""NetHack Light" or, "The Genesis Roguelike""

If you have no idea what the title of this review means, this is the long review:

Fight monsters! Gain levels! Gather gold! Find powerful weapons, sturdy armor, and magical items! A lot of your standard RPG fare is here, as far as gameplay goes. Not to be bogged down with trivial details such as a plot ("There's a dragon in there. Kill him. Uhh, it won't be day until you do, I guess.") the game focuses on the gameplay.

Thirty floors of randomly-generated architecture, randomly-placed monsters, and even randomly-selected items are between you and said dragon. Gameplay is pretty easy to figure out. The A button picks stuff up and checks for secret doors. B button allows you to change which way your facing without taking a step. Hold it down and press the direction you want to face. Since the game is turn-based, this comes in handy. C brings up the item menu.

There is no attack button, you'll notice. Instead, you just try to move into the square that an enemy is using, and you'll automatically attack. They'll get a counter, and then it's your turn again.

Most of the items are pretty straight-forward. You have your weapons (swords, axes, spears, and stuff like that), your shields, your helmets, armors... Then you get to the fun part of the game with canes, potions, scrolls and rings. (Bows, for some reason, are tacked on the end instead of being near the weapons.)

Now, if you've never played a game like this before, the magic items are going to throw you for a loop. Each one has a color, such as the Red Cane, the Purple Ring, the Brown Potion, the Orange Scroll, etc. The color is how you tell what type it is, kinda. If you drink a Red Potion, and it heals you, then you know that all Red Potions are healing potions. Seems pretty simple, but the trick is, those descriptions are shuffled randomly each game. A red potion might have healed you last time, but it could be something completely different, like hunger or poison. Thankfully, the game will keep track of what you know, and once you highlight one you've used (or appraised, there is a scroll that will tell you what an item does), the status bar on the bottom will remind you what it was.

Normally, a situation like this is ideal for replay value. The down side is that there really isn't much depth to the game, so once you've beaten it (and for many, long before that happens), you're pretty much done with it.

One last feature is that you must eat to survive. As long as you have food in your stomach, you'll regain health by walking. If you run out of food, you'll start losing health over time instead. However, if you're greedy and eat too much, you'll either get bloated and miss turns, or you'll die if you eat too much past that.

The game borrows ideas from a genre known as "Roguelike", named after a game called Rogue, which is now completely ancient by today's standards. These generally feature randomly-generated dungeons, items that change appearance between games, and having to eat to stay alive. However, Roguelikes are usually of much greater depth, with a lot more freedom. (Though, since the original Rogue ran on machines too old to display anything but text, they usually follow that tradition by using text for their graphics.) A good example of a Roguelike game is NetHack, at www.nethack.org .

All in all, it's a fun little game if you feel like trying something new. It's a good way to get used to the ideas in the more in-depth roguelikes if you've never played them before, or a nice break from the other games if you have. The years haven't been kind to this title, especially in terms of graphics. Gamers used to anything on the SNES, or about 90% of Genesis titles, are going to be pretty disappointed with the palette-swapped critters, drab and identical-looking rooms and hallways, and the less-than-impressive guy under their control (even if you CAN see the armor he's wearing on his sprite, something that not even Final Fantasy never seems to bother with...) but they do get the job done. I only wish the different kinds of similar items had gotten different sprites. All potions are the same color until you pick them up, all swords look the same, and so on.

Music gets repetitive, sound effects lack variety, and the graphics could be better. Even that won't stand in the way of solid gameplay when it comes to the classics, though. Pac-Man stands the test of time with little more than a couple seconds of intro music, a yellow circle, dots, and some ghosts. Granted, this isn't going to make any Hall of Fame records, but it's definitely worth a play-through. And if you like it, check out other games like NetHack, ADOM, Angband, and so on.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 12/20/06