Slashdot Mirror
NetHack: Still One of the Greatest Games Ever Written
M-Saunders writes: While everyone obsesses about frame rates and polygon counts, there's one game that hasn't changed visually for decades. NetHack may look incredibly primitive today, but it's still arguably the best game of all time, with an unmatched level of depth, creativity and replayability. Linux Voice looks at this fascinating dungeon romp, explaining what makes it great, how to get started with it, and how to discover some of its secrets.
Rogue, Moria and the likes. I personally played Rogue and Moria.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
When monsters steal your loot, use what should be your wands, drink potions, and you can be killed by tripping over a cockatrice corpse, you better expect a super interesting game.
Pity it hasn't been updated meaningfully for over a decade - perhaps it just hit perfection?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
BZFlag with a few friends is way more fun than another D&D ripoff you can only play by yourself.
Just saying.
No, I dont mean graphics wise, or anything like that.
Nethack needs full multi-user, and an overhaul on the generated story (what there is of it), so that the core process can be daemonized, and users attaching to the system can play against each other.
The plot of NetHack is to get the silly amulet and take it to YOUR god's altar on the last level, before anyone else can. Given the obscene amount times people die, it could reasonably take weeks for this to happen. (Seriously-- Gehenna without any genocide scrolls? LOL! As IF!)
I would like to see a fully MUD revamp version of NetHack, that connects users either through port listener, with a remote client app. The "remote client" can be run locally on the system using ssh, or it can attach to an exported listen port. Either way, players attach to the server deamon, which does the real nitty gritty.
The spontaneous level creation is a fun part of Nethack, and I would like to keep that-- just have the game world get reset with new random dungeons after somebody manages to put the amulet of yendor on an altar at the end.
Why would this be more awesome than nethack already is?
1) Players can choose weather or not to cooperate to get through certain areas before having to go all "highlander" on each other at the end.
2) Nethack's dungeons were deformable at-will using certain spells/items. Even without regenerating the world each and every time, the gameworld would change in unpredictable ways with multiple human players attacking it and changing it.
Nethack uses so little resources on modern systems that it is not even funny at all. Seriously, I can run it on an openwrt enabled router over ssh. For real. A daemonized instance of it would hardly make anything modern even twitch, even with many users stuck on it.
I'm in complete agreement that great framerate, high resolution, and 3d graphics dont mean shit when it comes to a fun game. Wonder how I missed this one. Going to check it out.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is by far my favorite crawler and it's regularly updated as well.
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/
download it or play it in your browser as ascii or with tiles.
Entirely true, I'm afraid. The day my friends saw me play NetHack was the day I became a loser. I tried to explain how the unique challenges make it one of the best games ever made, but they didn't understand. "It's just a bunch of boxes!" they said. Later they asked me if I still played "that stupid game." When I admitted that I did, they never spoke to me again.
there's some forks with more classes to play etc.
but at the heart nethack is a memorization and risk minimization game.
all the insta deaths you need to prepare to counter(reflection is a must) and then just making the character strong enough to deal with the enemies - and there's a certain degree of luck involved in if you can prepare to some insta deaths before they become likely to happen.
but since nethack is already a complete game with beginning and an end goal(ascension), don't know what's there to update, I don't remember any bugs either really. the endgame is kind of ridiculous and the character needs to be kind of ridiculous(ac -27 and what have you) to face it but that's the game...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Games like nethack don't need constant updates to be interesting, and there are enough variants to nethack and angband around to keep them from getting stale. My favourite, zangband, hasn't had any updates in very long time but it's still fun. It was the first roguelike I found that had a proper overworld, something I found to be awesome. Interesting classes and some unique systems made it more amusing than baseline angband, too.
MAngband was another interesting one that had an explorable overworld. Plus it was multiplayer, which is pretty unique for these games.
I'm so sorry your life was wrecked. Have you tried installing MyCleanPC?
I'm not installing anything, and in fact I'm not doing anything at all until Bennett Haselton, frequent contributor, writes an article telling me how to form an opinion based on his ideas. I should not wait long, after all he's a frequent contributor.
While I feel that Nethack was a groundbreaking classic with an insanely complex and quirky world, DCSS has become my go-to favorite for crawling in recent years. I can see how unraveling the depths of Nethack could still be appealing in an exploratory sense, but it has become this massive volume of metagaming madness that's more akin to dwarf fortress than a fun and playable crawler.
Yep, and this is why it's not a very good design. In a good roguelike, decisions should be situational: there should be different approaches you can take, and risk/reward tradeoffs so that a good played can take chances when behind, and play it safe when ahead. Nethack has very few meaningful strategic decisions. Crawl/DCSS had the right idea when they aggressively stripped "no-brainer" and counterintuitive decisions from the game.
(Among the counterintuitive things in Nethack that I remember: Level scaling, i.e. you don't want to get your level too high too early. All priests, even the priest of Moloch, you can donate to for divine blessing without your god getting pissed at you)
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
If it wasn't for this game, I for one would have fininished my PhD a year earlier. Will nobody think of the students?
Stone Soup was the first roguelike I actually got into; and probably still the one I've sunk the most time into. Not remotely qualified to talk about whether or not it's good, but dang it's fun.
Pity it hasn't been updated meaningfully for over a decade - perhaps it just hit perfection?
Well, there is one game that has a lot of that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It is graphical enough to support your game play, but still has some of the feel of a character based game like Nethack, and perhaps an even more elaborate system of magic, faith and skills - plus an enormous set of maps.
Are you actually saying that people play nethack without using a debugger and source code?
Inconceivable!
I still have instinctive reflex to be cautious of a large swarm of letter a. And many other characters bring back memories of past adventures.
Permadeath? Well, one of the first things you have to learn to do is cheat by backing up those file. Of course, on a Unix box you'll need to be root, but easier on other platforms.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
I refuse to believe that I am alone in remembering the awesomeness that was Omega.
I have not played recent forks or versions of nethack, but I recall the original starting out in a dungeon and forever progressing through the same dungeon randomly and endlessly. Where Omega had the same random dungeons, it expanded to include a country-side, a city, many villages, a volcano, a sewer, many temples, and much more. So much more depth, yet the same rogue-like text graphics.
Oh Omega, how I miss thee.
"Warning: Arithmetic Overflow in _withdraw
Yo mama. Core dumped."
I want an article by frequent contributor, Bennett Haselton, in which he analyses the MyCleanPC stories as an alternative to traditional Fairy Tales.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
There was a multihack variant of nethack around 10-15 years ago. I think I might've downloaded it once when it was still 'new', but haven't been able to find a direct link to it since, only references mentioning it having existed.
That said, there's tomenet as another nethack-ish alternative. It's set against Middle Earth, has hundreds of potential houses to buy, dungeons, the ability to play either hardcore or 'resurrectable', 'real time' turns based on a tick timer (second or two per turn), lots of equipment, etc etc.
I haven't played it in a while, since most of my friends have turned into OMG GFX snobs, but it was quite fun the few times I got a group together to go adventuring.
My exact reason for giving up on Nethack after grinding through the same levels Sokoban for the 40th time for the same loot.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
... the keys used to specify directions are a real pain on laptops without a keypad.
I can't imagine anyone using the vi shortcuts (k for up and, going clockwise, u l n j b h and y).
Using an external USB keypad is a possible solution but my experience with those devices is that they are unreliable and they behave strangely with Numlock.
... there will be blood spilt today!
A few years ago, one of my Nethack games went like that
Start as a wizard. Room is empty. I feel safe
Move toward the door
Move toward the door
"A trapdoor in the ceiling opens and a rock falls on your head!"
"You die..."
alt dot org slash nethack
watch the ttyrecs
choose the name that's right for you
dare to compare
You may as well just go for the whole "No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame." response.
And I'm not quite ready to go to single-player mode. Still figuring out 13..
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I think Cataclysm got inspration from this
while
You haven't seen NetHack until you've seen it on a retina MacBook or iMac. I nearly soiled my trousers the first time I saw "L" coming at me on such a display.
Alien: Isolation has nothing on it.
Trolling is a art,
I've noted that the Steam game, "Dungeons of Dredmor", is a nice upgrade to the genre of rogue-like games. It's good, for those who enjoy them and like a bit more graphics. It has different shop mechanics, but I was given a copy and enjoyed it. And I do remember compiling and playing the original Rogue decades ago, along with 'rogomatic' to watch someone _else_ trying to dungeon dive.
reflection is a must
I have ascended 8 times. None of them used reflection at all. I use gray dragon scale mail, amulet of lifesaving, and usually small shield--no reflection.
I don't know about NetHack. I started with Hack back in the late 80's, and have played that then NetHack off and on since, usually picking it up for a day to a few weeks then losing interest. Never finished the game. I'd usually play until I got a guy down pretty far with a great kit, then when he inevitably died from something stupid, I'd be annoyed and lose interest again.
It's a good game, maybe even a great game, but it's not a perfect game and it's not the best game ever. Too much of it is just not fun. The major design flaws in my mind:
* Once you hit the labyrinths and have to deal with the wizard following you around, it just becomes a grind. A little bit of a grind in order to achieve something afterwards is fine but when a game becomes work then that is not.
* It doesn't give you a fair way to figure out what to do. A lot of the actions required to finish the game are neither hinted at nor intuitive.
* It's too repetitive. It doesn't exercise my mind much; you just do the same things again and again.
* It's too time-consuming, and frequently unnecessarily so (which goes back to the repetitive point).
Anyway, just my thoughts.
I enjoyed NetHack a lot in college during the 3.low-numbered-X days. It slowly increased its complexity to the point where it stopped being fun for me. It started becoming more about the meta-game -- how to test your gems, how to mix your potions, how to identify your scrolls -- and less about the dungeons. I gave up on it when they added the Sokoban levels and I switched to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, although I'm playing that less and less these days as well in favor of Larn. At least Larn has a clearly defined goal and a clear path to get there.
I will fully acknowledge that it's the standard and the baseline. It's just not fun for me anymore.
The textures are fucking horrible.
ZAngband is great. And needs an update...
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
You can polymorph into a cockatrice, make yourself female (if male), lay cockatrice eggs, put them into a sack and have projectiles that automatically stone monsters.
Polymorph yourself into a Winged Gargoyle, you can wear armor and don't have to worry about stoning with the eggs. You are also flying, so you can get over the pesky water parts of the lower levels and the elemental plane of air.
You can polypile to make a bunch of rings of +1 damage / +1 accuracy, then poly yourself into a Xorn, eat the rings and gain intrinsic accuracy and intrinsic damage bonus. Most people use this to increase scores by having 1-hit-kills on the horsemen at the endgame.
The game has insane levels of depth.
Don't give him any ideas! We should treat his name as if he was Harry Potter's Voldemort, and refer to him as "The Frequent Contributor Who Should Not Be Named"
If you have a 32-bit OS, you can still play Exile III from spiderweb software. It's one of the best RPGs ever made. The story, combat, spell list, writing, and non-annoying puzzles were so far ahead of their time, it's insane.
World of Warcraft needs a tourist class. Give him a camera, a Hawaiian flowery shirt and a million hit points per level, and the only way he can level up is to wander around taking pictures of things. How does any self-respecting RPG not have a tourist class?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
FTL is a great game but I wouldn't call it a rougelike. If you want to bend words you can call Minecraft for an FPS since it's in first person view and you actually can shoot. Saying that FTL is a rougelike is more of a stretch than that. We need clear distinctions. I don't want third person shooters to be called FPS because I enjoy one but not the other. For a similar reason, calling FTL a rougelike is doing it a disservice. Just because someone violently hates rougelikes in general doesn't mean that they shouldn't check out FTL.
There's a big difference between "Going Rogue" and "Going Rouge", and yet I see this mistake a lot.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Seriously, name me one serious game that is not either a rouge type game, a FPS, or CinC game on steroids. Maybe this one http://kotaku.com/worlds-first...
Most game makers are recycling the same crap over and over again. Go on a quest, kill the monsters, create an army, manage resources etc. That's about it.
Boring......
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Wasn't there a game called Omega? I recall that from the late 80's
There are lots of nethack servers running right now. There's the alt.org nethack server, and I also run a nethack server (telnet to nethack.kraln.com) Also, my entry to the Ludumdare 48 competition was a nethack/roguelike thingy, so I am getting a kick out of this post: http://ludumdare.com/compo/lud...
No, not really. Now it's just a geek point thing.
I play nethack because obscure is cool., plus references.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And Shakespeare did all the plots, therefore nothing good has been written since.
That is what you sound like.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, you see one romantic comedy you've seen them all. Some are funny but they do not hold my interest. As is the boy meets girl tragedy which also has been rehashed countless times. He did have a a way of writing about the upper classes so anything about the under classes would not be in is lexicon. But there is a huge amount of recycling in movies and literature finding something fresh is hard for me to find. "Rambo" and imitators are just rehashes of Hercules perhaps. Though "Son of Rambo" was fun.
HP Lovecraft was pretty original. As was Campbel, Ursula K. LeGuin, and a few more. But mostly a rehash. "Star Wars" was mostly a rehash of Joseph Campbel's "Hero of a thousand Faces".
Once you see the paradigm and tropes it starts to bore you...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It is possible to die on turn 0, before you have even had a chance to act.
Pity it hasn't been updated meaningfully for over a decade - perhaps it just hit perfection?
Though I've ascended a few characters, I haven't tried to do so in a while, mainly because of that long, slow slog through the mazes. I'd consider changing things around so that there's maybe a 1/10 chance of getting a maze on any standard Gehennom level - or better yet, only the special levels get mazes.
Funny how the wizard is one of the weakest characters at the beginning of the game, but becomes almost unstoppable at experience level 30. Reverse-genociding purple worms, taming them, and teleporting them away can really be helpful on the Astral Plane - a bunch of pet purple worms can really wreak havoc. Even one pet purple worm can be handy in Minetown (though I take care to lock Izchak in his shop when I clean out Minetown).
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
personally, Unnethack is my favorite fork. It has UI adjustments and early game changes that really add to the game experience. Can't wait to see the next Nethack update, I heard some of the code got leaked recently so it will probably be awhile.
Starving is how 90% of the characters die. 90% of the rest die because I'm eating everything to stop dying of hunger and I'm poisoning myself.
...nethack has been and still is my least favorite, along with rogue and "hack".
I latched right onto LARN, Omega, and Moria as soon as I found out about them. Then later Angband(and the host of variants, BTW has angband development stopped? it's got to be close to "nethack" in age unless they're including hack, in which case they'd have to include Moria for Angband), all of the angband variants(esp. Pernband-> band->T.o.M.E. -s-o-r-t-o-f-> Tales of maj'eyal or whatever it is), and crawl.
Even powder I find to be more fun than nethack.
Why? Nethack always just felt too arbitrary to me, and just overall not a very fun roguelike.
There is a slightly newer/modified version here. https://sites.google.com/site/mangojuice75/
Fixed a few things, and improved the magic system a little, especially summons. But I agree, zangband is by far my favorite roguelike and I really wish somebody would take up maintaining it again.
I wouldn't put it anywhere close to the top of my "best games" list. I've always felt that a lot of its difficulty is the false difficulty of figuring out how everything works, as once you understand the game's mechanics it's not terribly hard to grind out an ascension if you're willing to play slow and methodical. The game also gets stale pretty fast, as the mid- and especially late-games tend to be very similar in each playthrough.
Finally, with no story to speak of and no window dressing at all, it has felt increasingly sterile as I've gotten older. And I'm not saying that all games need to have melodramatic AAA-style cinematics to be worthwhile, Dwarf Fortress is a great example of a roguelike that manages to be beautiful and compelling without any pre-rendered settings or stories.
The roguelikes I've enjoyed most recently, even if they only fit the mold loosely, are FTL, Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain, and Rogue Legacy.
I've played it on and off, for years. Have never won, not once, even in X (explore) mode.
Try playing it with one of the 2d graphical overlays (like XNetHack), too.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Funny how the wizard is one of the weakest characters at the beginning of the game, but becomes almost unstoppable at experience level 30.
This pattern isn't unique to Nethack, for better or worse, it's endemic to most Fantasy RPGs, in my experience. I think it's a game-balance issue - either the wizard is the specialist at *magic* which is a powerful force, or *magic* is simply a skill tree where other classes have their own powerful skills (i.e., Diablo).
Part of the problem is modeling a wizard after Gandalf or other archetypal figures - those characters meant to be support NPCs - actually playing Gandalf would mean you're playing a completely different game than a protagonist like Frodo or Aragorn.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I've been playing Pixel Dungeon on my phone. Completely addicted. Haven't been so happy with a game since I discovered Dwarf Fortress 5 years ago.
And it has revitalized my interest in Rogue-likes. I fired up Nethack last week for the first time in 10 years, I've been looking around for more rogues, I looked at the Wayback machine for my first love in Rogue-likes, Wyvern(cabochon.org), I'm even feeling motivated to build my own.
I haven't tried to do so in a while, mainly because of that long, slow slog through the mazes.
Scroll of Magic Mapping is your friend, as is a big pile of Wands of Digging. Ring of Teleport Control does wonders, too.
I never get tired of this game, and I still go through month long stretches of time where wheneve rI have spare time, I start playing it.
Lately I've discovered nethack 4 - it's an unofficially blessed fork of nethack and some fo the same core developers are contributing to it. The game mechanics and strategies are the same, but the user interface (still all character based by default) is a lot nicer. It also is a complete architectural change to a client-server model - and one fo the benefits of that is that save files have gotten a lot more robust & streamlined.
I know it's hip to play in text mode with vi keys, but you don't have to. Tile graphics mode has been around for a while now, and cursor keys have pretty much always been there. The article doesn't seem to indicate that.
Dungeon crawl is much better
How about http://idlerpg.net/ where players doesn't have to do anything except idle in IRC channel. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I always try these plans, but I end up starving to death.
Came here for the Larn reference, left satisfied. (I had the same experience).
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com