Like nethack, moria,
and rogue, one of the large freely distributed
Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of
machines and operating systems. The name is from Tolkien's Pits of Angband
(compare elder days, elvish).
Has been described as Moria on steroids
; but, unlike Moria,
many aspects of the game are customizable. This leads many hackers and
would-be hackers into fooling with these instead of doing productive work.
There are many Angband variants, of which the most notorious is probably
the rather whimsical Zangband. In this game, when a key that does not
correspond to a command is pressed, the game will display Type ? for
help
50% of the time. The other 50% of the time, random error
messages including An error has occurred because an error of type 42
has occurred
and Windows 95 uninstalled successfully
will be displayed. Zangband also allows the player to kill Santa Claus
(who has some really good stuff, but also has a lot of friends),
Bull Gates
, and Barney the Dinosaur (but be watchful; Barney
has a nasty case of halitosis). There is an official angband home page at
http://thangorodrim.angband.org/
and a zangband one at http://www.zangband.org/. See also
Random Number God.