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."

Comments

Great!

[morgan_greywolf]

Good luck to both of you still playing nethack!

Re:Great!

[cbuhler]

Thanks. I've only had one assension so far, so going to need it. Been playing for years. Very addicting game.

Re:Great!

[evanbd]

My only ascension so far has been a wizard. I may try to ascend a monk for the tournament. Wizards with their spells have so many options, but they can be very fragile at times...

Re:Great!

[SeePage87]

You might be surprised how many people still play. Last year there were 16,722 games played in the tournament (which is not even the biggest). This is only from players hearing about the tournament and participating. Playing across the internet is often painful because of latency, so most people don't bother.

Re:Great!

[SQLGuru]

Starting class only determines how you start (starting abilities and inventory)....after a point, all characters evolve into basically the same thing. Even race has only a small bearing on your character after a point (starting intrinsics). There are ways of getting all of the equipment and intrinsics such that by the end of the game, you've collected all of the ones you need.

Generally, I find Valkyries to be the easiest early on (and most likely to survive long enough to make initial class irrelevant)..... Archaeologists are also good because gem identification (makes it easy to buy the good equipment0..... Wizards are tough early on until you can gain some strength and good equipment.

Layne

Re:Great!

[SeePage87]

Do you play nethack? Waiting for the board to update every move would drive most people crazy, but not doing it and "queuing" your moves will get you killed very quickly. You need to look before you leap. In a FPS, when you die you come right back to life (and don't use CS as a counterexample, it's not the same as losing a character you've spent 5 hours carefully tending).

Re:Great!

[evanbd]

You missed a big one: caps on skills. Different classes are restricted as to how far they can advance in different skills. Wizards and monks, for example, are the only classes that can reach Basic level in all spellcasting schools. Other classes do better with weapons and such.

Re:Great!

[jackbird]

Unlike in other games, Nethack is not multiplayer at all. There's not much incentive to play online. This makes it much easier for lag to drive people to local copies.

Not true. Bones files (levels containing a dead character's corpse, ghost, (mostly cursed) equipment, pets, and whatever nasties killed them) can be found by any player no the same machine. If it was a powerful character who died of something stupid high up in the dungeon, it can be a really, really good thing; and it's usually a nice-ish stash regardless once you get things uncursed.

Re:Great!

[skeeto]

"While the graphics may seem primitive by today's standards, today's gameplay seems primitive by NetHack standards."

(Found that quote here.)

For those too young...

[rob1980]

For those too young to remember games older than Halo...

Get offa my lawn!

Interaction

[evanbd]

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.

Re:Interaction

[hitmark]

ah yes, i was wondering what "gaining" a level would actually mean.

thing is this tho, are not the levels counted in increasing numbers while going down?

as such would one not be "loosing" a dungeon level by going up?

or is this on par with:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0012.html

Re:Interaction

[Chris Burke]

I suppose losing a level would be more technically correct, though it depends on whether you consider "gaining" to mean "increasing the number" or "going up".

Anyway, the question you should be asking is what happens if you use a cursed potion of gain level on the uppermost level of the dungeon, i.e. the first floor below the surface.

And the answer is that, unless you're carrying the Amulet of Yendor, then nothing happens. If you do have the amulet, you go to the Plane of Earth (the first level in the final quest to ascend).

Yeah I had to look it up and yeah I thought it'd be more exciting... there are other cases where leaving the dungeon for the surface causes the game to end.

Re:Interaction

[Artifakt]

That 'outright sadistic' is why I don't play Nethack. I quit after a beginning character stepped on a trapdoor, landed on a trapdoor on the next level, landed on a teleport trap on the third level that sent him two more levels down, only to land on (you guess it) another trapdoor.
        No one who did that to my character in a pen and paper RPG would ever get me back to the table. I've thrown people out of conventions for doing that sort of thing to other paying members when running tournaments (and I point out, every organized gaming convention, without exception, will readily do just that to stop the cases of sadistic abuse that sometimes happen, and has a public posted policy on just that point in the membership and/or staff kits).
      Some companies who feel they are losing customers thanks to sadistic GMing keep a joint industry blacklist of referees who have abused players in sanctioned tournaments that way, just to curb the 'outright sadistic' conduct. Back 30 years ago, Gary Gygax sometimes told bad DMs he observed that they were never to DM ever again, and instructed TSR's mail order dept to refuse to sell to those people so as to put some teeth into it.
      Oh, but this is a computer game, that makes it different. No, it doesn't. All the good features of Nethack you've cited, the neat options for character class and so on, would make a great game, maybe the best game evah! BUT not with the 'outright sadistic' parts.

 

Re:Interaction

[Urkki]

Nethack and the like would be boring without the sadistic part, without the constant threat of dying of unfair causes. It helps the game to stay somewhat challenging even after completing it many times. It makes every game intense and exciting.

Besides, many unfair deaths aren't really unfair deaths, but instead deaths that could have been avoided by playing better (preparing better, being more cautious, being less greedy, etc). This is especially true when you get further along in the game and have more to lose. Truly unfair deaths where you do everything right and then you just die anyway are quite rare.

Note: I'm not saying you're "wrong" to not play Nethack 'cos you think it's too sadistic. Then it's just not a game that's entertaining for you. I'm just saying that it would be worse if it wasn't like that, it would be just plain boring.

Re:Interaction

[Scooter]

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...

This is what kept me playing Nethack for many years - to see if some obscure piece of logic had been accommodated. It usually was.

I once "died" in Nethack of a "thermonuclear explosion", largely due to a series of unfortunate events (coulda been a Darwin contender :P):-

I had a room full of demons to deal with, and adopted my usually successful room clearing move which goes like this: having acquired teleportation and a ring of teleport control, I teleport into the room; then using my magic whistle, I summoned my 3 tame dragons (Huey, Dewey and Louie - when you absolutely have to kill off every last m**** f**** in the goddam dungeon...). This where it all went wrong though as on the next turn, the dragons breathed fire at the demons, I got caught in the cross fire, which wasn't a problem as I had many many HP by then and was fireproof (you need to be to descend to the "hell" levels), but I was also carrying so many spellbooks, wands, potions, scrolls etc which all went up causing a critical mass of magic...

I also remember a friend of mine who thought he'd be clever and hack his save file in an early Nethack and give himself max HP. He was very pleased with himself until he went up a level, gained 8hp, and the signed integer rolled over...

Re:Interaction

[Mr. Flibble]

One of the things I liked in a very old DOS version of HACK (It was not called nethack in the 80's IIRC) were the bugs.

If you started on beginner mode, all your items were identified for you. And, if you selected a wizard class, and then immediately left the dungeon then started a new wizard and left the dungeon. Then you repeated this process over and over your characters would gain an extra wand or 2 over time as you created each new character.

After enough iterations, your character would be carrying (32) wands - and all of them would be identified. At this point though, the game bugged out. The game was not designed for a character to have 32 wands. So, you would select your items to wear, and one of the wands you carried would be overflowed to be treated as a piece of clothing. The value for the charge was taken as the value for the armor class. And, since you were carrying so many wands, one of them was bound to be a wand of charging. This would allow you to start the game with somewhere around a -66 AC with your elven cloak and your wand.

Another great thing was sometimes you one item would overflow and become a 'Glorkum.S" I don't know what that is, but you could wear it, and it had around a -45 AC as well. It appeared to be as a result of an overflow as well.

Finally, the best trick was the wand of wishing. You could not wish for more wands of wishing, but you COULD wish for a wand of cancellation. You used the wands 3 wishes, and then kept trying to zap the wand over and over again. After a while, you would get the message "you wrest one more spell from the worn out wand, what do you want to wish for?" Then the wand would go to -1 charges. Then you could zap it with the wand of cancellation and bring it back to 0 charges and start again...

Suffice it to say I managed to ascend with the real amulet of yendor many times due to these bugs. I wish the team had never fixed those ones....

Re:Interaction

[lawpoop]

I had a spell of nethack addiction a few years back. One of it's great features is the interaction of all the various elements. Potions, monsters, items, etc.

But I got the feeling it was all coded as a bunch of IF statements. IF you got a pie in your face, and IF you wiped it with a towel, then it would unblind you. Very cool, and on a level much more complex than most other games. However, it was all still pre-planned. Any cool interaction of things in nethack you discovered as coded into the game by a dev. You were discovering someone else's cool tricks.
I thought it would be cool if a game could have true creative interaction of objects -- a sort of emergence of events, not just a list or pre-planned events. I think you would have to do it with a discrete combinatorial system, so that you have just a bunch of simple parts. Like legos, they dont do anything by themselves, but the way in which you combine them in new and creative ways leads to things no one could have predicted, much less plan and code into IF statements.

Re:Interaction

[jandrese]

I've always found the apparent dread fear the devs have that someone somewhere might finish the game to be excellent protection against getting addicted. Seriously, when the game has about a million ways to screw the player over randomly in ways they could not prevent and also offers no save points and is structured such that even experts have less than a 1% chance of beating the game (which is not short by any measure).

Every few years I pick up Nethack again and give it a whirl, and it always goes the same way. I'll lose a few characters in the early levels where you have almost no tricks up your sleeve and the monsters are still strong. Then I'll get a character past the hump and really start to make progress, only to be killed by some complete bullcrap like opening a door and discovering a monster room, so you close and try to pin (or wizard lock) the door when a dragon walks up behind you and one of the monsters on the other side of the door destroys it and pins you between them. So you pull out the emergency scroll of teleport and it teleports you right into the middle of the monster room, onto a sleep gas trap. That's when I stop playing the game for a couple more years.

Re:Interaction

[SleepingWaterBear]

Dude, no offence but what you've described is extremely unlikely, and while that is no consolation to you when it happened, it is unlikely to happen again.

I don't know - I haven't been playing nethack that long and I've had almost the identical scenario happen to me several times. I once ended up on level 10 of the dungeon from level 2 because of a series of trap doors and level teleports.

I used every trick in the book, and even managed to survive working my way back up to level 3 before I messed up and died. Part of the real fun of nethack is that at times it can be sadistic, but if you're careful and learn from previous mistakes you can handle most the things it throws at you (there's always the Gnome with the wand of Death of course).

If there's a problem with nethack it's that the game isn't sadistic enough at the later levels. The beginning is very challenging, but you reach a point where you are near invincible and only a stupid mistake will kill you, and then you have to play another 10 hours to finish the game. Not that winning is assured at that point, stupid mistakes are quite common.

Re:Interaction

[smitty97]

yea, that happened to poor DeathOnAStick on NAO. It was horrible. He had spent nearly a year and a half mining the entire dungeon and polypiling rocks for gems. He had a couple pet giants lugging around bags of his loot since it was so heavy. sometimes i would watch him play, like the rest on rgrn, trying to figure out what he was up to.

from nethack.wikia.com:
After killing the Wizard of Yendor on dungeon level 1, he found a potion of gain level from the death drop. He drank it without fully identifying it first, finding out it was cursed.

Upon reaching the Plane of Earth, he desperately checked his inventory, and indeed he was carrying no gems. At this point, he went idle for 38 seconds. A few of his entourage of giants had been close enough to be dragged into the Planes with him, but they were either killed off or left behind at the inter-plane portals. The only gems DeathOnAStick had at his ascension were 2 dilithium crystals.
 

I've said this before but...

[slaker]

I ascended with a wishless tourist once, and I consider that more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.

Re:I've said this before but...

[cbuhler]

My one assension was with a Ranger. I personally would consider getting a tourist past the mines a bit of an accomplishment, probably my poorest character. Wizards and healers are both fun, but it's almost a different game with them.

Re:I've said this before but...

[syousef]

I ascended with a wishless tourist once, and I consider that more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree

So do I.

Signed,

Your boss. ;-)

Nethack is fine

[Xeth]

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.

Very difficult but strangely rewarding

[FourthAge]

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.

Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding

[evanbd]

I think most veteran hackers would agree that looking at the source, along with most spoilers, is definitely cheating -- though some level of general advice is not. The definitely-not-cheating ways to learn about the game are explore mode and the oracle; both are quite informative without being overly spoiled. At the same time, I think the vast majority of players look at spoilers to some degree.

To anyone new to nethack out there: Give it an honest try without spoilers. Use them when you get stuck, but only in moderation. Nethack is fundamentally a game about discovering the rules; if you learn them all by reading, it's far less fun. Of course, remaining eternally clueless is no fun either. As in many things, moderation is the key.

Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding

[FourthAge]

I agree with your general sentiment, that it is good to learn the game without spoilers, but due to the game's difficulty, I found this far too frustrating. The game does not forgive mistakes, and even in explore mode it is easy to get stuck.

I think I have a different philosophical approach to the game. I see it as a black box. Provided you don't open the box and change the rules, you can do anything you want with the information it provides and the moves you're allowed to make. Viewed like this, Nethack is a sort of remote debugging challenge in the form of an adventure game. To understand the state of the game running on the server, you can look at your own local copy, the source code, the spoilers, and everything the server has sent you - if you want. Which is even geekier than treating it as an RPG!

Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding

[LotsOfPhil]

I agree. The grandparent needs to be modded down. Ellora's Saga is legendary because the guy tried so hard to not be spoiled. Saying someone should try their hardest to beat Nethack without spoilers is just plain mean.

Re:Very difficult but strangely rewarding

[Anonymous Coward]

As a seasoned nethack player (I've ascended all classes and done some optional conducts. Still working on pacifist :) ). Spoilers and source diving are not considered cheating amongst the greater nethack community. And by greater nethack community I basically mean rec.games.roguelike.nethack.

There is only one thing that is universally considered cheating, and that is backing up save files to circumvent permanent death.

While spoilers are very helpful, they are not gamebreaking. There's no set path to follow in nethack that will guarantee victory.

Spoilers are more often used as a reference for things that just don't make sense to memorize.

For example, let's say I need a scroll of enchant armor, I have blank paper and a Magic Marker with 15 charges on it. I don't remember how many charges are required to make that scroll, so I look it up.

The spoiler won't give you the idea to make a scroll that you need using equipment found around the dungeon. But they will give you the details you need to be a little more efficient.

Think of the spoilers as more of a pocket reference than a walkthrough or tutorial.

I pulled off a Double Top last year

[JoshJ]

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.

bsdgames, hack, age of nethack

[jonaskoelker]

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.

I prefer Angband.

[CrazyJim1]

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.

For those who tagged this "getalife"

[Anonymous Coward]

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 put more effort into nethack...

[tempest69]

I'm pretty sure that between the ages of 15 and 23 I put in a PHD amount of work into ascending in nethack. And no, it didnt happen.

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.

Re:variations

[dweezil-n0xad]

I would recommend Vulture's if you want a a graphical version of NetHack.

The Vulture's games are forks of the Falcon's Eye project; over the standard Falcon's Eye base and the optional use of the Slash'EM core, Vulture's incorporates the latest core sources, hundreds more graphics and sounds, many bugfixes and performance enhancements, and an open, collaborative development environment.

telenet nethack.alt.org to watch live games

[6350']

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.

Flamebait - Best game ever

[mathimus1863]

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.

Re:Flamebait - Best game ever

[Bambi Dee]

I'm bad at both... and I keep trying to save and quit Nethack with a ":wq".

Re:Flamebait - Best game ever

[lawpoop]

I thought the interaction of objects in NetHack was very cool and well-developed, but nonetheless, I think it could be taken one step further. Basically, all of the interactions are a bunch of IF statements hard-coded into the game. You don't discover anything other than what a dev thought was cool,and coded in. It's very cool and elaborate at this point, but ultimately limited.

It would be theoretically possible to create a game where you can have true unexpected interactions of objects. You would create a set of simple properties, and then more complex interaction emerge from the interactions of simple properties. Like legos, you keep combining and combining, coming up with new and creative combination, suprising yourself with things no one could have predicted. It's like language or music; you can never exhaust the possibilities. They're endless. It's literally and endless set. It's called a discrete combinatorial system.

Re:Flamebait - Best game ever

[porpnorber]

In some sense, NetHack has had this from time to time. Some of the interactions were 'prototyped' as bugs: different object classes stored their attributes in overlapped storage (unions, shared bitfields, whatever), and the type checking was a little sporadic. So casting an enhancement spell on something that had an inappropriate data structure would occasionally give things peculiar properties. Then devteam would look at the bug report and say, hey, this is a latent feature, and give 'proper' semantics to the effect.

Made for a huge binary though. It's nothing nowadays in the days of template metaprogramming and the million monkeys coding effect, all held in balance by virtual memory and nearly-free RAM, but shoehorning the 2M executable into a 640K PC footprint was my proudest NetHack achievement.

Sadly, I almost always found the game far too hard to enjoy. There were only one or two releases I felt I could make any progress with, and devteam always thought they needed fixing because they were too easy (I was sooo sad when wand-pool stopped being the method of choice against shopkeepers). But still. Some of my best work went into that game—far, far under the covers.

Nethack isn't hard among roguelikes

[Khashishi]

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.

Re:Nethack isn't hard among roguelikes

[bhaak1]

NetHack isn't really about being hard. It is about surviving situations that the RNG throws at you or you get yourself into by using all options available to you.

If you want a punishing NetHack, play Slash'Em :-)

An incredibly hard, incredibly fun game

[HonestButCurious]

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

telnet noway.ratry.ru 37331 for tourney games

[tripa]

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!

Re:three four three

[tzot]

Well, they still answer to bug reports. Sometimes :-)

The last update to the bugs page has been in August.

But what's taking them so long for a new version, nobody knows.

I've heard that they had issues switching to a new graphics engine.

Re:Obama's aunt an illegal, living on taxpayers $$

[Lars T.]

Having a deadbeat relative precludes you from being President?

Heck, (once) being a deadbeat doesn't preclude you from being President.

Spoiler Warning?

[djdavetrouble]

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...

Re:Spoiler Warning?

[SQLGuru]

1 in 10,000???!??!?? You must play in Wizard mode. :D (That's either a smiley or YASD by newt.)

Layne

Re:Spoiler Warning?

[g0dsp33d]

Screw the newt, I'm more afraid of the dragon.

Finally, a thread where my sig makes sense...

It is "lol: You see no door there." for posterity.

Best nethack moment ever

[bertok]

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."

Re:three four three

[glittalogik]

What, Times New Roman?

Re:Useful, but...

[Krakhan]

Yes, quaffing cursed potions of gain level work in Moloch's sanctum, and everywhere I believe. In fact, a useful thing to do is if you have any wishes left over near the end (and assuming you're not going for a wishless conduct) is to wish for two cursed potions of gain level. Since you can't levelport and branchport while carrying the amulet, this is an essential item to use to save time climbing back up, especially with not having to deal with the mob in Moloch's sanctum on the way out.

It's also useful for bypassing the Zoo while going up to Moloch's sanctum. It's a trick I've used many times myself once an expert player who's well known in the Nethack community taught me it.