Well, I dug up UMoria v5.5.2 again out of my archives and started mucking around with playing it. UMoria is an old text-mode adventure game like Rogue / Hack / Nethack where you move your character (literally a character in the shape of '@'!) around the screen and delve into the dungeon of Moria to go after the Balrog. There's half a dozen races and half a dozen classes (or so) to choose from - rule set is similar to AD&D. It's not real-time, there's no fancy graphics or sounds, just good solid game play. And it still runs fine under WinXP (as well as a bunch of other operating systems, or you can compile the source to run on the O/S of your choice).

However, since UMoria has not been updated in forever, I started looking around to see if it had been updated and where I could download the newer version... and found it's successor is called "Angband".

There's actually two dozen or so active variants of Angband (it's open-source) - but since I wanted a simple update to UMoria, I went after plain vanilla Angband (also known as v3.03). There is now a windows version that runs in a window and you can choose the font size. In addition, there are 'tile sets' that you can pick from to make it semi-graphical in nature (I run with David Gervais' 32x32 tiles). They also added very simple sounds which are good for getting feedback that a door opened or that a monster died.

So what have they added in terms of content between when they branched off from UMoria? Oh, quite a few things. Unique monsters (like Wormtongue) that inhabit levels of the dungeon and will keep popping up until you kill them off forever. (Nice feature, because it gives you lots of mini-bosses as you dive down into the dungeon.) New weapons like the Westernesse weapons and a new store in town called the Black Market. The end-game monsters have also changed. They've also added magical items called 'rods' which are like wands, but instead of a limited number of charges, you're allowed to cast them once and then wait a dozen or two dozen turns for the rod to recharge.

One of the bigger changes is the "level feelings" that you get when entering a new level of the dungeon. These messages are supposed to give you an idea of how hard or how worthwhile it will be to explore every corner of the level. A feeling of 'superb' means that you're almost guaranteed to encounter a bunch of monsters that are way out of depth (say from 1000' deep when you're only at 300' deep), that there will be good treasure, and that it's going to be a nasty business clearing the level. One of the superb levels around 300' took me probably 2 hours to clear a room that had at least 100 cave orcs, black orcs, half-orcs, etc. (The key is to pull away 2-5 at a time by using terrain to your advantage.) When I was done, I had filled a large room with all of the treasure drops (good drops in one corner, junk drops along the other wall) and I then had to pick and choose which items to leave behind.

Another new feature is the macro abilities. This lets you do stuff like tag items so that you have to confirm that you want to use the item with a yes/no prompt. (I do this to my Word-of-Recall scrolls.) Or when you're carrying a few wands, you can tag each wand with a number, which lets you refer to your wands by number instead of their current letter position in the inventory (which changes frequently).

Links:

Thangorodrim (central site)

Angband FAQ part 1

Angband FAQ part 2 (some spoilers)

Macro FAQ

After playing all weekend, I have a level 22 Elf Mage with some half-decent toys. I've only gone as deep as 400' and spend most of my time around 350' currently. At that depth, I'm able to dispatch most mobs just by using my (3) rods (Lightning Bolt, Fire Bolt, Frost Bolt) without expending any mana. Plus, this gives me a hefty margin for when I encounter a 'superb' level feeling.