·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
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One other game amused me occasionally in Ottawa, and that game was the occasionally inscrutable Nethack.

I only dabbled in it a few times in Ottawa, but I was playing a bit more often a year or so back. Nethack is kind of a weird game. It is a “roguelike“, which is to say, a descendant of Rogue, an ancient dungeon-crawler that is among the progenitors of that genre, if not the very root. You pick a class, the game randomly generates a few dozen dungeon levels for you to delve in, and you try and get to the bottom to get some Amulet for some reason or another. I’m sure it’s not important.

I would say there are three major aspects of Nethack that come together to make it a pleasant experience, especially for the price. The first is the exploration element. Every time you play, the dungeon is entirely different due to the random generation. The game is based around permadeath, which is an silly way of saying that when you die you do not have the chance to reload a save game. (Well barring cheating by backing up various data files, but really now.) Without permadeath, the random generation becomes kind of pointless since you’ll just be reloading all the time and will only see one dungeon, in which case you would be better off playing something more personally designed. Without random generation, the permadeath would just be obnoxious, since you’d be doing the same thing over and over again, every time you died.  (With a turn-based, slow-paced game like this one, it would feel a lot like this, only really really slow so it would take forever each time.) Together, however, they work: the game becomes a challenge of efficiently exploring the dungeon, without running out of food, wandering into traps, being killed by monsters, etc. The fact that everything resets when you die forces you to become a better explorer to succeed, not merely learn the contents of the dungeon.

And you will die a lot. The second aspect I appreciated somewhat once I got deep enough into the dungeon that it becomes more interesting is, surprisingly, the punishingly difficult combat (there is a caveat here, I will put it aside for now.) It starts off simple enough, with you trading blows against random critters until they die, which is usually before you do. A few levels in, though, and things become a bit trickier. You begin to encounter monsters that poison or confuse you, that steal from you and scoot away much faster than you can chase them, and those damned, damned, one thousand times damned floating eyeballs that freeze you in place until an ant kills you or you starve to death or hopefully your pet puppy comes and saves the day, but anyway the point is this: things just get more interesting than they would appear at the onset of the game.

The third aspect of Nethack that I will mention is the mystery. I mentioned above that the game was difficult, but with a caveat. The caveat is that, from what I gather from the internet, the game is actually somewhat easy once you learn all of the ins and the outs and the various tricks that are buried in this game. Things like which monsters to eat to gain various immunities, how to get information about unidentified items, what mysterious random things to write in the dust on the floor to give you shelter in combat, generally what the priorities for the player should be at any given point. I’m too impatient to learn all of that, so I just kind of dove in and played. I still don’t know all of the commands available to me, at least not off by hand. The result is a long, long list of dead Mes strewn in dozens of dungeons, dead from eating poisoned monsters, dead from overwhelming monsters, cursed weapons fused to their hands, starved to death, killed by the friendly elves he accidentally annoyed, dead for any number of reasons I can’t remember.

Each time you play, not only the dungeon is randomly generated, but also much of the items. A blue potion in this game does not do what a blue potion in the next game will do. You won’t know what blue potions do in your game unless you can cast Identify on them somehow. Or you can just drink it in an emergency and pray that it is a healing potion, and not an exploding potion. Magic scrolls work the same way. Weapons and armor could be blessed or cursed, and wearing them is a bad way to find out (cursed items can’t be removed.)

Combine all of the above with the not-very-modern graphics and archaic interface (hey, learning vi finally pays off!) and you get a game which really would appear to not like the player very much, and really would prefer if the player could find some place else for amusement, because Nethack is very busy these days and shouldn’t you be going home now? For this reason, I don’t actually go around recommending it to anyone. But it really does have a weird sort of charm. It also runs in a terminal window and so was also great to play when nobody showed up to the lab I was TA-ing for (if I didn’t feel like some DROD, that is.)

Nethack’s modern, mainstream descendants are your modern-day Diablo clones, which are actually coming back en vogue these days. Of course, these games seem to have traded the turn-based tactical nature, and the mass of inscrutable death-traps, for lots more pointy and clicky and shiny, which of course has made them much more popular in the mainstream. There is still an appeal to a game that hates you, though, since I gather that Hellgate: London uses the option to enable permadeath as an attraction for its optional subscription. In any case, if you are looking for something a bit more historical, or a bit more freeical, Nethack is open source and available here.

GameSetWatch has a regular column on Roguelikes that may be of interest as well: @Play.