I’m a bit of a roguelike fan, yes they are probably the most geeky games in existence, but there is something about trawling through a dungeon slaying monsters and finding treasure that always apeals to me. If you have no idea what a roguelike is (which is more than likely!) check out the wikipedia page for details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike, but to quote and summarise:

A roguelike is a member of the role-playing video game genre that borrows its name and gameplay elements from the 1980 computer game Rogue. Superficially, a roguelike is a two-dimensional dungeon crawl with a high degree of randomness and an emphasis on statistical character development. Though traditionally featuring a text user interface, many such games utilize graphic tiles to overcome character set limitations.

The roguelike I mostly play is Angband on the PC, but I had the urge to see what portable versions exist, primarily for the Nintendo DS. Sadly no playable version of Angband exists for the DS, but there are a few other roguelikes available, this is what I found…

- NetHack

There are two versions of this venerable roguelike for the DS, one is unplayable (IMHO) due to the microscopic font and tileset used. The other one is much better and far more playable. Get it here:

http://frodo.dyn.gno.org/~brettk/NetHackDS

- Crawl

Crawl is another popular roguelike, it’s been ported to the DS but many of the links and the main site for it are dead, I finally found a working copy at the link below. It’s not got as much graphical polish as Nethack (and that’s not saying much!!) and it has an odd control scheme that took some getting used to, but it seems perfectly playable on the DS

http://library.dev-scene.com/index.php?dir=DS/Games/DSCrawl/

- POWDER

I’d never heard of this roguelike until today, but it seems rather good. It was developed specifically for the Gameboy Advance which explains why it works so well on the DS. It’s got a good user interface which works excellently on the DS. Of the 3 games I’ve tried this the best “fit” for the DS, the other games show their PC heritage with obscure command maps and pseudo-keyboard input. It also seems pretty detailed in terms of things to do and monsters. Recommended.

http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about

Right so now I can happily slay goblins, cast spells, drink unknown potions and bash down locked doors all from the comfort of the train!