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I can't believe they failed to mention the greatest computer game of all time, Nethack!!! No history of gaming is complete without it...

# A big plus for me is that arrow keys function correctly. You may laugh, but the version of HPUX vi I used at my old job didn't do this

Use the arrow keys? But then your fingers have to leave the main bit of the keyboard...

Tip: If you are having trouble getting used to hjkl navigation, play Nethack for a while with the Roguelike keyboard bindings. :-)

Interesting point, but I really doubt that this is aimed at the general consumer. It's for Joe Linux, who prides himself on doing nifty tech things with Linux.

Okay, Tux Racer may not be the most amazing thing in the world, but it's fun for a couple hours.

Freeciv...why is freeciv bad? You don't like civilization? There are some differences, but aside from the fact that civ had more artists (and, IMHO, a worse interface) and is a bit easier to use, not huge difference in fun factor.

Lets consider some others:

zangband/ToME/angband/nethack/etc: These *are* a lot of fun. Diablo has much more simplistic, boring gameplay, and it took off all over. Most variants have a pretty simple text or 2d graphics based interface without music, but some are a bit more elaborate. Be a bit of a pain to play on the controller, yes...

Chromium BSU: flashy scrolling shooter. Could use the 3d hardware in the X-box.

Dunno if you can just use ordinary ol' x86 binaries (particularly considering RAM usage), but:

Quake 3 (use the 3d hardware). Not free.

Abuse: This was a *blast* when it came out -- I played it over and over. It's looking a little dated now, but it's still a good game. Free now -- thanks crack.com.

Pingus is apparently shaping up pretty well.

There's part of the amazing Exile series available for Linux. (shareware)

Maelstrom may be too "simple" for you, as it's only an astroids clone, but it was a very well known game on the Mac for a long time, and I still like it.

While I'm not a tremendous fan of Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium II, their Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders is a non-flashy but very deep, very good strategy game. Shareware.

There's a DOS-style shooter from Mountain King Studios, Raptor. (shareware)

Finally, there are all the emulators and whatnot...take a look at GNUboy, TuxNES, snes9x, DGen/SDL,
FreeSCI, Sarien, Exult, XU4, ScummVM, Basilisk II, YAE and others.

There are a host of Loki ports that you can't get any more except used. Lots of good stuff from LGames, though I'm not as big a fan of their stuff as some other people are.

Finally, text-based but really, really sophisticated, good, and almost all of them free, there are text-based interactive fiction (Try Tower of Babel before giving up on this...first one I ever beat without cheating, and it's *soooooo* good). The Interactive Fiction Archive has games and players.

Finally, many good games can be played through WINE -- Starcraft, Fallout, Max Payne, Half Life...

These are just some of the games that I enjoy under Linux. There are lots more (admittedly, some of lower quality) available at the SDL Games Page and the Linux Games Tome.

Linux games usually take a bit more (okay, often a lot :-) ) more effort to set up properly. But they're often very customizable, you can actually have an impact on the game design ("This game needs feature X"), and you don't have to leave the comfortable environs of Linux. And the environment is getting better, not worse.

The graphics for EverQuest are very primitive, yet still capture a person's imagination enough for them to forget about reality and do nothing but play the game.

I think there may be some priot art here...

Trinux, anyone?
but you weren't installing systems with FLOPPY drives, were you. And those CDROMS, set them not bootable and password the bios? Physically lock the case so the CMOS can't be cleared? Just don't include a CDROM?

And that program that doesnt write to the registry or outside of [its own] directory -- I think I have that one.

Bah, who needs more than Nethack anyway?

Insert "back in my day, we had lines of text and we LIKED IT!"-type ranting here...

Finally some players I can frag!

all kidding aside, it seems like there are other games more suited to alternative display technologies.

Point well taken.

But there are a lot of one-man projects that look pretty cool. For example, I thought X-Plane was pretty amazing: looks and sounds pretty nice (at least my old version, the new version looks and sounds even more impressive) and is very realistic.

Then, there are projects like Nethack: Developed by a group, with not too many visual arts or music talents... but the game itself is what counts, and even when it's ASCII or has ugly graphics, the game itself is excellent.

But this, of course, doesn't mean that everyone is instantaneously able to make games like these =)

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.

What about Nethack? Low system requirements, but incredably playable.

Besides, the machines at my work don't have good enough graphics cards to play anything interesting anyway.

There are some very interesting text games like Nethack and GnuGo. Both are free and run on several platforms. And without graphics you're less likely to get caught ;)

Here's the link to Nethack:
Nethack.org

A great tool for switching between games and work on the Unix shell is screen. It comes installed since at least Redhat 6.2, but can also be downloaded and compiled from here

You use 'ctrl-a a' to shift between screens, and can have as many screens as you want. Also, if a net connection goes dead between you and your host, or your machine crashes, type screen -r to return you to your vi, nethack or irc session without missing a beat.

Nethack has Mozilla beat in that respect. The code is a tangled mess of #ifdefs to work around ancient compiler bugs and platform peculiarities. It runs on Windows, DOS, MacOS, OS X, BeOS, OS/2, Atari, Amiga, VMS, and almost any version of Unix.

Someone mentioned iRogue; I'm a fan of that.

There's also NetHack 3.2 for CE. I dunno if that will work on PocketPC or not, not being a pocketpc guy, but I hope so.

What I'd really like is a palm nethack that will sync with my desktop nethack, but the devteam has made it clear a palmtop version is not in the cards.... (though these guys are working on it)

Good luck!

The DOS version has actually had the possibility of a 'real' graphical interface for quite some time already. And according to that page, now even the windows version has it.

Ah yes, progress... not like in the old days anymore... :)

The DOS version has actually had the possibility of a 'real' graphical interface for quite some time already. And according to that page, now even the windows version has it.

Ah yes, progress... not like in the old days anymore... :)

Win32

nh340win.zip (by HTTP)(about 1M)

nh340win.zip (by FTP)(about 1M)

Linux

nh340lin.tgz (by HTTP)(about 1.1M)

nh340lin.tgz (by FTP)(about 1.1M)

NetHack 3.4.0 Linux Elf with TTY and Athena-widget-based (traditional X11) graphics interfaces (including tiles). This version requires X11 libraries, which are installed on almost all Linux systems.

This binary has support for tty and X11 windowing systems, but not Qt. This means you will need to have X11 libraries installed on your system to run this binary, even in its tty flavor.

nh340linQt.tgz (by HTTP)(about 1.2M)

nh340linQt.tgz (by FTP)(about 1.2M)

NetHack 3.4.0 Linux Elf with TTY and Qt-based graphics interfaces (including tiles). This version requires the Qt libraries (version 2.2 or 2.3) which may or may not be installed on any particlar Linux system.

Note: Most Redhat installations do not include Qt by default; it must be specifically selected.

And how! I was considering a facetious comment along the lines of "Hey, that looks like a nethack level..." but that would only work in a group of nethack players.

Anyway, you left out the part about it being the best game in the world, etc. Diablo? Diablo is for people with short attention spans who like shiny graphics. Us hardcore gamers (with, er, 386s...) know where it's at. [/joking- play whatever you like, it's a theoretically free world]

The curious ought to go to nethack.org and give it a shot. If you're new and using DOS/Win, try the graphics version. But whatever the interface, the game is highly addictive.

A company makes an innovative software product, and can't remain afloat, thanks in part to the pathological cheapness of the Linux crowd.

Keep it up, cheapskates, and Linux will never grow (in the desktop market) beyond being a hacker toy.

I hope you're happy; I'm sure Bill Gates is delighted by how savagely you treat your own.

`Our own' are hackers. Our own are those who appreciate freedom. You, you animal, are most definitely not one of our own. Aures habet, sed non audiet. Or something like that; my Latin is rusty:-)

[1] I believe that the game industry is the one case in which free software does not necessarily make sense. It does for games such as NetHack, but for Quake and its ilk. Granted, I'm not certain that Quake and its ilk really are games. And I entertain a certain fancy that in a world of free software we'd have the graphics of Quake and the intricacy of NetHack. Still, I am quite willing to pay for the efforts of artists.

And no, I don't consider programmers artists in the sense that painters are. And I'm a programmer myself.

I don't know if spoiled is quite it. More to the point, I think some games spend too much attention on graphics, sounds, special effects, and not enough on making a good, playable game. That's true of all game genres, not just multi-player online games.

If you're looking for a MUD, even a text-based one, they're still out there:

• NetHack - successor to Rogue, the granddaddy of them all
• Falcon's Eye - a graphical version of NetHack
• Wyvern - a Java/Jython MUD with graphics

The success or failure of game systems depend on two factors:

1. The quality of the games that are available.
While open source/free software development is a noble concept, if the games aren't built, they will not come. Honestly, how many of us here who play games use Linux or Free BSD boxes *exclusively* for game machines? I play games on Windows boxes because the games are there. Until there are handheld games the quality of those produced for GameBoy, the GP32 will never sell well. If I want to play "snake", I can do that on my cell phone.

2. Inertia.
If I've invested in a hardware platform for games that I'm satisfied with, I'm going to continue to use that platform, and buy more games for it. The GP32, or any future handheld game system, will have to offer qualities or features that aren't on my current platform.

Closed-source games are bad. I am an ardent RMS follower; hence, I play Freeciv and Nethack. Granted, they may suck, but at least I can rest assured knowing that I helped make the world a better place and protected our American freedoms.

Be careful, you could be very disappointed by the end result. And too much drooling could damage your keyboard.

I waited impatiently for the movie, and was very disappointed. I've decided not to wait impatiently for this one. Besides, I think I've got plenty of time to finish Nethack before this one is out.

Just as books cannot be judged by covers alone, games cannot be judged by screenshots alone. Based on screenshots, would you ever play this game? No. But you should.

You can kill shopkeepers, kill succubi for their money after you finish with them, eat little kittens, and do all sorts of Unaustralian things.

They can't censor life. So they will fail.

• nethack
• Xpilot
• freeciv
• Tux Racer
• MAME

but why play a crap looking game when you can play a beautiful looking one?
Sometime adding graphics is hard, becouse it needs a lot of work, so you have to choose - write better code or spend time creating graphics, sounds, and music.
Please look at nethack - it's awesome, with no gfx/sound at all, now compare it with fallout or diablo - and remember, that nethack is opensource .
You can also try other roguelike games. Yes - there are frontends, but they appear long after games were playable.

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!

Everybody knows, NetHack is the best. :)

They did list Zork, but in my opinion they were missing Colossal Cave Adventure & Nethack.

All those console players who thus far do not know the beauty of the One True Game will finally be enlightened!

-- Agthorr

Madness? You bet. http://www.nethack.org

While I generally agree with you, there are games that have been in continuous development for over 10 years, and are all the better for it. Angband (and its finest variant) is continually improving, and is far in advance of any commercial game in terms of long-term playability. Nethack is another one that has been around for a very, very long time now, and continues to improve. It is amazing how much gameplay can get squeezed into a game over a decade or so, especially when no one cares about the graphics :)

--
All your .sig are belong to us!

--
All your .sig are belong to us!

-Daniel

> second only in difficulty to programming enterprise-scale RDBMS systems.

You mean like Mysql?

Or perhaps PostgreSQL? NASA recently gave up Oracle in favor of MySQL, if I recall correctly. Besides which, on the gaming end, I recently purchased Tribes2, but I still find myself playing GLtron and Freeciv and Nethack more than anything else.

Surprisingly enough, all those games are also under the GPL.

The difficulty of making a game engine is exactly why Free Software is an ideal solution.

I don't think that turn-based games are dead. They might be for multi-player, but that's because you have to wait for someone else. Roguelikes are single-player turn-based games, usually set in a fantasy world. Examples include nethack and ADOM. These are terribly addictive games, and I'd recommend everyone give one a try sometime.

Nethack is an excelent turn-based game. It features lots of characters, potions, spells, weapons, aromour, shops, etc. The homepage is here and the Qt version (which i prefer) is here

--

1. The design documents shall contain no reference to any object which is installed inside the outer case of the target machine.

Well, I dunno. I'm not privy to the DevTeam's workings.

2. The use of hardware 3D acceleration of any sort is forbidden. Software 3D engines are not forbidden, but the game must run at 20 frames per second or better in 640 x 480 16-bit SVGA mode or the nearest available equivalent.

You can run Nethack on a Unix box with a VT100 terminal. Check.

3. Only the following input devices are allowed: on a console machine, the controller which normally ships with it. On a computer, a 2-axis joystick with two buttons, or a D-pad with two buttons; a standard 101-key PC keyboard; a 2-button mouse.

All you need is the keyboard. All you can even use is the keyboard. Check.

4. There shall be no knights, elves, dwarves or dragons. Nor shall there be any wizards, wenches, bards, bartenders, golems, giants, clerics, necromancers, thieves, gods, angels, demons, sorceresses, undead bodies or body parts (mummified or decaying), Nazis, Russians, spies, mercenaries, space marines, stormtroopers, star pilots, humanoid robots, evil geniuses, mad scientists, or carnivorous aliens. And no freakin' vampires.

Well, uh....Nethack has knights, elves, dwarves, dragons, wizards, golems, giants, clerics, necromancers, thieves, gods, angels, demons, sorceresses, undead bodies and body parts (mummified or decaying), mercenaries, space marines, stormtroopers, star pilots, humanoid robots, an evil genius, and lots of freakin' vampires.

But no wenches, bards, bartenders, Nazis, Russians, spies, space marines, stormtroopers, star pilots, humanoid robots, mad scientists, or carnivorous aliens.

5. The following types of games are prohibited: first-person shooters, side-scrollers, any action game with "special attacks." Also prohibited are: simulations of 20th-century or current military vehicles, simulations of sports which are routinely broadcast live on television, real-time strategy games focussing solely on warfare and weapons production, lock-and-key adventure games, numbers-heavy role-playing games, and any card game found in Hoyle's Rules of Card Games.

Well, lessee...Nethack has special attacks, I suppose. It could be called a lock-and-key adventure game.

6. All cinematics, cut-scenes, and other non-interactive movies are forbidden.

None of that. Just a quick note on startup.

7. Violence is strictly limited to the disappearance or immobilization of destroyed units. Units which are damaged or destroyed shall be so indicated by symbolic, not representational, means. There shall be no blood, explosions, or injury or death animations.

Kill something, and it leaves a "%" (a corpse) if anything at all, and whatever it was carrying. Check.

8. There may be victory and defeat, and my side and their side, but there may not be Good and Evil.

Well, Nethack has Good and Evil in spades.

9. If a game is representational rather than abstract, it may contain no conceptual non sequiturs, e.g. medical kits may not be hidden inside oil tanks.

Would a shop on Level 23 be a "conceptual non sequitur"?

10. If a game is representational rather than abstract, the color black may not be used to depict any manmade object except ink, nor any dangerous fictitious nonhuman creatures.

Oopsie. Nethack has black dragons. :-)

Well, Nethack misses on a few points. But it's still one of the most addictive games around.
--
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delenda est Windoze

You know, without the "none of those canonical fantasy creatures" bit, nethack would qualify.

Good news for you: there is now a very pretty GUI version of Nethack called GnomeHack. If you love Nethack, you will want this!

This has been folded into the official Nethack distribution, so it no longer exists as a separate project.

If you use RPMs, do a Google search for "GnomeHack" and you will find lots of sites that have them. If you are a Debian user, you can get this with apt-get.

Here's a review of GnomeHack.

steveha

Diablo, Planescape, those "Whatever his name is" Gate games are all nothing but cute graphical interfaces to a tiny subset of Nethack's gamely. The gameplay is the ONLY thing. Yes, the interface is ASCII, but it's still around, still being enhanced and still more complex and detailed than any of the pretenders with glitz and glamor.

Nethack is proof positive that Open Source workes for the game core. Sadly, the same has yet to be proven true for graphics and 3D engines.....

Besides, you gotta love a game with instructions written by Eric S. Raymond.

http://www.nethack.org/

http://www.matthewmiller.net

Diablo, Planescape, those "Whatever his name is" Gate games are all nothing but cute graphical interfaces to a tiny subset of Nethack's gamely. The gameplay is the ONLY thing. Yes, the interface is ASCII, but it's still around, still being enhanced and still more complex and detailed than any of the pretenders with glitz and glamor.

Nethack is proof positive that Open Source workes for the game core. Sadly, the same has yet to be proven true for graphics and 3D engines.....

Besides, you gotta love a game with instructions written by Eric S. Raymond.

http://www.nethack.org/

http://www.matthewmiller.net

Ah, excellent! Now you Linux folks can play with Falcon's Eye, one of several spiffier-than-the-average-16x16-tiles interfaces being designed for that paragon of gaming, Nethack.
So guess what I've been playing recently... ;-)

-J

But... but... NetHack already works. Who needs anything else?

Seriously, though, Linux does have a number of games:

• Tux Racer (previously mentioned /.)
• Various FPSes (Doom, Quake, ...)
• Pengus (a Lemmings clone)
• FreeCiv (a Civiliazation clone)
• All the stuff port by Loki games
• Star Control: TimeWarp, an unofficial, open-source game in the Star Control universe (caveat: Getting it to compile under Linux took a bit of effort when I tried, but it was doable)

That being said, I do agree that Direct3D support in Wine is A Good Thing (except for the possibility that it decreases the likelyhood of true Linux ports). But don't sell Linux short.

(Random "It probably won't work, but..." thought: Running a WinCE Dreamcast game under WINE running on Linux on a Dreamcast. That'd be cool. Useless and probably impossible, but cool none-the-less.)

Maybe NetHack?

No, wait, stop laughing. I'd bet the the majority of college seniors now don't have nay experience with roguelike gaming; the closest "popular" game is Diablo (shiny nethack! with animation!), which differs from the average "real" roguelike in that it is more real-timeish and generally less convoluted.

Nethack has a nice blend of thinking and hack-and-slash violence. If you play it enough, you really have to start thinking and applying knowledge (do you know what amethyst means, and how amethyst stones interact with various potions? Hm? Do ya?).
Also, it's my favorite game. 8)

-J

Games can be open source, they can be GPL, and at least the one in this link has been running on linux for several years now.

If your character dies it is *D*E*A*D*. No saves, no respawn at the start.

"died? well, that's ok, just reappear in town. want your nifty stuff back? quit to the menu and restart..."
"hey that hurt! i'll just nip back to town and get healed by the blacksmith. you wait here, ok?"
"need more experience? just quit to the menu and restart to regenerate all of those easy monsters!"

You give the impression that nethack is not under active developement, version 3.3.1 came out rather recently. It can be found at http://www.nethack.org. Other roguelikes worth mentioning are ADOM (don't worry, he's better at designing a game then a website), and Angband. There are several derivatives of Angband and Nethack, while ADOM is closed source. A good list of other roguelike games (with links) is available at http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/links.html. All of the popular roguelikes and most of the rest have linux binaries, and the source code is often available too! Nethack is even released under the GPL license.

The other side of text-based gaming are text-based MUDs, a nice list of them can be found at The Mud Connector.

The article also fails to mention that there is a free version of civilization that will run on Linux and has multi-player capability. Check out www.freeciv.org for information and downloads.

Is the poster saying the Columbine posters have to have used Linux to be worth of posting to Slashdot. Yuk.

No. Clearly not. Come on, you know better. Read the post. update() is 100% correct. What's more, his/her point is simple and clear and you look very bad in dismissing it so casually.

I'll elaborate on that. There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with the argument, but if you're going to flippantly assign a particular logical fallacy to it, i.e. circularity, that fallacy should be noticeable somewhere in the argument in question. I have a real hard time finding any circularity in that particular argument. That looks bad.

I know geeks and gamers that are visionaries. I know geeks and gamers that are artists. But being a geek or a gamer implies neither of these things in any way. I also know geeks who have no such interests and I also know gamers who are utter simpletons.

By the way, I'd like to know what games you're playing that you think are more complex than chess. Even Nethack, the deepest and most subtle computer game I know of, pales in comparison to chess.