zRogue

Even though, in this day and age, roguelikes are plentiful for most devices - if I play on Android, I can enjoy Pathos as the latest generation Nethack clone - it is still very pleasurable to load up a zMachine interpreter and play the grandaddy of them all, in the zMachine format. There is always a sense of wonder at seeing these abuses. Tetris, programming languages, Sokoban, Snake. Sometimes it's simply fun to load up my IF terp and use it for something else.

This game is clearly marked non-IF, so I won't criticise it for not being IF. It's a port of Rogue. Sometimes one does get a hankering for a roguelike. Hmm? What's that you say? One doesn't? Ah. Well, this one does, and this one is writing this review. :) The added portability is always a bonus, even if these days it may seem less important; after all, why bother with a zMachine Rogue when I can download a roguelike app?

Honestly? Sometimes you just can't beat oldschool. In its oldschool presentation. @ going around ..... S'ing |_ for secret +'rs and wielding your bow to throw arrows at a distant K, for $ and loot; wondering whether to Q that latest ! you found, or put on that funny-looking unknown =; and looking for the > (which is % in this version).

Maybe it's nostalgia, I'll admit. Nothing I can do about that. I have fun playing this. Maybe it's simplicity; so much has been added on to Rogue over the decades that it's become amazingly deep, and, you know, sometimes one prefers a little simplicity. What's that? One doesn- will you shut up already, One? Ahem.

Great port, great work. As fun to play as the original. It's not IF, but it's not meant to be. Gevan Dutton, I'm grateful for your hard work. So far, only two things have behaved unexpectedly: in this port my savegame is not deleted after it's restored (hehehe, that's not altogether a bad thing for me 😇 ) and "c"alling something, naming it, doesn't seem to work, at least not in the interpreter I tried.

zRogue is an interesting programming exercise and well done, but not really something worthwhile for the player, I believe. Rogue is readily available on many other platforms. Since it is entirely text-based, the novel connection to interactive fiction is somewhat credible, but very little remains to make it interesting for the interactive fiction audience.

If you're an IF programmer and want to be impressed, go ahead and take a look. If you want to play IF, don't bother.