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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.
Don't forget the original Hack on which Nethack is based - (basically) the same game, but on ASCII terminals (yes, I'm that old).
I played both Rogue and Hack on the VAX-785 running BSD back in college. Rogue was more forgiving, like if you ran out of food (faint, continue, repeat...), where Hack was hell-bent on killing you for the slightest mistake. You were boned if you died in Hack, restarted and ran into your former dog - who hadn't been fed in a while. Lesson: Teach your pet to hunt non-humans or be prepared to end him.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
What roguelikes are you playing? The entire appeal of roguelikes, as I see it (and that includes pseudo-roguelikes which have random worlds and permadeath but aren't turn based) is that you have to actually optimize, actually get better in order to progress: learn which things are good, which ones are situational, which ones are mostly bad. And it's not enough to get the good things, you have to get a picture of the risk/reward ratios too, so that you take less risk when you're on a path to winning, and more when you aren't. Such considerations are largely absent in non-roguelike RPGs.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
looked at the sun shining outside, thought about how much the obsession was taking me away from my girlfriend
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