Angband
“Damnation! You take your ring of free action off for one second and your level fifty half-troll warrior gets paralysed and eaten by jackals!”
“This is a total perversion of my vision. Why would a half-troll use The Electric Vibrator of Arwen to stab Morgoth to death?”
Angband is a program for many platforms including Windows, Linux and the other ones that no one has ever heard of. While many people think it is a simple roguelike game, the actual truth is far more sinister. When you play it, you are actually connecting to a robot in the real world and sending it out to massacre hundreds upon hundreds of innocent people, some of whom may have done nothing more serious than huff the occasional kitten or invent a new Chuck Norris joke. Actually, that last one is heinous. You're justified with that one.
The History of Angband[edit | edit source]
Forged in the dark computer pits of Mount Doom, Angband was created by a team of aliens who had picked up a transmission of Peter Jackson's live-action version of The Lord of the Rings and were so incensed by it that they decided that the race who created it must die. They searched the universe for five hundred years and they searched for five hundred more, just to be those aliens who could annihilate the human race for all eternity. After doing that shameless Proclaimers rip off, they went to Earth, and took on forms that were fair to mortals. Then plotted the demise of humanity, and eventually determined that the most ironic way of doing it would be to allow the humans to do it themselves, through a Lord of the Rings themed game. They programmed the game, built some robots with radio uplinks to every computer in the world, using the power of the intarweb, publicised the game then jetted off back to their own planet to crack open a few cool drinks and watch the extermination from afar.
The Premise of the Game[edit | edit source]
The game challenges you to descend into the pits of Angband (actually the separate floors of the U.N. building) and destroy various evil creatures (actually the entirety of the human race who are in the U.N. building for some reason). Your eventual goal is to find and annihilate the evil Morgoth (Kofi Annan). As you control the game, your evil robot killing machine will move around, a ridin' and a whompin', every livin' thing until, well, they're all dead. For some reason, the 'enemies' do not move when you don't, a phenomena that can be attributed to magic. A person who completes the game is given many bragging rights in geek centres, an attribute that will earn him no sexings whatsoever. The game is notoriously hard, due to the fact the the bastard humans you are killing just don't seem to want to die, and will kill your evil robot at any chance they get.
The Evil Robots...[edit | edit source]
..are not actually evil, as they lack free will. The players are the evil ones. The robots are equipped with an advanced nano technological system, allowing themselves to be upgraded as new programs are unlocked. These programs are represented in game by weapons and armour, such as the +6*10^500 Short Sword of Slash-Stabbity death. The robot actually attacks with a simple hammer, swung with different amounts of force depending on the 'program' 'installed'. So it all seems a bit pointless, especially after you've killed a really tough critter and acquired a sparkly new weapon.
Dangers of Angband[edit | edit source]
It is clear that Angband is a danger to the human race (basically the whole gist of this article, really), but what of the risks of the player. Here are but a few:
- Believing that killing Morgoth is some sort of achievment.
- Writing above statement on your C.V.
- Insanititis.
- Being sucked into Tolkien's twisted mind.
- Eye failure due to lack of graphics.
- Wheelchair of the legs
- Angband is highly addictive. Excessive playing will turn you onto harder drugs such as Slashdot, or, God's mighty testicles forbid, Wikipedia. Stay away from Angband, you hear? It will do you no good.