Nethack: The Best Game on your Mac

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.

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/

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.

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

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...

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.

Years and years later I still love this game and have fond memories of playing it for hours on end.

There's also the 3D version:
http://www.sbrain.org/nethack3d/index.html

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.

Is this any different than Rogue - the Original?