The Atari ST version of the classic dungeon-crawler, Rogue, is arguably the best conversion of the game out there. It was developed by A.I. Design and published by Epyx in 1986 and combines the best bits from the original with new graphics and a few new features of its own.

The best thing about this version is that you can use the cursor keys to move around and the mouse pointer for combat and menus, which is great – it really speeds-up play and makes surviving easier.

Graphically, the enhanced graphics are decent, even if the scrolling is a bit jumpy. Gameplay-wise, it is reasonably faithful to the original Rogue. Combat is well-balanced and isn’t too hard, nor too easy, although it’s still quite possible to find yourself dead if you don’t play carefully.

Pressing the space bar will give you the zoomed-out view of the map, and you can even move your character around while in this mode, which is good. You can name items that you pick up (actually, just like in the original Rogue), and there are menu commands for show rank, change name (of your character), and Hall of Fame (a high score table that saves to disk).

Just like in the Amstrad CPC version of Rogue, your inventory seems to get full even though it might not look full, which is a small niggle. Otherwise this is an excellent conversion that is well worth a play now.

More: Rogue on Wikipedia