Friday 1 January 2010

Winner of the Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year 2009: DoomRL

This year, there was never any doubt... the movie featuring Dwayne 'The Rock' Hudson and Karl Urban had inspired an unstoppable roguelike force that lives up to it's unforgettable tag line 'No One Gets Out Alive'.

Ahem. DoomRL is the enfant terrible of the roguelike world - the quick play game that shouldn't be good but is instead great, and is one of the few roguelikes that has successfully broken out of its genre niche and achieved popular acclaim. Kornel Kisielewicz has gone on to make other roguelikes inspired by the likes of Aliens and, in a post-modernist twist, Diablo, but this game is arguably now superior to its inspiration. DoomRL also predated the now common trend of 'demakes' - taking a modern game and porting it to an older platform.

It looked for most of 2009, that this 'coffee-break' roguelike had gone for an extended latte - but version 0.9.9.9 of DoomRL was released in October 2009 and I'm sure version 1.0 will be 'real soon now'. The DoomRL community features PR managers, a monthly newsletter (The Phobos Times) and lively forums.

For further reading: John Harris has featured DoomRL in one of his @ Play columns where he describes it as 'set[ting] out to do one thing and do it well'.

4 comments:

Kornel Kisielewicz said...

What can I say... I am honored. And I'd like to express my big thanks to the community that made this possible.

ChaosForge is promising a much better year 2010, and I'd like to invite all interested, especially to the revelation on DoomRL's next big feature:

http://blog.chaosforge.org/articles/43/chaosforge-2010

Slashie said...

Gratz Epyon!

I'd like to remind everybody that DoomRL was never a 7DRL (Am I wrong?) I see a lot of articles imply that from time to time.

Andrew Doull said...

Slashie: I've amended the article - certainly the other roguelikes I was referring to are 7DRLs.

Anonymous said...

Dont know if its any good. I own a mac.