ScottVee Gaming

I have been reading the histories of some old classic video games, going way back to the DOS/text era.  I got seriously retro watching let's play runthroughs of things like Dungeons of Moria.  These days, you can't browse ten games without someone saying "it's a roguelike dungeon."  So, I was just trying to find the origin of the phrase "roguelike dungeon", and it turns out they were clones or inspired by the actual game called Rogue. I was happy to stumble onto the Youtube channel of RogueLove .   And Here is the start of his long long playlist of Moria -- over 100 episodes. He also covers Nethack although he spends a lot of time confused by the obscure command system.  His playlists page is a regular museum of the ancient. He does have a few episodes about the original Rogue game.  There are plenty of other people covering it, but I think RogueLove does some of the best walkthroughs; he's calm and knows what to do. To put credit where it belongs...

I was tinkering around in a game called Moonshades, which I would classify as a "semi-3D" dungeon crawler.  The scenes have 3-d elements, but they are fairly static.  You can walk (forward, backward, left or right, or turn left, turn right) to step one chunk at a time through a maze.  Fight monsters, take their stuff, level up your characters.  I find these relaxing, and really enjoy the highly creative names for the hundreds of items.  These modern games have some amusing cheats, like having teleport pads in every main encounter area so you don't have to walk all the way home through every level just to get to your drop chest.  I have also heard "two-and-a-half d" for these. While this is a fine game, with plenty to fight, and lots of abilities and spells to learn, and even some crafting, it got an old memory stuck in my head. So last night I was trying to remember one specific game from the 90s, a really early game of this type.  It was a DOS game wi...