Net Hack diaries: Episode I

I used to live in the same house with this insane autist half-Japanese loser. He scavanged old Macs from the dump, strew them around the living room and wired them together into horrible approximations of working computers. He and his other weird outcast buddies would then play retarded old games on them that were incredibly hard, incredibly non-intuitive, ugly and appreciated only by fringe audiences.

One of these games was Nethack. I once caught my autist housemate playing this game, where your character is represented by an @, monsters were various letters like B or q or L , hallways looked like ###### and potions looked like '. It was the hardest fucking thing to understand, what was going on or even what it was about. So my OTHER roommate (who was also a huge geek but was my buddy and an actual human being) explained that it was this ultra-difficult RPG in which there were a million ways to die, literally.

Also, so much time had gone into this game (having been a work-in-progress since 1986) that there was an incredible amount of depth to it as well. If you fought a Vampire and it bit you, you might become one and have to suck blood for the rest of the game. You could find a tinning kit and put monsters you've killed into tin cans to eat later, so as to avoid the ever-present threat of food poisoning. You could pray to your god to help in times of need. You could role-play a tourist with no weapons except a credit card.

I said "well why is it so fucking ugly? Can't they make it look decent?"
My buddy said "You can download stuff that makes it look modern, but it's still the same game."
At this point my loser roommate chimed in "but why would you want to do thaaat?" at which point I felt like curb stomping him and decided to forget about Nethack.


Then, arriving last week, my April copy of PC Gamer (which actually had some good shit in it for once) listed the Top 49 Game Developers of All Time. Among them were Valve, John Carmack, Wil Wright Blizzard and "The Nethack team: Makers of the game that hates you and wants you dead."

Quote: "It's not beating Nethack that matters; it's knowing just how few people have managed to do it...Behind the challenge is one of the most fiendish cabals ever to plot your randomly generated doom...they think of everything."

Unable to resist at this point (and helped by an attached screen shot of the game that looked like a mid-90's RPG instead of DOS code), I downloaded the thing and a tileset to make it look decent and started to play.



So far, these are the horrible things that have happened to my various characters:

Magic Man the Wizard: Killed by his own kitten while unconscious from lack of food.

Pussy Man the Caveman: Frozen by a floating eye and killed by a sewer rat while helpless.

Sheila the Tourist: Killed by a falling rock trap that had just killed her kitten, while attempting to pick up the kitten corpse to offer to her god.

Magic Mann the Wizard: Killed in the gnomish mines by a master mind flayer that ate his brain.

Johnny Lollerskates the Ranger: Also killed in the gnomish mines by a master mind flayer that ate his brain.

Leafboy the Elf Ranger: Killed by a watch captain (the furthest I've gotten so far).

Patty the Tourist: Killed by her own kitten after putting on a "ring of conflict."

Konan the Barbarian: Killed by a Pony.

Dr. Hessler the Archaeologist: Killed by a Naga Hatchling that jumped out of a fountain he tried to drink from.

Sally the Tourist: Drank a cursed potion of levitation, which meant she couldn't go down any stairs, push boulders, or throw anything without flying backwards. Also couldn't pick stuff up off the ground. Escaped by the stairs she entered the dungeon through.

Dr. Bentler the Archaeologist: Killed after being bit by a WereJackal (and becoming one himself) and succumbing to food poisoning from eating a rotted Gnome King corpse.

Wizard's Baker the Wizard: Mauled to death by animals inside a shop while trying to buy food and fainting from hunger. (The shopkeeper "gladly inherited his belongings.")




Here are various odd things that have occurred, and can easily happen to you with no warning:

-Read a magic scroll that causes your stuff to explode.
-Stand on a water trap that rusts your sword.
-Go blind from shooting lightning at a monster.
-Hallucinate from an unidentified potion, and get messages like this: "The harpy beeps! You kill the poor succubus! The audience applauds!" after you accidentally kill your own kitten.
-Enter a room with 20 leprechauns who all steal your gold and run.
-Get blinded from a thrown custard pie.
-Eat homemade gnome that you tinned yourself out of gnome corpses.
-Lose 50 DKP from getting feared into the dragon welps (j/k that's World of Warcraft LOL)
-Be a tourist and blind monsters with your expensive camera.
-Accidentally wear or use one of a million cursed items. Anything in this game can be "cursed," meaning it sucks and you can't drop it, ever.
-Die from eating an egg you find on the ground.
-Waste a shit load of free time only to die horribly.


More mini-updates to come, hopefully once I get better at this and find all new ways to get killed.