{"id":4377,"date":"2009-09-02T23:27:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T21:27:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"opinion-true-hardcore-for-the-true-hardcore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/4377-opinion-true-hardcore-for-the-true-hardcore","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: True Hardcore for the True Hardcore"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: This article does not reflect any stance or opinion held by MyGaming.<\/em><\/p>\n

I don’t much like the word “hardcore”. It’s the sort of word Counter-Strike players use to describe themselves, and everyone knows Counter-Strike players are ***holes. But before Counter-Strike, and before Counter-Strike players, there were roguelikes. And once upon a time way back in the beginning of it all, there was Rogue. <\/p>\n

And Rogue was really hardcore.<\/p>\n

Originally developed by a bunch college nerds on UC Santa Cruz’s UNIX mainframe sometime in the early 80s, Rogue was an entirely text-based RPG from the Dungeons & Dragons & Stuff school of RPGs. So lots of swords and trolls and algorithms crunching numbers. Much like its pen and paper progenitors, Rogue relied extensively on the random generation of encounter scenarios – and even further, by randomly generating not just the kobolds and heaps of treasure in the dungeon, but the dungeon itself. If this is starting to sound something like Diablo, that’s because it’s more or less exactly the same as Diablo, but with two fundamental differences. One, in Rogue and other standard roguelikes, combat is turn-based and two, death is totally, irrevocably, incontrovertibly permanent. Once your dauntless level 16 barbarian war mage with all the awesome loot bleeds his last hit point onto the stony floor, it’s game over. Kinda just like real life, but with more stuff nicked from the Silmarillion. <\/p>\n

Some of you might be screeching indignantly, “BUT DIABLO HAD PERMADEATH TOO!”, and you’d be quite right, sort of. Diablo II introduced a – wait for it – Hardcore mode of play to the series, with your character having just the one life to do all that saving the world business. Not many people made it to the Arreat Summit. Not many people made it to Kurast. Some people barely made it out of the Rogue Camp, only to be pecked to death by Foul Crows on the Den of Evil’s doorstep. The point was never really to win the game, but rather to see how far you could get. Kinda just like real life, but with more stuff nicked from the Silmarillion. <\/p>\n

Of course, as time passed on and people demanded that their characters be somewhat inexplicably resurrected at the press of a button, hardline roguelikes have mostly fallen away in favour of games that allow characters to be somewhat inexplicably resurrected at the press of a button. The industry’s such a pushover like that, and nobody gives a crap about narrative consistency anyway. <\/p>\n

There are still a few around, though. You can pick up Shiren the Wanderer for DS off just about any secondhand game shelf in London, because there are always at least 15 copies there, because you die permanently in the game, because people have forgotten what hardcore really is. If you’re made of the sort of indomitable stuff that exists for ASCII interfaces (which is already almost halfway hardcore), you can take a look at ADOM, a massive freeware roguelike for PC. There’s also the rather superb Spelunky, currently available as freeware on PC, although an XBLA version is also on its way. Which was actually the real reason for writing this retrospective – GUYS GUYS GUYS, THERE’S GOING TO BE AN XBLA VERSION OF SPELUNKY! In the meantime, check it out<\/a>. Then you can call yourself true hardcore.<\/p>\n

Discuss ‘hardcore gaming’<\/a> in the forums<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The World According to Roguelikes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}