Roguelikes - Some of the Best Free Computer Games Available

To me, for a game to be great, it has to have playability, and long-term. There has to be something that makes you come back to that game on a repeated basis, and keep you playing for long periods of time. I would also say that this applies to free games as much as commercial games, if not more so; if you buy a commercial game, you feel (in the short term at least) obliged to continue playing, because of the financial outlay. A free game has to grab you from the start, or you'll simply uninstall it and look for something else

I could mention many kinds of different games like this, but to me, there's one particular genre that has held my attention for more years than I can remember: The Roguelike Game. Similar to CRPGs (And indeed, a big influence on the conception and gameplay of the Diablo series by Blizzard), examples would include such games as Angband (and its many variants), Linley's Dungeon Crawl, Ancient Domains of Mystery, and particularly Nethack. The games are similar and yet often radically different in execution, but I'll focus on Nethack to explain why they retain this air of long-term playability. They are also all, to the best of my knowledge, completely free, usually published under the GNU licence.

1) Little to no graphics - The majority of Roguelikes use little more than a basic tileset. Most experienced players won't even bother with these, and use little more than an ASCII character set. Arguably, this makes the game more fun: Instead of development time spent on rendering and artwork, the focus is on the gameplay. And as someone once pointed out, there's never been a game which could conjure images better than your own imagination.

2) Random generation: Every Roguelike, by definition, generates the game world from scratch every single time you play. Monsters, dungeons, equipment are all randomly placed every single time. There's no predictable areas to explore, no repetition of gameplay. Apart from what you've learned, you might as well be sitting down to play a brand new game.

3) Perma-death - Most CRPGs allow you to save your game at regular intervals, and backup to those savepoints if you die. Roguelikes don't. If your character dies, it dies. Start a new game. This can be daunting to a lot of newer players, but it does increase the involvement with the game as you get used to it: The stakes are higher, leading to a more cautious playstyle, and a greater immersion in the world.

4) Live programs - There's probably a better term than this, but most mainstream Roguelike are continually being actively developed, with new features being added and tweaked all the time. The version of Nethack you played 5 years ago would only superficially resemble the one you downloaded today. In Nethack's case, this has been going on since the mid-80s.

5) Support - Nethack, Angband, and many other Roguelikes have large online communities. Angband has http://angband.oook.cz/, where you can upload game dumps, highscores, screenshots, and discuss the game with other players, and Nethack has http://www.alt.org/Nethack, where you can compete against other players on a telnet server, and others can actually watch you play and send you in-game advice.