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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.
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.
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.
While the puritans out there will have a conniption fit, I personally prefer a graphics pack enabled port of nethack.
There are several available on the google playstore that are quite enjoyable, and practically MADE for use on a tablet.
If you want the really real deal though, you need a linux/unix machine, and you need to play the ncurses command line version in a terminal.
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.
I'm so sorry your life was wrecked. Have you tried installing MyCleanPC?
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?
There is a pretty awesome isometric interface for nethack, http://www.desura.com/games/vu... or http://www.darkarts.co.za/vult... and it's free :)
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."
... 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.
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.
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.
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?