Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

12 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. SlashdotHack? by Carnildo · · Score: 2, Funny

    What's this, the annual Slashdotting of DevNull?

    --
    "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
  2. If it's good enough.... by Naffer · · Score: 4, Funny

    Nethack is one of my all-time favorite games, one I've been playing since 1200 baud was smokin' fast. -- Actor Wil Wheaton

    If it's good enough for will wheaton, then it's good enough for me. I'll have to give it a try. Anyone else tried it out?

    1. Re:If it's good enough.... by Pentagram · · Score: 4, Informative

      My God(s)! If you haven't tried it out yet, then download it now. Provided you don't mind losing a few months, that is.

      NetHack is the one of the most vicious, amusing, intelligent, fun games of all time. It has its own insane rules that it follows to their illogical conclusion and more cool ideas and quotable lines than you can shake a wand at. It's also extremely challenging and requires considerable dedication to beat even if you take all the easy options.

      Example: there is a cockatrice monster that can turn you to stone if it hits you. But if you kill one, you can hit monsters with its corpse and turn them to stone (assuming you're wearing gloves, naturally). But what happens if you get swallowed whole by a huge worm and then you hit it from the inside with a cockatrice corpse? Try it and find out.

      Just try not to read the spoilers - the most fun part of the game is working out how it works.

    2. Re:If it's good enough.... by Haeleth · · Score: 2, Funny

      Nethack holds a record where I'm concerned: it's the game I've failed to get into the most frequently.

      It promises depth. It promises adventure. It promises to be better than sliced bread. From the descriptions, it's exactly the game I've been looking for all my life. Yet in actual practice, I still find staring at a grid of ASCII characters, trying to learn an interface more cryptic than Emacs, and dying permanently every five minutes to be somehow just not fun.

      Hmm... it's about the time of year when I try it again. They say there are graphical front-ends which answer two of my three objections... maybe if I try one of those...

  3. I would.... by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Funny

    I was planning on playing, but I ate some meat earlier and I feel deathly sick.

    --
    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  4. Hey boys... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    FREE PR0N!!!
    &
    n
    &
    n
    &

    FREE LESBIAN PR0N!!!

    n n
    n
    n

    FREE BEASTIALITY PR0N!!!

    @ @
    u
    @ @

  5. 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

    1. Re:Ughh.... by bakunin · · Score: 5, Informative

      The tournament offers players the option of recording their games as VT ASCII animations, and the option of making these files publicly available.

      Once we've launched, you can go to the gamefiles section to see whether any of the mor successful players have this turned on and (if so) you can re-run those games as terminal movies. Some of them can be incredibly edifying.

      -robin

    2. Re:Ughh.... by DrEldarion · · Score: 2, Funny

      I think it's because those people have played the game since it came out due to the fact that it's the only game that reliably runs on Linux (ducks).

  6. 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.

  7. Re:Not my favorite... by Moghedien · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you tried ToME?

    --
    I've come to... anesthetize you!
  8. 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?