4th Annual NetHack Tournament

fatquack writes "The NetHack tournament season is upon us once again. /dev/null's Fourth Annual NetHack Tournament has just opened. As with past years, the Tournament is open to anyone who'd like to play. We're also open to anyone who'd like to volunteer to run a game server since, though we have a T1 hosting the main game server, play can be slow across the transoceanic links. devnull.net is a loose association of networking geeks, unincorporated and noncommercial. We just do this for giggles; we make no money from this other than what folks feel like donating. The prize structure going in, as we're always open to suggestions to change this during the Tournament, is: Prizes The "standard" prizes will go to: Highest Score 1st, 2nd and 3rd Highest Score in each class The "additional" prizes will go to: Most Ascensions Lowest Scored Ascension This year's Tournament will begin with servers in California and Oregon, but with servers in Colorado, The Netherlands and Australia hopefully coming online in the first few days."

Comments

For all you NetHack fans..

[Anonymous Coward]

Give Mangband a shot http://mangband.org/ if you like dungeon hacks. Open source..even a Japanese version or two.

Re:I don't understand what's up with Nethack

[Romothecus]

Nethack is different from most other "dungeon crawls" in that it is about content and strategy, instead of action and eye candy. There are hundreds of different items in Nethack, some magical, some mundane, all with some kind of use. Any troubling situation you find yourself can can be solved various ways, and no two solutions will yield the same outcome. The game leaves a lot of room open for play style; try playing Barbarian, then try Ranger or (if you're a masochist) Tourist.

If you want more specific, in-depth information about Nethack (including some spoilers about dungeon depth, as you asked) then go to List of Nethack Spoilers which contains A LOT of information about Nethack. The other great thing about Nethack is that it's open-source, which should automatically get it kudos with most of the people here. :p

Re:4th Annual NetHack Tournament and cheaters

[fatquack]

First: the team of the tournament are rather experienced coders themself. Second: there is no client executable, the games run on the (dedicated) servers. You just use SSH or even Telnet to play. And if you want to walk through walls, just polymorph yourself in a Xorn :-)

Re:I don't understand what's up with Nethack

[jericho4.0]

If you don't get Nethack, you might not ever, but before you decide....

Play at least 30 games. The multitude of actions you can do at any time is huge. This leads to very open-ended gameplay, with no two games the same.You'll die 20 times on the 3rd level, and next game you outwit some 15th level monster and walk away with a wicked weapon, etc. It's highly rewarding.

Other things I love about Nethack;It's net-aware and Unix friendly, delivering emails via messengers and other neato tricks. It runs on the console, and it has a wacked sense of humor, in the best tradition of oldskool Unix hacking.

I know you can't use it

[SquadBoy]

for the tournament. But if you want the gameplay of Nethack with rather cool graphics and music try Falconseye

Re:I don't understand what's up with Nethack

[TopShelf]

The key words there are "typefaces which are supposed to be..."

One of the great things about Nethack is how much is left to your own imagination. The experience is somewhat akin to listening to a baseball game on the radio, which can often be a richer experience than watching it on TV. Gameplay, content, and humor make Nethack quite simply the best computer game I've ever played, period.

How many other games can you come back to years later and still find them entertaining?