Angband: n. /ang'band/ 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 Random Number God.
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