preventing you from leaving a room until you close it again, which adds so much friction that finding new equipment often provoked a sigh of anticipated tedium.

What’s worst of all, combat in MAD WARRIOR is frequent, gimmick-free, and unrewarding. Of course there are a bunch of monsters, and fighting is an integral expectation of this kind of game, but there’s nothing that makes it especially fun: you don’t have magic or special moves, so you just attack the bad guy until they die (in theory you can use items, but given the need to futz around with your bag that’ll probably just get you killed faster). And then once they do die – that’s it. I never saw a monster drop anything upon expiring, and there’s no experience system incrementally improving your stats either. And over three runs – most ending at level 5 of who knows how many – I didn’t find any especially exciting treasure lying around the dungeon either, it was all just the occasional consumable rather than weapon or armor upgrades. Oh, and while combat rolls are randomized, the location of monsters and treasure seems to be fixed, so this isn’t a game you get better at as you develop a strategy, it’s one you get better at as you memorize the map and decide which monsters to avoid or run away from.

Cutting the player off from the core reward-loop of the genre – number go up – is a bold choice, and one that could work if there was something, anything replacing it: an alternate, ability-based progression, maybe, or deeply implemented puzzles, or even just a well-integrated backstory. But in the absence of any of that, I found it impossible to muster the requisite commitment to progress in MAD WARRIOR. It did make me realize it’s been a couple of years since I’ve gotten back to Angband, though…