Adam White's Guide to Angband Variants
adam white
It's time for another variant guide, one that is _not_ filled with
maintainer propaganda. It's time for some hard, cruel words about the
lousy design, sloppy coding, awful gameplay, and abysmal lack of
maintainer vision found to some degree in every single variant. Yes,
boys and girls, it's time for Adam White's Guide to Angband Variants!
I say _nothing_ good about any variant. I don't care how much i
play it, or agree with its way of modifying vanilla, or how much i've
tinkered with it, or admire the maintainer personally or
"professionally" - it's _still_ going to get blasted below! "If you
can't say something bad, don't say nuffin' at all".
I only bother with the most important of the latest variants. If a
variant hasn't been updated for six months or more, or doesn't have some
unique features that really expand what *angband is, it doesn't get a
mention.
Angband/64:
Top of the list, and possibly the buggiest variant out there
today. Kamband may blow up more often, and Pernband make for more
ridiculous situations, but for sheer _quality_ of nasty, nasty bugs,
give me Angband/64 any day. The running code is broken. The lighting
code is broken. The trap code is broken. The resting code is broken.
Fight a bunch of Baby Red Dragons and CRASH! Where else can you make a
character that gets all fifty levels as soon as he kills his first White
Worm Mass? Every intersection i timidly step into has traps stacked two
and three deep. The help file actually promises a 1800 point dispel
evil. But this variant has real charm: who can resist staircases that
act like elevators for players who learn a little trick? I don't need
Word of Recall scrolls anymore!
Kamband:
The technical term for this variant's idea of "game balance" is
Russian Roulette. You wield that Crossbow of Extra Might (+9),
laboriously find Artifact Body Armour #513, activate a random artifact
that permanently increases charisma, buy twenty potions of Restore Mana
in the store, and get killed in 48 picoseconds flat by the Black Death.
This is the only variant in which i permanently activate the "Cheat
Death" option. I could howl a little about how ridiculous the
attributes of the various object materials are, or give you figures on
just how long it takes to actually find anything in inventory, or write
a paragraph on just how little this variant understands the concept of
"pacing" in any way, shape, or form, but i'll just leave you with thes
immortal words: "Nothing's worse than being stuck in the Kamband
wilderness without a scroll of Word of Recall.".
Oangband:
And people actually play this thing? I want a real variant, not a
sadist's circus, damnit! The maintainer has thumped his chest for pages
on end about Neat Oangband Features, but for all that razamataz the
variant STILL PLAYS LIKE VANILLA! Well, not quite: it's managed to
break Half Troll Warriors quite nicely (i knew that homebrewed combat
system would be good for something other than frustration), and all the
early power they gained, the poor Paladins lost. And there are
Intermittant Software Bugs galore: I found a Law Dragon Scale Mail at
50'. My savefile got broken in an arena level, and i had to console
myself with the hilarious macintosh store prices (this is *good*. You
have to see this!). My Large Wooden chest gave me three artifacts, and
every time i see a "player ghost", i break out into a cold sweat. And
don't even get me started about the funky two-step it takes to enter
trees!
Pernband:
I don't know whether the gameplay flaws or the bugs are more
impressive. Two words: Deathmold Mimics. Three Words: Weapons of
Life. You gotta understand that this variant is a munckin's wet dream.
I can get 300 HPs at level one, i can do 150 pointsof damage right off
the bat, i can count my HPs in the thousands, i can tote around objects
that activate for Acquirement. Problem is, this variant corrupts my
savefiles so quickly that actually playing a game is flat-out
impossible. Do the wrong thing in the Battle of Five Armies quest, and
the game will crash every two steps.
Vanilla:
Oops. I didn't mean to include this one. It has so much dust on
it that _Moria_ is starting to look exciting. Ben is dead - the FAQ is
actually posted by a droid.
Zangband:
God, is this variant _broken_! It seems like every game-balance or
structural problem in vanilla has been lovingly nutured to full hideous
perfection here. The kind of object, ego-item, artifact, monster,
damage, and protection inflation not seen since Weimar Germany. So much
f***ing stuff that people seriously request a mass ID spell. You either
get nine blows per round, invulnerablity, or seas of runes - or you're
dogmeat. A gazillion new weapons and armour that are all exactly
alike. A gazillion races and classes that are hardly distinguishable.
Oh yeah - and one rod. Where is the logic here? - other than "stuff it
in: if some is good, more must be even better!"? This is the variant
that introduced us to the Trump Tower, a Resist Time mutation, four
separate homes, and Wizard Lite for one mana point. And i know i don't
have to mention golem warriors to anyone...
-adam
---------------------------------
-Pink Floyd the Wall!
darkgod
adam white wrote:
Thanks adam for this ..... strange .... stupid .... annoying .... and silly
guide.
Yes, there are some or even a lot of bugs in the variants.
Yes, there are some unbalancing, strange, annoying features.
Yes, I'm bad at writting english :)
But well, don't you think that it's better than nothing ? Don't you think
that the variant's maintainers have to made a lot of work tu make thoses
variants ! And instead of just pointing out the bug of the variants you
should help us(the variants maintainers) to make bug fix.
But maybe you're too stupid to understand !
The variants you've listed are some of the most played angband variants, so
don't you think they have some good things ? Have even really tried them ?
And if you don't like angband(and you seem to don't like it) DON'T PLAY IT !
Goodbye, I've spend enough time with your stupid post.
Angband Addict
adam white wrote in message <36F3C8B9...@spark.ul.edu>...
>Yo all,
>
> It's time for another variant guide, one that is _not_ filled with
>maintainer propaganda. It's time for some hard, cruel words about the
>lousy design, sloppy coding, awful gameplay, and abysmal lack of
>maintainer vision found to some degree in every single variant. Yes,
>boys and girls, it's time for Adam White's Guide to Angband Variants!
>
> I say _nothing_ good about any variant. I don't care how much i
>play it, or agree with its way of modifying vanilla, or how much i've
>tinkered with it, or admire the maintainer personally or
>"professionally" - it's _still_ going to get blasted below! "If you
>can't say something bad, don't say nuffin' at all".
>
> I only bother with the most important of the latest variants. If a
>variant hasn't been updated for six months or more, or doesn't have some
>unique features that really expand what *angband is, it doesn't get a
>mention.
>
this is going to be unpopular'...
It appeals to my sense of humour though - a 'Devil's Advocate Guide to
Variants'.
I must admit, I value stable code greatly. I'd rather see a variant with 5
extra features that work, than 25 extra features that are bug ridden. And
so, with bated breath, I scrolled down the rest of the posting for a review
of Cthangband to see which parts of my code were hated and how many bugs
you'd found...
Ah - The Irony of it! You don't even mention Cthangband, relegating it to
the status of 'Unimportant'!
Oh well, I'd better go back into my little hole and eat humble pie for a
while...
Dean
P.s. Keep up the good work!
Sennarrion
> Ah - The Irony of it! You don't even mention Cthangband, relegating it to
> the status of 'Unimportant'!
Either that, or he couldn't find anything bad to say about it! I've just
started playing CthAngband (I too had relegated it to the "old, unmaintained
variants" category, before seeing a post about it a little while ago). This is
probably because there are hardly ever any posts about it here. Stability is
good (very good actually), I've ceased messing with Kamband because it has a
distressing tendency to crash ALOT (like when reading id scrolls?) I promise
to post something about CthAngband after I've played it awhile.
John Bashaw, note I didn't promise to post something GOOD about it...
Leon Marrick
adam white wrote:
>
> Yo all,
>
> It's time for another variant guide, one that is _not_
> filled with maintainer propaganda.
(snip of various commentary)
Adam,
Like the description for one of my monsters goes, I'll be "hunting
you down patiently, ready with my poison-tipped daggers".
To all:
To mis-quote a Far Side cartoon "Squirrels in Central Park":
"Wat is dis? I tell you two bugs yestaday, you promise to fix them
taday. You want I should break your incisors, or what?"
"I fix da bugs! I fix da bugs! Just give me a liddle time, skweezle!"
Yours,
Leon Marrick
Andrew Schoonmaker
darkened thusly:
>Angband Addict wrote:
>
>> Ah - The Irony of it! You don't even mention Cthangband, relegating it to
>> the status of 'Unimportant'!
>
>Either that, or he couldn't find anything bad to say about it!
Somehow I doubt it... he didn't find anything bad to say about
OAngband, either...he just thought he did.
-Andrew ()
--
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
Andrew Schoonmaker (aschoo...@hmc.edu)
Hi! I'm a replicating .sig virus! Join the fun and copy me into yours! :)
Greg Wooledge
>Ah - The Irony of it! You don't even mention Cthangband, relegating it to
>the status of 'Unimportant'!
Come, join us here in the corner. Just shove aside that pile of dust....
--
Greg Wooledge | Distributed.NET http://www.distributed.net/
wool...@kellnet.com | because a CPU is a terrible thing to waste.
http://www.kellnet.com/wooledge/ |