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tophat8855's review
3.0
I listened to this on Hoopla while doing yardwork. It definitely made me want to play Rogue again- my dad used to play the DOS version on our computer at home and I played it as well and made sure I copied it over to my college desktop when I moved out. I don't know if he ever knew I did that. I just loved Rogue so much. And I've never won it.
I wish the history of Roguelikes had more women in it. Listening to this history about these teen and young men making their Roguelikes just emphasizes you don't need a ton of special knowledge to hack about on your computer and do stuff.
I wish the history of Roguelikes had more women in it. Listening to this history about these teen and young men making their Roguelikes just emphasizes you don't need a ton of special knowledge to hack about on your computer and do stuff.
celtic_oracle's review
4.0
I’m a long-time Angband fan, but now I want to play all of the roguelikes!
sonofthe's review
4.0
Picked this up with a Humble Bundle and am glad I did. I started playing roguelikes in the early 90s and have kept up with them on and off since. This history runs through the classic, giving fun details, both personal and technical, about the games.
I loved hearing how these games came from such an exuberant, creative place, regardless of the creators. There's a contagious sort of energy coming from these stories. My biggest beef is that there's not enough to them. I wish the author had gone deeper and included some of the roguelikes he left out (I know he mentions it, and why, but I really wanted to hear about T.o.M.E.).
The narrator was good, for the most part. A couple of his pronunciations pulled me out of the book, but those were few and far between. Still very understandable. Didn't have the problem of droning on.
I loved hearing how these games came from such an exuberant, creative place, regardless of the creators. There's a contagious sort of energy coming from these stories. My biggest beef is that there's not enough to them. I wish the author had gone deeper and included some of the roguelikes he left out (I know he mentions it, and why, but I really wanted to hear about T.o.M.E.).
The narrator was good, for the most part. A couple of his pronunciations pulled me out of the book, but those were few and far between. Still very understandable. Didn't have the problem of droning on.
laci's review
4.0
Okay, that was also a good one. Craddock apparently knows what he's doing. I'd say this one was even better than Stay Awhile And Listen. (And it makes me wanna play Mines of Moria and Angband and ToME and FTL and... and... and I am installing D2 now, too. Whoops.)
djotaku's review
3.0
I got this book as part of a Humble Bundle. I chose to listen to it because Dan (one of my younger brothers) had roped me into Rogue-likes via FTL and Spelunky! The book was a fun, quick read of the history of these games. Two things were fascinating to me about the events of the book. One is remembering how primitive early computers were and how long it took them to get anywhere close to modern. This, of course, led to creativity in how to create games when disk space, RAM, or processing power were extremely limited. What was more fascinating to me was to see that the legacy of Rogue, Rogue-likes, and Rogue-like-likes was not just in modern games like Vertical Drop Hero, Diablo, FTL, and Spelunky! Lots of these games are still actively developed! While my fondness for many of the modern Rogue-likes demonstrates that I'm not a slave to graphics or music, it was interesting to read that as late as 2012 there were people actively developing (and playing) the original games developed in the 70s and 80s - or at least the most recent releases of those old games.
count_zero's review
3.0
Note: This review originally appeared on my blog - https://countzeroor.com/2018/05/12/book-review-dungeon-hacks/
Procedural content, permadeath, and extremely punishing difficulty has become more and more of a thing in game design. So, that fact, combined by my affinity for the history of technology from a social, technological, and scientific perspective, lead me to this book about the history of roguelikes. It makes for a good portrait of the development of four games, and getting briefly into some of the ways roguelikes have spread into wider gaming culture, though what could be a good look at the larger gaming picture is sadly limited.
Dungeon Hacks is, ultimately, the story of six games - Beneath Apple Manor (BAM), Rogue, NetHack, Moria & Angband together, and Ancient Domains of Mystery. Beneath Apple Manor is set up as being what Rogue could have been - the Roguelike that predates Rogue, but which failed to get the level of penetration that Rogue did.
Rogue and Nethack probably get the most time each, with the discussion of Rogue getting into how the game came about, along with it's cultural permutation through its initial distribution in BSD Unix. The discussion of Nethack gets into the concept of the Nethack "Dev Team" along with how distributed development for the game was handled.
Moria and Angband, and Ancient Domains of Mystery get the least time of the main roguelikes. In part, that's because Moria & Angband were basically designed as a response to the fact that NetHack's tone is pretty much all over the place, with tongue-in-cheek classes (like "Tourist") and joke monsters (like the actual Three Stooges). Ancient Domains of Mystery mostly stands out because it's pretty much the main focus of one developer, and with a much larger scope than any of the other Roguelike games.
The book concludes a discussion of "Rogue-like-likes" - in particular FTL and the original Diablo. This part is probably the most disappointing part of the book - mainly because of the limited scope - and particular what this section overlooks. In particular, the book basically takes the tack that the mainstream popularity of the roguelike is a modern western thing. This is unfortunate and wrong - in both respects. Home consoles got roguelikes, either as straight-up roguelikes like Fatal Labyrinth on the Genesis, or as "Roguelike-lites" like the Mystery Dungeon series and the Shiren the Wanderer series. They may not have gotten the same degree of penetration here that they did in Japan - but it is still important to mention - they got an incredible amount of cultural penetration in Japan, at at time where they had no penetration whatsoever in the US.
Procedural content, permadeath, and extremely punishing difficulty has become more and more of a thing in game design. So, that fact, combined by my affinity for the history of technology from a social, technological, and scientific perspective, lead me to this book about the history of roguelikes. It makes for a good portrait of the development of four games, and getting briefly into some of the ways roguelikes have spread into wider gaming culture, though what could be a good look at the larger gaming picture is sadly limited.
Dungeon Hacks is, ultimately, the story of six games - Beneath Apple Manor (BAM), Rogue, NetHack, Moria & Angband together, and Ancient Domains of Mystery. Beneath Apple Manor is set up as being what Rogue could have been - the Roguelike that predates Rogue, but which failed to get the level of penetration that Rogue did.
Rogue and Nethack probably get the most time each, with the discussion of Rogue getting into how the game came about, along with it's cultural permutation through its initial distribution in BSD Unix. The discussion of Nethack gets into the concept of the Nethack "Dev Team" along with how distributed development for the game was handled.
Moria and Angband, and Ancient Domains of Mystery get the least time of the main roguelikes. In part, that's because Moria & Angband were basically designed as a response to the fact that NetHack's tone is pretty much all over the place, with tongue-in-cheek classes (like "Tourist") and joke monsters (like the actual Three Stooges). Ancient Domains of Mystery mostly stands out because it's pretty much the main focus of one developer, and with a much larger scope than any of the other Roguelike games.
The book concludes a discussion of "Rogue-like-likes" - in particular FTL and the original Diablo. This part is probably the most disappointing part of the book - mainly because of the limited scope - and particular what this section overlooks. In particular, the book basically takes the tack that the mainstream popularity of the roguelike is a modern western thing. This is unfortunate and wrong - in both respects. Home consoles got roguelikes, either as straight-up roguelikes like Fatal Labyrinth on the Genesis, or as "Roguelike-lites" like the Mystery Dungeon series and the Shiren the Wanderer series. They may not have gotten the same degree of penetration here that they did in Japan - but it is still important to mention - they got an incredible amount of cultural penetration in Japan, at at time where they had no penetration whatsoever in the US.
colonel2sheds's review
3.0
Short but interesting. Each of the games featured are pretty similar so the chapters do start to get a little "samey" but the book doesn't overstay it's welcome. Goodreads really needs to let me have half stars. 3.5/5 would recommend if you're interested in the subject.
dozens's review
3.0
There's a special place in my heart for the roguelike. This was a fun little genealogy of some of the genre's forerunners.
It strikes me how closely related developing the early games was to developing for the hardware, and to the limitations of the hardware. We don't really have that constraint any more, and I definitely get how it can be a real thing of beauty to be as perfectly expressive as you want to be within a clearly defined set of constraints. It's the whole point of haiku, and other rigid poetic constructs.
I think that if I were to start writing such a game myself today, I'd start on a fantasy console like the TIC-80 in order to feel some of those same limitations.
It strikes me how closely related developing the early games was to developing for the hardware, and to the limitations of the hardware. We don't really have that constraint any more, and I definitely get how it can be a real thing of beauty to be as perfectly expressive as you want to be within a clearly defined set of constraints. It's the whole point of haiku, and other rigid poetic constructs.
I think that if I were to start writing such a game myself today, I'd start on a fantasy console like the TIC-80 in order to feel some of those same limitations.