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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."

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Just started by WTFmonkey · · Score: 1, Interesting
    I just discovered NetHack two days ago. It's amazing how much more fun I'm having with it than I had with, e.g. Baldur's Gate 2.

    That is all. Carry on.

    1. Re:Just started by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Wow, talk about an undeserved up-mod. To put off the inevitable "overrated," howzabout I actually say something interesting?

      I think what makes it fun (and I haven't gotten very far yet) is the anachronisms and humor. BG is fun, but it's very locked in its D&D rules and can get a bit tedious. Yeah, there's a fairly decent sense of humor at times, but overall, the game gets repetetive quickly. The monsters get harder, so you ge tmore stuff. Buy a bigger sword, kill a bigger monster, get more stuff, ad infinitum.

      Nethack, on the other hand, seems to me to have a great sense of humor, a lot of background in both popular and geek/cult culture, and enough anachronisms (credit cards?) to give it a ha-ha-only-serious feel.

      I guess what I'm saying is that the game doesn't take itself too seriously. That's the biggest difference between NetHack and most other RPG/D&D style computer games I've played-- that NetHack realizes it's a game, and doesn't try to force total-life immersion. Does that make sense? Anything's in as long as it gives the game some added value. It's a blast, and I can't wait to put in some serious dungeon time.

  2. Ughh.... by smoondog · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Last year, after the /. nethack post, I tried nethack. That game is the most ridiculously addictive frustration fest this side of thumb cuffs. I don't understand how some (rare) people can ascend so often. I'm always falling through the floor, pissing off of shopkeepers, getting poisoned by snakes, running out of food, pissing off my god, or getting turned into a were-something. (Those were-somethings deaths are particularly annoying, especially when praying doesn't work) I generally play a dwarf Valkarie, because the mines are really much easier when everything isn't trying to kill you.

    Is there any place for watching logs of successful games, to get an idea of how to play certain aspects of the game? For example, I still have trouble with spells and scrolls. They usually do something bad to me, and I never find out what they do (until I die).

    Heh,

    -Sean