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Content Tagged with NetHack + game

You turn the corner, walk to the end of the hall, and open the door. Inside, a giant orange “D” rears its ugly head to attack. You panic and kick the dog! (Argh! You didn’t mean to do that!) It yelps at you, but still attacks the dastardly beast on your behalf. Your sword is useless, and you are gravely wounded.

You have only one option left – that scroll that you found lying in the pile of dust in that last room. You’re not sure what it is, but you’re running out of time and it may just save your neck. You read it and …

All your armour falls off and turns into dust. The orange “D” proceeds to eat you for breakfast. Game over.

Welcome to another average game of the best game you’re not playing: Nethack. Inspired by an earlier similar game called Rogue, Nethack has been an active project for over 20 years, being worked on by some well known names such as Jay Fenlason and Jon Payne.

One of the biggest reasons you’re probably not playing it? It’s entirely ASCII based. You are a small ”@” character (assuming you’re humanoid) fighting off little “d”s (dogs and jackals), “o”s (goblins, orcs, and Uruk-Hai), and “D”s (dragons), oh my!. Walls are made with plain old |, -, and + ASCII characters, and you use the cursor keys to move around in the dungeon. Only on some platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, do you even know you’re fighting a brown “c” (coatl – tough, but survivable) versus a yellow “c” (a cicatrice – bad, bad, and more bad).

The current version is 3.4.3, and supports a remarkably wide variety of platforms and architectures, including Unix, Windows, and my trusty OS X-based powerbook. The game is controlled by keyboard sequences and are usually single characters, sometimes requiring you to hold down the CTRL or ALT keys first. Thus, instead of having to type “pick up scroll, pick up potion”, you can just hit ”,” and select the items you want to grab.

In the game, in a way familiar to anybody who’s played games like Dungeons & Dragons, you are an adventure-seeking character, working your way down through dungeons, mazes, Gehennom, and various elemental planes, to find the Amulet of Yendor, take it from the body of the Wizard of Yendor, who is not at all inclined to let it go, and carry it out to the real world again. Along the way, you will have to defeat monsters, the undead, ghosts of players past, and grab as much loot as you can. More monsters and loot mean more points, which is good.

To give the game more variety, you can choose from a number of character types, including wizards, knights, valkyries, samurai, tourists, and barbarians. These all have various strengths and weaknesses, such as different affinities for magic, healing, fighting, or otherwise doing cool things. As you use different character types and die (often) and try again, you’ll learn which ones are better at which things, and how to make the best of all their skills.

Most impressive are the dizzying number of different levels and special places this game offers. You will go through traditional looking dungeon levels, pass through special floors with puzzles and other tricks and traps, and then proceed to other special floors with neat surprises at the end.

Make no mistake: the game is hard. Between random chance and random levels, your game can go south, quickly. But in those games where you do everything right and things go your way, you can do gloriously well and get tantalisingly far along in the game—usually only to do something incredibly stupid and kill yourself (I have done this so many times it is embarrassing).

All of this combines to make Nethack one of the most replayable games I have ever seen. I buy other games, play them, and either finish them or get bored of doing the same tedious crap again and again. I always end up coming back to Nethack, to get my butt kicked. If you are a hard core pure gamer, you can figure out how the game works by trail and error (and frequently dying). For those less patient, you can check out the source code (eeek!) or one of the many Nethack Spoilers sites still viewable to this day on the Intarwebs.

So before you sit and mock the lowly ASCII game player from behind your texture mapping 5GHz overclocked-requiring fully light-sourced bouncing bits of anatomy first-person shooter games, give Nethack a try. I bet you’ll get hooked.

Nethack sources and many binaries are available from the Nethack website, www.nethack.org. The game installs trivially on most supported platform.