Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Jun 30th, 2009
A note to the reader: This was the originally-planned Retro-Active column for this week, but you almost didn’t read it. Following the death of Michael Jackson last Thursday evening, I had a notion to scrap this and do a review instead of Moonwalker for the Sega Genesis as something of a tribute column. However, after about seventy-two bazillion attempts to write about that game without making the too-obvious jokes regarding its subject matter – which given recent events might be seen as in somewhat poor taste – I eventually gave up and went back to my original plan from before the King of Pop breathed his last. I may return to it later on, after the situation becomes a bit less sensitive. Just so you know what’s in the pipeline for the future, anyway…
Of all genres of classic video games, perhaps few are as misunderstood as the “Roguelike.”
To some, Roguelike games are overly simplistic, being for the most part without plot or meaningful graphics. Others go to the opposite extreme, claiming their control schema are far too needlessly complex for what they are, and not very easily memorized. Also, since most Roguelikes are free (in both the “speech” and “beer” senses) there’s a certain stigma associated with it from the “You get what you pay for” crowd, similar to the hurdles that perfectly capable FLOSS projects like The GIMP, Inkscape, and OpenOffice.org have had to overcome in the arena of public perception.
The truth is, the term “Roguelike” simply refers to a dungeon crawler-style RPG that plays like the early UNIX-terminal classic Rogue, arguably the primordial soup that spawned the “graphical” adventure game. Never mind that the “graphics,” in Rogue’s case, were simple ASCII text characters; they could still be arranged to form rudimentary maps, with your character represented as a @ and monsters by capital letters. (If you’ve never had nightmares about being stalked through narrow, twisty corridors by flame-spewing Ds or a white-furred, bellowing Y, you obviously never played Rogue or one of its descendants in your formative years.) Text-based graphics are not, contrary to somewhat popular belief, a prerequisite for being considered a Roguelike; such graphics are merely the lingua franca of computer displays, making a game that uses them extremely portable to other platforms. One of the biggest hits of PC gaming of this past decade, Diablo, earns the classification despite a modern user interface and professionally-designed graphics. It’s all about the gameplay, not the presentation.
Speaking of “all about the gameplay,” that would take me to today’s topic of discussion, which I’ve somehow managed to tear myself away from long enough to write this article.
Sword of Fargoal, a very well-known game in Commodore 64 fandom, was one of the early Roguelikes for a microcomputer, While a humble machine like the 64 couldn’t possibly, due to memory limitations and a lack of mainframe connectivity, re-create the full experience of Rogue, it could play something that resembled it, albeit with a simplified interface and some features removed. But Sword of Fargoal, as you’ll see, has much more going for it than just being a “dumbed-down” version of a classic terminal game. It is a solid and fun dungeon crawler strictly on its own merit, and even today it’s maddeningly addictive. I should know, I’ve just spent the better part of three days lost within its mazes!
Let’s check it out…
If you liked that, try...
- Retro-Active: Gauntlet (NES)
- Retro-Active: Phantasy Star
- Retro-Active: The Legend of Zelda – Swordless!
- Retro-Active: Deadly Towers
- Retro-Active: Dragon Warrior
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