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)."

Comments

Re:Dying Bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard

Am I the only geek who HATES Nethack?

[BadmanX]

I'm serious. I'm a huge computer game buff, but Nethack has always left me cold. The interface is awful, the game is deliberately user-hostile, and you die constantly in ways you can't possibly prevent (boulder trap on level 1, for instance). Most "puzzles" have completely non-logical solutions. (Starving? Pray to your diety! Makes perfect sense!) It feels far too much like playing a paper-and-pencil RPG against an adversarial GM. They thought of everything? Everything but the fun.

Re:Am I the only geek who HATES Nethack?

[Powercntrl]

But yeah, the hardness of the game is the only thing that really disappoints me. But then again, few games manage to inspire feelings of GREAT accomplishments even on The Most Stupid Death Ever.

Back in the day... (*looks at calendar*) Okay, it wasn't that long ago... I started out playing adventure games like the Leisure Suit larry series by Sierra. I realize adventure games (collect items, solve puzzles) aren't the same thing as RPG (kill monsters, get XP), but the thing that really frustrated me about the Sierra games was the incredibly stupid deaths...

Let's see, I am play Leisure Suit larry, let's cross the road to see what's on the other side... "SPLAT! Oops, that street is really dangerous! Load a savegame or restart?" Uggh. There goes all my fun.

I didn't really think adventure games were something I could really get into until I started playing ones like the Monkey Island series, The Neverhood, and Willy Beamish (which admittedly you could die in, but it rarely happened). I thought it was really funny when playing Lucasarts's Monkey Island how they poked fun at Sierra by having the character fall off the ledge and then bringing up a parody of the infamous Sierra "You fscked up" screen.

It just amazes me that a game like Nethack even needs to have character death at all. It seems like the game is large and complicated enough to pose a challenge without having your character die suddenly.

Re:Am I the only geek who HATES Nethack?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you're not. I can't stand that game. I haven't looked at the source, but I'd swear that game cheats by the entire game environment behaving strategicly against you.

In games where you play against another human or a creature with AI, an opponent that uses strategy is expected. But in a man vs environment game, the world setting itself should not be able to use strategy! The world is supposed to be situation neutral, but instead the entire nethack world tries to exploit your current weakness every time.

Examples:

Hungry? You'll never see another food animal again.
Low on hit points? Here's a level full of monsters.
Buffed? No monsters to kill at all.
Empty inventory? No items to pick up.
Full inventory? Lots of items to pick up.
Have identify scroll? Nothting to identify.
No identity scrolls? Everything is unidentified.

Re:A good plan?

[Des Herriott]

When will this game be brought a decade forward in multimedia quality?

When someone feels like doing it.

Personally, I like the game for its playability, not any so-called "multimedia quality". Hell, I still play in ASCII mode (albeit with colour). I'm not a luddite, though - I've played Eye of the Beholder, Diablo, Dungeon Siege etc., and found them reasonably enjoyable for a while, but Nethack is the one that keeps me coming back. 15 years since I first played it (back in the 1.0 days) and it's still fun.

If Nethack is as good as I've heard, it could turn out to be a killer game.

It already is a killer game... lord knows it's killed me enough times :-) But seriously, it's a game developed by a group of people for fun, without the expectation of profit, and it has an intensely loyal following. If you don't like it, don't play it, or do something by contributing to it. But standing at the sidelines and bitching isn't going to do you, or anyone else, any good.

Re:A good plan?

[watanabe]

I find that the original, color IBM PC text interface for nethack is the one I'm best at. I think this is for a few reasons:

• The Information density of colored text is quite high. This is because font designers spent years making sure that for your 96 pixels, you got 128 very different looking things. Frankly, the text is easier to read than most tilesets. I know at a glance that two small light blue ds are winter wolves. How many artists can accurately convey 'winter wolf' to me in a 32x32 icon? And make it distinguishable from a silver wolf?
• Having played nethack for 10 years or so, I definitely 'get' the map generator. So I almost always know which rooms have secret doors, where to look for passages, etc. I've found this really hard to do in isometric view. Also, even though I run at 1600x1200, I haven't found an isometric view which lets me see the whole level at a time. Unlike ASCII.

I already am bad enough at the game that I don't need another layer of confusion (What, those were Uruk-hai? Not gnomes?) added to my poor playing. I'll stick with ASCII, thank you very much.