POWDER (freeware RPG windows mobile) Your goal is simple: dive to level 25 of the dungeon to reach Baezl'bub, slay him, and return to the surface with his black heart. Plenty of nasty monsters stand in your way, however. Fortunately, the dungeon is littered with useful equipment.
This is a roguelike originally developed specifically for the Gameboy Advance (GBA). It is built around replayability and long term ergonomics, not short term learning. It uses actual graphic tiles (16x16) rather than the traditional characters.

To understand POWDER, you should first understand roguelikes. "Roguelike" is a term applied to a wide variety of games which share a common inspiration from the game Rogue. A non-exhaustive list of such games would be: ADOM, Nethack, Crawl, Diablo (I & II), Moria, and Angband. My apologies to the many excellent roguelikes I didn't list. What characterizes these games? The exact specifications are a matter of debate - indeed, I may receive hate mail for including Diablo - but I shall try to write a few:
* Tactical play. The unit of action is based on the individual adventurer. The game is not twitch oriented (like Quake, rewarding reflexes & well trained actions) nor is it strategy oriented (like Civilizations or Warcraft, requiring working on the large picture)
* Based in Hack and Slash. A roguelike isn't primarily about plot development or telling a story. It is about killing things and acquiring treasure.
* Random games. A roguelike is a dungeon crawler where no two games are the same. The maps are different, the items are different, there are no guaranteed win paths.
* Permadeath. You die, that is it. No restoring a savegame. Good roguelikes delete your save game after loading them. This is compensated by the replayability of the game.
* Complex interactions of properties. While the commands for a roguelike are simple, the potential interactions are not. My favourite example is equipping a silver ring as a weapon in order to damage a creature vulnerable to silver, but not one's other weapons. [Editor: This matches the Hack branch of the roguelike tree, not the Angband branch]
* Steam rolling monsters. If a critter is in your way, and weak, you shouldn't even notice it is there.
For more information about roguelikes there is the Rogue Basin, a Wiki documenting this genre, and the Temple of the Roguelike, a newsite tracking developments in the field.
Having defined Roguelike, POWDER is easy to describe: A Roguelike designed for the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS.
Changes in this release:
- It actually works on 320x240 devices!
- It no longer crashes when you change tileset or whatever! Testing
this involved save-overwriting my second best character ever, so
remember him while you would play POWDER on your handheld.
- It no longer does weird things when screen orientation isn't
portrait! Fixing this involved sacrificing a chicken and a lot of
cargo cult programming.
Personal note: EXCELLENT gameplay for a freeware game, lots of depth here, commercial quality, one of a kind. Its like Diablo for windows mobile. Simple, wow.
Download :
http://heretical-rantings.blogspot.com/200...ows-mobile.htmlThis post has been edited by Baronic: Dec 4 2008, 08:53 PM