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."
Nethack is fine (Score:3, Interesting)
But in the genre of cruel dungeon-crawls, I prefer Iter Vehemens Ad Necem [sourceforge.net].
There's nothing like bludgeoning a zombie to death with your own severed arm, then being forced to eat the arm to stave off hunger.
Re:Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
I prefer Angband. (Score:3, Interesting)
The game also has its own special flair when it comes to ironmaning it. If you run out of light or food, you pretty much lose. If you linger too long on a dungeon level, you waste light and food. So if you get low on light or food, you play more aggressively and dive faster. Of course if you dive too fast, you won't be able to defeat the enemies. So very often you find yourself staring death by lack of resources vs death from tough monsters.
I put more effort into nethack... (Score:5, Interesting)
I replayed the game in 05 a decade later... and cheated to do some "tourist gaming" even with a full wand of wishing, and optional dying, it took all night to ascend,, When I left the dungeon I was bloody surrounded with monsters. Even in the deep parts of nethack there are monsters conventions that make moving a total pain.
Still, a game where you can wield the iron ball on your ankle as a weapon rocks.
Re:variations (Score:2, Interesting)
The Vulture's games are forks of the Falcon's Eye project; over the standard Falcon's Eye base and the optional use of the Slash'EM core, Vulture's incorporates the latest core sources, hundreds more graphics and sounds, many bugfixes and performance enhancements, and an open, collaborative development environment.
Re:Great! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
Starting class only determines how you start (starting abilities and inventory)....after a point, all characters evolve into basically the same thing. Even race has only a small bearing on your character after a point (starting intrinsics). There are ways of getting all of the equipment and intrinsics such that by the end of the game, you've collected all of the ones you need.
Generally, I find Valkyries to be the easiest early on (and most likely to survive long enough to make initial class irrelevant)..... Archaeologists are also good because gem identification (makes it easy to buy the good equipment0..... Wizards are tough early on until you can gain some strength and good equipment.
Layne
Re:Interaction (Score:5, Interesting)
Nethack and the like would be boring without the sadistic part, without the constant threat of dying of unfair causes. It helps the game to stay somewhat challenging even after completing it many times. It makes every game intense and exciting.
Besides, many unfair deaths aren't really unfair deaths, but instead deaths that could have been avoided by playing better (preparing better, being more cautious, being less greedy, etc). This is especially true when you get further along in the game and have more to lose. Truly unfair deaths where you do everything right and then you just die anyway are quite rare.
Note: I'm not saying you're "wrong" to not play Nethack 'cos you think it's too sadistic. Then it's just not a game that's entertaining for you. I'm just saying that it would be worse if it wasn't like that, it would be just plain boring.
Re:Great! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding (Score:5, Interesting)
As a seasoned nethack player (I've ascended all classes and done some optional conducts. Still working on pacifist :) ). Spoilers and source diving are not considered cheating amongst the greater nethack community. And by greater nethack community I basically mean rec.games.roguelike.nethack.
There is only one thing that is universally considered cheating, and that is backing up save files to circumvent permanent death.
While spoilers are very helpful, they are not gamebreaking. There's no set path to follow in nethack that will guarantee victory.
Spoilers are more often used as a reference for things that just don't make sense to memorize.
For example, let's say I need a scroll of enchant armor, I have blank paper and a Magic Marker with 15 charges on it. I don't remember how many charges are required to make that scroll, so I look it up.
The spoiler won't give you the idea to make a scroll that you need using equipment found around the dungeon. But they will give you the details you need to be a little more efficient.
Think of the spoilers as more of a pocket reference than a walkthrough or tutorial.
Re:Useful, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, quaffing cursed potions of gain level work in Moloch's sanctum, and everywhere I believe. In fact, a useful thing to do is if you have any wishes left over near the end (and assuming you're not going for a wishless conduct) is to wish for two cursed potions of gain level. Since you can't levelport and branchport while carrying the amulet, this is an essential item to use to save time climbing back up, especially with not having to deal with the mob in Moloch's sanctum on the way out.
It's also useful for bypassing the Zoo while going up to Moloch's sanctum. It's a trick I've used many times myself once an expert player who's well known in the Nethack community taught me it.
Re:Interaction (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the things I liked in a very old DOS version of HACK (It was not called nethack in the 80's IIRC) were the bugs.
If you started on beginner mode, all your items were identified for you. And, if you selected a wizard class, and then immediately left the dungeon then started a new wizard and left the dungeon. Then you repeated this process over and over your characters would gain an extra wand or 2 over time as you created each new character.
After enough iterations, your character would be carrying (32) wands - and all of them would be identified. At this point though, the game bugged out. The game was not designed for a character to have 32 wands. So, you would select your items to wear, and one of the wands you carried would be overflowed to be treated as a piece of clothing. The value for the charge was taken as the value for the armor class. And, since you were carrying so many wands, one of them was bound to be a wand of charging. This would allow you to start the game with somewhere around a -66 AC with your elven cloak and your wand.
Another great thing was sometimes you one item would overflow and become a 'Glorkum.S" I don't know what that is, but you could wear it, and it had around a -45 AC as well. It appeared to be as a result of an overflow as well.
Finally, the best trick was the wand of wishing. You could not wish for more wands of wishing, but you COULD wish for a wand of cancellation. You used the wands 3 wishes, and then kept trying to zap the wand over and over again. After a while, you would get the message "you wrest one more spell from the worn out wand, what do you want to wish for?" Then the wand would go to -1 charges. Then you could zap it with the wand of cancellation and bring it back to 0 charges and start again...
Suffice it to say I managed to ascend with the real amulet of yendor many times due to these bugs. I wish the team had never fixed those ones....
Re:Interaction (Score:3, Interesting)
But I got the feeling it was all coded as a bunch of IF statements. IF you got a pie in your face, and IF you wiped it with a towel, then it would unblind you. Very cool, and on a level much more complex than most other games. However, it was all still pre-planned. Any cool interaction of things in nethack you discovered as coded into the game by a dev. You were discovering someone else's cool tricks.
I thought it would be cool if a game could have true creative interaction of objects -- a sort of emergence of events, not just a list or pre-planned events. I think you would have to do it with a discrete combinatorial system, so that you have just a bunch of simple parts. Like legos, they dont do anything by themselves, but the way in which you combine them in new and creative ways leads to things no one could have predicted, much less plan and code into IF statements.
Re:Interaction (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude, no offence but what you've described is extremely unlikely, and while that is no consolation to you when it happened, it is unlikely to happen again.
I don't know - I haven't been playing nethack that long and I've had almost the identical scenario happen to me several times. I once ended up on level 10 of the dungeon from level 2 because of a series of trap doors and level teleports.
I used every trick in the book, and even managed to survive working my way back up to level 3 before I messed up and died. Part of the real fun of nethack is that at times it can be sadistic, but if you're careful and learn from previous mistakes you can handle most the things it throws at you (there's always the Gnome with the wand of Death of course).
If there's a problem with nethack it's that the game isn't sadistic enough at the later levels. The beginning is very challenging, but you reach a point where you are near invincible and only a stupid mistake will kill you, and then you have to play another 10 hours to finish the game. Not that winning is assured at that point, stupid mistakes are quite common.
Re:Interaction (Score:3, Interesting)
yea, that happened to poor DeathOnAStick on NAO. It was horrible. He had spent nearly a year and a half mining the entire dungeon and polypiling rocks for gems. He had a couple pet giants lugging around bags of his loot since it was so heavy. sometimes i would watch him play, like the rest on rgrn, trying to figure out what he was up to.
from nethack.wikia.com:
After killing the Wizard of Yendor on dungeon level 1, he found a potion of gain level from the death drop. He drank it without fully identifying it first, finding out it was cursed.
Upon reaching the Plane of Earth, he desperately checked his inventory, and indeed he was carrying no gems. At this point, he went idle for 38 seconds. A few of his entourage of giants had been close enough to be dragged into the Planes with him, but they were either killed off or left behind at the inter-plane portals. The only gems DeathOnAStick had at his ascension were 2 dilithium crystals.