Slashdot Mirror

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

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

Actually we peaked with NetHack. It's been a while, admittedly, but then again, you guys never had a peak anywhere near that high

Personally, I'm much more a fan of character creation and item discovery than the actual hack-and-slash or story parts, but it's all pretty fun for me.

Then I've got a game for you, and it's 100% less expensive than Diablo III.

Behold: http://www.nethack.org/

Agreed, any puzzle game is lame compared to the puzzles we face when programming.

To contribute anecdotal information, it seems that programmers (sample size: one, me) love racing games and NetHack (actually a very big puzzle but so varied that it's hard to think of it as such). They spent some time playing sokoban, a much smaller puzzle. They rarely play programming related games with the exception of Core Wars back in the '80s. They think Rubik's Cube is cool but can't remember anymore the solution studied on a magazine 20+ years ago and they disdain sudoku. You don't play sudoku, that's computer work. If you really have to mess with it you program a computer to solve it (but it's NP-Complete).

Nethack or GTFO!

I dont see those participating in Humble Indie Bundle with problems in marketing... in fact, they are making a good money

Big publishers releases today are mostly just remakes of the same games, with better graphics... in fact, many times the game is even less fun to play, because "all" the development work was put in the graphic and very little on new ideas, the game story, bug fix, balance or simply in the fun of playing!

That is also why humble indie have lots success, most of the games are original and very fun to play, even if sometimes the graphics arent the state or art.

Taking things to extreme, to show that what is important is the fun to play, nethack and Dwarf Fortresshave almost no graphic feedback, yet are very famous, fun to play and people play it for years, even decades!

Not everyone (and dare I say most people) don't want to play a game where you get grazed in the leg with a bullet and your movement becomes entirely awkward, your character develops some sort of infection and then his leg needs to be amputated in the middle of the jungle with charlies everywhere, then being required to finish the rest of the game with one leg. (surely one person will reply to this begging for that)

And for those who do, there already is nethack and DwarfFortress.

This nethack game is easy: all the stairs are right next to the entrance. I've been playing this game for a few minutes and I'm already way down in here. Hey, what's a floating eye?

Losing is Fun!

What do you mean, everyone in the Fortress committed suicide because one child's pet cat fell down a hole? Well... the cat broke its leg, the leg got infected, the pet cat died, the girl had a tantrum and stopped drinking so died. Then so did her parents. Then all their friends. Except the ones who went berserk from seeing the girl's ghost and started punching other people. Yeah, they may have all been a little on edge...

so when can I start to play nethack ( http://www.nethack.org/ ) on an arm phone? ;)

"Elbereth" is mentioned in the Guidebook. That's the long document you might want to read.

http://nethack.org/v343/Guidebook.html

Nethack would probably get NC17 (or whatever their equivalent is) because it has:

1) Drugs (Magic mushrooms and potions that make you hallucinate),
2) Incubi and Succubi that have (implied) sex with you,
3) Violence against police* (the "keystone cops" that show up if you directly steal from a shop),
4) Cannibalism,
5) Sex changes, and
6) Devil worship and human sacrifice--by the player!**

Yet the whole thing is done with ascii character "graphics", and is purely tongue-in-cheek, and is about as dangerous for the kiddies as a Warner Brothers cartoon.

* This could have actually gotten it banned entirely under a short-lived California law.
** Don't try this unless you're playing a chaotic character--but still...

You want nethack.

(Or, if you value your free time, you don't)

Most certainly easier nowadays. I have completed WOW about 5 times in the last few years. I have been playing http://www.nethack.org/v343/nethack for more than half of my life, (I am over 50) and I still haven't won!

perhaps nethack would be a fun game for you. It's acknowledged by blizzard as inspiration for diablo, and it's a pretty fucking awesome game otherwise.

Clearly you have never played the finest of them.

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.

See Nethack

I don't dispute that most apps designed for older versions of windows run okay on newer versions, but you haven't given any evidence at all as to why this might be true. Just to play devil's advocate, linux runs any X11 app and that goes back decades and decades (e.g., nethack is from 1985). Also, often apps that runs on OS X can run on any version of OS X but there were some changes between point releases but I don't know of an app that fails to run on new versions. Also, the X11 server lets you run any linux or unix program that uses that as well. If you have an app that runs on OS 9, you can run that in classic mode (which I believe they stopped including for leopard, but I'm not sure), and that takes us back to 1999. Finally, I have all kinds of DOS or windows 3.11 apps that don't run well or at all on windows any more, even in emulation mode. We also used to have some kind of VB app that only ran on windows 95 and refused to run on anything else. Most of these are scientific software packages for driving instruments or interfacing with specific hardware, but not always.

I know you windows fanboys hate to hear it, but contrary to being perfect, windows does break backwards compatibility sometimes with new releases, AND there are other operating systems that achieve similar or greater (in the case of linux) backwards compatibility to their predecessors.

I would not even call ascii primitive audiovisuals. It is more of a abstraction. And it enourages developers to work on important stuff: gameplay. And if game is fun without graphics, you just hit jackpot.

But of course awesome things happen if someone manages to take that roguelike core and adds fitting graphics ( Diablo series. )

Nethack has a Qt tileset that lets you distinguish objects that would be represented by the same character at a glance.

That being said, I do miss the tightness in the stomach whenever I saw a "D".

Without Rogue there would be no Nethack and no Dwarf Fortress.

And I could probably have used all that time to write a frakkin' book or something, instead of zapping ghosts with a wand of polymorph or dropping merchant caravans into lava just to see what would happen.

It started when I reformatted my drive and started using Linux exclusively and gave up TV about 10 years ago. Up until then, I used to buy games and had game consoles around. I last remember playing Metal Gear Solid like a man obsessed and getting a sound beating or two playing Starcraft online.

On Linux, there were plenty of games - GNU Chess, Same Gnome and so forth. There was no buying any games for Linux at that time, so I learned to like these games a lot. I imagine people must have had a similar experience with Microsoft's Solitaire.

When I got married, my wife needed a Windows machine to access work applications, so we had a Windows machine and I could purchase games again if I were inclined. But, it just didn't occur to me to buy games anymore. I found free games to be more interesting in some respects because they didn't have money for graphics, so they focused more on other things. This isn't knocking professionally created games. In my experience they're great, I just wasn't looking for them at this point.

I tried playing games that won The Interactive Fiction Competition because I remember playing Zork back when I was young. I couldn't get into text adventures anymore, but I think it is worth exploring.

I had played Civilization before too. So, I tried freeciv, which led to other free turn-based games like Battle for Wesnoth and even returning to older games like Nethack.

I then went on to try independent games that you had to pay a small amount for, like those made by Positech.

I also tried Second Life and similar and found them to be glorified IRC chat rooms.

I'm getting into this history because I think it raises an interesting question. Why would anyone buy Halo III when they have never played the the first one? Particularly, if someone can buy the earlier editions for a fraction of their original cost now, and they would likely enjoy them as much as most people did the first time they played them, why not start there?

You may not be as extreme an example as I am, but I bet there are older games, free games or low-priced independent games that you have never played and would like. So, why are you buying the newest WOW expansion set (and paying the subscription fees) or HALO 3 - as soon as it comes out? Is it that you are so involved in these games? I can understand that because the one game I have purchased was Sid Meyer's Pirates - again, partially because I had played it before and liked it a lot. But, I don't want to assume that is true of everyone.

What about a new game? It's one thing to get the new Grand Theft Auto. It's another to get a totally new game. How do you decide to go with something just released - rather than buy something older that you haven't played before? Is it about having the newest and greatest in graphical features? What's the appeal?

Maybe you are such a hard core gamer that you've played most new games. But given the amount of time they require - is this really so? Maybe it is playing with friends, a la Quake. Maybe it's checking the review on Gamespot or Slashdot. Since I don't play them, I don't know. So was wondering if someone can offer a clue.

I guess part of my question is that I am looking at new things to try. I know there are a lot of good games out there that I haven't played. So, why would I be interested in these new models of game production or even new games? What do you suggest? What games do you think everyone should know? Is there a great game out there that you think most gamers have missed?

For example, I remember reading about one game in Slashdot where you are a pencil or something and you role around and things stick to you - something from Japan. I've also heard someone that taught fo

NetHack.

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.

What part of open source is confusing you?

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 can't seem to figure out why some many people (usually MS haters) claim that Windows Mobile crashes consistently. I've had my phone for years and have only had to reset it about 12 times. Windows Mobile likes to keep apps open, but if you get MagicButton or any similar task manager, you can make programs actually close. This improves the performance and the stability quite a bit. And while I haven't done any heavy statistical analysis, I've found the built in Excel to be capable of meeting my needs (quick spreadsheet to track boxes of girl scout cookies sold for my daughter, a spreadsheet to help calculate loan costs of cars when shopping for a new one, etc.). Not a lot of need for Word and PowerPoint, so I can't speak to those.

Growing up with a C64 and then DOS of all flavors and even Windows 3.x, I'm used to limits of an operating system (and before you raise too many flames, how many programs can you run on an iPhone......). If those limits mean that I can't have 20 programs running at once, I'm ok with that. If you live within the limits, the OS is usually very stable and performant. Sure Windows Mobile isn't the worlds greatest OS, but I don't think it's as bad as the bashers like to claim. I think that it's smaller requirements would make it perfect for a NetBook because, let's face it, a NetBook isn't supposed to be your only computer. It's supposed to be something that is portable to be connected anywhere and allow for limited work. My phone (HTC Wizard) is already capable of meeting those basic needs and the newer versions (HTC Touch, HTC [next]) even more so.

Good uses of a Netbook:
Taking notes - Can do with Word Mobile
Surfing the web - Can do with IE (really needs a better browser, though it does technically work -- I've read Slashdot with my phone)
Playing music / video - TCPMP
Play games - yep.....Nethack, anyone: http://www.nethack.org/v343/ports/download-wince.html or maybe Doom http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/Games/Action/Doom-for-Pocket-PC-9834.shtml or Quake http://handheld.softpedia.com/get/Games/Action/Quake-3-Arena-CE-22440.shtml

No Flash support beyond v8 yet (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/updates/8/flashlite2/fl8_flashlite2_1_update.exe), but I would expect it to be supported soon.

Basically, everything I would do with a NetBook works on my phone. Just without the larger screen and the laptop footprint (I've got a real keyboard). For that matter, it even already supports pen input (including OCR), so you could make a convertible NetBook fairly easily.

Layne

...it's even open source.

Also, the graphics had reached a level I consider sufficient to support a good game:
-full 3D engine
-Characters and items were clearly recognizable, not reduced to a crude bunch of pixels like in DOOM due to limited computing resources
-the supported resolutions allowed to check out things at a distance, where earlier games (DOOM again) would make things unrecognizable because they shrinked to a few pixels.

So 2d graphics are insufficient to support a good game? I can think of a few exceptions to that. Even if you want to limit it to RPG/FPS hybrids, check out Ultima Underworld. It predates Wolf3d, and is an excellent game.

Either way the effect is the same -- you'll get your gaming without DRM, because they'll protect the game in an alternative manner, using all sorts of things that also piss you off. Monthly fees, phone home activation, and micropayments sound like great ideas to you? Then please, continue boycotting DRMed games to send a message. The message the industry receives might not be the one you think you're sending, though.

That's okay. I will simply not play any game which pisses me off. There's plenty of alternatives, such as Battle for Westnoth or Nethack. Crash and burn, industry.

Computer games are in the "nice to have" -category. They aren't necessary or essential. If the games industry stubbornly keeps on pissing their customers, said customers will simply find other forms of entertainment, and the industry will go bankrupt. And frankly, if it stubbornly continues in a course for which its customers have spelled out their displeasure, it deserves to.

One word: nethack!

I still play NetHack couple times a month. Excellent.

http://www.nethack.org/

And, indeed, the depth of NetHack is impressive.

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20011107&mode=classic

Wake me up when a real computer game like Wolfpack Empire or Nethack shows up on the console. Note both games have text graphics. You can play them on equipment that people would pay you to take off their hands. The point I'm making here is that there's more to games than graphics. Sweeny is focused on the wrong thing as I see it. For example, while the WoW graphics grab people, it's the multiplayer environment that keeps bringing people back to pay that monthly fee.

<cough>

I don't work in IT, but somebody always mentions Nethack http://www.nethack.org/in the comments of these kinds of stories. They often also mention that you can always tell your boss it's a "vi training tool" (if you use vi-keys, which I don't even though I do use vim) Might as well do it myself.

Some games, like Nethack, don't. They work on the honor system.

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game; raise armies and fight battles. Play solo campaigns where you can advance your troops' skills, or play short battles against other players online. http://www.wesnoth.org/

Freeciv is a Civilization clone, also single player or multiplayer online. http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

And if you're willing to go really old-school, nethack is always available; the annual tournament is ongoing in the month of November. Current standings at http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/scoreboard.shtml or enter for free at http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/howitworks.shtml ; you can always telnet to nethack.alt.org to play or download from http://www.nethack.org/

There are all kinds of trophies for smaller achievements, so first-time players can hope to get something but it's still competitive for experienced players--I pulled off 6 ascensions in a row at the June tournament and didn't make the top 3 for most consecutive, so the level of play is quite high.

2D with ascII characters. I still enjoy this game.

http://www.nethack.org/common/index.html

http://www.nethack.org/

2D with ascII characters. I still enjoy this game.

http://www.nethack.org/common/index.html

http://www.nethack.org/

So, looking at the game market, what game titles have been out there that have any level of nudity that can be considered an artistic addition to the story, rather than as a very poor way to try to sell more copies to the young male audience?

Ying Yan! X-Change Alternative, which, ironically, is a porn game. The sex scenes and sexual elements in it are absolutely vital to the plot.

Of course a case may be made that it doesn't really count, being a choose-your-own-adventure rather than what's usually considered a game, but that's a debate for another time.

Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters also has a sex scene, but the cowards censored it by making the screen black out. It isn't quite vital to the plot like X-Change's scenes are, but fits it nonetheless.

Lastly, Nethack has sex scenes with succubi. They are every bit as graphical as the rest of the game. They can have a dramatic effect on the player character, and may mean the difference between winning or losing the game.

I play nethack!

It's perfect for my work because the colored ascii on top of the black background is very similar to my AutoCAD interface. It would take a second glance to notice I'm sacrificing monsters for artifacts instead of creating building elevations and sections. ;-)

I'm sorry, but that was as non-erotic as you can possibly get. If anyone considered it "scoring" that their sim gave a backrub and had a friendly kiss, or worse yet as some pornographic material to choke the chicken to, I'd seriously worry about their mental health. Then they'd probably be as turned on by a bowl of rice.

You underestimate the power of human imagination. I've known people who have masturbated while interacting with a succubus in Nethack: "Time stands still while you and the succubus lay in each others arms...". That text, and the letter @ (the player character) next to the letter & (a demon; a succubus in this case) next to each other in the screen is all it takes.

The phrase "There is someone who is turned on by X" is true for all values of X. There are people who get turned on by bowls of rice; there are people who get turned on by Goatse and Tubgirl; and there are people who get turned on by watching an animated GIF of a cartoon character performing seppuku. By contrast, the guy who gets his kicks from having one Sim perform a backrub on another is positively glowing with mental health. Or is it just the afterglow ?-)...

You don't need to tell a story to be art. I would consider Nethack to be a great work of gaming art. The story is immaterial, the beauty of Nethack is in the rules. It is wonderfully balanced, intricately detailed, and a hell of a lot of fun.

Also, I take issue with your assertion that games have no advantages when it comes to storytelling. They do. Games really allow you to identify with the protagonist more deeply. The story of the reluctant hero is a lot more interesting when you feel like you are that hero.

Maybe you're just playing too many shooters. Go back and play some 90's adventure games. King's Quest 5 and 6 are absolutely exquisite. Or if that's not your style Bioware has made some great RPGs recently. Compare Knights of the Old Republic to Episodes 1-3 and see which tells a better story.

The truth of the matter is that it's a lot easier to add complexity into a text based game

Hence Nethack. The most complex, most detailed, intricate, and damned hard RPG ever written. But oh, it's so worth it when you finally ascend. Nethack is my desert island video game. Assuming the desert island has electricity, I guess.

The flip-side to "pretty" code is good documentation. There are too few programmers out there who can both write elegant code and explain what it does just as elegantly. I have his "The Inform Designer's Manual, Fourth Edition" sitting on my shelf right now, and I can honestly say that it is the only manual that I have had the pleasure of describing as a "page turner".

The code itself is equally impressive. Satiated with (helpful) comments, compiles on virtually any platform, easy to read, follow, and modify as you see fit. There's also a separate "Technical Manual" for those who are interested in modifying the original code.

Let's see... Let's not forget nethack. They thought of everything. :) http://www.nethack.org/

And then there are always those little tidbits of code like this inverse sqrt function that fall into the it just works category. Code that mere mortals such as myself can hardly comprehend - let alone write! http://www.math.purdue.edu/~clomont/Math/Papers/20 03/InvSqrt.pdf

I still find the idea of people being addicted to video games a stretch.

Ever played nethack?

Your comment was hilarious. However, NetHack.

Case in point.... http://www.nethack.org/

nsa_hawk$ nethack

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.

I'd like you to attempt, on just one game, what you're suggesting the ESRB do. Here's a copy of Nethack. =)

Sincerely,

Someone who's pretending to be a constituent.

I feel his pain. I've hit the wall on Nethack; I been playing for a week and I haven't beat it yet.