bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (09/13/83)
Well, as along time fan of Rogue, I had to order the version for my IBM-PC as soon as I saw the ad. Here are my impressions (I got it today). First, the disk is copy protected. This is reasonable (although there is a strong faction that thinks Rogue is public domain since it was done at UCB) but I don't like some of the results. I would prefer that the copy protection simply insisted the Rogue disk was in one of the drives. Then I could copy the .exe file (yes a .exe not a .com) to my hard disk or ramdisk and loading would be a lot easier. This is a problem because loading does take a bit of time, so it is a bit of a pain to restart a game after you are killed. You have to type in your player name each time too, which is a pain. I would really like it if there were an option that allowed you to play another game at the end instead of terminating. This would remove the need for the ramdisk idea and reduce the wear on the disk. The score file is on the floppy too, so you can't write protect it. The game will NOT work on a system with a Davong hard disk under Dos 1.1. The strangest bugs appear, including all sorts of things not being initialized. (This includes monsters, who usually kill you with one blow). A real strange bug, which went away when I booted vanilla Dos 2.0 to run Rogue. You need the display cards, you can't run it off an ANSI terminal. The display is OK. It is character based, but uses all kinds of strange IBM-PC text characters. The box drawing ones do the rooms. The player is the smiling face and not the @. Other items have more graphic representations. Monsters are still letters. In order to avoid lawsuits from the folks at TSR, all D&D references are out of the game. This means many mosters are re-named and the letters are permuted. A bit of new fun while figuring out which old friend each letter really stands for. (a "R"attlesnake does what a Giant Ant does. An "I"ce monster does what a floating eye did, etc.) Armour class goes in the reverse direction. (Plate is 8, Leather is 3) Otherwise is plays like real Rogue, which is to be expected. No options, you are always in passgo mode, you are always asked what to call things. I have not run into fruit yet. You can't name your fruit. (I used to call mine, "12 year old virgin". Think of all the strings with this in it!) In fact the "o" key says "I don't have any options". All other keys perform very much like an old-time Rogue player would expect, but they have put all movement on the IBM arrow pad as well, and several popular functions on the function keys. You even get a little square to put over the keys to label them. The company is called "AI Design". Look up their ad in PC magazine if you want to order it. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304