AdomPortable - update update 29th June - beta2

App: Adom Portable
category: games
version: 1.1.1
license: closed-source postcard-ware
homepage: http://www.adom.de/
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adom
download: http://www.ormus.info/downloads.html

description:

Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM for short) is a roguelike game which means that it
is a single-user game featuring the exploration of a dungeon complex (and in the case of 
ADOM a few other games of this genre: the exploration of a large wilderness area with 
villages and many special locations). You control a fictional character described by 
race, class, attributes, skills, and equipment. This fictional character is trying to 
achieve a specific goal (see below) and succeed in a difficult quest. To fulfill the 
quest, you have to explore previously undiscovered tunnels and dungeons, fight hideous 
monsters, uncover long forgotten secrets, and find treasures of all kind.

So far this might sound like many other computer roleplaying games like Diablo, 
The Bard's Tale or Ultima.

   1. There are two major differences to roguelike games though: most roguelike games 
do not use any graphics but rather rely on the ASCII character set to display their 
surroundings.
While this might sound horrible to you, you will be surprised how quickly you start 
to enjoy this "primitive" type of display. Your imagination quickly will take over 
and you'll no longer miss those ugly hand-drawn graphical tiles that do not resemble 
your picture of a dragon at all. But in your imagination, that blue D will soon become 
the most horrible and frightening ice wyrm you can imagine. Try it out. You won't 
be disappointed.
A side effect of this "graphical style" is that you won't need to download much. 
Roguelike games are pretty small because most of their code is concerned with a very 
intense sort of gameplay and not some ugly graphics quickly becoming out of date. In 
that respect many roguelike games are far superior to commercial roleplaying games 
(did I forget to mention that? Most roguelike games are available for free!)
   2. Roguelike games are very random. While almost all of them have a background for 
the gameplay, the dungeons, villages and other locations in the game are randomly 
created anew for each game. This offers a never-ending challenge as each dungeon will 
be different and there (almost) is no tedious "Let's try this dungeon for the 
twentieth time... how boring since I know all the tunnels".
   3. Roguelike games usually do not allow you to save your character past his/her 
death. While this might seem overly harsh at first, you will quickly discover that 
this provides a level of tension unheard of in commercial games. Every decision is 
important and it's a lot more exciting to explore unknown terrain, if you know that 
death is final. 

If you've never tried a roguelike game, you should do now. You most probably will never 
regret it!

notes: Adom is not open-source software, that's why the launcher doesn't include the actual game. The installer will offer you the option to download and install the game for you though (that is a legal approach and recommended!).

latest updates:
29th June 2007 - beta2
- cleaned launcher code up
- now properly detects an already running portable instance