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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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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
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.
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.
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.
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