Rogue is one of my favorite video games, and the original reference game for later 'roguelike' games. It's a classic 'dungeon crawler' game, created originally in 1980 by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, with later contributions by Ken Arnold. In Rogue you descend through a dungeon, collect gold, fight monsters, and retrieve the amulet of Yendor before returning up to the surface. As the player you wield weapons, wear defensive armor, don rings, and carry magical staffs, but this description evades the sense of puzzle-solving that pervades. It's a unique combination of combat, magic, resource managing, and a good dose of randomness that make for a compelling game.
Rogue is the quintessential oldschool roguelike. All actions by the player are triggered by a key press, and there are a lot of keys you can press. The game is turn-based, so actions only happen when you press a key, such as to move, one square at a time. Rogue is inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and can be thought of as one attempt at making a single player D'n'D game. It's especially noteable for its different-every-time dungeon, which is also why the game continues to be enjoyable for its fans play after play. Each dungeon presents new mystery and challenges, requiring new strategy. Also of note is 'permadeath'. When you die, no progress is saved. Each attempt at a dungeon is unique, standing on its own, without any resources saved from previous attempts.
Lately, I have been getting interested in gopher+ again. I've been doing some research and reading through the spec, and trying to collect any information that I can find on the protocol. Unlike gopher classic, which is still comprehensively documented and talked about, secondary sources for gopher+ are practically non-existent on the internet. There are a few random magazine articles and educational materials in '94, but practically nothing after that point. Which makes sense I guess, since gopher declined pretty rapidly to WWW.
I wanted to do a survey of gopherspace to see if anyone is still out there, playing around with gopher+. I asked on the gopher-project mailing list but didn't get much of a response. Then I was looking at gopher and thinking about it some more, and I figured there are only 300-ish servers out there, so why not try them all and see for myself?
I haven’t been programming for a while but I spent a few minutes putting together a li’l rss-mash utility that takes RSS URLs on the command line and prints a combined XML file of all those items to the standard output.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
