It has spawned numerous websites, user groups, mailing lists and Usenet topics. It has been around for decades and yet it still has uncounted adherents. It is, perhaps, the best game you can install on your Macintosh. It is Nethack.
Nethack is a first player adventure game. You enter its dungeons searching for treasure and fighting off monsters like trolls, and dragons, and newts as you become embroiled in various quests depending on the type of character you play: elf, ranger, knight and so forth. Sure, it has crappy ASCII graphics and a learning curve that is, to say the least, steep--at least for the purists who play it in Terminal. (There is also a Carbon version available, but it somehow fails to match up to the good old ASCII style with its intricate character-based commands.) Playing Nethack can take minutes, days, or when you start getting good at it, months.
Many Nethack players have been doing so for decades because it's that good a game with that level of intricacy, humor and detail. So if you've had it with Bejeweled and Chess and those Big Bang Board Games, consider investing a few hours or days into learning Nethack with its long term entertainment payoff.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-20-2007 @ 1:01PM
JD said...
Myself, I like playing Vulture's Eye (you can get it from here http://usrsrc.org/svn/vultures/ — also Vulture's Claw). If you didn't know, it's a graphical version of NetHack (Vulture's Claw a graphical version of Slash'EM).
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5-20-2007 @ 1:17PM
Zach said...
Sorry, I just fail to see how that can be entertaining.
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5-20-2007 @ 2:55PM
Matt said...
Sure, it has crappy ASCII graphics...
As opposed to excellent ASCII graphics? The fact that terrifying monsters are rendered as "D" or "&" is the whole point! There are actually graphical "skins" of this game out there, but almost no one uses them.
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5-20-2007 @ 3:46PM
DarkSpy said...
There's also the 3D version:
http://www.sbrain.org/nethack3d/index.html
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5-20-2007 @ 4:56PM
Kane said...
Years and years later I still love this game and have fond memories of playing it for hours on end.
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5-20-2007 @ 5:18PM
Dave said...
Is this any different than Rogue - the Original?
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5-21-2007 @ 3:29AM
Peedu said...
Actually, there are a myriad of other Rogue-like games available for Mac also. My personal favourite is ZAngband - www.zangband.org . Also see http://www.thangorodrim.net/ for more general information.
Thanks to this post I actually installed the latest version of it, after a 6 year hiatus. Thanks a lot - this stuff is like crack - you may think you've gotten rid of the addiction, but then something just proves you wrong again...
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5-21-2007 @ 9:30AM
Jeff said...
If you're a Nethack or other rogue-like fan you might want to check out TOME (Troubles of Middle Earth). It's in the line of Moria or Zangband, but is much more feature- and quest-rich. I've been playing rogue-likes since the late 80's and TOME is by far my all-time favorite.
Check it out at http://t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0
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5-21-2007 @ 11:19AM
jps said...
Nethack had my clawing my eyes out after a while. Couldn't handle the unpredictable nature of it.
1 out of every 30 tries I get a little further or discover something new. The other 29 I die quickly for a stupid reason (new creature I had never seen, ran out of food, etc.)
Too frustrating, gave it up.
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5-21-2007 @ 12:28PM
guns said...
I can't believe TUAW actually posted something about Nethack! I can't imagine that a sizeable group of TUAW readers would actually find this game compelling, but nonetheless, it is one of the oldest computer games still in development, and for very good reason.
I'll skip the proselytizing, though, and just mention that Nethack does look pretty ugly under Terminal.app. You want to enable the "IBMgraphics" option, which uses the full ANSI character set to more beautifully display the game. It is considerably more pleasant than the standard ASCII display. Terminal.app doesn't support ANSI fonts, however, so you'll have to use another terminal program like rxvt, which can be port installed using MacPorts. I use a font called vga11x19.bdf to get a larger display.
If anyone has any questions, come to rec.games.roguelike.nethack and ask away! Don't mind the occasional curmudgeon though.
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/
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5-21-2007 @ 12:35PM
paul said...
Maelstrom is still the best Mac game ever, and somebody ported it to OSX a few years ago (it's somewhere out there). Best Astroids ever. I wish Ambrosia would do a sequel, or a 10.4/10.5 era update.
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5-21-2007 @ 4:37PM
dzd said...
Nethack is the ultimate triumph of game design over style. Sure, it's ugly as heck, but everything you can possibly think of doing within the context of the game world is possible.
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