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As a rogue addict, nice read. But rogue is a gateway drug to the nethacks :) * ssh nethack@alt.org * ssh nethack@hf * ssh play@server.gnollhack.com * ssh slashem@slashem.me
I never did beat the game, but My most memorable experience was once when I was messing around in wizard mode(a sort debug/creative mode to try things out in) and summoned a high level demon for grins and giggles, which promptly killed me. I did not think much of it at the time. but nethack, when you die, writes a bones file with what you had on what level and what killed you. it normally lets you find what killed you and a chance to get your stuff back. But now my nethack install is tainted with Juiblex, the faceless evil, on dungeon level level 2. I probable could have fixed it but it made the game hilarious, every play through containing a mad dash through level 2 and fervent usually unanswered prayers that the infernal thing would not follow you to the next level.
Next time, we’ll learn how one of the most popular of all the slick commercial games of the late 1990s grew out of this odd little corner of hackerdom… I wonder what game he's talking about. Have to circle back sometime or subscribe to their RSS feed.
Diablo, I guess. It’s got quite clear rogue influences.
As a rogue addict, nice read. But rogue is a gateway drug to the nethacks :) * ssh nethack@alt.org * ssh nethack@hf * ssh play@server.gnollhack.com * ssh slashem@slashem.me
Newcomers to old-school roguelikes may find Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup more accessible as an entry point to the genre, which can be played in a graphical interface in your web browser via https://crawl.develz.org/play.htm or via classic SSH interface at joshua@crawl.akrasiac.org (password "joshua").
I understand that they have to keep updating it to keep it fresh for long-time super-experienced players, but it's like an entirely different game now, compared to the one I first played years and years ago.
Very very intriguing. Always liked roguelikes and now I might have a nethack addiction.
For me the funnest way to play nethack was with a copy of the source nearby. It's cheating of course, but it is the fun sort of cheating. I always thought of it like being a monk or wizard, journeying forth armed with the hidden secrets of the world. I never did beat the game, but My most memorable experience was once when I was messing around in wizard mode(a sort debug/creative mode to try things out in) and summon…
> Juiblex, the faceless evil, on dungeon level level 2.
LOL! Wands of polymorph can result in interesting monsters showing up in early-level bones files. Nothing like waltzing down to level 3 and getting digested by a purple worm named Spud...
For me the funnest way to play nethack was with a copy of the source nearby. It's cheating of course, but it is the fun sort of cheating. I always thought of it like being a monk or wizard, journeying forth armed with the hidden secrets of the world. I never did beat the game, but My most memorable experience was once when I was messing around in wizard mode(a sort debug/creative mode to try things out in) and summon…
In my opinion, source diving and using spoilers aren't cheating, if only because the games are so thoroughly randomized. You can know everything about your inventory, but one misstep and you're toast. Any ascension is as much a matter of luck as it is of skill. > Juiblex, the faceless evil, on dungeon level level 2. LOL! Wands of polymorph can result in interesting monsters showing up in early-level bones files. Noth…
Is it? Admittedly, I've only fooled around with NetHack occasionally, but from observing good players it was my impression that with encyclopedic knowledge of the game, ascending can be done pretty consistently, barring some _incredibly_ unlucky happenstance or attention-related carelessness.
A couple of specific things that jumped out at me, as someone who lived through this (and got hooked for varying amounts of time on several roguelikes and roguelites):
I strongly disagree that today's world has the best of open source & proprietary. (Also, omitting any mention of Free software is a little odd.) We do have a mix, but it's neither the best nor the worst to be had. The proprietary mindset has infected the "programmers with free time" community, to the extent that one reason why you don't see ambitious user-facing projects is because the profit motive has drained away enough energy and talent that the engine of open source development just kind of sputters along until things start to risk taking off, at which point someone will come up with an idea for monetization. And monetization kills the "true" open source spirit dead.
On a related note, pointing fingers at open source games for lackluster design and poor user centric thinking is a little ironic, given that the exact same thing ails today's commercial game scene. Loot boxes and more subtle forms of the same thing have largely destroyed the freedom and original thinking that used to create interestingly novel experiences. We had a period where the indie scene carried that torch, but it has now been subverted in much the same way as the open source scene.
There are plenty of individuals or small groups out there who still have the fire, but it seems like getting any traction (whether by growing a community or gaining users/players) brings those people in too close of contact with the poisonous influence of profit or fame or whatever, and it takes a strong character and quite a bit of privilege to resist those influences. Temptation is everywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a completely different kind of game. Roguelikes are single-player games, MUDs are multiplayer games. Roguelikes usually feature permadeath, MUDs rarely do. It's the difference between an RPG and a MMORPG.
Also Nethack offers a turn based top down gameplay simulated with ASCII chars, MUDs are real time or almost real time based with a wall of text and prompt based, like a text adventure.