Is that a computer game or bad ASCII art?
” From one perspective, the roguelikes are throwbacks. Here is a class of games, not really mainstream but not obscure either, that have largely resisted modernization. While it might be difficult for someone looking at Colossal Cave to connect it with being of the same kind as, say, Telltale’s recent Bone games, roguelikes, by and large, look the same as they always have. Although two of the three major roguelike games have color graphic modes, they also retain their classic ASCII mode, and practically all other computer roguelikes use an ordinary text console window as its sole display. Nethack has inspired a number of attempts to give it fairly modern graphics, yet possibly the most-played form of the game even now, twenty years after it came into being, is on public telnet servers with hundreds of players, not tremendously different in appearance from Rogue itself back upon its release in 1980. But while there is an air of the Neanderthal surrounding these games, they’ve survived f
