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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."
and why? I mean, I do not think I would have thumbled into it if I would be a bit younger. Do you, non-dinosaurs, really play it? How did you get introduced to it? Is there anyone who can admit just pretending it's cool, because it's "oldskool" :)
I started playing when I was about 13. I was reading somewhere and the website said that ZAngband gave you funny error messages if you typed unbound keys. This eventually led to Nethack, which I play sparingly now (I'm 15 now.)
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
Ok, I used to play it a lot, but I gave up, partly cos its irritating as hell.
In theory there is actually a way to win the game, I think there's atleast 25-40 levels or more; but in practice unless you cheat and/or research the game a lot chances are you'll never, ever win it; it's just too obscure. I've known a dozen or so players- of those, maybe one has completed it, maybe once.
Still there's plenty of fun in there- robbing shop keepers is a blast, and the keystone cops turning up is fun, if a bit life shortening. Your pet dog/cat and you against the dungeon has a certain nice ambiance to it.
But ultimately the random death element got on my nerves just too much.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Seriously, there needs to be a (Score: -1 Bullshit) moderation option. If you had a life, you wouldn't be taking time out of it to bitch about Nethack, would you?
They can be great fun if you have craploads of time on your hands (like us students >: ) Most RPG games do start out lame. Final Fantasy VII is still for my money the best RPG ever made (controversial choice, I know) but for the first coupla days of play all you do in fights is select Attack from a tantalisingly big empty list of options.
RPGs are always shit when you first start out. That's a side effect of the essence of role-playing - growth. If you start out fully grown, what's the point?
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
The makers of the game concentrated on the content, not the graphics or presentation. =)
The game is challenging. There's about ~40 dungeon levels or something. I've played the game for about a decade. I've been to level 12 or 13. (Okay, I'm a very lazy player, but still.)
There are few games that give this kind of feeling of accomplishment. Even if you don't win, if you have One Hell of a Game, it really means you have One Hell of a Game. I, for one, use the expression in a way entirely different from the way non-Nethackers use it.
For me, personally, it's also a grim reminder of the harsh reality: I can't really call myself a gamer until I've finished Nethack. I mean, everyone can finish these new games, but Nethack is an old, time-proven test that separates really dedicated gamers from the rest of the people. If someone says they have finished the game without cheating, I look at them with Great, Boundless Respect(tm). Anyone who can finish a game this hard has to be worth their merit. And I'd give the Nobel or something to the guy who finishes the game without tips, spoilers or sourcediving and with all optional challenges done...
Just face it, whoever says that Nethack is better MUD surely has something wrong in the head. My reasons?
Nethack is long dead, why not let it go in peace rather than holding on to the nostalgia of the past. Let Nethack take it's place beside Pong, Space Invader, Frogger, etc. and be proud of what it has achieved in the past.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Geez, this is like suggesting that you should give up on chess or go and play "Hungry Hungry Hippos" instead. Somtimes the enjoyment comes more from the quality and depth of gameplay than the eye candy, and multiplayer isn't always desirable.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Please play more commercially-produced, retail linux games. We need to invest time in the "commercial market", the free and opensource market will always be around. I don't troll when I say this; Linux, and its buddy, freeBSD, need to be recognised as alternative platforms for gaming and we need more 1337 SysAdmins playin and talkin Linux UT2003, Linux Tribes2, Linux Doom3, Linux RtCW, and Mr. Mike Simms' new effort called Majesty. Thankyou for the excellent forum to post this unto and thanks for the consistant ranting, praising, code ethics, and kindness.
OK, how do you merit Nethack with quality and depth? Sure it has a gazillion dungeons and monsters (which I remind you, is represented by some ASCII character). But what person who has a life would spend hours a day (at present) staring at typefaces which are supposed to be characters of a game?
I'm not saying it doesn't have quality or depth... It used to have... back in the 80s and early 90s *at most*.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
Dan-V ascended to demigoddess-hood. 479 [496]
7th Place, 5878647 points
(1999 NH tournament)
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
That's exactly the point; don't judge it until you have played it at least to the gnomish mines. It may be hard at first, but one gets better with time and knows what to take and what to avoid.
The depth is simply awesome and recent dungeon-crawlers like the "click-click-click-kill" Diablo 2 and the barely interactive screensaver Dungeon Siege don't even come near a tenth of it.
It does have a lot of items and monsters, but the interaction and possibilities are endless.
In Diablo II, how many ways of going around are there? One; killing everything you can kill. Same for Dungeon Siege. In Nethack, each class has a TOTALLY different way of playing. For instance, with a tourist, you may (and will) want to avoid fights. For instance, the tourist starts with a photo camera, which he may use against monsters. Some times, the flash blinds a monster, sometimes it enrage them, some like it. Some flee when they see it. It all depends on the monster. Almost any obscure action you can do with the game's very extensive commands have programmed responses. Another exemple: touching a cockatrice petrifies you, but this effect still apply to the corpse. To take a cockatrice corpse, you would need gloves. Then, one can take the corpse as a weapon and turn other monsters to stone with it.
MUDS do have that much depth. To get a MUD as developped at Nethack would be infeasible (well, save the infinite-monkey theorem).
It's not like graphics matter; they simply are pixels. NetHack's not making graphic cards useless, it just spares 'em.
NetHack is not simply random, too. It has a story, and some parts are half pre-generated (special levels and such).
It requires thinking, unlike MUDS and other recent RPGs. It comes from an era where almost only intelligent people used computers, and was very succesful in those times. Games were dumbed down during the nineties, but Nethack stood still. The fact that this news was posted on Slashdot proves that intelligent gamers are not all dead.