Some people like spending their days rolling dice and talking to each other, pretending they're adventurers in fantastical countries. Other people do the same but use little pieces of cardboard to help their imagination, and yet more move little figures around the room like toy soldiers with very complex rules. And then some people use computers to do the same since they don't have any friends. Or something. Angband is one of these last.

In Angband you must start by creating a new character, and then battle through level after level of adventure, collecting objects and spells, buying and selling items, and generally doing all the sorts of things adventurers are supposed to do, such as lots of fighting with other people. But in Angband you needn't worry about gory visuals...

The quality of the graphics used in computer games can stretch from the amazing all the way through to the just plain amazingly bad. Angband, however, takes a primitive approach to its graphics, and uses only normal alphabetic and symbol characters to render its screens. But what is surprising is how well it manages to do it! Through clever use of colour the game even incorporates lighting effects, which really do add a lot to the game - visually, at any rate.

Angband is not an Acorn-only game, but is widely available on many platforms, and has been ported to RISC OS computers by Kevin Bracey (author of Zip 2000), who's done an excellent job of it. Rather than merely being happy to just let the game compile, he's not only shoved it into a window, but done a great job of shoving it into lots of windows! In other words, he's produced a nice desktop front-end for it.

To be honest, this isn't the sort of game which will suit everyone (myself included), but it does have a large band of loyal followers, and I know of people who've happily played this game for many, many hours. If you like RPGs which don't rely on lots of pretty graphics then you'll probably love this game.

For the past several months Angband has been maintained by Adrian Jackson, and the current version is available from http://www.swallows.demon.co.uk/angband/.

ftp://ftp.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/systems/acorn/riscos/games/angband279.spk
http://www.swallows.demon.co.uk/angband/ - most recent version

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