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

nethack?

[Klerck]

ADOM is a much better rogue-like.

I don't understand what's up with Nethack

[CanadaDave]

Can someone please tell me honestly why I should start getting into Nethack? I mean I've clicked on the icon a few times and tried it out but it didn't seem that interesting. I mean, what I am trying to say is, does it get better, more interesting? how many levels are there? What else can you tell me that will make me want to take up this seemingly lame game.

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

[_ph1ux_]

Well, where to begin.

Nethack was such a big influence in the lines of RPGs... and a great Thief of Time in so many of our lives.

Its a great game - it was an early online D&D style RPG - its fun. very fun.

But it requires that you get into it because you loved D&D and love the RPG genre. If you cant get over the lack of wild 3D fragging madness - then move on...

I know that it may be hard for "newbies" (i.e. people who didnt play it when there was no such thing as 3d graphics) to get into it... but when it came out it quenched our thirst for a time by filling the RPG wish we had.

You should definitely give it a go. I would recommend starting it at the same time as a friend - that will help engender competition between your characters... and help you get into it a little easier.

Dont be fooled it is not lame. But I would recommend that you try Zangband.....

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

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yes, and no.

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.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't actually lame, it is just hard and complicated. Minesweeper it is not. It does get better. I'll play for 20 hours at a stretch if my wife lets me. As to why you should try it? Why should you play any game? Nethack is challenging, fun, surprising, and can take years to master.

Some tips:

Starting out, play a Valkyrie. They're quite formidable. Add non-cursed armor as you find it.

Don't wield/wear cursed items (one's a pet won't walk over).

Don't eat anything your pets won't eat. (_Old_ corpses, kobolds)

Refer to the spoilers often (online or in /usr/doc/nethack-spoilers).

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

[digitalhermit]

One thing I've learned is that, while blind and hungry, it's not a good idea to wander around the dungeon feeling for food on a level where you've killed a cockatrice.

Playing Nethack always reminds me of the room in Infocom's Enchanter where one must retrieve a scroll from a maze of caverns. Every step is important. Y'know how food rots away if left too long? I was once starving and did a hk to move instead of the diagonal. In that one step the food disappeared. I starved to death.

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

[Sancho]

I have ascended (beaten it) as have two of my friends. It's difficult, and can take weeks. The number one problem I see when someone new plays nethack is that they try to go too fast. Take your time. It should take a week at minimum to finish a game. I consider that a speed play. To finish the game you have to be extremely careful.
One of the most fun and challenging aspects is identifying items. Sure, you can look for scrolls of identify, but even then you're unlikely to have /those/ identified! Trying to figure out items by the way they interact with the world and without using them in a way that they can blow up in your face is one of my favorite aspects of the game, and almost a necessity unless you are very lucky early in the game (Book of Identify or a couple of scrolls).
There are sites devoted to "spoilers" for the game. These sites detail the way object interact with the world. For example, if you engrave something into the floor with a wand, usually something non-destructive will happen. By knowing the message a fire wand gives, for example, you can rule out whether the random item you find is a fire wand. Similarly for just about all item types. Also, once you find a shop, you can have a general idea of the power of an item by attempting to sell it.
Once you get a large number of items identified (either by truly ID'ing them or by marking them when you find out what they are) you can begin really gearing yourself up. Eventually you'll find a wand of wishing (there's always one at least) with which you can get some real protection and be more daring.

I used to be addicted to the game. I came close to ascending a monk, and I did ascend a couple of Wizards (cheesiest class, imo), but you truly must take your time or else the game will be nothing but a frustration.

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

[LoveMe2Times]

Better: Yes. More Interesting: Yes. How many Levels: Yes. Getting into Nethack requires a little patience. Then again, so does Chess. They're both no fun when you don't know what you're doing. Nethack is miserably dull when you keep starving on dungeon level 2 and keep starting over again and again and again... What you've missed, though, is that Nethack is the deepest game ever made. By that, I mean most games make you do what the programmers' want you to do. This is because the interactions between items, actions, bad guys and such is combinatoric in nature, so games that have a fixed dev schedule only implement a tiny fraction of interactions. This is why you must find the "Magic Key" to open the door, rather than just kicking it down. In Nethack, you can kick the door down. Unless you're a tourist, in which case you might hurt yourself trying. You can also try picking the lock. This can work well on locked chests too. You might not want to kick chests open, because that can destroy some things inside (like potions in glass bottles...) You see, Nethack has been in development for a VERY LONG time by people who aren't wasting time making pretty graphics. This means that people have come up with interesting, clever, and often funny interactions for so many corner cases that you will likely never exhaust the possibilities of this game. Toss in multiple character classes, and randomly generated dungeons, and you have a game with more replayability than anything else I can think of. Oh, and it's HARD. You only get one life. You die, you start over. Makes you actually think about what you're doing, and makes all these decisions really matter. Oh, and one piece of advice for the newbie: if you're about to starve on one of the early levels, try praying, and don't eat zombie corpses.

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

[Pike65]

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?

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

[WWWWolf]

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...

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

[MoThugz]

IMHO Nethack is way due its expiration date... This is not a flame, nor do I find ASCII-based games boring, but face it, Nethack is just being kept alive so that a mid-30s Unix admin can brag about the items he discovered back in the "good old days".

Just face it, whoever says that Nethack is better MUD surely has something wrong in the head. My reasons?

• MUD is Multiplayer
• Text (ASCII) is better used for describing things rather that "draw" them
• There are better gaming technologies at present, why hang on to a "has-been" from ages ago?
• Wasteful misuse of that GeForce4 4600 you just brought

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.

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

[JesseL]

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.

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?

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

[micromoog]

Nethack is long dead, why not let it go in peace . . . Let Nethack take it's place beside Pong, Space Invader, Frogger, etc.

Done. It now has a desktop icon and hotkey shortcut too. And as soon as a PalmOS port is done, it'll take its place there beside the others as well.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[Scarblac]

In Nethack, you can kick the door down.

Or you can, say:

• Zap it with a wand that destroys it
• Pick the lock
• Polymorph into an acid blob or so and ooze under the door
• Polymorph into a Xorn and walk through the door
• Dig around the door
• Go up a level, dig down, jump through the hole, hope you end up behind the door
• Teleport to the other side
• Unlock the door with the spell of Knock, then open it
• Have the door hit by a disintegration ray (from a black dragon that misses you, or by polymorphing into one)

And this is just a start. There are options like this with anything you can do in the game. If I want to impress people with Nethack I try to tell them of all the strange situations that can happen with cockatrices... Say a monster has gloves on, picks up a cockatrice corpse and wields it... You put on your ring of conflict, the nymph next to him steals his gloves, he turns to stone :-).

And that's why Nethack is unique!

How many of you between 15-15 really know nethack?

[jukal]

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" :)

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:For all you NetHack fans..

[teamhasnoi]

http://mangband.org/ Isn't that a hentai porn site?

Prizes

[unicron]

For hacking related contests, all prizes should fall into the "Pieces of a Ma-Bell truck" category and the "Carolyn Meinell's severed head" category.

Now I can get fired from unemployment!

[teamhasnoi]

Like reading /. all day hasn't hurt my productivity, all I need now is to have a new excuse to play Nethack. I narrowly dodged the last release, and thought I was safe!

I better go find a tinning kit, so I'll have something to eat while I live on the street. :(

OOPS.

[_ph1ux_]

Contest is over. nethack.devnull.net slaughtered with a Vorpal Slashdotting +3

Re:OOPS.

[fatquack]

Looks like it had an Amulet of Lifesaving after all, it's running again.

Re:How many of you between 15-15 really know netha

[Yurian]

Well, Im 19 now - I don't remember what age I was when I first saw nethack - about 12 maybe. A friend of the same age introduced me - no idea how he was introduced.

I've played it in binges ever since, not because its oldskool, but because its a cool game, probably more detailed than anything else I've ever played. Ascended my first character last year - yay.

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:4th Annual NetHack Tournament and cheaters

[Nazghal]

The client isn't in the hands of the enemy. It's running on their own servers. All you can do is send input characters to their servers. No code runs locally at all. You literally play over a telnet session or the equivalent there of.

Disclaimer: At least that's how i remember the last one operating, /. effect prevents confirming this event is the same.

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

NetHacking and Jail

[GigsVT]

Remember, hacking into other people's computers is a crime, which you can go to jail for a really long time for.

You may think it is all fun and games "Hacking" the "Net", but when the cops bust down your door you may feel a little differently.

Doing a search on google for this tournament, it seems that people have been doing this for years! Just imagine all the lost hours of productivity when poor admins have to reinstall systems that were hacked. It's not their fault they ran Microsoft software.

3D Nethack

[Avumede]

It would be quite amusing for someone to make a 3d version of nethack, yet have it use 3d text instead of actual character graphics. Can you imagine, in the flickering light of a dungeon, the sight of a huge W jumping out from behind the shadows?

Re:3D Nethack

[VistaBoy]

If someone made that game, I think God himself would have vengeance by having a giant rain of Ts fall from the Heavens to impale everyone involved. Just for the irony. If God was really nasty, he may even use *s or even the dreaded #!

Re:3D Nethack

[Sancho]

When Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring came out, several of us couldn't help laughing out loud during the Balrog scene. Later while discussing the movie, we discovered that we'd all pictured an ampersand (&) chasing a bunch of h's and @'s ;)

We decided it was time to stop playing....

Re:3D Nethack

[WWWWolf]

If someone made that game, I think God himself would have vengeance by having a giant rain of Ts fall from the Heavens to impale everyone involved.

Rain of Trolls... and they say Slashdot has a troll problem...

Just for the irony. If God was really nasty, he may even use *s or even the dreaded #!

I understand the stones, but a kitchen sink from the heavens? If I remember the Bible stuff correctly, it was that ruler guy who washed his hands, not God!

Re:3D Nethack

[VValdo]

Something like this?

W

Not so hard.

[juuri]

You just have to be dedicated. I personally have ascended 10 characters out of probably 1-1.5k games of nethack starting from around 1995-2000. After I got 3 valkrys up in a row I stopped playing.

Re:Not so hard.

[CanadaDave]

Whoa, you're crazy? How do you have time for your wife?

Re:How many of you between 15-15 really know netha

[Kintanon]

Got a few of my mates into it, but we quit after a while- It was just really frustrating- you would just die at some random level after you came across some 'monster' that you simply couldn't kill.


Monster?! There are MONSTERS in this game?! What am I doing chasing around all these #'s and b's then?!

Kintanon

Ascensions? Give me a break!

[Pac]

I said it elsewhere and I will say it again: Where are the prizes for us clueless? Where is the "Dumbest Death" prize? "Fastest Death"? "Best Death Playing as if it was Quake"? "Most Stupid Level 1 Death"? "Best Level 1 Death While in Level 10 or More" (like starving for lack of attention deep into the mines)?

Mysterious Dungeon

[moronga]

Chunsoft (the people who make DragonQuest / Dragon Warrior) have a series of "Mysterious Dungeon" games that are rogue / nethack games, with spiffy graphics. The purists out there probably cringe at the thought of bitmaps (the latest ones are in 3d!) but the gameplay is basically the same.

It's really amazing how much strategic and tactical complexity you can get out of simple rules and a huge number of items and monster types.

The most famous one in the US is probably Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon, published by Square. Typically, these games get ripped apart in reviews by idiot videogame writers who don't understand the first thing about good gameplay. They have a really loyal following in Japan, though.

Check them out if you have a PS1. Chocobo's Mysterious Dungeon and Toruneko's Escape are available in the US.

I can tell you what the winner will look like

[Pyrosophy]

@

If he's lucky, he'll be accompanied by

d

Ah, Nethack, where

!$%??!

is a store, not a swear.

What's really great about NH

[danshapiro]

Load it on to your laptop. Turn off the backlight. It's text, so it's still easy to read. It'll never page, so your HD goes to sleep. If you switch it into text only mode and you're using Windows XP and your drivers support it, your graphics accelerator will go to sleep (not sure about Linux). And be sure to pull out your PCMCIA cards, and get network drivers and an ACPI BIOS that play nice. You'll get battery life and entertainment value to last most of a transcontinental flight. Try that with the latest EA game-of-the-month!

Dan-V ascended to demigoddess-hood. 479 [496]
7th Place, 5878647 points
(1999 NH tournament)

Nethack Replayability

[Succa]

One of my favourite things about Nethack is the ability to do conduct challenges. This feature gives Nethack a lot of replay value. There have been some crazy ascensions posted to rec.games.roguelike.nethack. For example, check out this Atheist, Pacifist Ascension. Or this Extinctionist. Or this absolutely unbelievable Vegan, Atheist, Illiterate, Weaponless, Wishless, Genoless, Polyless Monk. Great fun, I tell you. Anyone know of ascensions more impressive than these? Post them!