10th Year of the International Nethack Tournament 170
Dr. Zowie writes "The 10th annual Nethack Tournament just started over at nethack.devnull.net, so put on your Hawaiian shirt, grab an expensive camera, and head for the dungeon. The tourney runs through the month of November each year, with volunteer game servers dotted around the world. Fewer than 1% of contestants actually finish the game by retrieving the Amulet of Yendor and ascending to demigodhood, but take heart: there are many prizes for intermediate goals, and prizes for team effort. For those too young to remember games older than Halo, Nethack is the apotheosis of the Roguelike genre of role-playing games, rendered in ASCII. Gameplay is phenomenally complex, and the game is somewhat sadistic; there are no 'checkpoints,' so if you manage to kill yourself somewhere in the dungeon you must start over from the beginning. The dungeons are quasi-randomly generated, so every game is different."
Obama's aunt an illegal, living on taxpayers $$ (Score:0, Informative)
Amazing [boston.com].
Barack Obama's aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in South Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago, the Associated Press has learned.
Zeituni Onyango, 56, referred to as "Aunti Zeituni" in Obama's memoir, was instructed to leave the United States by a US immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late last night.
The disclosure about Onyango came shortly after Obama's presidential campaign confirmed that Onyango was Obama's paternal half-aunt on his father's side.
It was not immediately clear how Onyango might have qualified for public housing with a standing deportation order.
Re:Great! (Score:2, Informative)
Very difficult but strangely rewarding (Score:5, Informative)
I never managed to complete Nethack until I found the spoilers [cam.ac.uk], which include helpful advice about the best way to approach the game. The dungeons are random, but the structure of the game is not, and the same things will appear in approximately the same places (with different names). Once you have got to a certain depth, you've cracked the game and a win is almost certain.
Whether it is cheating to look at the spoilers is a philosophical question. Cheating is copying a save file or modifying the game - reading spoilers is no more cheating than looking at the source code.
bsdgames, hack, age of nethack (Score:5, Informative)
For those too young to remember games older than Halo
Halo? More like Bomberman or the Lotus and Turrican series (~1990). Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.
If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack.
To get an idea of how the world looked when the internet was black-and-white, look at the end of the man page:
BUGS
Probably infinite. Mail complaints to mcvax!aeb .
Bang path ftw :) I'll get off your lawn now.
Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding (Score:3, Informative)
I think most veteran hackers would agree that looking at the source, along with most spoilers, is definitely cheating -- though some level of general advice is not. The definitely-not-cheating ways to learn about the game are explore mode and the oracle; both are quite informative without being overly spoiled. At the same time, I think the vast majority of players look at spoilers to some degree.
To anyone new to nethack out there: Give it an honest try without spoilers. Use them when you get stuck, but only in moderation. Nethack is fundamentally a game about discovering the rules; if you learn them all by reading, it's far less fun. Of course, remaining eternally clueless is no fun either. As in many things, moderation is the key.
Re:Interaction (Score:1, Informative)
It means go up a level, not down one. On the top level, it'll make the game end as if you took the stairs out. (Unless you have the Amulet.)
telenet nethack.alt.org to watch live games (Score:5, Informative)
This thread will (has) descend into alternative recommendations, so I'll take a moment to pimp a multiplayer variant of Angband, being MAngband ( http://www.mangband.org/ [mangband.org] ). A realtime non-turnbased roguelike sounds kooky, but it actually works out pretty darned well (and Morgoth in realtime is a very frightening experience).
On a side note, I always appreciate roguelike-related threads on slashdot, as it is a rare opporunity for my username to have any sense of context.
Flamebait - Best game ever (Score:5, Informative)
As an example of pure depth, consider the water traps that rust your weapons and armor. Well, if you are polymorphed into an iron golem, you can rust to death from walking into a water trap. Touching cockatrice corpses will turn you to stone instantly, but if you wear gloves you can wield it as a weapon to turn other creatures to stone. But if you are burdened carrying too much stuff, you are likely to fall down the steps and turn yourself to stone. Game over, try again. If you are confused from eating rotten food, reading scrolls will cast spells in ways you weren't expecting. They thought of everything in this game.
You can actually find a wand of wishing on the first level and get any three items in the game. The inexperienced player still won't make it very far. No matter how strong or amazing you are, you could still die from a falling drawbridge, cockatrice corpse, being digested by strange creatures, being drowned by an electric eel, or kicking a wall while you are near death. Even after all the years I've spent on this game, I still learn something new every time I play. It's that deep.
Re:Interaction (Score:3, Informative)
I suppose losing a level would be more technically correct, though it depends on whether you consider "gaining" to mean "increasing the number" or "going up".
Anyway, the question you should be asking is what happens if you use a cursed potion of gain level on the uppermost level of the dungeon, i.e. the first floor below the surface.
And the answer is that, unless you're carrying the Amulet of Yendor, then nothing happens. If you do have the amulet, you go to the Plane of Earth (the first level in the final quest to ascend).
Yeah I had to look it up and yeah I thought it'd be more exciting... there are other cases where leaving the dungeon for the surface causes the game to end.
Re:I've said this before but... (Score:2, Informative)
An incredibly hard, incredibly fun game (Score:3, Informative)
I ascended as a samurai once, and it was this close to landing on my CV. That one's offset by the squillion times I was killed by a combination of my stupidity and the cruelty of the almighty RNG (random number generator).
Then there are those crazy iron-man ascents made by guys who never eat, never attack other monsters, never wear armor and so on.
It's a great game, and after playing it a few times you can take a look at some archived YASDs to appreciate their fine humour:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/search?q=yasd [google.com]
telnet noway.ratry.ru 37331 for tourney games (Score:3, Informative)
Unlike all-year public servers, the tournament ones aren't watchable by default. But a few of the contestants broadcast their own games anyway on telnet://noway.ratry.ru:37331 [ratry.ru] so that's always a nice watch too. This service doesn't get enough publicity, I wish the top players could show us their progress!
Re:Interaction (Score:3, Informative)
That 'outright sadistic' is why I don't play Nethack. I quit after a beginning character stepped on a trapdoor, landed on a trapdoor on the next level, landed on a teleport trap on the third level that sent him two more levels down, only to land on (you guess it) another trapdoor.
No one who did that to my character in a pen and paper RPG would ever get me back to the table. I've thrown people out of conventions for doing that sort of thing to other paying members when running tournaments (and I point out, every organized gaming convention, without exception, will readily do just that to stop the cases of sadistic abuse that sometimes happen, and has a public posted policy on just that point in the membership and/or staff kits).
Some companies who feel they are losing customers thanks to sadistic GMing keep a joint industry blacklist of referees who have abused players in sanctioned tournaments that way, just to curb the 'outright sadistic' conduct. Back 30 years ago, Gary Gygax sometimes told bad DMs he observed that they were never to DM ever again, and instructed TSR's mail order dept to refuse to sell to those people so as to put some teeth into it.
Oh, but this is a computer game, that makes it different. No, it doesn't. All the good features of Nethack you've cited, the neat options for character class and so on, would make a great game, maybe the best game evah! BUT not with the 'outright sadistic' parts.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. Bones files (levels containing a dead character's corpse, ghost, (mostly cursed) equipment, pets, and whatever nasties killed them) can be found by any player no the same machine. If it was a powerful character who died of something stupid high up in the dungeon, it can be a really, really good thing; and it's usually a nice-ish stash regardless once you get things uncursed.
Re:Flamebait - Best game ever (Score:3, Informative)
In some sense, NetHack has had this from time to time. Some of the interactions were 'prototyped' as bugs: different object classes stored their attributes in overlapped storage (unions, shared bitfields, whatever), and the type checking was a little sporadic. So casting an enhancement spell on something that had an inappropriate data structure would occasionally give things peculiar properties. Then devteam would look at the bug report and say, hey, this is a latent feature, and give 'proper' semantics to the effect.
Made for a huge binary though. It's nothing nowadays in the days of template metaprogramming and the million monkeys coding effect, all held in balance by virtual memory and nearly-free RAM, but shoehorning the 2M executable into a 640K PC footprint was my proudest NetHack achievement.
Sadly, I almost always found the game far too hard to enjoy. There were only one or two releases I felt I could make any progress with, and devteam always thought they needed fixing because they were too easy (I was sooo sad when wand-pool stopped being the method of choice against shopkeepers). But still. Some of my best work went into that game—far, far under the covers.