I’ve written ANOTHER article for Crispy Gamer, this one in the form of a blog post. This one talks about a favorite game of mine: Nethack. Here’s a snippet:
“No! It’s too strong! I … oh, damn it, the f*cking troll killed Carbomb.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” asks my wife Charlotte, who with a quick glance toward the little bed perched on our window-shelf can see that our cat, Carbomb, is still totally alive and sleeping peacefully.
“Oh,” I say. “I set the game so that if I start with a pet cat, the cat’s name is Carbomb.”
“That’s a game?”
“Sure. This little ‘at’ symbol is me, and that ‘T’ is a troll, and this is a …”
“Sounds great,” she says, and goes back to her book.
Okay, so perhaps not everyone understands the appeal of Nethack. Actually, it seems likely that the vast bulk of today’s gamers have never heard of Nethack, which really is something of a shame. How many games do you know of which have been in near-constant development for thirty years, boast a stunning depth of artificial intelligence unrivaled by modern titles, and will run flawlessly on any computer, of any speed, running any operating system available?
Check out the full article and let me know what you think!
I’ve never played Nethack before but I do have some experience with ASCII based games, specifically, Dwarf Fortress. Ever played that? It follows the same theme that Nethack does, namely, Dieing is Fun!
Tycho of Penny-Arcade recently posted a great tutorial for it if you’ve never played before:
http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/02/09/the-complete-and-utter-newby-tutorial-for-dwarf-fortress-part-1-wtf/
There’s also a great Succession game done by Something Awful of a fortress called Boatmurdered: http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/intro.html
Anyway, I highly recommend it if you’ve never played it and even if you have a long time ago. There are always some new features. And it’s a lot of fun.
Rogue Touch for iPhone is a decent port of Rogue (Nethack predecessor).
Wish I could post a screenshot showing my “+2,+3 mace of venus flytrap slaying”.
Alas, I do not own an iphone :)
Last I heard, that condition was still curable.
So in my latest game, I found 2 “vorpalize weapon” scrolls on the first two levels, which is really rare. When you read that type of scroll, it adds +1/+1 to your active weapon, and makes it “of X slaying”, which means that it has a special directional “zap” ability that will instakill that type of enemy.
My first vorpalize scroll (which I read without knowing what it was) turned my starter mace into a mace of Jabberwock Slaying (I’ve never seen a Jabberwock). A few rooms later, I amazingly found another vorp scroll which I used on my katana – giving me a +1,+1 Katana of Dragon Slaying at Floor 2 of the dungeon (I’ve never seen a Dragon either – but I know it’s the most powerful enemy in the game).
Fast forward to Floor 16; I encounter an “Ur-Vile”. Only ever seen one once before, and it was the end of that character. Fortunately, I had just picked up my second staff of Polymorph – poof! The Ur-Vile was replaced with a cloud, and the cloud was replaced with a… Dragon.
Out comes the trusty (and heretofore unused) Katana — zap, Dragon dead. “You have reached the level of Hero”.
Fun, unpredictable game.