"I could murder a good curry." - Hope that's in there.
ASCII @dventure game NetHack gets first upgrade in ten years
NetHack is one of the gaming industry's foundational texts. The animated adventure debuted in 1987, continuing an ASCII ancestry traceable to 1980's Rogue and earning it a place on the Museum Of Modern Art's list of games worthy of historical preservation. The game is simple: after choosing a race, gender and character class …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 08:48 GMT MacroRodent
Past obsession
Some 25 years ago I spent many, many nights with Nethack... never did find the amulet, though. But at some point I suddenly got enough, and have not played it, or any other computer game for that matter (OK, a bit of Wii games with the kid, but curiously did not find that any fun at all).
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 08:57 GMT Sandtitz
Sweet!
Not that I'm bored with Nethack (I've been playing since 80s) but I was kinda hoping for new characters, quests, dungeon features etc. after the hiatus. 12 years in the making and all we get are bugfixes and cosmetic changes. I've been periodically checking their website for any updates for a long, long time.
OK, that sounds ungrateful and I'm not, but since the Monk character is the only one I've yet to ascend I was looking for more...challenges.
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 10:13 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
To be fair, even if Nethack hasn't materially changed in the last few years, there are many other roguelikes - both extremely similar to Nethack, and more polished modern commercial games.
I suspect now the devteam have sorted various admin issues, new features will be released.
I've only ascended once, and I save scummed, so it doesn't count.. Generally I prefer to play either as a Gnomish wizard, or an archaeologist (I like tunneling).
I'd recommend checking out DoomRL if anyone hasn't already, it's very silly and a lot of fun.
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 10:33 GMT lurker
It would be nice to see updates to nethack, I can understand that they are conservative in not wanting to radically change the game 'design', but it would be great to see it given a UI overhaul similar to that recently applied to ADOM (now available on steam!), i.e an 'official' NotEye release.
I know ASCII purists will scream at the thought, but there's a lot of depth in nethack and it's a shame that no kid in their right mind today would give it a second glance.
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 15:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Great excuse if you need it...
"It's a game that doesn't look like a game to management. It's just the routine gibberish we have on our screens all the time..."
You get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don't even see the ASCII. All I see is dwarf, sword, mountain. Hey uh, you want a drink?
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Thursday 10th November 2016 01:53 GMT P. Lee
Moria
Hehe,
Last time I played that was on a 286 with an IBM-text-only type display. I killed the Balrog.
I think with today's larger screens the tile approach is a valid one. We've become used to having easier to distinguish elements on the screen.
DF was all a bit too complicated for me.
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 16:11 GMT pyite
I was just playing Nethack 4 and slashem yesterday
These are the best games ever. I hadn't played in a couple years so I started playing again a couple weeks ago.
There is a Nethack 4 with more interesting terminal support, give it a try: http://nethack4.org/
I like Slashem more than Nethack these days, but unfortunately it is 100x harder to ascend.
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 19:37 GMT Old Handle
Weird Coincidence
Just yesterday, I happened to check nethack.org for the first time in probably a year or so. I was intrigued to see there had been two announcements this year, hinting the development was still ongoing. And the next day, BAM I see this.
Anyway, I don't know if I'll really get into Nethack again, it didn't look like there have been major changes in the quick game I just played (killed by a boulder) but the interface improvements look nice. It appears the popular Status Colors and Menu Colors patches ave been rolled in for instance.
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Tuesday 8th December 2015 21:51 GMT BinkyTheMagicPaperclip
Re: Somewhat amused/bemused
Try it and see if it works; the source was originally designed to work under anything from '95 upwards. Course, they may be targeting a development platform that no longer supports '9x because it's so old.
The text support in NT is much better than 9x, so it's better to use that.
Alternatively, it may be better to use one of the DOS extenders that supports Win32 APIs including the console, than bother using 9x..
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Wednesday 9th December 2015 11:10 GMT Daggerchild
Irony
The slightly perverse thing is that, multiple times while playing the latest greatest GPU melting games, I've fervently wished that I could just replace some of the motion captured high polygon textured anti-aliased objects (in their latest fetching shade of Realism Brown), with a minimal blip signifying all of their inherent meaningful data (i.e usually almost none). I pine for Mechwarrior's tactical wireframe display mode.
The lump of grey jelly in my skull has to use dedicated hardware to filter out all that expensive noise to do just that, and in the days they cut out this middleware you could hit the player with massive amounts of pure metadata and make a really satisfying game cheaply. Yum.
Never played much nethack (nettrek tho..). My wizards kitten went splat at the bottom of a pit-trap, after obediently following its master, and my dwarf starved to death by spending too much time mining for gems :-)