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10th Year of the International Nethack Tournament
Dr. Zowie writes "The 10th annual Nethack Tournament just started over at nethack.devnull.net, so put on your Hawaiian shirt, grab an expensive camera, and head for the dungeon. The tourney runs through the month of November each year, with volunteer game servers dotted around the world. Fewer than 1% of contestants actually finish the game by retrieving the Amulet of Yendor and ascending to demigodhood, but take heart: there are many prizes for intermediate goals, and prizes for team effort. For those too young to remember games older than Halo, Nethack is the apotheosis of the Roguelike genre of role-playing games, rendered in ASCII. Gameplay is phenomenally complex, and the game is somewhat sadistic; there are no 'checkpoints,' so if you manage to kill yourself somewhere in the dungeon you must start over from the beginning. The dungeons are quasi-randomly generated, so every game is different."
Good luck to both of you still playing nethack!
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Amazing.
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For those too young to remember games older than Halo...
Get offa my lawn!
I love Nethack, but I prefer Slashem.
I made an uber-patched version of Slashem I should polish up and release some day.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
And for half that time there haven't been any official updates to NetHack!
Does the DevTeam still exist?
One of the things I love about nethack is that items (and monsters, and dungeon features...) interact with each other in so many ways. Wielding a cockatrice corpse as a weapon will make short work of many monsters -- as long as you're wearing gloves. Just be careful not to fall down the stairs because you're carrying too much load...
The lack of a save and restore feature is definitely one of the things that makes nethack work so well. After putting in several hours carefully figuring out which potions do what and collecting decent armor and weapons, that D down the hall will be far scarier than any gorgeously rendered 3D dragon. After all, it can actually kill your character, not just send you back to the last save point.
At first glance, nethack seems not just hard but outright sadistic (well, ok, it is, but bear with me). But, as you get to know it, you realize that it's not like many other RPGs. Rather than trying to acquire the single best collection of stuff you can, in nethack you're rewarded for having backup plans -- and backups to your backups. When you find yourself surrounded my monsters and low on HP and out of healing potions you might consider praying. If you've done that too recently, you might try a wand of teleport or digging to escape. And when you discover that those wands just ran out of charges, you'll be glad you didn't leave that cursed potion of gain level behind. (The cursed ones, rather than gaining a character level, make you gain a *dungeon* level.)
Combine the attention to detail with the huge variety of options for character class, general strategies, and the high game-to-game variability thanks to random dungeons levels with random items, and you get serious replay value.
I ascended with a wishless tourist once, and I consider that more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
But in the genre of cruel dungeon-crawls, I prefer Iter Vehemens Ad Necem.
There's nothing like bludgeoning a zombie to death with your own severed arm, then being forced to eat the arm to stave off hunger.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
I never managed to complete Nethack until I found the spoilers, which include helpful advice about the best way to approach the game. The dungeons are random, but the structure of the game is not, and the same things will appear in approximately the same places (with different names). Once you have got to a certain depth, you've cracked the game and a win is almost certain.
Whether it is cheating to look at the spoilers is a philosophical question. Cheating is copying a save file or modifying the game - reading spoilers is no more cheating than looking at the source code.
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
That may well be my crowning achievement in video gamery.
I've since retired from Nethack, simply because I don't have the patience for any more of it. Good luck to this year's players.
Care about privacy? Read this!
For those too young to remember games older than Halo
Halo? More like Bomberman or the Lotus and Turrican series (~1990). Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.
If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack.
To get an idea of how the world looked when the internet was black-and-white, look at the end of the man page:
BUGS
Probably infinite. Mail complaints to mcvax!aeb .
Bang path ftw :) I'll get off your lawn now.
Personally, I prefer Sword of Fargoal over Nethack.
reading spoilers is no more cheating than looking at the source code.
Which, I imagine, a lot of the people with long beards and intravenous coffee would also consider cheating.
Reading spoilers or source is like doping: it gives you an advantage over those who don't do it, but the sport is still challenging. As long as you can distinguish those who do from those who don't, and take appropriate measures [whatever that is], I see no reason to be offended.
Falcon's Eye: a graphical version on Ubuntu!
"You have finished eating your kitten."
I don't think I'd win. :-(
Everyone has their own preference. I just like the finding the elemental resist and speed artifact part of the game.
The game also has its own special flair when it comes to ironmaning it. If you run out of light or food, you pretty much lose. If you linger too long on a dungeon level, you waste light and food. So if you get low on light or food, you play more aggressively and dive faster. Of course if you dive too fast, you won't be able to defeat the enemies. So very often you find yourself staring death by lack of resources vs death from tough monsters.
God spoke to me.
Nethack is one of the few very complex games that requires *zero* time investment. I sometimes play when I'm stuck in an airport, or wherever, or waiting for something to download or update or compile, and when I'm back to work just save the game. Aside from not requiring time, but allowing you to waste as much time as you have to waste, it has infinite replay value. You could play it for your whole life without ever beating the game, and also without the game ever getting boring. The reason it never gets boring is because your character can die suddenly at any moment, and there's no way to restore (without messing with the game's internals, which I don't think very many people bother to do). It's the total antithesis of modern video games - no emphasis on graphics, and nearly infinite options for what you can do within the game. Nethack is the best roguelike (I've played dozens), the best free/libre software game hands-down, and possibly the best game, period.
So stick your world of warcraft where the sun doesn't reach.
I replayed the game in 05 a decade later... and cheated to do some "tourist gaming" even with a full wand of wishing, and optional dying, it took all night to ascend,, When I left the dungeon I was bloody surrounded with monsters. Even in the deep parts of nethack there are monsters conventions that make moving a total pain.
Still, a game where you can wield the iron ball on your ankle as a weapon rocks.
It can be a lot of fun to just sit and watch someone play nethack. Just type telnet nethack.alt.org into any old command line, and you can connect up to play, but also to observer a game in progress. Try to match up your window size to the player you wish to observer (listed in the game info). It's great fun to watch people are often far, far better than you, getting far, far further in the game than you ever will :P And my god, the speed these guys progress at. Yikes!
This thread will (has) descend into alternative recommendations, so I'll take a moment to pimp a multiplayer variant of Angband, being MAngband ( http://www.mangband.org/ ). A realtime non-turnbased roguelike sounds kooky, but it actually works out pretty darned well (and Morgoth in realtime is a very frightening experience).
On a side note, I always appreciate roguelike-related threads on slashdot, as it is a rare opporunity for my username to have any sense of context.
I don't post here much, but I have to write to promote this game. The game has been in development for 20 years, and the graphics have been exactly the same the whole time. So where did all the development go? Into pure depth of gameplay. I played this game off and on for like 7 years before I was able to finally finish the game once, and that's with just one of the 20 character types you can be. There's actually a portion of my brain devoted to nethack knowledge. Yes, I'm a nerd. But, this is a great game. As long as you don't mind your buddies making fun of you for playing a game produced exclusively from ASCII graphics (but it is the most efficient way for you to view and comprehend the current state of the game).
As an example of pure depth, consider the water traps that rust your weapons and armor. Well, if you are polymorphed into an iron golem, you can rust to death from walking into a water trap. Touching cockatrice corpses will turn you to stone instantly, but if you wear gloves you can wield it as a weapon to turn other creatures to stone. But if you are burdened carrying too much stuff, you are likely to fall down the steps and turn yourself to stone. Game over, try again. If you are confused from eating rotten food, reading scrolls will cast spells in ways you weren't expecting. They thought of everything in this game.
You can actually find a wand of wishing on the first level and get any three items in the game. The inexperienced player still won't make it very far. No matter how strong or amazing you are, you could still die from a falling drawbridge, cockatrice corpse, being digested by strange creatures, being drowned by an electric eel, or kicking a wall while you are near death. Even after all the years I've spent on this game, I still learn something new every time I play. It's that deep.
Nethack is high on the illogical quick factor, so there's a harsh learning curve, but once you learn them or spoil yourself, then Nethack is not difficult. ADOM and Crawl are far more punishing.
I had a wizard down to the end of the Dungeon. I had stopped playing for a while in order to catch up with Real Life. When I came back, I had forgotten all of the tricks, and a titan cast summon nasties around me in the Castle.
I even had a scroll of taming in my bag I could have tried, followed by invoking the Eye. FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUCK...
DO NOT WANT
Link you meant to use is probably SporkHack, or telnet here for the public beta server. :)
I ascended as a samurai once, and it was this close to landing on my CV. That one's offset by the squillion times I was killed by a combination of my stupidity and the cruelty of the almighty RNG (random number generator).
Then there are those crazy iron-man ascents made by guys who never eat, never attack other monsters, never wear armor and so on.
It's a great game, and after playing it a few times you can take a look at some archived YASDs to appreciate their fine humour:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/search?q=yasd
Aw. No Ubuntu package.
Unlike all-year public servers, the tournament ones aren't watchable by default. But a few of the contestants broadcast their own games anyway on telnet://noway.ratry.ru:37331 so that's always a nice watch too. This service doesn't get enough publicity, I wish the top players could show us their progress!
Now that you know that one tidbit,
I suggest that you read every other spoiler you can find,
and then still have only a 1 in 10000 chance of ascending...
music lover since 1969
I didn't think c!oGL worked in Moloch's Sanctum?
Anyhow, what they might really be wondering is what happens if you quaff one on level 1 (at which time it would take you to level 0 and outside the dungeon).
This depends on whether or not you have the amulet, IIRC. If you have the amulet, you can leave for the elemental planes (and go through the endgame--what, you thought it was over just because you grabbed the amulet?). If you leave without getting the amulet, your game ends, but you don't win. There are other ways to go to further negative levels (e.g. level -1) or something. IIRC, you die from falling back to the ground unless you have levitation in those cases. The Dev Team DOES think of everything.
There's almost always a way out of every deathtrap, but you usually only think of it once you die (e.g. ooh, I had a camera? I should have photographed that monster to blind it!).
It's just amazing how many strange combinations of items and effects have been thought of by the dev team.
My favorite Nethack moment ever was when I had used a blessed scroll of genocide to permanently wipe out all dragons from the game, but I was still wearing a suit of silver dragon scale mail I had acquired earlier. I stepped on a polymorph trap, and discovered a little known game mechanic that if you're wearing dragon armor while polymorphing uncontrollably, you turn into that kind of dragon. However, dragons were already wiped out, so I couldn't. The message the game gave me was:
"You feel slightly silver dragon-ish."
Even with all the spoilers and hacking my game to reset hunger to the default every turn, I have never ascended. Good thing I haven't tried in a while, my hands thank me for it.
That said, Nethack is a masterpiece.
Personally, I love both Nethack and Angband. Why limit yourself to just one? ADOM deserves mention here, too, as do the *band variants (ToME, ZAngband & Enteroband are all personal *band variant favorites).
There's no reason you can't play them all. Some, like ADOM, are very well-developed. It has the most 'plot' of them all, IMHO. But I wouldn't want to be limited to playing just one of them!
So far, I've beaten everything except Angband (unless you count watching that Borg winner, but the Angband Borg is another story, and a very cool bit of AI!)
I linked all those variants up for you because I want to encourage people to play these games. And if you're stuck, I like to read spoilers. Some people help that, but they REALLY help you appreciate the depth of the games, IMHO. If you don't like that, though, don't read them. But there are lots of crazy things about what resistances you need, or what gear is important, or even what to wish for that are really hard to figure out. I mean, how many would notice that herbs grow in a pattern according to Conway's game of Life? That's important if you want to farm them (what did you think farmers were good at, other than polearms?).
Anyhow, these are rich & fun games that shouldn't be ignored just because you think text based interfaces are too retro. Good times, all around :)
Well, you start out with a fedora and a leather jacket as armor and a bullwhip as a weapon... If I play an archaeologist, I normally name my dog "Indy". (It's useful to name your dog, in case you end up encountering other dogs in general. Also, if a player dies, a later player on the same machine may encounter the earlier player's ghost (remember, Unix used to be a time-sharing multiple-user operating system :-), and naming the dog can be a hint to the later player that meets a dog that there may be a ghost around also.)
And if you don't know why the Tourist's goddess is The Lady, you should read more early Terry Pratchett.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Play some soybon/syobon action. you end up owing the game your mans. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs8khszHmyc
Never really got into NetHack. Played more Moria. I originally encountered it on a mainframe (to give you an idea of it's age!)
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
As mentioned, looking at spoilers is not necessarily considered cheating. Really it's more of a personal preference. Personally, I'm opposed to most spoilers, but I do think it's fair for me to have some basic information. I call this "D&D" rules, in the sense that when playing D&D anything in the Player's Handbook is fair game for your character to 'know', while things in the Dungeon Master's Guide and other supplements may be considered out of bounds. So, based on that, I read spoilers for all the character classes and races regarding their abilities and potentials, and I read spoilers detailing all the normal (non-magical) loot. I figured not knowing the ultimate magical items is the game or the weaknesses of every nasty monster left a good deal for me to figure out, and BOY-HOWDY did it. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
...
...
I don't mind the text sometimes, the images it shows.
Running from the Ds and Ls, and killing all the Os.
Faded prints and subtle hints and fortune cookie lies.
You never ID all your stuff, until your @ sign dies.