Review of Angband
While we are here, let's do a quick review of Angband, which was recently listed as #8 in my original Top 30 list, and it slid to #9 in my modified one I made a month ago. It's still in the back of the Top Ten, and I love it and its variants more than Civilization, Master of Orion II, The Legend of Zelda, Star Control II, Baldur's Gate, Pokemon, SimCity 4, Half-Life, and more.
So let's take a look under the hood at this very, very free game.
Okay, before I begin this review, I want to point out a couple of things. I like a game with a lot of detail, tons of complexity, and strategies I can learn for months.
Angband is not a good looking game. It's clean, but it's not pretty. However, take a look at the user reviews at GameSpot of this game - 9.4 is very high.
Okay, with that caveat, I present Angband. We'll start with a graphical version:
If you are interested in Angband or variants, you had head over to:
Thangorodrim - The Angband Page
Okay, let's talk about the history of Angband, because it is very important.
In the late seventies, a game developer created a cute little freeware game called Rogue. In Rogue, you are delving through a dungeon and picking up potions, scrolls, wands and more while killing various monsters. The tech at the time was poor, so you were represented with an "@" symbol, and everything else were ASCII characters as well.
In 1985, Robert Koeneke fondly remembered that Rogue game he played years ago, but could not find it. He set out to create a similar game, with a bit of a Tolkien theme, named "Moria." He built the game around Tolkein, with the player decending to level 50 before killing the Balrog.
He remembered Rogue being very difficult, so he handed out early version of his game to friends, and each time they beat the game, he closed off the avenue they used to do it. He intentionally set out to make Moria the hardest game ever developed (and succeeded).
Moria was significantly more advanced than Rogue, with tons of monsters, items, spells, classes, and more added to the game. There was also a village level at the top of the dungeon that had a few shops.
Other writers also wrote Rogue variants, and this genre of game is called a "Roguelike" game (go figure
). Most of them share a common element with Rogue - once you die, you are dead. No save game. If you die, you die. There are other Roguelike games like NetHack, ToME and Ragnarok out there.
This creates a ton of suspense. It's tough to go through a game that is designed to be amazingly hard and THEN is unable to load a save game.
As a result, Angband is the hardest game I've ever played. Ever harder than Fragile Allegiance.
Anyways, back to history. In 1990, a couple of guys decided that Moria was not Tolkien enough so they wrote Angband. Angband has come to be viewed as THE roguelike variant to play.
Angband added so many unique ideas to the equation. They added unique items, many from Tolkien, like Angdrast, Sting, Ringil, the Phial of Galadriel, and more.
This added a new element to the top end of the game and added tons of flavor as well.
Next they added unique monsters. Many of these are Tolkienian, like Smaug, Thuringwethil, Saruman, each of the Nazgul, and more. This also added a new element of challenge to the game as you progressively moved into harder and harder terrain.
Then they added tons of things to the dungeons, like a monster pit, which is a room full of a monster type, or vaults, which are large areas chock full of treasure and nasty out of depth monsters (As you delve deeper, more powerful monsters exist, and an out of depth monster is one that is up too high of his average level.)
On this floor, an orc pit is to the left (like I said, a lot of monsters) anda vault is to the right. Both of these are special rooms and to get them both that hgih up in the dungeon is unusual.
The randomizers added out of depth items and monsters upon occasion. There were new elements to add more creativity to your armor (in addition to basics like fire and cold there was now nether and chaos and such).
The game also stretched 100 levels instead of the previous 50.
Angband took everything that was great about Moria and exploded it into many more pieces while also adding tons of new elements to the game.
I prefer playing with the text version, instead of that crappy graphic version. Here's a pic (remember, you are the @)
Angband became so popular and definitive that over SIXTY-THREE variants were written by other people as freeware. That's how influential and important Angband became.
Oh, and did you like Diablo? Diablo was just a very, very, very dumbed down Angband with graphics.
Now, as a matter of fact, I prefer one of those variants, ZAngband, to Angband. Z is a game as advanced from Angband as Angband was from Moria (and Z is the most popular variant as well.). Z is based on Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles. It also includes quests, outdoors, tons of classes, a better overhauled magic system, tons of races, mutations, and lots more great stuff. I love it.
However, this is not a review of Z but of Angband, the vanilla version. It may not look like much, I know, but packed in here is one of the best computer games ever made. I spent an entire summer once playing Angband.
Overall - 4 out of 5 stars for most, who care about things like graphics and sound and stuff, 5 outta 5 if you just care about gameplay.