I recently downloaded NetHack, a 1987 text-based RPG. This was the result of my first attempt.
Posted Nov 18, 2015, 5:18 PM UTC
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NetHack: for when Dark Souls is too casul for you
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I used to go pretty hard on nethack. My fav deaths are when I fell down a hole and had the cursed ball and chain around my leg smash my head open when I landed, and the time my pet minotaur (who i got by displacing my kitten onto a polymorph trap over and over) turned agasint me me.
oh also a helpful PSA: Don't kick sinks
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Dying from going down the stairs when carrying a cockatrice corpse is always a good one too. You remember to wear your damn gloves, but forget you will fall down the stairs if you are overburdened.
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Man... Don't get me started about being overburdened. I ran into a floating eye whilst trying to carry a unicorn corpse to an alter... Guess how that ended.
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I need to play this game.
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Seriously I had never heard of it until now but it sounds like the most fun I'll ever have.
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or if you are blind, and not wearing gloves, and feel a cockatrice corpse on the floor while blindly searching around
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Well now I have to try all those things, don't I? I'm sure nothing negative could possibly happen.
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You'll die. And then you'll play again, and get your arse kicked by your ghost.
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Don't listen to this guy. You can get a ring to pop out of the sink if you kick it enough.
^^(also ^^nasty ^^monsters)
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But how else are you going to get the magic rings out of them!?
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okay, you know what? get your sink-kicking boots on everyone! kick all the sinks you like, go to town, pay for plumbers children to go through university.
#INFINITE SNAKES POUR FORTH
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A slime came out! The slime has rusted your sword!
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I think if all game developers were forced to beat Nethack, the games we'd have today would be totally amazing.
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There would be fewer of them, though.
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And we'd have only one or two new games per year :P
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Coincidentally, ADOM has just been released on Steam this week. It's definitely one of the best rogue-likes (and the non-Steam version is still free on the adom.de site).
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It's been suuuuuuch a long time since I played it (easily over 10 years) but I'm pretty sure I was never good enough to last that long!
I wish it was more playable on a laptop keyboard (Mac in particular). I'd so get back into it.
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They are charging for ADOM on steam? That's pretty lame.
Great game though. A little less on murdering you compared to Nethack. Still, nothing quite like mistakenly sleeping through your Strength of Atlas wearing off and having your inventory crush you to death.
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It looks like they've added some content to the Steam version at least, but CAD$15 is too much.
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In what world is years of work and passion not worth 15 dollars, the indie game explosion and market saturation has driven game costs down to an obscene degree, any rogue like I have gotten into has provided many times the entertainment of any AAA title, for a fraction of the cost (or free).
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ADOM is worth $15, being able to save, and having some an options menu isn't. The steam updates seem to add very little, and expect $15 for a game that's available for free elsewhere, and several additions are marked TBD.
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preach it, brother
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Truly one of the greatest games ever made in my opinion
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What is this graphical nethack. ASCII for life.
Also, my favourite death was Crushed by Drawbridge.
There is one drawbridge in the game, and if you're standing under it when it falls....
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ASCII all the way.
Favorite death thread!
My favorite death was down in Gehennom. I foolishly tried to convert Moloch's altar, and naturally he was upset by this. He sent a couple minions, no big deal, but also tossed a lightning bolt at me. I had an amulet of reflection, because you don't get that far without some reflection, and it bounced the lightning into the heavens. I thought that was great, until I hit enter for the next line and read that he chuckled about my impudence and then insta-killed me.
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You can withstand that with disintegration resistance.
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I think you get a ton of experience for surviving it all, don't you?
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ASCII all the way. Never been more afraid of an L than in Nethack. If there is one thing I approve genociding, it is Lichs in Nethack.
Favourite death: Brainlessness.
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Ah yes, I had forgotten that one of the recommended things to wish for if you find a wand of wishing is a scroll of genocide, which you then use on Lichs. I seem to remember there being two different scrolls of genocide - the regular one, which would just genocide Lichs, and a bigger, badder one that would genocide any monster with Lich in the name, like Arch Lichs. (Just checked the wiki, and of course I'm thinking of a blessed scroll of genocide).
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Once I was pretty far on a run and died by choking while eating a can of tuna.
Boy was I pissed.
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Forgot to use a can opener first?
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I... put the screw... in da tuna!
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For those who want a more approachable entry into the genre, there's always Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. It even has a tutorial mode that explains things as you play (it's called Hints Mode; Tutorial Mode is something different and kind of broken and wonky, I recommend Hints).
Unfortunately, it doesn't have falling off ponies, getting conked on the head by the ball and chain around your leg, etc, but it does allow you to play a Halfling Berserker that worships a god whose preferred form of worship is being covered head to toe in cursed items, etc.
^(You can also play a cat - can't wear most armor, wield any weapons, etc, but gets extra lives, or an octopode - can't wear most armor or wield most weapons but can wear eight rings and a hat, best as a spellcaster - or worship a deity of slowness by being slowed down as much as possible.. or specialize in drawing random cards from decks of magical effects..)
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Yes to DCSS, here's a link for Webtiles: https://crawl.s-z.org/#lobby
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DCSS is great! Regularly updated, consistent design philosophy, online play in both ascii and graphical tiles.
Anyone that gets into DCSS should know about the learndb and the knowledge bots. Both contain spoilers.
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Sigh, there goes all my free time as you just triggered my annual quest for the Amulet of Yendor. Thanks.
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Rodney spelled backwards...
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A few bits of advice:
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Never eat corpses that aren't freshly killed.
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Drop all your shit on an altar to identify bless/curse.
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Scrolls of identify have a unique price in a shop, usually 26.
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Praying will save you from almost anything, but only once in a while.
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Engrave "Elbereth" on the ground, and almost everyone will leave you alone. If you write in the dust, (no weapon) you scuff out the engraving if you do almost anything.
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Wizard is easy mode. Great starting loot, plus an athame, which can engrave Elbereth forever without dulling.
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Engrave "Elbereth" on the ground, and almost everyone will leave you alone.
The actual reason is that most monsters cannot walk onto a tile that has an active Elbereth written on it. Elbereth is "active" only when the tile is occupied, so when you're standing on Elbereth melee monsters cannot attack you since they're afraid to enter your tile. But you can do more than just protect your current location: engrave Elbereth on the ground and then drop a single gold piece on that tile to keep it occupied. You've created an impassable barrier for most monsters. This allows you to seal off corridors or in open rooms create a maze that forces monsters to pathfind criss cross to get to you while you arrow them. It's insanely powerful.
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Agh the classic jack Daniels route
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So thou thought thou couldst kill me, fool.
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But for new players, Dwarvish Lawful Valkyries, are probably the easiest for beginners. Just keep dipping your longsword in fountains after you are lvl 5, to get Excalibur.
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I can't figure out how to mount a horse or rub a lamp how do you expect me to dip my longsword in anything?
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My worst/best death was stumbling down a flight of stairs while holding a cockatrice in my hands, causing me to get stoned. Very NetHackesque.
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See also: being seduced by a Succubus who convinced you to take off your gloves while wielding a cockatrice corpse.
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When I was a kid in the early 90's my family had a Macintosh SE that was greyscale, and there was a turn based RPG game. Since I could barely read at that point, all I ever found out how to do was walk around a bit and get killed by a knight. That wouldn't be this game would it?
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Possibly this? It was quite fun actually. Used to play it at school during lunch hours.
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Possibly this. Rogue on the Mac had absolutely delightful little icons for all the ASCII critters and items (and the hero wore a helm with one horn on the right). Glen Wichmann designed the graphics for the Mac version, described here. We played this in the retail store I ran in the mid/late-80s until we wore out a trackball.
However, by the 90's the D&D gold box games were out for the Mac, and it's just as likely that you could have played one of those, such as Pools of Radiance, which is a turn-based, first person dungeon crawler.
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Ahh, NetHack. Been playing it onn-off for about 17 years now and I've never ascended. When I do, my life will be complete.
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Nethack is the hardest game I've ever played, and I'm very proud that I ascended after many years of attempts (without save scumming).
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I'm trying to decide if Nethack or IVAN are the hardest, because IVAN is just plain cruel, it'll drop insanely out of depth monsters on you at the slightest provocation, the game actively wants you dead, even more than most roguelikes.
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There's lots of kinds of hard. There's games where you just have to keep playing until the RNG comes out in your favor. A lot of infinite runners are like that.
There's ones where you have to get a perfect run to get through, but it's still just memorization of the route. R-Type, I Wanna Be The Guy, Super Meat Boy and many other popular games are like this.
Those aren't Nethack hard. Nethack hard means you have to have a depth of knowledge, good strategy, and resourcefulness to identify and get out of bad situations. It's emergent hard, because lots of things come at you at once, sometimes combining and magnifying the difficulty... and opportunity to escape.
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Very true, what makes IVAN a contender to me is that if you manage to get yourself good gear, the game acts accordingly and gives you insanely powerful monsters to contend with at low levels. Also you can decapitate yourself by slipping on a banana peel exactly once.
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That doesn't sound like my kind of game. If it scales the difficulty to match how well you're doing, it doesn't matter how well you do. The metagame becomes doing as well as you can without increasing the difficulty. You're effectively playing against the difficulty scaler, not the game itself.
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after ivan, i tried zapping all the bananas i found ingame.
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Some favorite deaths include using a scroll of genocide on your own species, getting blasted by picking up another class's artifact, and accidentally tunneling into a shop when you don't have the money to reimburse the shopkeeper.
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Damnit, I just clicked the OK button. Then clicked it again and immediately remembered that it was a picture... I swear I work in IT... I'm just tired...
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One of the classes is the Knight. The Knight starts with a pony you can ride. You don't start mounted on it, so perhaps the first thing you do will be mounting up. You can slip in the process, fall and take enough damage from the fall to die. First turn and you're dead. Never had a chance.
The game has a unique message to mess with you if you die in such a way. Nethack is awesome.
That's great. I love games like this that have personality. The only thing that's slowing down my progress, really, is the steep learning curve. Do you have any pointers for remembering the commands, other than through repetition?
Honestly, in my case I mostly relied on having played a lot of this style of game. Nethack spawned a lot of very similar games that use very similar commands, so knowledge in one tends to transfer to others. There's an ingame help menu if you type ? though.
Ah. Thank you. Perhaps I'll leave it open for reference.
There's also Slash'em which adds many features on to the base game, including new classes. Also, if you write Elbereth on the floor, it keeps some monsters from crossing over that space. Useful if you need to heal and find an empty room.
If you don't want to go with true HC gamer attitude I'd advice using wiki to learn things. Maybe not everything but at least I read the wiki a bit to survive.
edit Two pointers: Finding out what scroll is identify helps a lot.
This one is really obscure if you don't know. Writing even on dust on the floor "Elbereth" can protect you from many but not all things.
Be sure to check out r/nethack. And never ever look at the nethack wiki, it's full of spoilers!
I spent countless hours playing it back in the day. It's amazing all the things you can do in the game.
Not sure if it was vanilla Nethack but can't you also fall to a pit on first move?