Having played Roguelikes since first picking up Angband, I have to say that (sorry purists) meta progression has improved the genre.
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I donāt want to get into the like vs lite debate, but it does make me happy some of these mechanics are turning up so often in modern games.
Also, Iām another one who started with angband. In the mid 90s, I was given a floppy disk at the back of the bus by one of my fellow geeks. I had no idea what what I was supposed to do but I got hooked.
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Iāve always considered the first roguelike game that I played to actually pre-date Rogueābut I realize Iām in the minority in my thinking that Zork was a roguelike.
But think about it a sec: perma-death, no leveling up, exploration (twisty passages, all alike), possible to complete on the first run if you have experience, and single character/non-party. Itās all text, but aside from that, it mostly fits.
To openly show my advanced years, I originally played it as Cave Adventure when I was maybe 10? My father worked for a large telecommunications corporation that youāve heard of, and when they offered him the opportunity to transfer from telephone tech to computer tech, he took it. He became a computer repair techāthis was in the mid and late 70s, before computers were a thing anyone thought of as something to have in your home. And of course they were rather large, so as much as he wanted to bring one home, he couldnāt do so easily. But he could bring home a teletype machine with a modem and hook up a keyboard to it, which is what he did on the workbench in our basement. And heād bring home a box of perforated teleptype paper every week or so.
I learned basic navigational commands for exploring the systems of anything I could get into on this corporationās network, only without a monitor, so everything would print on these endless scrolls of paper. It was the 70s, and I was more or less a child, so I had no conception of āhackingā or anything like that, I just wanted to see what I could find. Iād dial in and move around directories, and if there was a login required, my father could often get it, so I just kept nosing around. If the paper ran out, I would just flip it to the other side and run it through on the blank side. So we never ran out. Though I must have killed a forest of trees doing this.
And then one day, I found Cave Adventure.
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.
AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.
Try to imagine what this was like. Youāre ten, you come home from school and go down into a dark basement every afternoon, climb up on a stool in front of a workbench, dial in, and spend your time poking around for weeks into rather boring files and servers (before knowing they were called that) trying to explore the boundaries of the system, to find anything interesting. I can still remember perfectly the sound of that teletype printer moving across the page. And then that pops up. It felt as though Iād finally found the thing that had been hidden there just for me. I knew there had to be something really interesting in there, but I couldnāt have imagined that.
It took almost no time for me to figure out how to play, and then I was a totally lost cause. After school, after dinner, I was downstairs in the chilly basement working through the game, pages of maps Iād drawn spread out around me, clogging up the (landline) phone so that no one could call anyone to or from our house for hours. I was already a very avid reader, and this felt like the future of games and reading all in one. I tried telling a couple friends about it at school, and they looked at me like I was crazy, so I just kept it to myself.
So thatās my first roguelike (IMO) and my first computer game of any kind. By the time we finally got an (um, āborrowedā) amber monitor, Zork had been released, and then you know what came after that.
Sorry if TMI.
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I love this. I recall being a similar age, but in late 80ās, and running every single file on the computer just to see what it was, convinced there were hidden games if only I could find them (and liberal use of undelete).
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Not at all man, thatās a fantastic anecdote. I remember the days of two-colour monitors, but having the level print out is something else.
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For you 
I dislike most of them personally and find they detract from most of the games Iāve played with them.
Part of it may simply be that I am bad at games and without some sort of permanent progression I would never beat them.
I will admit, thought, that I can see the appeal of permadeath, but I prefer it to be an option that I can enable after Iāve gotten the hang of a game. Itās not really a rogue like, but the only way I play Diablo these days is in hardcore.
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itās not about being good or bad at games!
I find a lot of the metaprogression mechanics do not respect my time as a player with things like too low resource gain, too long per run for what you get, or randomized drops for permanent equipment unlock.
Even things like follow up, harder difficulties have no respect - are you playing the real game at the base difficulty? Some of them the answer is āNoooopeā when the upper difficulties do things very differently from the base.
I completely understand why theyāre popular (takes the sting out of permadeath run based games by giving some form of progression), itās just not something I enjoy because it feels like the devs put in mechanics to artificially inflate the amount of time spent.
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Maybe thatās a feeling that you have to try and look around then, or find the games roguelites that donāt artificially force that so poorly. With quality roguelites I donāt get this feeling at all. I see it quite the other way, I see meta progression as at the least a small reward system to encourage learning the game intricately and build upon previous gained knowledge. Beating each sector, or section, or stage, or boss, on the way in a good roguelite is thrilling enough, such that during game progress just each section, sector (etc) feels almost like a huge mission and an entire roguelite game in itself. Better or different tools or some buffs between runs is just all the more exciting to for being able to maybe, just maybe press on to the next section, section (etc), until it all comes together in one seemingly (once again) insurmountable task.
Admittedly since the genre has grown exponentially over the past year or two, thereās bound to be some not so great roguelites that tack on the meta progression system only to lead you down the path toward beating a run, but the best roguelites donāt do this just so blatantly, or at the least hook you on the the gameplay, the challenge of the game enough that inter-run progression is a hard earned reward, and exciting to see how you can utilise the reward on the next run, perhaps with a different build but equally as winnable in any run as the build/loadout that you just tried (and essentially failed with).
I like roguelikes as much as roguelites. I love the factors (mentioned above basically), that roguelites have brought to the broader genre.
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Now that Nintendo have leapt into action and we can all easily share screenshots, Iām busy playing around with some more unusual team compositions in Into the Breach; Iām still not very competent with some squads, which require unusual play styles, and Iām a very straightforward massive-damage-AOE man, but I love this game to bits.
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And it is currently on sale (at least in the US).
Relatedly, Nintendo just sent me my āYear in Reviewā report about how I used my Switch. Apparently, May and June were my heaviest use months, which makes sense, as there was essentially nothing else to do during those months.
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This game is absolutely wonderful. I finally stopped a few months ago after putting many, many hours in over the last eighteen months or so, because after clearing all teams on all lengths on Hard and getting 30k on every squad outside of Secret, I just kinda ran out of stuff to do. I still expect to pick it up every now and again and spontaneously lose three or four hours to its siren song, however.
While I am not yet playing this because I am doing a hard push to finish a writing goal by yearās end (albeit not TOO hard a push since I am posting here with an open laptop beside me waiting for some more tiptapping), KotOR 2 recently hit mobile. If you have not already gotten on it, I would. Pricey at $15, but you know you want it.
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Have gotten very much into Chess lately with an eye towards honing my skills and becoming better. While I doubt Iāll ever reach grandmaster status, I am having some fun and a lot of forehead smacking moments. JS619 on chess.com if anyone is up for an easy ELO bumpā¦
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Let me guess, watched the Queens Gambit recently?
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Haha, guilty.
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just the same happened with my son @HolstenKnight.
it started with Queens Gambit.
and thenā¦he liked to watch lots of chess tutorials and videos on historical matches and tournaments.
and now heās playing blitz matches on chess platforms.
āno video game or mmorpg can produce so much adrenaline as blitz chess can.ā
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Has anyone given any time to A Planet of Mine on iOS? It looks like a neat little 4x game but I donāt know if spending the money to unlock the full game is worth it or not and I am looking for opinions.
I played it a while back and lost interest apparently, as it no longer lives on my devices. I forget exactly, but I seem to remember something about it getting repetitive and easy to beat?
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With the noir turned up to 110% and eardrums blown out from gunshots in tiny rooms, itās MAX PAYNE. Everything about this game is ridiculous and fun.
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I got a lot of play out of a planet of mine. I canāt remember enough to explain what I got out of it, but I know I got my moneyās worth
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