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Nethack 3.4.1 Released
fatquack writes "Almost a day ago the DevTeam wrote: The NetHack DevTeam is pleased to announce the release of NetHack 3.4.1. NetHack 3.4 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack. It is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.3. Get your copy at nethack.org now! (and it fixes the boulder/landmine bug)."
I once starved to death as I crammed apple after apple down my throat. Why? I don't know. And after I deleted the game, I didn't care either.
I remember my most promising game...I actually made it to level 3, where I was almost instantly confronted by a goblin with a wand of magic missile. Zap! Half my hitpoints are gone. I try to run. I get one step away. Zap! The other half are gone. Good-bye character. Good-bye game.
It's just completely arbitrary. There's really no design to it at all. Winning the game is simply a process of playing it compulsively over and over until you finally get lucky and don't die right away and can start building levels. And even then, one wrong move and you're dead. Sorry, I got tired of that game mechanic back in the mid-80's.
And that's the real problem with the game. Nobody on the DevTeam has played a game since Zork, or they'd understand that frustration isn't considered fun any more.
You aren't alone. Nethack feel like nothing more than that to me -- a hack. When I play the game, I always get the feeling of playing a product of a bored hacker who just liked to have something to do while not administrating his Unix system. And that might very well be the actual origin of the game as well, I don't know.
My problems with this game is probably due to a combo of the disgusting ASCII "art" and the illogical game play with a million of keyboard shortcuts to remember. So I pick up a port that's focused on the graphics part such as Falcon's Eye and get the same game but with sprites that look the same regardless of which way you turn, merely as a substitute of the @ character or whatever.
I'm not saying I could do it better, I'm saying that I think it sucks when compared to a commercial RPG. So I choose to play those instead. If I'd pick up the aging Eye of the Beholder today, I'd still find that much more fun than a game of Nethack.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
You can't use the "dot" in C, only C++. You have to dereference the pointers manually.