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."
Interaction (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the things I love about nethack is that items (and monsters, and dungeon features...) interact with each other in so many ways. Wielding a cockatrice corpse as a weapon will make short work of many monsters -- as long as you're wearing gloves. Just be careful not to fall down the stairs because you're carrying too much load...
The lack of a save and restore feature is definitely one of the things that makes nethack work so well. After putting in several hours carefully figuring out which potions do what and collecting decent armor and weapons, that D down the hall will be far scarier than any gorgeously rendered 3D dragon. After all, it can actually kill your character, not just send you back to the last save point.
At first glance, nethack seems not just hard but outright sadistic (well, ok, it is, but bear with me). But, as you get to know it, you realize that it's not like many other RPGs. Rather than trying to acquire the single best collection of stuff you can, in nethack you're rewarded for having backup plans -- and backups to your backups. When you find yourself surrounded my monsters and low on HP and out of healing potions you might consider praying. If you've done that too recently, you might try a wand of teleport or digging to escape. And when you discover that those wands just ran out of charges, you'll be glad you didn't leave that cursed potion of gain level behind. (The cursed ones, rather than gaining a character level, make you gain a *dungeon* level.)
Combine the attention to detail with the huge variety of options for character class, general strategies, and the high game-to-game variability thanks to random dungeons levels with random items, and you get serious replay value.
For those who tagged this "getalife" (Score:2, Insightful)
Nethack is one of the few very complex games that requires *zero* time investment. I sometimes play when I'm stuck in an airport, or wherever, or waiting for something to download or update or compile, and when I'm back to work just save the game. Aside from not requiring time, but allowing you to waste as much time as you have to waste, it has infinite replay value. You could play it for your whole life without ever beating the game, and also without the game ever getting boring. The reason it never gets boring is because your character can die suddenly at any moment, and there's no way to restore (without messing with the game's internals, which I don't think very many people bother to do). It's the total antithesis of modern video games - no emphasis on graphics, and nearly infinite options for what you can do within the game. Nethack is the best roguelike (I've played dozens), the best free/libre software game hands-down, and possibly the best game, period.
So stick your world of warcraft where the sun doesn't reach.
Nethack isn't hard among roguelikes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with your general sentiment, that it is good to learn the game without spoilers, but due to the game's difficulty, I found this far too frustrating. The game does not forgive mistakes, and even in explore mode it is easy to get stuck.
I think I have a different philosophical approach to the game. I see it as a black box. Provided you don't open the box and change the rules, you can do anything you want with the information it provides and the moves you're allowed to make. Viewed like this, Nethack is a sort of remote debugging challenge in the form of an adventure game. To understand the state of the game running on the server, you can look at your own local copy, the source code, the spoilers, and everything the server has sent you - if you want. Which is even geekier than treating it as an RPG!
Re:Nethack isn't hard among roguelikes (Score:2, Insightful)
NetHack isn't really about being hard. It is about surviving situations that the RNG throws at you or you get yourself into by using all options available to you.
If you want a punishing NetHack, play Slash'Em :-)
Spoiler Warning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that you know that one tidbit,
I suggest that you read every other spoiler you can find,
and then still have only a 1 in 10000 chance of ascending...
Re:Flamebait - Best game ever (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flamebait - Best game ever (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be theoretically possible to create a game where you can have true unexpected interactions of objects. You would create a set of simple properties, and then more complex interaction emerge from the interactions of simple properties. Like legos, you keep combining and combining, coming up with new and creative combination, suprising yourself with things no one could have predicted. It's like language or music; you can never exhaust the possibilities. They're endless. It's literally and endless set. It's called a discrete combinatorial system.