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://www.phial.com/angband and a zangband one at
http://thangorodrim.angband.org. See also
