[richardjdare]

The thing is, in many cases "Roguelike" is not a helpful description. It's like calling Megaman an "R-Type-like" because it's a side scroller with a beam-up weapon. The things that make Megaman what it is, have nothing in common with R-Type even though they share a couple of game mechanics.

I got really confused when people called Spelunky a roguelike. If my friend called on the phone and asked me what Spelunky was like, I'd say "A Rick Dangerous style platformer with procedurally generated levels" - and he'd have a pretty good idea of what I meant. If I said "It's a roguelike" he'd probably think I was talking about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or ADOM or something.