2006 NetHack Tournament

robin writes "With another Halloween here and gone, the fall NetHack season is open once again. The 8th annual /dev/null/nethack Tournament started at midnight on November 1st, and will last through the rest of the month. You may wish to read the instructions and see what trophies are available this year before registering to compete."

Re:Just started

[grumbel]

The problem with Falcon's Eye and virtually every other NetHack GUI is that they basically only replace the ASCII characters with graphical tiles, they neither change the interface nor gameplay, which however would be needed to have a good looking and well playable graphical client. The result is that the graphic clients still look ugly (no animation, no smooth scrolling, walls don't differ from unexplored terrain, ...) nor play well (gtk dialogs are not what you want to use to navigate nethack, mouse interface is there, but basically unplayable so you need keyboard, ...).

I would love to see a nethack version/fork that adds real current day graphics and interfaces, while staying true to the core of the original game, but so far none of the GUI additions come even close to that, they don't even try.

Re:NetHack GUI for OS X

[Slashcrap]

Does anyone know of a good NetHack GUI for OS X? All I've found is the old Carbon version, and something based on QT. They are both incredibly ugly.

So not only do you need a GUI to play a fundamentally text based game but you're complaining that the window decorations on the GUI you have clash with your oh-so-pretty OSX.

Are you trying to be a parody of the whiniest, most irritating Mac user ever created or are you just like that in real life?

Re:If stuck...

[jandrese]

I second that thought. One thing I've never much liked about Nethack is that as you get better you can often make games last for hours before finding a situation you've never encountered before, but handling the situation wrong (and the proper solution isn't correct) basically just dumps you back at level 1 with nothing. That gets disheartening real fast because there are a lot of dangers on the lower levels that can kill or screw you over in a single action and basically stop your 12 hour run right on the spot. I also get kinda tired of fighting the same low level enemies over and over again just to get to the parts of the game I havn't seen yet.

The "death is final" aspect of Nethack (and in fact almost all roguelike games) is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it means the game has a ton of replay value, because you'll need thousands of hours to discover everything in it (because you have to grind the low levels so many times), but it's a curse that keeps the game on the fringe because most people will shut it down and not start it again if they get 5 hours into the game and then lose everything to what is basically an unavoidable situation.

I'm not sure if there is any real solution to this. You could have a set number of lives, but that will make the game too easy for people who have spent 20 years mastering it (and really, these are the people who do the most development). I have a sneaking suspicion that if this were the case then they would feel compelled to make some other aspect of the game even harder. That said, there are certainly no lack of extra-hard nethack clones available (I played on once on the Mac where spells would "burn out" if you used them too often (20 casts was enough to burn out the "fireball" spell, but even just 50 Magic Missiles would burn it out, and once it was burnt out you had no way (that I found) of ever casting that spell again), which make Wizards really hard to play.