Nethack is awesome - Discuss

Yeah, wanted to discuss nethack, since I have been playing it a ton lately.

Man its addicting, especially when you decide to risk the throne, and get a +2 blessed frost brand really early on your Samurai.... that is just crazy.

That being said, my archaelogist has spent about 3000 turns in minetown attemtping to sacrifice for a Grayswandir, since sabers themselves are so rare and I can't convince my pet to kill the watch captain (and am lawful so don't want to do it myself).


What are other peoples thoughts/enjoyments about the game?

Also FYI, I prefer to play the 'vulture' version where it has isometric graphics, as it just makes it so much nicer to play (though there are 'bugs' inherent in this sometimes)

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Real_Wolf wrote:

What are other peoples thoughts/enjoyments about the game?

For a start, I disagree completely with this:

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Real_Wolf wrote:

Also FYI, I prefer to play the 'vulture' version where it has isometric graphics, as it just makes it so much nicer to play (though there are 'bugs' inherent in this sometimes)

It makes the game nicer to look at, but not nicer to play - in fact pretty much every effect it has on the process of actually playing is to impede getting full information or doing things.

In general, though, Nethack is pretty cool, yes. I've beaten it twice, and haven't played for a long time, but I still go back occasionally.

I know where your coming from (and have had what I consider YASD from this lack of information before, apparently naga hatchlings aren't being given any sprite so they are invisible), but I just find it much nicer having the visual interface.

I just get so angry at it when I die from something I shouldn't, but I really ennjoy the idea that you really don't know what anything does, and to just get used to not having items identified, yet figuring out what they are based on other information.

I moved to Dungeon Crawl after a year of Nethack and played on it for a while.

With how bad the content for DC has been over the last few years, I think moving back may be in order.

As for the visual feedback, loading a full graphics stack makes the game impossibly hard to play on the toaster I ssh'd into.

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pneuma wrote:

I moved to Dungeon Crawl after a year of Nethack and played on it for a while.

With how bad the content for DC has been over the last few years, I think moving back may be in order.

As for the visual feedback, loading a full graphics stack makes the game impossibly hard to play on the toaster I ssh'd into.

What sort of toaster do you have? I remember playing this on windows 95 and the graphics weren't so intensive it had trouble. Maybe it was 98. I don't remember that clearly as I was a teenager or perhaps younger then.



What would be nice is a graphical interface that still had all the full details available that the actual nethack game has, this would make it lovely to play while not compromising information

I never really got into NetHack; it always seemed a little bit... smug, like 'haha you'll never be able to understand what's going on without these crucial details I won't tell you about'. I was more of an Angband player - less sophisticated game mechanics, but far more comprehensible. I never beat it, of course, but it was great at producing what the kids today call 'emergent narrative', those times when things were tight and through ingenuity you managed to scrape through, or possibly through ineptitude you went out in a blaze of glory. Angband was a descendant of a previous roguelike called UMoria, whose other (more famous) descendant was the action-roguelike Diablo 1, so I think it's appropriate to mention in these forums. :)

As for modern roguelikes, I've heard people say nice things about Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, but possibly the friendliest roguelike I've encountered so far has been Brogue. It uses text (with some symbols) to represent things, but it's plenty colourful and can be completely mouse-driven so you don't have to memorise keyboard shortcuts (and there's mouse-over tooltips on monsters and items so you don't necessarily have to remember that a T is a troll, although you will anyway). Brogue's thing is that it's almost completely focussed on the item identification game: a dozen kinds of potions (which can be drunk or lobbed like grenades), a dozen kinds of magic wands (which each cast a specific spell, with a specific number of uses), a dozen kinds of staves (which each cast a specific spell, with a cooldown), plus other things like charms and blessed/neutral/cursed weapons and armour, and you need to identify and equip the good ones to keep up with the monster level curve.

Of all the classic roguelike features that were simplified away in the transition to Diablo and Diablo II, I miss the item-identification game the most. Being able to wield an un-ID'd weapon and discovering it had Added Fire Damage because monsters started bursting into flame when you hit them... that was pretty cool.

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Thristian wrote:

Of all the classic roguelike features that were simplified away in the transition to Diablo and Diablo II, I miss the item-identification game the most. Being able to wield an un-ID'd weapon and discovering it had Added Fire Damage because monsters started bursting into flame when you hit them... that was pretty cool.

I think this is the sort of thing I really like most about nethack. The way you have of finding out information about items without having a definite information. Like when you have a wand, no idea what it is. You go to a shop, you drop it. Shopkeeper offers you $500 for it, and you go "Wand of death or wand of wishing". If he offers a lower amount, theres more options for what it could be, but you know its not a wand of death or wishing.

Or even with just a helmet you find. You don't want to put it on incase its cursed, which would be bad, so you can drop it on an altar (definite BUC status), or else just drop it and force your pet to walk on it (if they move reluctantly its cursed). At this point when you know its not cursed you can wear it, and even then you don't know everything you may want to (are your boots jumping boots? or are they just regular boots)

I find nethack to be ok, but I agree entirely with the guy about Angband. It is easily my favorite roguelike. Insanely hard to beat, a near endless chain of potential upgrades, and a sometimes brutal monster generation makes it endlessly replayable. I started playing moria when I was just a wee lad and have pretty much never stopped playing it.

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The Variant Maintainer ('p')
He has slain 74 of your ancestors, who remain unavenged. A deranged programmer, scattering bizarre ideas and bad code everywhere. He moves highly erraticly, and unbelievably quickly. He is invisible. He can breathe confusion, and is magical, casting spells that summon software bugs, summon Random Number Gods, and crash the game, 1 time in 2. He can hit to drain macros, hit to invalidate save files, hit to change your spells, and hit to consume your free time. You feel an intense desire to kill this monster...

Haha all this talk has reminded me of Dwarf Fortress.

for me it started with the OG, Rogue. which i eventually beat one day but of course none of my friends were around to witness it and it was like 1988 and i was 13 so no iphone to document it.

then my friend's big brother showed us Moria...Rogue on crack! Never beat the balrog although i saw him a few times.

last one i played was a variant called "Angband" that was cool too. also never beat that one but it is the one i have on my travel laptop for long flights :)