It's one of those days, apparently, with Scorpia announcing she will cease updating the Lair.

We don't really cover rogue-likes here but they certainly intersect with our main coverage.  Scorpia has some thoughts on rogue-likes after playing some ZangbandTK:

“Roguery” here meaning Rogue-like games. I’ve been pondering my experience in ZTK, along with Dungeon Crawler’s comments in my previous ZTK post.

DC may have a point about treating it like an arcade game. I poked around in some of the info files, and saw that the two goals of the game - Oberon and the Serpent of Chaos - are on levels 99 and 100, respectively. That’s a long way down.

Very long. I cheated and looked at some of the monsters that are waiting on the lower levels, and it seems to me that getting past them would be a job and half, if not impossible. For one thing, your character is capped at 50, which isn’t all that high.

Scorpia's latest piece is on traps - and I think she's got a point:

I was re-reading last year’s posts on Do We Need Rogues? and The Rogue Question II, and I got to thinking about traps. What’s the point?

We could say they’re supposed to add an element of tension, of risk, to the game. Whether the defusing method is D&D’s dice rolls, Elder Scrolls’ minigames, Avernum’s “skill equal to or greater than to some preset number”, or any other procedure, you’re supposed to feel uncertainty about success and worried about failure.

As we know, however, most players in this situation will save the game first (unless they forget, oops). Then if their character is killed, or hit with a nasty condition for which no cure is available, they just reload and try again. Except for “equal or greater”, since you either can or can’t.

Scorpia has taken a look at the 15 Best Video Game Stories Ever we reported recently from GamesRadar and noticed all of them (according to Scorpia) use pre-created characters.  She goes on to muse about the importance of this in creating a good story:

Some games may allow for a diverging of the plot - usually between good and evil - but the story itself is about the particular person. And to me, that is a flaw, something that takes a little bit of the edge off the playing experience.

Hey, I’ve liked the stories in a number of games I’ve done. However, as I wrote way back in I Gotta Be Me, there is a feeling of apartness when I’m running a character given by the game. No way do I ever think of it as me, be the person male or female.

Planescape: Torment had a great story. It would have been a good novel. But I didn’t like Nameless, and I didn’t much enjoy maneuvering him through the game. I could never imagine myself being him, for one thing.

Fallout 2 is on that list, and while I don't think FO2 would be on my list of best stories, it has a full chargen unless you count being a descendent of the original Vault Dweller as "pre-created".  Anyway, agree or disagree?  What games had great stories and do you need a preset protagonist?

I have a terrible memory for bugs (and don't notice many of them) so none of these ring a bell but some readers may have fun with a trip down the memory lane of old "undocumented features" at Socrpias Lair:

We know that pretty much any game released today will have its quota of problems. But the early ones did, too. Only back then, most of those bugs tended to be in the player’s favor.

Of course, some might not think of those “undocumented features” as being favorable. It took an iron will to ignore the temptations of unlimited wealth or unlimited experience. And we all know how easily iron can rust. Ahem.

The great classic was Wizardry: Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord. For those few who may not be familiar with it, the game had mages and clerics, and a class called Bishop. Bishops could cast both sets of spells. They also had a unique ability to identify unknown magic items.

Wiz was stingy on inventory. We’re used to mountains of gear: all the stuff we have equipped, plus what’s lugged around in our backpacks. But this game allowed only eight slots for everything, equipped or not, and the slots were numbered (naturally) 1-8.

So the Bishop identified items by number. And the trick came with item #9, which, of course, didn’t exist. “Id item #9″, and the party received huge amounts of experience.

It was so easy: just pop down to the dungeon, id #9, then bop up the stairs to the stables for a free rest and skyrocketing levels. In no time at all, players had teams of six high-level Bishops parading through the levels. Now, that’s a feature!

Anyone remember other cool or funny bugs?

Scorpia goes on a bit of a rant about the lack of engaging NPCs in RPGs, observing that a good story is all about the characters:

For instance, we know all the “people” (a.k.a. NPCs) are really there just for us. They populate the world so it won’t look empty. They wait around with little odd jobs for us to do outside of the main line. They provide cannon fodder so we can grab goodies and level up on our way to Foozle.

Added to that is the fact that NPC personalities tend to come in just three flavors: forgettable, obnoxious, and helpless. Throw in the difficulties of conversation, and it’s no surprise that we have a hard time feeling anything beyond exasperation or antagonism for any of them.

...and in a related piece, she discusses the need for better motivation:

Even when a game allows one to be “evil”, we still end up knocking off Foozle at the finale. Once in awhile, there’s a change of pace. Might & Magic VII, for example, allowed one to “go darkside” and obtain a different ending where the “bad guys” win.

Usually, though, good, evil, or neutral, we follow along and perform our heroic duty. The particular reason why is typically left up to us, the individual players.

Oh sure, sometimes we have “The Fiendish Hordes Of Ancient Evil Foozle wiped out your family, nay, your entire village!”, so we’re supposed to be motivated by the revenge motif. Ho hum.