Eh. 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.

"This is, however, a really fantastically designed website."

I disagree. At first glance, I thought this was another zombo.com. I'm guessing it's a text adventure, but the site spends more time bragging about its legacy, not explaining what the game is, as if the legendary status of this game should be obvious to us mere mortals. The design is good from an aesthetic point of view, but not from a "getting your point across" view.

Agreed. The web site also completely breaks text search since it's a mix of text and graphics. Just search for "nethack" and you will see your search miss half of the occurrences.

Maybe the author's design sense could be put to good use by improving Nethack's graphics :-)

> the legendary status of this game should be obvious to us mere mortals

As indeed it should. It's Nethack! :)

Good point. I was speaking aesthetically.

Knowing 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.

Playing 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.

I'm curious what you mean by saying it doesn't hold up to continued scrutiny. I have played and enjoyed it for about a decade, and think it has held up well -- something I can claim for only two other games.

Can you be specific about how you think it fails as a game?

OK. So, like I said, I've ascended four times (Wiz, Val, Rog, Tou). And don't get me wrong--NetHack is certainly not a bad game, by any stretch of the imagination. But it's limited, and those limits are closer to the player than I think many fans would like to admit. And those limitations are total fun-killers; they kind of show you the "man behind the curtain," so to speak, and hurt the desire to keep playing.

There comes a point, and it's not that far into the game, where you have essentially won barring an extreme combination of events. Once you've gotten reflection, magic resistance, and MC3 (so just after Sokoban, for a wizard), enemies that focus on status attacks more than damage are pretty toothly. Sleep resistance (elves, either being or eating) removes one of the bigger threats remaining in the early game, and you should run into enough elves to chow your way into sleep resistance well before clearing the mines. The absolute latest you'll get reflection and/or magic resistance is the Castle, and I don't remember a game where I got to DLV 11 without reflection or magic resistance.

So what do you have once you've got reflection, magic resistance, and sleep resistance? You've got a very grindy set of levels leading to a very grindy Quest leading to an eternally grindy and completely uninteresting Gehennom; even Fort Ludios is really only there to give your get key a workout when half of them kill each other with a wand of death and when you hack your way through the rest of them. Rarely are there interesting tactical choices, and wall-to-wall monsters does not interesting gameplay make.

The game again becomes somewhat interesting once you've got the Amulet and are on the way back up. But this is after multiple hours of what amounts to very little actually happening, and many chances for losing the game in ways that amount to nothing more than frustration. Success in NetHack is not the result of ingenious play, but rather just not doing a relatively constrained number of stupid things and not having a string of random rolls go against you. It is the epitome of the Luck-Based Mission. (And let's surely not conflate douchey random happenings with tactically interesting situations or difficulty; losing a character because you're blinded and bump into a cockatrice is not interesting or difficult, it's stupid and absolutely exemplifies meanspirited game design. It's the video game equivalent of the asshole pen-and-paper GM who's looking for reasons to kill the players. Uncool.)

.

A great comparison to NetHack, in terms of flavor but doing quite a lot of things very right, are the Diablo games. The wide array of skills and spells result in legitimately interesting long-term choices and a number of different ways to deploy them creates tactical challenges that you don't see in NetHack (but, as it happens, do see in other Roguelikes; I'm personally waiting for Doryen because jice, while a bit of a jerk, has some fantastic ideas that I'd love to see realized). Even things such as items are more dynamic and interesting, with random properties applied to different weapons. The static nature of NetHack weapons results in everyone specializing in long sword or saber if they can get it, because of Grayswandir and Frost Brand--welp, how would the game feel differently if Frost Brand was a two-handed sword in some games? (Answer: not too differently, they'd just not use it because the two-handed sword is balanced poorly. But what if it was a scimitar?)

Yes, NetHack came before Diablo, and surely influenced it in some ways. But NetHack has to be evaluated compared to what exists today, not what exists when it came out. And it does not stack up, even within its own genre. And what you really have, at the end of the day, is a game where almost every playthrough is the same regardless of class or race and there really are "right answers" for most of the potential character creation decisions that might pop up. I don't think you could get me to sit down and grind out another game today, because there are more dynamic, more responsive, more continually interesting games out there on which I can spend my time. NetHack, though, is basically solved. And I don't think a great game is solvable.

So great to hear people mention TA. I still don't think a better RTS has ever been made.

This 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.

NHL12 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. :)

You, too ;)

Great site. But if you're interested in roguelikes I'd suggest starting with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead (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.

I 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/) as a fantastic game, and its shorter length might appeal to more casual players.

I've spent far too much time playing the Android port of Angband on my phone.

Seeing 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/

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

TOME (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.

I thought TOME is Angband-ish, isn't it? It's a very different branch of roguelikes.

I'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!

And 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

I suggest brogue [http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/] as a better starter roguelike. It looks nice and plays like a dream.

Also 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.

Lost Labyrinth is a nice graphical roguelike. Games are relatively short but it has a high replayability. http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/

After reading the headline, my reaction was "Yeah right. It's not better than NetHack."

click

"Oh"

The 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.

There 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.

I 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.

It's not just the design -- the writing is quite good, too.

am I weird in finding the fade-in rather distracting? also the layout of the body is visually too complicated?

I think I agree about the body layout. It's like all the text is just little to big and jam-packed and busy.

When 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!

I don't know about spending countless hours in NetHack, but... wow! great site! Designer: http://www.ryanbaudoin.com/

Maybe this is revolutionary web design?

I'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.

I 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 :)

So i found this thread on Lion + Nethack on Reddit: 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

I'm going to give that a shot :)

I'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.

For those that want people to watch your game, or to watch other people's games, use http://nethack.alt.org/

This site is absolutely gorgeous.

Yes, 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.)

Noooo! The DS link is busted! Seriously, stuff like this is why I got that flash cart...

Can't help with the link, but have you seen POWDER? http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about

There's a DS port for it too!

For those needing more palatable options, there's the pretty graphical interface to NetHack, Falcon's Eye: http://users.tkk.fi/jtpelto2/nethack.html

A great way to learn the Vim navigation keys.

Didn't work for me. I use nethack's number pad option. But with a Dvorak layout, the standard navigation is just too confusing anyway.

I switch to qwerty to play NetHack.

Not bad, but Progress Quest is better.

I'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.