Roguelike games and how they progressed through history

Hi, I'm fizzyflask3, a twitch streamer who is new to steemit. While reading some game articles here, I realized that modern roguelike games are very popular but not many people know what roguelike means. The following is a quick summary of some important games that can be described as roguelikes that showed innovative concepts off to the gaming world. Please note that the few images shown here are not my own, and are here only to help visualize the games that are discussed here in a hopefully educational blog post.

Roguelike games are games that rather than have specifically designed levels, use rules to randomly generate levels while taking current character level or point of game progression into account to balance the level of difficulties that you face. The genre was names after one of the earlier titles for 1980s PCs called Rogue.
Rogue used basic keyboard letters and symbols to depict randomly generated dungeons. The gameplay did become repetitive and boring to many, but this random content generation method would be used to make some amazing games throughout the years, leading to our current generation where roguelike games are super popular. At the time Rogue was made, the idea of roguelikes was not commonly seen in console games as the limited data size of game cartridges made rogulike game production difficult but not impossible. Toejam and Earl was a rare gem of a roguelike game for Sega Genesis.

This 1 or 2 player roguelike tasked players with exploring random levels with various enemies, obstacles, and present box items with various effects. It was not turn based like most roguelikes, where enemies only moved when you move. This game had real time gameplay with lots of random events from hula girls to magical wings. This game began to play a little with the roguelike formula and as more roguelikes were made, the formula would continue to be tweaked and mashed up with other genres to make some amazing games. One of the first roguelikes to add other genres of gameplay to its randomly generated content, was Dark Cloud for PS2.

This game had fairly repetitive roguelike dungeons to explore (again in a real time manner, similar to Toejam & Earl). The roguelike content was often broken up by tasks such as rebuilding towns from resources found in dungeons. As structures and people were restored, they can request that you build the town in certain ways and reward you for doing so. Fishing also becomes a rewarding pass time, as well as customizing and maintaining breakable equipment that you can influence the stats of with customization gems. This game (along with many others on this list) had an average reception of about 7 out of 10 by game most review magazines.

Fast forwarding to the present, many roguelike games have emerged. Crypt of the Necrodancer mashes rhythm game mechanics with roguelike dungeon exploration. Games like binding of Isaac & Dead Cells add roguelike mechanics to the action genre or top down shooter genre to provide a new experience. There are too many roguelikes to picture or mention them all but hopefully this article helped you understand more about roguelikes, what they are, and some roguelike games that have popped up through history.

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