Nethack - Best Game Ever (2000) | Hacker News Reader

Nethack - Best Game Ever (2000)

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50 pointslukas29 comments

For those of you who might be looking for something similar in a strategy/empire-building game, Dwarf Fortress is available for free at: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

With a free graphics front-end for the game at: http://mayday.w.staszic.waw.pl/df.php

It's donation-ware, still under development, and the learning curve is a right-angle, but the game is really fun and addictive.

A wiki has been put together in lieu of proper documentation with this page: http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Your_first_fortre...

providing everything you need to start.

If you enjoy the game, please donate. This is a startup which really deserves to succeed.

I downloaded Dwarf Fortress last Thursday. Worst decision I ever made.

After having no idea what I was doing on the first fort, I spent an hour reading the Wiki the next day. I then proceeded to spend 6 hours straight playing it.

This game is great, but you really have to read the documentation, otherwise it's pretty much impossible. I found that the more games I lost the more I learned for the next game which made it just that much more fun. Learning new things also had the side effect of causing my games to run longer, so.. be careful :)

Dwarf Fortress doesn't seem to work on Linux. Which is strange, since the GUI is ASCII. It is not open source, so I can't jump in and fix this either. All that said, it looks like a cool game.

It isn't just plain ASCII; DF actually uses OpenGL (!) to render ASCII characters.

I believe it runs under WINE.

Yes, it runs under wine, but in my experience you have to turn off sound.

That makes it easy: There is no in-game sound.

If you would like the DF music to play in the background, just fire up the game's mp3 (under /data/sound) on your player and you're off.

To be honest, I turn off the sound anyway. That one single tune on repeat gets slightly annoying after a couple of hours.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is arguably a better game than Nethack in almost every way, and it's actively developed. Crawl is better balanced, meaning that when you die it's often due to your own misstep, rather than arbitrary luck. The UI takes care of a lot of the grunt-work of crawling through the dungeon, so you can spend more time on the aspects of the game that are actually fun. And it's got more to do than Nethack does, featuring a variety of branches and interesting areas rather than the monotony of the same kinds of levels over and over.

Before Crawl, I never thought I could feel absolute terror while playing a roguelike. You'll see what I mean the first time you're frantically trying to find a portal out of the Abyss with a veritable armada of demons closing in on you.

More info: http://crawl-ref.sourceforge.net/

The one thing that Nethack does "better" is that it's got dozens and dozens of ways to die. In Crawl, when you die, it's usually due to hit point loss.

While I will take your word that crawl gets good later in the game, I've always found it to be really monotonous to start, so I never got into it, and have never played it long enough to see past the first level or two.

Nethack was intriguing and really funny right from the start, so I got really into playing it, and the sense of humor is really important to me.

I will have to give crawl another serious look, because at first it seems really mechanical. Pretty much like Diablo, but on the console.

Nethack definitely has more going for it in the comedy department. I like good game humor as well, but balance and interesting gameplay are even more important to me. I would encourage you to give Crawl another try, if only so that you can appreciate the quantum mechanics in Nethack that much more.

If you want an actively developed Nethack, you might try the fork Sporkhack: http://sporkhack.nineball.org/

To play, simply telnet to sporkhack.com

The author of Sporkhack tries to make the game more balanced, but without increasing the difficulty for beginners.

"Say a hacker who's suddenly become wealthy from a Linux-related IPO approaches you and says, 'Here's a million dollars. Let's make a full-blown, graphics-rich version of Nethack to rival Diablo. Interested?'"

That would really kick ass. Anyone having a spare million dolars?

There are graphic clients available, in various stages of maintenance (see the Wiki article on NH). But I keep going back to the text version. It's like porting Pacman to the Quake or other 3d engine - you don't really gain anything, and arguably the visual distractions get in the way, over-emphasizing the limitations of the square grid and limited view. Additionally, the isometric 3d of some ports makes it too easy to step into the wrong square.

When I was in High School (80s) I used to sneak onto the campus of the local technical college to play Hack.

I suspect it would take more than a million dollars to make a modern graphics-rich game, regardless of its basis in Nethack.

I'd certainly like to play such a game, though. The depth of the Nethack world is impressive. Put it on the Wii so I can swing swords, throw daggers, fling spells, etc. and I would probably never be heard from in the real world again.

So classic. A few years ago I told my dad what I was playing and he told me he had played Hack (from which NetHack is derived) on his first PC.

Roguelikes have aged better than any other games I can think of.

I had Hack - my dad bought it for me from a mail order catalog in the 1980's and they sent us a 5¼-inch floppy. I remember printing out the manual on my dot matrix printer. I don't think I have ever loved a computer game like I did this one.

If you like this sort of thing there is also Angband - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angband_(computer_game)

I actually tended to prefer the "straight-forward" roguelikes, like Moria and Angband. Nethack struck me as requiring participation in some esoteric cult-like sub-culture to really appreciate the game. Whereas the original Rogue and descendants were more pure games, that focused on strategy and risk management, rather than exploiting a never ending stream of "gimmicks."

Ultimately, I stopped playing these and started playing the commercial fare like Diablo. It wasn't the graphics, though. It was the simple fact that the commerical games were designed to be beaten. It used to be a matter of course for the developers of the roguelikes to constantly patch or change the games to make it harder and harder to win. I, quite frankly, got tired of playing games that only provided one primary goal (beating the Balrog/Morgoth; getting the Amulet) and pulling the goal away from me faster than I could adapt. Even the modern MMORPGs (like WoW, which is my current addiction) provide intermediary goals that make the time investment feel more productive.

WoW is a great example of the concept that people enjoy new goals, but hate it when their old goals become harder.

Which is why sucessful games tend to add hard content that becomes easer over time just as new goals are added to the game.

Perfect companion for the Nintendo DS: http://frodo.dyn.gno.org/~brettk/NetHackDS

My favorite roguelike has to be Troubles of Middle Earth http://t-o-m-e.net/ There's nothing like a treasured gameplay style mixed with a treasured backstory.

Rogue is on the iPhone. Nethack and Dwarf Fortress would be amazing. Does anyone have any inside info?

Nethack is probably doable. Dwarf Fortress isn't open-source, and would probably bog down badly on the iPhone without significant modifications.

Yes, Nethack should be doable. It already runs on some smartphones [1]. The most pressing problem seems to be the limited methods of input. Nethack bears many similarities to Vi in the user interface, and I need a full keyboard to enjoy it.

[1] http://www.nethack.org/v343/ports/download-wince.html

ADoM is also good, but closed source unfortunately. Can't play it on my PDA.

Yes, this is an amazing roguelike. My favorite one. Too bad it's sequel (Jade) is still vaporware...

Dead By Zombie is a Rogue-like set in a zombie apocalypse world. And with mad scientists. Survival horror aspect. A little comedy. And written in Python. Without ever looking at any Rogue-like source. The demo is free at: http://deadbyzombie.com

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