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Annual Nethack Tournament

Posted by Cliff on from the tis-the-season-for-a-dungeon-crawl dept.

jvarsoke notes: "After the last little goblins leave your porch tonight, sit on down at your old-school terminal and light up your favorite dungeon crawl. The annual /dev/null/ Nethack Tournament starts tonight. Or, if Nethack is too easy (or Marvin too intimidating) for you, slide over to the public Slash'EM server."

1 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Someone help me out with this... by Geaus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I tried NetHack. I wanted to like it. I realy, REALLY wanted to like it. But I kept dying to stuff I had no chance of escaping. Open a door at level 3, find a Pony. It runs me down and kills me. Get to the bottom of the mines, a Mummak (sp) runs me down and kills me. By some miracle live long enough to get down to say, dungeon level 13 and what do I find but a Minotaur, which runs me down and kills me. And thats not counting the multitude of times I was just surrounded and outnumbered or met some other ridiculess and almost inavoidable end. I can only assume that past level 13 which is my high score to date, that massively powerful monsters are still waiting below that I will have no chance in blazes to kill before they take me out in 2 turns. Now I know enough that if I see something I cant kill to try and get away, but even as an Elf that wasnt always possible.

    Eventually I gave up in disgust after a month or two of trying to level up a Wizard to the point of getting their artifact. I even tried save scumming. I'm not proud of it, but after a month of trying to live long enough to get past Mines+Sokoban I was willing to try just about anything to find out what I was doing wrong. Even that didnt keep me alive for long.

    Now I may suck at NetHack, but I've been playing just about every type of game under the sun for the last 15 years. And I cannot for the life of me understand what the allure of a game with such random, unavoidable deaths is. Especially when you arent allowed to save. So what makes this game so great? Do people really just enjoy being thrust into inescapable death scenarios, and restarting characters till they get lucky enough to get powerful enough to avoid this kind of random demise?