NetHack: Still One of the Greatest Games Ever Written 186
M-Saunders writes: While everyone obsesses about frame rates and polygon counts, there's one game that hasn't changed visually for decades. NetHack may look incredibly primitive today, but it's still arguably the best game of all time, with an unmatched level of depth, creativity and replayability. Linux Voice looks at this fascinating dungeon romp, explaining what makes it great, how to get started with it, and how to discover some of its secrets.
Don't foget (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Don't foget (Score:4, Interesting)
Rogue-like also needs the randomness. Randomly generated levels, random monsters, random loot. Plus it has to be easy to restart because your character will die often (they're a lot like solitaire or minesweeper that way). And not much thinking, as your goal isn't to minimax your build.
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Interesting)
What roguelikes are you playing? The entire appeal of roguelikes, as I see it (and that includes pseudo-roguelikes which have random worlds and permadeath but aren't turn based) is that you have to actually optimize, actually get better in order to progress: learn which things are good, which ones are situational, which ones are mostly bad. And it's not enough to get the good things, you have to get a picture of the risk/reward ratios too, so that you take less risk when you're on a path to winning, and more when you aren't. Such considerations are largely absent in non-roguelike RPGs.
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Interesting)
Very much this. For this reason, FTL is a roguelike in almost every meaningful sense of the word, even though the presentation and subject matter are nothing of the like.
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and then there was Diablo 1. Very much a rogue game but with graphics!
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and then there was Diablo 1. Very much a rogue game but with graphics!
No. It had random dungeon layout, but not random encounters or plots.
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Actually, most people who hate roguelikes will probably hate FTL. The most controversial feature of roguelikes is permadeath, and FTL has it.
Even Sarah Palin got this one right ... (Score:2)
FTL is a great game but I wouldn't call it a rougelike. If you want to bend words you can call Minecraft for an FPS since it's in first person view and you actually can shoot. Saying that FTL is a rougelike is more of a stretch than that. We need clear distinctions. I don't want third person shooters to be called FPS because I enjoy one but not the other. For a similar reason, calling FTL a rougelike is doing it a disservice. Just because someone violently hates rougelikes in general doesn't mean that they shouldn't check out FTL.
There's a big difference between "Going Rogue" and "Going Rouge", and yet I see this mistake a lot.
Re: Don't foget (Score:3)
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Interesting)
Rogue, Moria and the likes. I personally played Rogue and Moria.
Don't forget the original Hack on which Nethack is based - (basically) the same game, but on ASCII terminals (yes, I'm that old).
I played both Rogue and Hack on the VAX-785 running BSD back in college. Rogue was more forgiving, like if you ran out of food (faint, continue, repeat...), where Hack was hell-bent on killing you for the slightest mistake. You were boned if you died in Hack, restarted and ran into your former dog - who hadn't been fed in a while. Lesson: Teach your pet to hunt non-humans or be prepared to end him.
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Yup, Hack is the real Hack, NetHack is a poseur.
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Interesting)
These days, you can pretty much skip nethack... Rogue and Hack were the originals. Nethack was a modest extension of Hack, which had a brief injection of popular culture tropes before being abandoned by its dev team in about 2003. For the progression of the roguelike genre (conservative or extended) , it hasn't directly mattered in a long time. The only modern game I can think of that draws directly on Nethack lore is Spelunky.
More important roguelikes for today's games: Dwarf Fortress, Linley's Dungeon Crawl/DCSS
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As far as modern games I've only played nethack and slashem (I've played rogue and moria) Crossfire too, but crossfire is so different.
I can honestly say that after over 10 years of nethacking I am not very close to winning. I love getting a ring of teleportation and eating a bunch of leprechauns and tengus to become "jumpy" though.
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Funny)
I've said this before on Slashdot, but now is the time that I will say it again: I consider the fact that I have ascended a wishless Tourist more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
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Well, I think most of us can guess which took more time and effort.
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Between that and a quote from Crow T. Robot, I salute you, sir.
The only sad thing is that your ascension probably doesn't earn you as much money. I've never ascended or even gotten close, but I hit a point about 10-15 years ago where I realized that beating Nethack amounts to reverse-engineering the spoilers list, a lot of which is arbitrary and capricious. I still play once in a while, but I don't ever expect to win.
I don't know if I've changed or the game has changed, but I don't recall Hack being so u
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These days, you can pretty much skip nethack...
You can skip any video game. Nethack can be quite fun and is nearly always a bit surprising. Don't play games because they're "important."
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DF is a roguelike too.
Adventure mode fits all the common criteria for being a roguelike:
* Permadeath
* Procedurally generated world/levels
* One character
* strictly turn-based.
Fortress mode fails criterion 3 and 4, and is such in the same pseudo-roguelike genre as Faster Than Light (roughly). Whether you consider that a roguelike, is a a matter of quibbling about definitions.
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Interesting)
Nethack is fiendishly addictive.
I liked the protection racket strategy. That, or playing an elvish ranger and using the rename trick to get stormbringer, if I was feeling too lazy for the protection racket and wanted a faster game.
I never did beat the game. Eventually, I made it to the final room and got killed by the four horsemen, just about went out of my mind with frustration, looked at the sun shining outside, thought about how much the obsession was taking me away from my girlfriend, and gave up the game for good.
Nice to see it getting some love though.
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Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Funny)
looked at the sun shining outside, thought about how much the obsession was taking me away from my girlfriend
I don't visit slashdot to read outlandish fantasy stories.
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I've beaten it several times, though I've never achieved my goal of doing so as a pacifist tourist.
To be fair, I've never even gotten close to doing it as a pacifist tourist ;)
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I really want to beat the game as a wizard. I'm kind of angry because I had a bag of holding with EVERYTHING, spellbooks scrolls of earth and MagicBane!, but somehow my bag disappeared and I can't even get through the tower because I'm a boulder short and no scroll of earth. Digging with my pickaxe didn't work either
O drow wizard (slashem) your quest may end here.
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I had a bag of holding with EVERYTHING, spellbooks scrolls of earth and MagicBane!, but somehow my bag disappeared
Your post contains the answer to this.
Re:Don't foget (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. It's a bane to magic, and bags of holding are magical. There's a saying with nethack: "The Dev Team Thinks of Everything" [tvtropes.org] Half of the source code is probably taken up by easter eggs. Check out a random assortment of them here [tvtropes.org]. Some of my favorites are how a Quantum Mechanic can drop a box containing Schrodinger's Cat which - unlike all other objects in the game - doesn't have its life / death state determined until you open the box; and tricking gods into killing creatures for you by ticking them off into trying to kill when you're engulfed by a monster (which gives you the experience ;) ). There's even some things in the source code that players never see, like a commentary about why angry gods don't notice certain details, relating it to how some nuns would shower clothed so that God wouldn't see them naked - as if God is a peeping tom with X-ray vision that can penetrate convent walls but not a bathrobe.
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I have had a few binges on it, and every year or so have another. Recently I was talking with someone about it and had to show them....so of course I started playing.... Ranger, found an uncursed cloak of displacement on lvl2...and of course proceeded to have one of my best beginings ever. I had found a blessed identify scroll, some nice armor.... found a co-aligned altar, two shops.... I was about ready to head for the mines...
Anyway long story short, stoked, I decide to go to bed before I make a stupid mi
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When I introduced it to my then girlfriend, she eventually ascended three times. I only ever managed two.
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When I introduced it to my then girlfriend, she eventually ascended three times. I only ever managed two.
Okay; we get it. Stop bragging about your penis.
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Amazed ADoM (adom.de) hasn't been mentioned yet. I've been playing it for about 15 years on and off (and actually won for the first time this year!). It lacks the stupid stuff you can only learn from spoilers that Nethack has, and it's got a more consistent universe - no stupid Sokoban, no flash cameras and credit cards...
DCSS seems pretty nice too, not played much
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DCSS is what replaced Nethack for me. DCSS is every inch as hard, but fairer than Nethack: spoilers will do you little good, boring/cheesy tactics (e.g. grinding) won't help, and you won't die from misclick-type errors as often. Best of all, it has variation in the endgame, since you need three runes to win but there are fifteen in existence. Once you're able to win the game at all, you can start pushing your luck in the extended endgame by getting more runes before doing Zot.
I'm a bit skeptical of the chan
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Rogue is too random. It's at least theoretically possible to win any random game of Nethack (assuming default options of course... never could bring myself to write "elbereth" everywhere), many (most?) games of Rogue are unwinnable, there simply aren't enough decisions to be made to overcome the random number gods.
Re:Don't foget (Score:4, Funny)
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Omega and Larn were fun, too.
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Omega was actually up to 0.90, but that version was rare as the official distribution channel wasn't trying to give it out.
It wasn't a popular roguelike as it was a little buggy... first version I encountered was for the Amiga, which caused the town guards to attack you if you joined the paladin's guild.
One of the few games with incredible imagination (Score:2)
When monsters steal your loot, use what should be your wands, drink potions, and you can be killed by tripping over a cockatrice corpse, you better expect a super interesting game.
Pity it hasn't been updated meaningfully for over a decade - perhaps it just hit perfection?
Re:One of the few games with incredible imaginatio (Score:4, Informative)
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is by far my favorite crawler and it's regularly updated as well.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
download it or play it in your browser as ascii or with tiles.
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Stone Soup was the first roguelike I actually got into; and probably still the one I've sunk the most time into. Not remotely qualified to talk about whether or not it's good, but dang it's fun.
Re:One of the few games with incredible imaginatio (Score:4, Interesting)
there's some forks with more classes to play etc.
but at the heart nethack is a memorization and risk minimization game.
all the insta deaths you need to prepare to counter(reflection is a must) and then just making the character strong enough to deal with the enemies - and there's a certain degree of luck involved in if you can prepare to some insta deaths before they become likely to happen.
but since nethack is already a complete game with beginning and an end goal(ascension), don't know what's there to update, I don't remember any bugs either really. the endgame is kind of ridiculous and the character needs to be kind of ridiculous(ac -27 and what have you) to face it but that's the game...
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Yep, and this is why it's not a very good design. In a good roguelike, decisions should be situational: there should be different approaches you can take, and risk/reward tradeoffs so that a good played can take chances when behind, and play it safe when ahead. Nethack has very few meaningful strategic decisions. Crawl/DCSS had the right idea when they aggressively stripped "no-brainer" and counterintuitive decisions from the game.
(Among
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Pity it hasn't been updated meaningfully for over a decade - perhaps it just hit perfection?
Well, there is one game that has a lot of that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
It is graphical enough to support your game play, but still has some of the feel of a character based game like Nethack, and perhaps an even more elaborate system of magic, faith and skills - plus an enormous set of maps.
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You can polymorph into a cockatrice, make yourself female (if male), lay cockatrice eggs, put them into a sack and have projectiles that automatically stone monsters.
Polymorph yourself into a Winged Gargoyle, you can wear armor and don't have to worry about stoning with the eggs. You are also flying, so you can get over the pesky water parts of the lower levels and the elemental plane of air.
You can polypile to make a bunch of rings of +1 damage / +1 accuracy, then poly yourself into a Xorn, eat the rings
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Pity it hasn't been updated meaningfully for over a decade - perhaps it just hit perfection?
Though I've ascended a few characters, I haven't tried to do so in a while, mainly because of that long, slow slog through the mazes. I'd consider changing things around so that there's maybe a 1/10 chance of getting a maze on any standard Gehennom level - or better yet, only the special levels get mazes.
Funny how the wizard is one of the weakest characters at the beginning of the game, but becomes almost unstoppable at experience level 30. Reverse-genociding purple worms, taming them, and teleporting them
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Funny how the wizard is one of the weakest characters at the beginning of the game, but becomes almost unstoppable at experience level 30.
This pattern isn't unique to Nethack, for better or worse, it's endemic to most Fantasy RPGs, in my experience. I think it's a game-balance issue - either the wizard is the specialist at *magic* which is a powerful force, or *magic* is simply a skill tree where other classes have their own powerful skills (i.e., Diablo).
Part of the problem is modeling a wizard after Gandalf or other archetypal figures - those characters meant to be support NPCs - actually playing Gandalf would mean you're playing a complet
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Nethack needs an upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
No, I dont mean graphics wise, or anything like that.
Nethack needs full multi-user, and an overhaul on the generated story (what there is of it), so that the core process can be daemonized, and users attaching to the system can play against each other.
The plot of NetHack is to get the silly amulet and take it to YOUR god's altar on the last level, before anyone else can. Given the obscene amount times people die, it could reasonably take weeks for this to happen. (Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!)
I would like to see a fully MUD revamp version of NetHack, that connects users either through port listener, with a remote client app. The "remote client" can be run locally on the system using ssh, or it can attach to an exported listen port. Either way, players attach to the server deamon, which does the real nitty gritty.
The spontaneous level creation is a fun part of Nethack, and I would like to keep that-- just have the game world get reset with new random dungeons after somebody manages to put the amulet of yendor on an altar at the end.
Why would this be more awesome than nethack already is?
1) Players can choose weather or not to cooperate to get through certain areas before having to go all "highlander" on each other at the end.
2) Nethack's dungeons were deformable at-will using certain spells/items. Even without regenerating the world each and every time, the gameworld would change in unpredictable ways with multiple human players attacking it and changing it.
Nethack uses so little resources on modern systems that it is not even funny at all. Seriously, I can run it on an openwrt enabled router over ssh. For real. A daemonized instance of it would hardly make anything modern even twitch, even with many users stuck on it.
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There were actually Rogue-like MUD games, ascii graphics and all. MAngband, Rogue Mud, etc.
Re:Nethack needs an upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, but not nethack.
These days, too many multi-player games focus on "events", and have various things nerfed for casual players.
Nethack is not for casual gamers. It chews them up and spits them out again until they become system exploiting, backstabbing bastards. That's the only real way to win that game.
As such, any vandalism, griefing, or other "It makes my mangina hurt!" type things that would happen in a fully daemonized version of nethack would ONLY server to ENHANCE the game.
Not sure how saving and loading would work. Whoever has the amulet of yendor would be virtually untouchable while in the nether of being offline, and having multiple true amulets of yendor would be game breaking. This means somebody could actually be a real dick and obtain the real amulet, save, then quit playing, forcing the server admin to reset the game to make it completable again.
Perhaps making players vulnerable while offline? (say, "asleep"?) Making hidden passages to crawl into for protection when you have to stop playing would solve that issue, and add incentive to get back asap before somebody finds you and gives you a finger of death.
The stupid wizard that shows up when you get the amulet would need to be prevented from teleporting to a sleeping player and stealing the amulet though.
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A more serious issue with multi-player would be handling the "turn based" nature of the game...how do you decide when the game "ticks"? And if it's not turn based, then it's really not neckhack any more...
-- Pete.
Re:Nethack needs an upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
You could go to a semi-realtime version if there aren't too many players, where you can issue any string of commands (including multi-turn commands like walk-to) and they execute sequentially until any player doesn't have an action queued up, some "demands a player's attention" event has occurred, or a player decides to interrupt their commands. You could give other players the option to force the current turn to end if any player hasn't taken an action and a minimum amount of time has passed.
Honestly, though, I'm not sure how much advantage multiplayer would bring to the game vs. the disadvantages. Maybe you could have fun with it, though, having one person be the player and one person being the "god of the random number generator" trying to hinder the player's progress ;) The player could be given certain advantages to assist them over standard play (say, free stat boosts and some starting wands / blank scrolls / marker / potions of holy water / etc), while the other person could be given some limited leeway to skew random monster creation, room creation, etc - not full control, just enough to be annoying, as if they have a slowly regenerating "mana" and can spend it on influencing random events, with the most evil influences being the most expensive ;)
"Oh, gee, there was a *polymorph trap* in that hallway? How'd THAT get there?"
"Hey, you're blind now? Wouldn this just be a TERRIBLE time for a SWARM OF KILLER BEES to show up?"
"Wow, YET ANOTHER unidentified ring turns out to be cursed! What are the odds?!"
"You know, I'd recommend actually hitting that troll before he kills you rather than MISSING eight times in a row!"
You could say that they're playing the Wizard of Yendor or something ;)
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Make it robotic. Don't have people control their character directly, but instead submit an AI routine to make the decisions. Then simply impose a time limit on the AI, and make the command "wait" if it's exceeded.
Re:Nethack needs an upgrade (Score:4, Insightful)
if you had to wait for others to finish their turn or if the turns had a time limit, it would take much longer than couple of weeks for anyone to finish.
this is what many people forget. the interface as it is, is suited for a single player game. like instead of pressing a button and typing in a number to wait for 100 turns would you rather wait half an hour? all the game mechanics would need changing. thing is, nethack is TURN BASED. changing it to a realtime game doesn't quite work out simply and in the end it is something totally else.
and in a little while all the levels would be digged up. of course, you could make them bigger than the screen but that would be totally changing the game mechanic again.
gehenna isn't too bad. usually you would have strong enough character to take the normal enemies there anyways.
Re:Nethack needs an upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually been writing a multiplayer roguelike so I may take a stab at some of these.
if you had to wait for others to finish their turn or if the turns had a time limit, it would take much longer than couple of weeks for anyone to finish.
I don't think there's any way to have a turn-based multiplayer dungeon game with a significant amount of people in it. At some point someone lags and the game dies. If you decide to have a cut off point (like 5 seconds per turn) then it just becomes a really slow real-time game. People hate it and stopped playing almost immediately during play testing.
this is what many people forget. the interface as it is, is suited for a single player game. like instead of pressing a button and typing in a number to wait for 100 turns would you rather wait half an hour? all the game mechanics would need changing.
Pretty much on the money here, I've had to re-evaluate almost every mechanic, especially the sleep/paralysis ones. The good news is that if you play in a team you are suddenly a lot more resilient to these effects, your team becomes your shield.
thing is, nethack is TURN BASED. changing it to a realtime game doesn't quite work out simply and in the end it is something totally else.
I agree that it would be near impossible to port all the NetHack mechanics verbatim. You could probably make something for a small team of four people or so, who are friends and talking on teamspeak or something, but not a game with hundreds or thousands of players.
and in a little while all the levels would be digged up. of course, you could make them bigger than the screen but that would be totally changing the game mechanic again.
I did playtesting with destructable dungeons, it's a nightmare. You just can't let people dig holes in the floors, walls. Perhaps the only way it would work is if it literally took hours to dig one square. I experimented with allowing you to dig a path with a pick, and letting the dungeon heal itself over time, it works OK but doesn't really add much to the game.
If you want to check out what I came up with check out Squadhack [squadhack.com]. It's in an early alpha at the moment and many things don't work but due to the graphics it will be familiar to many NetHack players.
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Nethack needs full multi-user, and an overhaul on the generated story (what there is of it), so that the core process can be daemonized, and users attaching to the system can play against each other.
There's a fork called NetHack 4 [nethack4.org] that is pretty much identical to vanilla as far as gameplay is concernced, but provides a client-server architecture. While I don't think that NetHack can ever be turned into a massive online game with thousands of players meeting each other, small scale PvP or co-op mode might be doable and actually fun.
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http://nethack.alt.org/ [alt.org] has online play, though it is just sharing of bones, and watching other people.
telnet nethack.alt.org.
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NAO and other public servers start an individual process for each player, there is no NetHack server process in the usual sense.
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Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!
Filthy casual [nethack.nu]. I been there, done that, shit was cash [alt.org]
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Well, wizards are probably the easiest class to play genoless because Magicbane will absorb almost all the curses from the Ls, and you have more than enough ranged attacks to choose from to deal with the ;s.
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Try it out: www.squadhack.com
It was originally a space game but the creator of the Absurd tilesets let me use them for the game, I've played hundreds of hours of NetHack (and other roguelikes) so players of NetHack will definitely notice a lot of similarities.
It's in an early alpha stage at the moment but is quite playable. Lots of corporate firewalls stop websockets dead though, so
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It all depends on how long you've been playing. (And how long you've been reading spoilers) For those who play for conducts, the most common conducts are:
Never changed shape.
Never polymorphed an item.
Never wished for an artifact item.
Never wished for a regular item.
Genocideless.
So you see lots of five-conduct ascensions, since these five are relatively easy to achieve. Easier than say, weaponless. Or pacifist.
(Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!)
Heh. I'm guessing this is about ar
Terrible game (Score:2, Funny)
If it wasn't for this game, I for one would have fininished my PhD a year earlier. Will nobody think of the students?
Permadeath? (Score:4, Informative)
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telnet alt.nethack.org
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No, you need to learn to take notes on your failures, focus more and try again.
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If you are going to cheat, why bother playing? just tell people you play, it's the same thing but with less effort.
Omega forgotten? (Score:2)
I refuse to believe that I am alone in remembering the awesomeness that was Omega.
I have not played recent forks or versions of nethack, but I recall the original starting out in a dungeon and forever progressing through the same dungeon randomly and endlessly. Where Omega had the same random dungeons, it expanded to include a country-side, a city, many villages, a volcano, a sewer, many temples, and much more. So much more depth, yet the same rogue-like text graphics.
Oh Omega, how I miss thee.
"Warning: Ar
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I too greatly enjoyed playing Omega - much more so than Nethack.
Very adictive but... (Score:2)
... the keys used to specify directions are a real pain on laptops without a keypad.
I can't imagine anyone using the vi shortcuts (k for up and, going clockwise, u l n j b h and y).
Using an external USB keypad is a possible solution but my experience with those devices is that they are unreliable and they behave strangely with Numlock.
Re:Very adictive but... (Score:5, Funny)
I can't imagine anyone using the vi shortcuts (k for up and, going clockwise, u l n j b h and y).
Imagine harder then, I don't know anyone who'd play it on the numpad, sounds rather inconvenient because all the other keys are on the main alphanumeric block.
In fact, I originally started to play nethack in order to get comfortable with hjkl for later use in vi. Worked great. (As an unexpected side effect I got horribly addicted though)
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Imagine harder then, I don't know anyone who'd play it on the numpad, sounds rather inconvenient because all the other keys are on the main alphanumeric block.
One hand on numpad, the other over the main keys.
In fact, I originally started to play nethack in order to get comfortable with hjkl for later use in vi.
vi? vi? Do you snap your suspenders and tug your beard as you pine for the days of pine over a 300 baud line? Real men/women/furry creatures from Alpha centauri, use VIM. And they use the cursor keys...because they have a keyboard with actual cursor keys instead of a ADM3A terminal. You'd think that terminal makers never used a Selectric.
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vi? vi? Do you snap your suspenders and tug your beard as you pine for the days of pine over a 300 baud line?
Since I switch a lot between vi/nvi/vim, depending on what's available (protip: vim usually isn't), yeah, it makes sense to learn the common subset first, which is basically the functionality vi implements. Besides, pine?
Real men/women [...] use VIM.
Real men/women use what's there.
[...] furry creatures from Alpha centauri [...]
Trying to be funny -- you're doing it wrong.
And they use the cursor keys...because they have a keyboard with actual cursor keys instead of a ADM3A terminal.
hjkl are much closer to the rest of the alphanumeric block, since they are, well, on the home row. It's fine if you like constantly switching between there and the cursor keys, or probably the mouse, just don't te
I've been playing Avatar for 27 years (Score:2)
And I'm not quite ready to go to single-player mode. Still figuring out 13..
Amazing an old game (Score:3)
You haven't seen NetHack until you've seen it on a retina MacBook or iMac. I nearly soiled my trousers the first time I saw "L" coming at me on such a display.
Alien: Isolation has nothing on it.
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You haven't seen NetHack until you've seen it on a retina MacBook or iMac. I nearly soiled my trousers the first time I saw "L" coming at me on such a display.
Those displays are nice, but if you are gonna play ... I mean *really* play, you need a serious ASCII accelerator card.
http://www.bbspot.com/news/200... [bbspot.com]
The higher frame rate gives you the edge that you'll need on the astral plane. And don't even think about trying it without a fully tweaked, N-key rollover mechanical keyboard! Those E's on the plane of air aren't gonna sit around sipping Earl Gray Tea waiting for your laggy $5 bargain bin membrane 'board!
Dungeons of Dredmor equivalent on Steam (Score:3)
I've noted that the Steam game, "Dungeons of Dredmor", is a nice upgrade to the genre of rogue-like games. It's good, for those who enjoy them and like a bit more graphics. It has different shop mechanics, but I was given a copy and enjoyed it. And I do remember compiling and playing the original Rogue decades ago, along with 'rogomatic' to watch someone _else_ trying to dungeon dive.
eh I don't know (Score:2)
It's a good game, maybe even a great game, but it's not a perfect game and it's not the best game ever. Too much of it is just n
It's now just a parody of itself (Score:2)
I enjoyed NetHack a lot in college during the 3.low-numbered-X days. It slowly increased its complexity to the point where it stopped being fun for me. It started becoming more about the meta-game -- how to test your gems, how to mix your potions, how to identify your scrolls -- and less about the dungeons. I gave up on it when they added the Sokoban levels and I switched to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, although I'm playing that less and less these days as well in favor of Larn. At least Larn has a clearly
Oh Yeah And (Score:4, Interesting)
There has been no real game innovation since then (Score:2)
Seriously, name me one serious game that is not either a rouge type game, a FPS, or CinC game on steroids. Maybe this one http://kotaku.com/worlds-first... [kotaku.com]
Most game makers are recycling the same crap over and over again. Go on a quest, kill the monsters, create an army, manage resources etc. That's about it.
Boring......
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And Shakespeare did all the plots, therefore nothing good has been written since.
That is what you sound like.
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Yeah, you see one romantic comedy you've seen them all. Some are funny but they do not hold my interest. As is the boy meets girl tragedy which also has been rehashed countless times. He did have a a way of writing about the upper classes so anything about the under classes would not be in is lexicon. But there is a huge amount of recycling in movies and literature finding something fresh is hard for me to find. "Rambo" and imitators are just rehashes of Hercules perhaps. Though "Son of Rambo" was fun.
HP L
Creativity? (Score:2)
No, not really. Now it's just a geek point thing.
I play nethack because obscure is cool., plus references.
It's maddening and addictive (Score:2)
I've played it on and off, for years. Have never won, not once, even in X (explore) mode.
Try playing it with one of the 2d graphical overlays (like XNetHack), too.
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While the puritans out there will have a conniption fit, I personally prefer a graphics pack enabled port of nethack.
There are several available on the google playstore that are quite enjoyable, and practically MADE for use on a tablet.
If you want the really real deal though, you need a linux/unix machine, and you need to play the ncurses command line version in a terminal.
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I find it hard to play with the graphics packs.
I need to do too much checking what is what :.
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If you want the really real deal though, you need a linux/unix machine, and you need to play the ncurses command line version in a terminal.
If you want the really real deal, you ,,telnet nethack.alt.org'', which a) works regardless of OS (provided it has a telnet client, which Windows does). Playing locally basically implies cheating ;)
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If you want the really real deal, you ,,telnet nethack.alt.org'', which a) works regardless of OS (provided it has a telnet client, which Windows does).
You mean
And preferably set your terminal to reverse video and use a VGA/IBMgraphics or DECgraphics capable typeface in your terminal. I personally prefer IBMgraphics because corridors look right and proper.
Playing locally basically implies cheating ;)
No, it doesn't.
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If you want the really real deal, you ,,telnet nethack.alt.org'', which a) works regardless of OS (provided it has a telnet client, which Windows does).
You mean
And preferably set your terminal to reverse video and use a VGA/IBMgraphics or DECgraphics capable typeface in your terminal. I personally prefer IBMgraphics because corridors look right and proper.
No, pretty sure I meant what I said. Especially the -8 is rather pointless. Reverse video also is a stupid suggestion as you can't know what the normal video mode is, for others.
VGA/IBMgraphics or DECgraphics capable typeface in your terminal. I personally prefer IBMgraphics because corridors look right and proper.
Actually, corridors look "right and proper" with the normal typeface, since that is nethack, this suggestion is also crap.
Playing locally basically implies cheating ;)
No, it doesn't.
The temptation can be very high, especailly when you're close to YASD
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Sir, why would I bother to consume lowly slime mold, when I can dine sumptuously on tinned leprechaun instead?
(Warning: Consumption of tinned leprechaun has been known to induce teleportitis.)
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I was once a developer for Vulture's Eye / Claw. :) Fun times.
Re: It's crap (Score:2, Funny)
I'm so sorry your life was wrecked. Have you tried installing MyCleanPC?
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Don't give him any ideas! We should treat his name as if he was Harry Potter's Voldemort, and refer to him as "The Frequent Contributor Who Should Not Be Named"
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Actually, the game gives a special death message if you die on turn 1.
Turn 3 is nothing :)
Turn 1? Pah! (Score:2)
It is possible to die on turn 0 [tasvideos.org], before you have even had a chance to act.