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The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play
- kenneth_reitz 15y agoThis site is absolutely gorgeous.
- colomon 15y agoYes, more design effort seems to have gone into that site than into the game itself! (Nethack is very cool, mind you, it's just strange to have such beauty advertising it.)
- cellis 15y agoMaybe this is revolutionary web design?
- DiabloD3 15y agoFor those that want people to watch your game, or to watch other people's games, use http://nethack.alt.org/ http://nethack.alt.org/
- johnswamps 15y agoGreat site. But if you're interested in roguelikes I'd suggest starting with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead (http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/). Nethack's really showing its age these days and is missing a lot of key features. Crawl is more accessible to newcomers and is less tedious to play. But it is very much a roguelike in the spirit of Nethack.
- kibble 15y agoI agree. NetHack has heritage (and nerd-cred) going for it--but in terms of raw playability, DCSS has it beat, hands-down. Crawl might also be the most active modern roguelike in terms of development (a rotating cast of a dozen+ active developers working consistently over several years), whereas, to my knowledge, all the modern NetHack forks are the works of lone developers. For players new to roguelikes, I'd also have to recommend DoomRL (http://doom.chaosforge.org/ http://doom.chaosforge.org/) as a fantastic game, and its shorter length might appeal to more casual players.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoI've spent far too much time playing the Android port of Angband on my phone.
- jcmhn 15y agoI suggest brogue [http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/ http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/] as a better starter roguelike. It looks nice and plays like a dream.
- bhickey 15y agoI'd like to add that the crawl devteam is really friendly and receptive to patches. Development is very active and I find it tremendously good practice to read a codebase that's been developing for the past 14 years. Just today the team took a patch of mine to simplify poisoning!
- ido 15y agoAnd if you find even Crawl too intimidating, you can try my roguelike - Cardinal Quest - whose Classic edition is now free to play on Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/idoyehi/cardinal-quest http://www.kongregate.com/games/idoyehi/cardinal-quest
- guard-of-terra 15y agoSeeing as comments turning into a list of roguelikes: ADOM is one of the best roguelikes. It's closed source but very deep and high quality. http://adom.de/ http://adom.de/ POWDER is a little graphical roguelike targetted at portable game consoles and PDAs. But you can play it from PC. It's reasonably quick and have a very fun and orthogonal skill/spell/item system. http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoTOME (http://www.te4.org http://www.te4.org) is ADOM-ish (reputedly, haven't seriously played ADOM) and pretty fun. I found the level generation a bit repetitive, though.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoI thought TOME is Angband-ish, isn't it? It's a very different branch of roguelikes.
- aw3c2 15y agoAlso POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder/ http://www.zincland.com/powder/ Graphical, short and really easy to get into. Runs on a multitude of platforms, also GBA and other consoles.
- kleim 15y agoLost Labyrinth is a nice graphical roguelike. Games are relatively short but it has a high replayability. http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/ http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/
- steve8918 15y agoI've been playing this game since the early 80's when it was called Hack, first on my friend's original IBM PC and then on my XT clone. After a while, my friend's diskette got an error on it such that reading scrolls of identify would crash the game, so he finished the game without reading a single scroll. I have to admit I was impressed by that. I still play it these days, but mainly when I'm flying on airplanes. It's perfect because it will last hours on my laptop since it's not power-intensive.
- 5hoom 15y agoWhen I saw the headline I really hoped it would be about Dwarf-Fortress or NetHack & not some metaphorical "Greatest Game". Not only is it all about NetHack, it's one of the loveliest bits of web design I've seen. Bravo!
- makira 15y agoI don't know about spending countless hours in NetHack, but... wow! great site! Designer: http://www.ryanbaudoin.com/ http://www.ryanbaudoin.com/
- jdludlow 15y agoAfter reading the headline, my reaction was "Yeah right. It's not better than NetHack." click "Oh"
- eropple 15y agoEh. I've ascended in NetHack four times. It is a good game. It might even be a great game. But to call it "the greatest game you will ever play" is hubris; the game has really serious problems once you figure out how to reliably get past the first ten dungeon levels or so. It picks back up again by the time you're going back up with the amulet, but almost all of Gehennom is just a grind. I've lost more characters to boredom than I have to deaths when in Gehennom. I think that a lot of people conflate an RNG with potentially nasty outcomes with depth or intricacy, which, coupled with the game's age, gives NetHack a bit more of a shine than it'd otherwise get. This is, however, a really fantastically designed website.
- psweber 15y agoKnowing how much time, experience and knowledge it would take to ascend even once, I know you have played a hell of a lot of NetHack. It's a great game. Just admit it.
- eropple 15y agoPlaying it a lot does not imply greatness, however; I've played a lot of NHL 12, which doesn't make it great. It's good, but not great. I played it a lot because I had a lot of classes with Unix terminals and was frequently bored. Nethack simply does not hold up to continued scrutiny. Games which I consider to be great--Total Annihilation, say--do.
- psweber 15y agoThis is clearly a quagmire, but I guess I'll continue. Comparing NHL 12 to NetHack is a crime. You are a criminal. Also, Total Annihilation was pretty good. Oh course, it's no NetHack.
- eropple 15y agoNHL12 is a good game in its genre that I've played a lot of. Neither is great. I think I prefer NHL12 though, because it does not, to the best of my knowledge, have fans like you. Have a nice day. :)
- Groxx 15y agoNoooo! The DS link is busted! Seriously, stuff like this is why I got that flash cart...
- rcfox 15y agoCan't help with the link, but have you seen POWDER? http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about There's a DS port for it too!
- Palomides 15y agoam I weird in finding the fade-in rather distracting? also the layout of the body is visually too complicated?
- andrewflnr 15y agoI think I agree about the body layout. It's like all the text is just little to big and jam-packed and busy.
- dkersten 15y agoNot bad, but Progress Quest is better.
- dbbo 15y agoI'm not sure I understand this story. Is it basically "check out the design of this website" or am I missing something? I thought, and the site confirms it, that Nethack has been around for quite awhile, so that's certainly not news. Roughly half the comments so far are about how good/bad the game was, and the other half are about this website, so I'm not sure what is supposed to be piquing my intellectual curiosity. I also don't mean to put down the site or the game. I'm just not sure what I'm looking for here.
- xbryanx 15y agoA great way to learn the Vim navigation keys.
- eru 15y agoDidn't work for me. I use nethack's number pad option. But with a Dvorak layout, the standard navigation is just too confusing anyway.
- AndyKelley 15y agoI switch to qwerty to play NetHack.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- tluyben2 15y agoI know Nethack and I've played it a long time ago. I thought now; ok for old time sake, so clicked on Mac. No Lion... So they might want to update that. Port install nethack installs the terminal version, so it does compile :)
- knowtheory 15y agoSo i found this thread on Lion + Nethack on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/g9f5o/future_nethack_for_intel_macs/ http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/g9f5o/future_net... Which points to a Cocoa port of Nethack here: http://code.google.com/p/nethack-cocoa/downloads/list http://code.google.com/p/nethack-cocoa/downloads/list I'm going to give that a shot :)
- jonnathanson 15y agoThe game and its relative merits vs. age notwithstanding, this is a really cool website. It packed quite a lot of text/information into one page, and more important, it got me to read every single line. I was not bored in reading the text wall; I was actually excited about it. The site turned reading into a game -- which is thematically appropriate to its message, not to mention simply fun. There's a great lesson in product-launch website design here. (Again, putting aside the fact that NetHack isn't exactly "launching" these days). This lesson would seem to dovetail nicely with the "Bury Your Sign-Up Button" article linked the other day.
- britta 15y agoThere are many interesting and thoughtful aspects of this design, but I found the fading effects and low-text-contrast parts distracting. Just something to consider if you're taking inspiration from it.
- jonnathanson 15y agoI think that's a fair critique. It's not a perfect execution, and there are some distractions in it. I still think, however, that the user experience is novel and interesting, and that it has a great thematic consonance with the subject matter. If I were launching an e-book, for instance, I might use something like this page as a demo of sorts.
- cjoh 15y agoIt's not just the design -- the writing is quite good, too.
- britta 15y agoI'd like to see another site marketing Nethack to young people. I came across it when I was 12 (on some freeware Mac games site), which meant that I ended up spending a huge amount of time practicing using text-based navigation, combining text commands for interesting results, finding and reading documentation, and unknowingly absorbing a bit of the culture of people who muck around with software. (I also learned a lot of new vocabulary, from "comestibles" to "quench" to "wakizashi"!) Fast-forward to when I was 15 and getting interested in software: I was introduced to using a command line interface for real-life tasks, and it felt slightly familiar instead of totally bizarre - a valuable feeling for beginners.
- wazoox 15y agoFor those needing more palatable options, there's the pretty graphical interface to NetHack, Falcon's Eye: http://users.tkk.fi/jtpelto2/nethack.html http://users.tkk.fi/jtpelto2/nethack.html