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... Nethack without spoilers. Without spoilers, not sure how you'd beat this.

That being said, I regret having the spoilers and forever depriving myself of the chance to do it. Is there any other nethack like game that would provide the same level of challenge?

Read up-thread: ADOM. There are many rougelikes that qualify. Angband is more slash-y. Dungeons of Dredmor is more modern. Take your pick!

ADOM always was my favorite rougelike. Not that there's anything wrong with Nethack, it's just that ADOM is clearly superior.

BTW, the pseudo-sequel to ADOM, JADE, finally got a public release in the last couple weeks. There's not really much game to it, it's more just a taste of what's to come, but it's good to know it's not going to end up vaporware after all these years.

Try http://angband.oook.cz/> Angband, http://www.nethack.org/> Nethack, http://www.adom.de/> ADOM, http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/> Crawl, or start looking at http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/> Roguebasin. Then you'll be really living. Briefly.

Well, I'm one of those old school fans and I think Daggerfall was clearly the best game in the saga, and it has been getting worse since then.

Morrowind (Elder Scrolls III) is a very good game, and definitely worth buying. It still has the flexibility and freedom that made Daggerfall great, as well as a complex plot with lots of factions that you can join. However, the world design philosophy is different. The dungeons are no longer so huge and randomly generated, all the map is crafted by hand. This means that there is more attention to detail, but anyway I preferred the sheer hugeness of Daggerfall. Compared to that, Morrowind felt just small (it's still bigger than most games from other franchises, though). The character creation system was also not as deep as Daggerfall's, and we hardcore CRPG fans like our character creation systems. And the immersion, although very good, was not as good as Daggerfall because Daggerfall's soundtrack must be one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time (despite being plain MIDI). So my personal evaluation of Morrowind is: very good game, very respectable, but quite worse than Daggerfall at least for me (I'm aware that other people prefer the hand-crafted attention to detail to the vastness of the randomly-generated world, and I can understand that opinion, but I know plenty of CRPG's that have that attention to detail and Daggerfall was giving me something different, that no other CRPG had, and Morrowind abandoned).

As for Oblivion (Elder Scrolls IV), unfortunately, I think it's just crap. I'm really sad to have to say this, because I had an enormous respect for the Elder Scrolls saga, but I'm afraid they just screwed up with this one. The graphics are impressive, the world is really nice, but the game just feels bland and uninteresting. And the reason for this can pretty much be summed up in two words: level scaling. Enemies in the game are adjusting according to your level, which kills all the excitement in the game. You can go slay the hugest enemies when you're level 1 because their strength will be according to your level (and they will drop crappy items, too); and when you're high-level you have to be careful of even the lamest enemies, and even the same petty bandits you fought at the beginning will be on par with you and drop posh armour. So there is no longer the thrill of going to a red dragon lair, getting slaughtered, and wondering how you're going to defeat it... returning 20 levels later to crush all the dragons.

I must say that I'm not against level scaling in general, but I think if it is applied it must be done with moderation, and it's extremely hard to do it right. ADOM is an example of an excellent game with level scaling, but this is because it applies it in a very slight way: enemies tend to get somewhat tougher over time as they get experienced, but in the end dragons are still dragons, and rats are still rats (and anyway the thing still has its drawbacks... google uberjackal effect). In Oblivion, they applied level scaling up to a point where every location in the world has the same difficulty, and where you are never surprised by finding an out-of-depth item or monster because everything is uniform, and this makes the game feel just dull. In fact, the best way to finish the game (I haven't tried it personally, but there are numerous accounts all over the internet) is trying not to level and staying all the time at level 1, for God's sake. That's a flawed design if I've ever seen one.

I wouldn't recommend you to play Oblivion unless you're a game designer and you have a professional interest in seeing what not to do, and how to totally screw up a game that could be great by a couple of horrible design choices. It's also a curious example of a game that gets top scores in the reviews but then bores the hell out of actual players, simply because the first impressions are great (they were great for me, too) until you begin to realise that there is something terribly wrong with the gameplay, which c

My favorite Rogue-like will always be Ancient Domains of Mystery. The control system is so much better than Nethack.

Personally, I love both Nethack and Angband. Why limit yourself to just one? ADOM deserves mention here, too, as do the *band variants (ToME, ZAngband & Enteroband are all personal *band variant favorites).

There's no reason you can't play them all. Some, like ADOM, are very well-developed. It has the most 'plot' of them all, IMHO. But I wouldn't want to be limited to playing just one of them!

So far, I've beaten everything except Angband (unless you count watching that Borg winner, but the Angband Borg is another story, and a very cool bit of AI!)

I linked all those variants up for you because I want to encourage people to play these games. And if you're stuck, I like to read spoilers. Some people help that, but they REALLY help you appreciate the depth of the games, IMHO. If you don't like that, though, don't read them. But there are lots of crazy things about what resistances you need, or what gear is important, or even what to wish for that are really hard to figure out. I mean, how many would notice that herbs grow in a pattern according to Conway's game of Life? That's important if you want to farm them (what did you think farmers were good at, other than polearms?).

Anyhow, these are rich & fun games that shouldn't be ignored just because you think text based interfaces are too retro. Good times, all around :)

I have an ATI Radeon 9500 ASC. It lets me get 1000 fps in Nethack.

Unless you get bored instantly with those shallow shooters.

Everything you say above is relative. I've been playing ADOM for years, and I'm still not bored of it. It doesn't have any illustrations, sounds, or animations at all.

Also, no one says that even if you need all those people, that they have to get paid. I just got hooked on Battle for Wesnoth, a completely free fantasy strategy/tactics game, involving around 400 volunteers doing music, graphics, and code. Very polished.

Finally, it's quite obvious that you can make a lot of money doing video games, involving all these people and paying them good wages, since otherwise we wouldn't have had a flourishing industry for over 20 years, producing a massive amount of games every year, selling them for outrageous prices, in a world of rampant piracy.

I am looking forward to JADE, a roguelike, successor of ADOM.

http://www.adom.de/

ADOM - Ancient Domains of Mystery

http://www.adom.de/

You would not believe how much detail can go into a rogue-like game. I've been playing this for years and still haven't gotten more than 25% through. And that's *with* the online spoilers.

Fun article that definitely made me a bit misty-eyed for ye olde days. However, its unfortunate that the article paints roguelikes as being firmly past-tense. In terms of pure dungeon crawl hack-n-slash, roguelikes have persisted, grown in interesting directions, and remain vibrant today.

You misspelled http://www.adom.de/ ;)

My favorite roguelike remains Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM). It's closed source and written by one guy, so while it's not as large as a group project like Nethack, it has a focus and polish to it that's very impressive. For me, it's the only game on the planet that might just be soaring into the quadruple digits in hours played over my lifetime, and yet I've only actually beat it 4 or 5 times. There's not many games that can make me jump up, dance around the room, and phone some gamer friends to gloat when the ending screen finally rolls around.

Isn't that a quote from ADOM (which of course is vastly superior)?

I wonder if nethack can be coded to an MMORPG ;-)

You jest, but the author of the best rogue-like game, ADOM, is working on a massively multiplayer version called Jade. I think there's a market of nostalgic text-based RPG players out there who would be all over this kind of thing. I've always found that as the sexiness of an online game's graphics decline, the number of jackasses decrease and the number of thoughtful, interesting roleplayers increase accordingly.

I wonder if nethack can be coded to an MMORPG ;-)

You jest, but the author of the best rogue-like game, ADOM, is working on a massively multiplayer version called Jade. I think there's a market of nostalgic text-based RPG players out there who would be all over this kind of thing. I've always found that as the sexiness of an online game's graphics decline, the number of jackasses decrease and the number of thoughtful, interesting roleplayers increase accordingly.

You, sir, need to turn in your geek badge. Aparantly, you don't play NetHack or ADOM

I didn't DL the game from here http://www.adom.de/ but it looks like the official site. I got it from dosgames.com. Anywyz... choose your own adventure! It's better than a book because at my job it looks like I'm working instead of reading a book.

ADOM is addictive. I've been playing for five years and have yet to win, though... *Sigh* http://www.adom.de/

adom of course. There's no better game, even though I've recently bought 6600 GT (because I need dualhead DVI for development). And even though nexuiz works pretty well on my debian system under 1600x1200, with 70 FPS.

next question, this one was easy.

They have Grues in ADoM.

You want plot and quests in a Rogue-like? Try ADOM. Available from http://www.adom.de/

There are two features of Rogue-like games I'd like to see implemented in modern hack-and-slashes:

(1) The ability to die without being a moron.
Seriously, unless you try to screw up, most hack n slash games are a breeze. I haven't played a single one where there is fear of what's behind the corner, the difficulty is always tailored to the strength of your character. There's nothing quite like worrying about your Level 5 Troll Monk bumping into a Greater Moloch in "A Nondescript Cave."

(2) Variability.
The gameplay is always the same. How about some more options for character races and classes? How about race differences affecting gameplay? I like to customize my characters in more ways than just selecting from a skill tree.

I seem to enjoy this more than NetHack or Moria. Not sure why, just one of those things I suppose. It beat out HL2 for attention many times - especially after I had beaten HL2. RLGs are great. Different game every time. http://www.adom.de/

In fact, second person games really exist. like ADOM (http://www.adom.de/), which tells you what have you done all the time along: You feel slightly exhausted today. You enter Terinyo, a tiny hamlet. You hit the large dog and slightly wound it. You feel very very bad. You die...

At the other end of the spectrum though, you will have large companies that have a pile of internal applications that run exclusively on Win32, making a move to Linux extremely difficult or largely pointless if they needed to use QEmu/VMWare on every PC just to run their internal applications. This is where Wine really shines, for applications that are needed, but have a low chance of being ported to Linux, and for which no native application exists. In the future they may decide to rewrite the applications to be native to Linux, but the chances of doing that as a part of the initial transion are low, as the time required to develop and test such applications is generally non-trivial.

I think in general, Wine is one of the catalysts for Linux adoption, which, ironically, will at the same time will cause it's own irrelevance at an accelerated rate. Without Wine, Linux adoption would be much slower than it is right now, even if only initially, people like to stick with what they're familiar with. Every person I know who has tried out Linux (including myself), has attempted to run the programs they used to use under Wine. I can also point out that they usually find native applications that replace the functionality of the programs they were running under Wine. I certainly did, and I no longer have a use for Wine, I've been running Linux exclusively for about 2 years now.

The one sticking point for a lot of users is still games however. Few Win32 games will ever be ported to Linux, and finding native games that can act as a replacement can be very difficult except for some of the most popular games, for example, the Civilization series => FreeCiv. Not to say that there aren't any games available for Linux, but if there was no Wine, the list would be significantly shortened, and many of the games that people want to play have no equivalant.

I don't think Wine will ever be completely irrelevant, but as it gets better, it will drive itself that way.

You mean similar to this?
http://www.adom.de/adom/gallery/adom.jpg

YES!! ADoM is such a great game. Underappreciated, though.

You forgotten to mention ADOM.

Those wishing for a more consistent Roguelike world -- indeed, it has an extensive overland map -- and a pretty interesting story besides (if you survive long enough to start to learn it) ought to try Thomas Biskup's Ancient Domains of Mystery, or ADOM for short. As devious as Nethack and SLASH-EM can be, I'm always pulled back to ADOM's imperiled world, which is also ridiculously deep and as such a blast to learn. Note that while the game is free, the source is closed (largely in order to prevent the development of variants inconsistent with the author's vision of the world and the monsters that inhabit it) and as of yet there are no OSX or Amiga ports.

ADOM!

The cure to Nethack addiction.

ADOM was a great game. I really should go back and play it again. Did he ever release the source like he said he was going to?

For those who don't know ADOM is a roguelike game which is entirely rendered in ascii text in a terminal window.

What always drew me to roguelikes was the fact that, without flashy graphics, they had to depend entirely on their playability and depth of content in order to gain popularity. In other words, if your character is just an at-sign and your BFG is just the text "(right hand) BFG" in inventory, then something other than the picture of a hulking muscular guy holding a large phalic symbol spewing forth glowing bolts of death has to be there to keep you playing... In the case of ADOM it was an intricate quest system that spanned an entire countryside, and involved several dungeons, towns and special areas. The magic system was awesome and the HUGE list of playable races and classes was just great.

I also recommend Nethack, Angband, Omega and even the relatively light Larn.

But for non-graphical RPGs, just stick to the rogue-likes, and you'll be happy.

Take Ancient Domains of Mystery - This is a roguelike game in every sense of the word, and the only maps that are static are the world map, towns, and a select few dungeon floors.

There is only one pure level-up dungeon, the rest all have limitations and hard-coded stuff - ie the first dungeon will always have 7 floors, and it's associated quest will climax at that point. The floor layouts are always random, and in a roguelike game (where death is permanent) not having the same floorplan all the time is a GREAT benefit - I doubt I'd have half as much fun with it after the first 5 times through the beginnings of the game.

I own a speccy, a QL and a Z88 (those are the Sinclair machines, I own more computers in total). I did indeed know that there were cartridges available for the interfaces, and had you read my post before replying to it you would have known this. Here, just for you I'll give you another try.

You may be thinking of the very very VERY small number of cartridge games (i.e. 2) that were available for extensions like the multiface, etc.

Now even if irony's a difficult concept for you to grasp, the fact that I mentioned the cartridge games ought to be a giveaway that I knew the cartridge games existed. You mentioned two games, I mentioned two games, I believe we are in brilliant agreement. However, I believe (having used the site for a number of years) that most of the WoS stuff is either RAM snapshots or audio tape image files. Not ROMs :-) Anyway, let's move on from that.

My sister's just got a PS2; it's reasonably nice but I think I'll stick with Chuckie Egg on the Dragon 32 for now. Oh and The Ring of Darkness, the game that was then what ADOM and nethack would like to be now.

Check this out. It's ADOM (another Roguelike game), and statically rendered scenes, but there you go.

without graphics card requirement is... ADOM. Nice interface, with inventory, and esp. missle combat. Also has a nice, busy newsgroup of devoted followers @ rec.games.roguelike.adom

Something like this?

W

ADOM is a much better rogue-like.

It's witty, addictive, great fun and runs on pretty much on all specs.

I'm still waiting for the OS X port, though.

How about ADOM. Its a great Rogue like game. Addictive as heck as well. Here it is

ADOM(Ancient Domains Of Mystery) FYI it's the same sort of text-based thing as Nethack, but a bit harder

I think the best you're going to get are Rogue-like games. I'd recommend ADOM. You might also try shockwave.com, they actually have some pretty interesting puzzle games.

If all else fails, there's always the Playstation Portable...

I really doubt it. QuickBasic 5 is an extremely limiting language - it's Basic, for Christ's sake, and Basic is a messy language regardless of what dialect you're using.

Games with simple ascii graphics can actually be a lot of fun - give nethack or adom a try.

ADOM is one of my favorites, it fits on a floppy disk and is free, takes a long time to beat, and is avalible on Linux/Windows and other OSs

Really, I haven't played Nethack since I found Adom and Angband. Angband is themed much better than others and it's easier to get into a fantasy mood in Angband than in others. (Think of Nethack: dragons, tourists and Keystone cops in the same game? Come on.)

By the way, has anybody yet found a good sci-fi roguelike? I've seen some in development but none of them were playable yet.

NetHack is sure a nice game, but I prefer ADOM. The two games are very similar, but I love all the little things that make Adom different :)

nethack is ok... but ADOM rules! http://www.adom.de check it out it is just like nethack only it is like 293824y7 times as deep

ADOM is a great game. Its a Rouge-like, similar to Nethack, except that it has an interactive storyline, tons of NPCs, towns, villages, and more. I actually like ADOM better than Nethack, as far as gameplay is concerned. However, ADOM is only free as in beer (runs on Linux too). On the other hand, Nethack is free in every way.

Hi,

I'm going to unabashedly karma whore for a second because Nethack is my favourite game ever. I can't tell you the number of hours I wasted playing this (or other rogue-like games, such as rogue, larn, adom, or omega).

Here are some links to get you all started:

Nethack.org

One of the first and best Nethack pages, from the legenday Boudewijn Waijers

another Nethack homepage

A newer Nethack page

QT Nethack

An impressive graphical Nethack

The google Roguelike directory entry

the classic rec.games.roguelike.nethack

Happy hacking!