Wednesday 1 January 2014

Winner of the Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2013: Noxico

You probably haven't heard of Noxico. It is one of the sub genre of adult roguelikes, that I only was made aware of when I ran this poll last year. The link I'm not going to include in this post has an adults only warning on the front page. The site beyond it is NSFW but in reality is only barely titillating. I'm bemused to see that the first bullet point feature the game has is 'Reasonable Unicode Support'.

Nonetheless, it garnered more votes than any other for the roguelike of the year, and I wish to congratulate the developer for his or her persistent fan base.

25 comments:

Abe Heron said...

Awesome! grats to the dev of Noxico, and happy new year everyone - take it easy! :)

Kawa said...

WHAT IN THE ACTUAL SHIT!?

Darren Grey said...

Well done to all the roguelikes that got votes. I hope in future people will be less obsessed over the number 1 slot. There are a lot of really brilliant small roguelikes in the list that got less than 10 votes.

Andrew Doull said...

Happy New Year everyone. Can't believe I spent the minutes over midnight typing up that post...

(Both daughters and wife asleep already).

Will do the rest in the morning once I get some rest.

Anonymous said...

This is a lesson in humility to the big one devs, next year spend your energies in more useful endeavors.

parisian goldfish said...

I think this nicely shows what a terrible system this poll uses, and how it should be reviewed to produce meaningful results in future, if Andrew doesn't want the roguelike community to consider it even more of a joke than it already is.

Ido Yehieli said...

Excellent!

I always found it a bit ridiculous that adom, tome, et al "mobilized the troops" in the glorious battle for the #1 spot on a casual poll hosted on some guy's blog.

Izak Flash Man said...

That's a shame, it looks like it wouldn't be such a bad game if it wasn't mostly about screwing willing animal people.
I dig the colour palette.

Jeff said...

Someone's having a bit of a laugh with us, there's simply no way Noxico won.

Anonymous said...

Congradulations to "Not Tome4" for winning the roguelike of the year, and Noxico for drawing together so many people for so many different reasons.

Also, good job to anyone who made the game they wanted to make regardless of how many votes it got.

Nick said...

"The only winning move is not to play"

FAangband wins!

Ben said...

Hooray! Perhaps this means the end to annoying "Please Vote" pop ups while I'm trying to play Tome4.

Al-Khwarizmi said...

Well, it's always nice to have a laugh, but to be honest, if I were a developer spending long hours on coding a roguelike and trusting an event such as this to get some well-deserved promotion (be it by running for the 1st place, the 3rd, the top 10 or whatever), I wouldn't be thrilled at all.

Whoever cheated should think about this, there are ways of having some fun trolling while respecting other people's hard work and hopes.

Abe Heron said...

Al-Khwar - I have to agree with you here. Tome4 and Adom (and possibly others) had plenty of good development effort put into them the past year with no signs of stopping and are truly deserving of the title. To cheat (if there was cheating) one of them of this honor (whether one think is dubious or not) is a truly piece of sh*t act. Andrew did the right thing though, Noxico had the numbers and with no proof of misconduct, this was the right course of action.

Abe Heron said...

Though I do wonder if this was not some personal payback on the poll itself by one of Noxico players, since Noxico was excluded from it last year much to the chagrin of its developer (though was later admitted in). Makes for an interesting conspiracy theory :)

Darren Grey said...

The Noxico dev didn't even know about the cheating going on till after the poll ended :) And if you want to talk cheating you just have to look at how ADOM and ToME were both shooting up ridiculous amounts in the last couple of days. The same happened last year too. I'm fairly sure the point of the Noxico votes was to make a statement about the poll being invalid anyway.

Abe Heron said...

Darren, I didn't mean to imply it was the Dev, but the conspiracy is that it is a disgruntled Noxico fan. I can understand why Tome/Adom fans would cheat (it is rather obvious), but why Noxico, and not any other game? (Heck they could have bumped DCSS/Cataclysm instead...)

Anonymous said...

Noxico was a in a wierd middle area where it had a large potential support group to be able to claim legitimacy (furries), a new ip for those that wanted a shakeup in the roguelike world (which dcss and cataclysm don't qualify for), and the support of people who liked it was doing well because of the rediculous premiss (people will vote for what makes them laugh).

Certainly it had its fair share of legitimate votes as did tome4 and adom (and likely many of the others) had illegitimate votes. Idk that another choice (like a BAND game) would have had the same level of support or impact that they did once people caught wind of it.

widelec said...

Cataclysm is 4th IIRC (possibly 3rd if taking the winner out for obvious reasons) - that's great.

Thanks for the poll, it was entertaining!

flashdoom said...

The Onion Router won tbh

graspee said...

"Cataclysm is 4th IIRC (possibly 3rd if taking the winner out for obvious reasons)"

It's no more valid to take the winner out than it is to take any other game out.

I do believe you should call the game you're referring to "Cataclysm DDA" though. It is absolutely a different game to the original Cataclysm, and there are those of us who get very angry about DDA.

Deis said...

Someone needs to fix this because the poll was quite obviously tampered with. The developer for Noxico even admits there was something fishy about the whole ordeal.

Kawa said...

@Deis: with all due respect, you kinda make it sound like I admitted to tampering with it myself.

geldonyetich said...

I was curious how it won, so I gave Noxico a play. Well, the world generation and the detail to the characters was nice, but other than that there was no real gameplay to it. Even the erotic aspect was quite bare bones (no pun intended).

I'm thinking either your poll got trolled or the lure of porn on the Internet overloaded it.

Unknown said...

If you read the comments at the end of Noxicos home page here http://helmet.kafuka.org/noxico/
you can see them talking about a hack in thier favor.
I'm just kninda pissed because thier game was barely playable, and i was hopeing to find some good games through this.
I took a screen shot but I dont know how to post it here...