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Because those are the "whoa! awsm graphics!1" milestones.
Real gameplay milestones are something else

http://nethack.alt.org/ has online play, though it is just sharing of bones, and watching other people.
telnet nethack.alt.org.

Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!

Filthy casual. I been there, done that, shit was cash

NetHack, preferrably on a public server
Years of time can be wasted

Game starts.

You take two steps.

You have died of dysentery. There is no explanation why this happened.

It doesn't take long before you search for something else that's a much better embodiment of fun.

Yeah, like a rouge-like http://alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html

Indeed. I still play Nethack. One day I'll win... one day....

And I play the terminal version (not the slash'em or other improved versions.) :) I just like the game a bunch... and forget Demon Souls and Dark Souls... you want crushing difficulty, play Nethack. ...and get off my lawn! :)

Nethack ftfw! In 10+ years of playing Nethack I have ascended exactly once (a Wizard). I have this masochistic tradition where I spend every Friday the 13th playing Nethack. Nethack is hard enough without a -1 Luck handicap, lol.

My own variant AceHack (which has been unexpectedly Slashdotted, it seems; I'm glad I'm not hosting it myself) is designed to improve the interface, while keeping the gameplay the same or slightly easier. (Most of the other variants are indeed designed to make the game more complex/harder.) It's also something of a protest against the way that vanilla NetHack is effectively unmaintained nowadays; although it is apparently still being developed (I've got replies to bug reports as recently as last week, including descriptions of what they changed in response), the repositories aren't public, and so nobody can actually benefit from the changes. So I'm trying to make an improved version without, hopefully, offending too many people (although some of the changes have still managed to annoy subsets of players; that's typical of anything, I guess). This tournament is quite healthy for the game's ecosystem, in a way; rather than playing vanilla over and over again, it can advertise some of the more actively and publicly developed variants, and also the public servers on which many of the community play nowadays. (In particular, telnet://nethack.alt.org, or http://alt.org/nethack, is one of the most popular public servers nowadays, and many people play there in preference to locally; it's just one of the servers on which the tournament can be played.) So in summary, the major advantage of the forks is that (other than SporkHack) at least they're still under development in a way that people can actually play them, unlike vanilla. My own fork AceHack is unfinished and still in alpha (SporkHack and UnNetHack have both had releases, and at least Un is likely to have more releases in the future), and we've been trading code and ideas between the forks reasonably freely.

Actually it is. Have you played it? Probably not--thought so.

Flamebait. Yes I own it. Would you talk to your parents like that? If not, then don't talk in a tone like that. Also don't be PC and say but I don't have parents! It's a hypothetical question, i.e, what if.

Uh what? That was completely unintelligble and made no sense.

Amnesia, while an amazing game, is simply a point-and-click game.

Oversimplifying the game. Also off-topic.

No, not off-topic. Completely on-topic. Your response: "Amnesia is a casual game." My reponse: "It is a casual game." Yes, very off-topic. And yes, it really is. It has no other mechanic than looking through rooms, opening doors, experiencing a story, etc. Adventure games: identical. There is no other game mechanic found in other games like RPGs (massive amount of items, leveling,combat), strategy games (building of units, strategy, currency and resource management), shooters (different weapons, different ammo, sometimes level building, and multiplayer). You're 110% wrong here.

And again, my point exactly. Strawman arguments. You dwell on one word, the "casual" one, when my entire argument was about Linux not having a realistic business market.

Ah here we go. Finally some meat, but with something ad-hominem.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/amnesiathedarkdescent/news.html?sid=6286090 -- buy once, play everywhere.
http://www.humblebundle.com/ check the Linux graph, it's significant. Again, buy once, play everywhere.
The Unreal Tournament series were also ported to Linux, until a few years ago.
The wikipedia article on Linux games (there are many, and games like Nethack are played daily [citation: http://alt.org/nethack/perday.html, able to play locally].)

You proved my point 1000%. Did you even read what you wrote? It's the same 6-7 games Linux zealots mention *every* single time *every* single year, oh for the past how many years now?

And nethack? Are you serious? A game that's how many years old? 25

Are you listening to yourself? Because you're just proving my point so easily it's like you're just walking into it.

My point is that there ARE games that sell well, and also run on Linux, but as lots of people point out, nobody really does ports because it's not "established." A Valve establishment would be a great boon for Linux gaming.

And as your post has shown, that is 100% wrong.

Yea, totally worth the X millions devoted to development, marketing, production, art direction, distribution, etc., for Linux

Take your false cynicism and bitterness and educate yourself. The only extra cost is development: artwork, models, particles, etc. don't change. There wouldn't be a chicken and egg problem if more people did double ports to Mac and Linux instead.

Only cost? yes artwork doesn't change. Only just about *everything* else. So again, there are millions of extra dollars needed, work, resources, and man-power. But that doesn't count, right!

Actually it is. Have you played it? Probably not--thought so.

Flamebait. Yes I own it. Would you talk to your parents like that? If not, then don't talk in a tone like that. Also don't be PC and say but I don't have parents! It's a hypothetical question, i.e, what if.

Amnesia, while an amazing game, is simply a point-and-click game.

Oversimplifying the game. Also off-topic.

And again, my point exactly. Strawman arguments. You dwell on one word, the "casual" one, when my entire argument was about Linux not having a realistic business market.

Ah here we go. Finally some meat, but with something ad-hominem.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/amnesiathedarkdescent/news.html?sid=6286090 -- buy once, play everywhere.
http://www.humblebundle.com/ check the Linux graph, it's significant. Again, buy once, play everywhere.
The Unreal Tournament series were also ported to Linux, until a few years ago.
The wikipedia article on Linux games (there are many, and games like Nethack are played daily [citation: http://alt.org/nethack/perday.html, able to play locally].)
My point is that there ARE games that sell well, and also run on Linux, but as lots of people point out, nobody really does ports because it's not "established." A Valve establishment would be a great boon for Linux gaming.

Yea, totally worth the X millions devoted to development, marketing, production, art direction, distribution, etc., for Linux

Take your false cynicism and bitterness and educate yourself. The only extra cost is development: artwork, models, particles, etc. don't change. There wouldn't be a chicken and egg problem if more people did double ports to Mac and Linux instead.

A game isn't fun if I'm scrambling to read the manual every 5 minutes to make sure I'm doing something right.

http://alt.org/nethack/perday.html Nethack called, thousands disagree.

Achievements are fun as long as they don't get too extreme. There's a roguelike game called Nethack see here and to make the game more fun people came up with 'achievements', i.e. ascending (winning) without reading (illiterate). Eating only plant-based foods (vegetarian/vegan). Completely ignoring the gods. (atheist). Attacking indirectly only (pacifist) etc.
It's actually a lot of fun to watch someone else play when they're going for an achievement. It adds replayability in this case, because each one encourages you to play the game differently. However achievements that are like 'kill 20 gazillion locusts' (ok maybe not) don't add replayability at all! They just add a grind job to the game.
Most importantly though, these achievements actually take skill to get. Roguelikes are so punishing that beating them with any kind of special ruleset is extremely challenging and therefore it's more fun. What part of grinding to kill a gazillion _insert monster name here_ requires extreme skill?
The achievements as they are set up today don't show off your skill, they show off your free time.

Yes, you can: http://alt.org/nethack/soiled/

No, Diablo 1 also has a lot of the same features too with regards to item/dungeon/monster randomization, difficulty settings, with the main differences in the character classes. By your own logic, you're saying that Diablo 2, roguelike or hack and slash game for that matter has no replay value. Yet, people have ascended in nethack multiple times and continue to do play it to this day.

If these are games with no replay value, what the hell kind of game do you consider that has tons of replay value?

Gee; I should get these guys to buy my lottery tickets for me.

And it certainly can be considered a web game

You own the software to an extent. You can download the source code for several parts (albeit, not all) of the TiVo system directly from TiVo, including many of their tools (and their modified PowerPC Linux kernel, obviously, to be fully GPL compliant). And there are plenty of user-provided modifications out there to do things like make a TiVo pull from xmltv (so that a TiVo can work in places where TiVo listings are not available) and so on.

Here is a decent list of TiVo hacking resources. Sure, you invalidate your warranty, but if you rip apart something and rebuild it, it's not really rational to expect the company -- who have no way of knowing what you have done, how you have done it, and so on -- to still provide support for it or a replacement.

Death by Snu Snu- classic.
No wonder it's #1 on Nethack.
http://alt.org/nethack/top.php

NetHack isn't that hard. [...] I haven't ascended yet. I've come close twice

Err, right..

On the nethack.alt.org server, the record for ascension streak is IIRC 23 straight ascensions, some with conducts. So although luck plays a part in all games, it's not as big as you think, and ascending with 95% certainty can be done, just as long as you keep paying attention.

Marvin is really in a class of his own. http://alt.org/nethack/ascstreak.html lists ascension streaks. Note that it drops off very quickly.

For plenty of Nethack fatalities, check out rec.games.roguelike.nethack, and search for either YASD (Yet Another Stupid Death) or YAAD (Yet Another Annoying Death).

Also, check out the Top Deaths List at alt.org.

As many may know, one can play Nethack on a publicly-viewable server at nethack.alt.org. There is also a group project to play through and obtain as many unique deaths in Nethack as possible on a shared account called DeathRobin. For the curious, one can check on his progress here. The character was started as one of several shared accounts on the IRC channel #nethack on the Freenode network.

As many may know, one can play Nethack on a publicly-viewable server at nethack.alt.org. There is also a group project to play through and obtain as many unique deaths in Nethack as possible on a shared account called DeathRobin. For the curious, one can check on his progress here. The character was started as one of several shared accounts on the IRC channel #nethack on the Freenode network.

Right, that's a good reason to ban the Windows build of NetHack.

Well you can stil telnet to play a game of nethack at nethack.alt.org or even use java and go here to play a game.

The Legend of Zelda
Wasteland
Nethack on alt.org
Star Control II

Maybe something like this : http://alt.org/nethack/topdeaths.html

If you want to archive stuff off the TiVo, just hack it, put it on your LAN, and extract the video to your PC. It only takes a couple hours to set up, if you own a Torx screwdriver and you know how to burn ISOs and install hard drives. For the price of this Sony unit, you could upgrade your TiVo's hard drive and buy a new DVD burner.

• A monster. As in, loss of hit points from getting attacked by a monster. This is the biggie; probably 95% of deaths are due to this, and even experienced players die most often to these.
  
• Starvation. But once you know you can eat monster corpses, and once you know about everyone's friend, the #pray command, this almost never happens. That leads us to....
  
• Food poisoning. But again, once you know never to eat a corpse that hasn't been killed in the last, say, 20-or-so moves, this never happens.
  
• Choking on food. Again, just never eat when full.
  
• (Actual) poisoning. Whether from poisonous monsters, poisonous arrows, or poisoning traps (arrow, dart, spiked pits). This is the second most common cause of death, even among experienced players. Gaining poison resistance is an important early-game goal.
  
• Paralysis from smacking a floating eyte. If you ever see a cause of death that reads "Killed by a newt, while helpless," this is why.
  
• Monsterous insta-death. Primary among these sources is the lowly, yet potent, cockatrice. A little care goes a long way in dealing with these.

Patches for the S2 EEPROM/PROM were released last November. For those without a way to reprogram the PROM, a version of (two-kernel) monte has also been released. With monte-mips, you can reload any kernel you want by launching it from one of their "secure" kernels with known vulnerabilities. So there are numerous ways to get into the box. It's just these ways aren't as user-friendly as before.

We need to come together and paaaaaarty! :-)

Really, that's the only solution to this problem. Probably, this is something we are going to see more frequently, so frequently perhaps that it may undermine the free software community's credibility. Therefore, we must come together and meet, and exchange signatures, so that at least we can ensure that they software is signed by its maintainer.

Now, go and get registered at Biglumber, sign up to the keysignings list and start organizing keysigning parties. Also, make sure that you meet other hackers when you're out travelling.

However, people would probably not fetch the public key from the same place, but from a keyserver. That helps a bit, but not a lot. There is nothing that stops anyone from generating a keypair with the same name and address as the original source, and quite possibly, you would see the file verified, but still by the wrong key.

Even if you would have two public keys, you would have no idea which one to trust. So, signing is no magic bullet.

We have to get much better at organizing keysigning parties. Keysigning parties are really the key (yeah, pun intended, puns are cool! :-) ) to this problem.

Gather friends every now and then, make sure you have a printout on you fingerprint on you at all times, whenever you travel, try to find somebody to meet, and so on. That way, we will build a web of trust which is so strong, people can identify valid keys, and then we're an awful lot better prepared to face this kind of problems.

Make sure you sign up at Biglumber, that you check it when you're out travelling, and that you subscribe to the "keysignings" list to keep up to date when things are happening in you area.

And, then, I'd really like to see my distro check sigs by default.

Yeah, and my keyid is 6A6A0BBC.

Hey,
Here are some cool gpg links:
http://biglumber.com

key Signing Mailing List

Encrypt!!!