Gaming Rougelike Dungeon Crawl Games

[iain_benson]

I've recently completed Orcs & Elves, and while it was fun, it doesn't really have much in the way of replayability.

What I'm looking for is a dungeon crawling games where the levels are randomly generated, and thus can be replayed.

What would people recommend in this genre? I'm not overly concerned about story, more about quality and playability.

 

[AndreXL]

Roguelike?
Check out Izuna and DS #2082: Mystery Dungeon.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as well...

 

[FAST6191]

Roguelike huh, there have been a bunch of homebrew ports/remakes etc of rogue/hack/nethack, my favourite of which is powder although there are a few others.
http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about links for the other ports as well.

I second Izuna and would have you take a look at rune factory.

Some of the rpgs such as Hoshigami and a few of the localised Japanese ones are fairly good when it comes to replaying, they are usually quite hard though.

If you have GBA capability it is worth looking at some of the rpgs that appeared there.

 

[cutterjohn]

Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer is VERY much like Izuna IMO although the penalty for death is MUCH steeper. (Your character goes back to level 1, and loses all of his gold/xp(of course).)

Also there are:
Nethack for the DS
Powder v1.02 now
DSCrawl Linley's Dungeon Crawl for the DS, here's the link for a DLDI version http://errabes.free.fr/pogo2/ . I just found it today and haven't tested it yet. If you google DSCrawl you can turn up v1.0-beta2 that uses libfat and seems to work with most slot-2 carts.

 

[BoneMonkey]

does it have to be for nintendo ds?

i play dungeon crawl but with titles you can download it here this is for pc
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/crawl-ref...mp;big_mirror=0

also etrian odessy is kinda like dungeon crawl

 

[sk3tch]

I really enjoyed Etrian Odyssey. Very challenging.

I second Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer...it's roguelike to a T.

 

[cutterjohn]

does it have to be for nintendo ds?

i play dungeon crawl but with titles you can download it here this is for pc
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/crawl-ref...mp;big_mirror=0

also etrian odessy is kinda like dungeon crawl

Why are you giving a link to a Windows version in a DS forum?

nm he's linking to a binary with tiles included, presumably for the tiles. I've just loaded a uSD with the DLDI version and will see if the included character sets actually include a tile pack...

 

[Karmatic]

Commercial Games? The best = Shiren, then Izuna, finally Pokemon Mystery Dungeon

Homebrew has POWDER and the Nethack port is becoming easier to navigate, finally the Crawl port but I find it very difficult on the DS

Roguelikes are one of my favorite genres so I'm glad to see the interest!

 

[Cermage]

so in shiren you pretty much can't die to beat the game? because hearing that you go back to lvl1 is a really big turn off.

 

[cutterjohn]

Just in case anyone cares the "font" that DSCrawl ships with has some graphical elements, e.g. dungeon walls are solid blocks, potions are simple bottle shaped bitmaps, armor a sort of armor looking icon, weapons sort of weapon looking icons, scrolls like unfurled scrolls, etc.

Floor tiles remain '.'s, and monsters remain letters.

I'm not at all certain that the tile sets contained in bonemonkey's download will work, but they or another set might as I DID see some dscrawl screenshots with better tilesets.

 

[Ruri]

so in shiren you pretty much can't die to beat the game? because hearing that you go back to lvl1 is a really big turn off.

There are ways around this. First, as you go you sort of 'build up' relationships and so on in the towns along the way that will help you next time... you can play through a single attempt in an hour or so, and even if you fail you'll have laid the groundwork for a more successful attempt later on.

Additionally, the DS Shiren includes a 'rescue mode'. If you die, you can send a rescue request over the internet, and other players can 'rescue' you, letting you continue your adventure (you can do this up to three times per adventure.) So dying isn't automatically the end. I'm surprised we haven't gotten a "rescue plz!" thread here yet...

 

[iain_benson]

Thank you for all the suggestions, I bought izuna and pokemon mystery dungeon, and will have a play soon.
Shiren, rune factory and etrian odessy are not available in the UK (yet?)

 

[Yugge]

Well there always is www.ebay.co.uk for you UK-ers

 

[Ruri]

Thank you for all the suggestions, I bought izuna and pokemon mystery dungeon, and will have a play soon.
Shiren, rune factory and etrian odessy are not available in the UK (yet?)

Oh, I missed this. While Etrian Odyssey is a great 'old-school' wizardry-style RPG with a huge dungeon that will take a long time to beat, it is not randomly-generated. I'm pretty sure Rune Factory isn't randomly generated either, but I didn't play it for long.

They're still worth getting. Well, at least, Etrian Odyssey is, and people say Rune Factory is. But don't get them expecting random dungeons.