·:[ Smiling Politely ]:·
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Today, I encountered someone who was… significantly… aggravated by not being able to obtain a certain sized pouch of coffee beans at a Starbucks.

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.

I might as well turn this officially into a gaming blog or something.

A few months ago I was in Ottawa. I had my laptop with me, but that was about it for entertainment. I took the opportunity to do something I had meant to do (and attempted to do) for a while now, and that is play the Marathon games. Years and years ago, while I played Doom and Quake, I had heard about these Marathon games. They were for the Mac, so hardly anybody played them, but everyone that played them said they were super fantastic, but anyone that did anything on the Mac in those days said that everything they did was super fantastic so that wasn’t really saying much. I pretty much ignored them.

Then Halo came along and made Bungie a household name. Marathon was brought up once again, being the precursor to Halo, and more and more people were talking about how great it was and how ahead of its time it was. I still kind of ignored them. However, one thing got my attention and that was when Bungie released the trilogy as freeware a few years back. (The source code for Marathon 2: Durandal had been released some years prior, but that’s just the engine.) A year or two ago I took a stab at playing it but not really very devotedly so I drifted away. With nothing much to do in Ottawa, I dedicated myself to the cause. The cause of beating some random old game during the evenings while Ms. M. did something boring and useful like studying or something.

The surprising thing to me about Marathon was this: for once, I was not struck by a heavy sense of the mehs when I finally got around to playing this heavily hyped, legendary game. It really was super fantastic. When compared to its peers, it really was doing a lot of things way beyond what they were doing. It remains remarkably playable, unless you really can’t go back (or never had to begin with) a pre-Half-Life state of mind for your first-person-shootering.

There was one big negative first impression when I fired up Marathon, and that was the graphics. The various critters you encounter certainly look… unique. Brightly coloured in blues, purples, and greens, much like the Covenant in Halo, but very, very flat and unreal looking. I quickly overcame this feeling (hey, they’re supposed to be alien, right?) and quickly started enjoying myself. You begin by landing on the space station Marathon, which has suddenly been attacked by a very Covenant-esque alliance of alien races. You interact with one of the station’s three controlling AIs, Leela, through various computer terminals scattered about. Leela sends you on various urgent missions to begin restoring the station to a condition that is capable of repelling the alien attack. As you do this, it becomes clear that the aliens have been attacking the AIs themselves, apparently disabling one and driving another (one Durandal) “rampant.” Or was Durandal rampant before the attack? Did he bring the attack about himself? Who knows?

These terminals are clearly what sets this game apart from its peers. By peers, of course, I mean Doom, and all of the Doom-clones of the day. (The FPS genre didn’t officially exist back then. They were all “Doom-clones”.) Sure, there are other, minor innovations that get brought up, things like weapons having alternate fire modes, swimming and oxygen supplies, friendly NPCs, all sorts of little things that later games took inspiration from. But the terminals are what make this game so substantial. In a day before scripted sequences or cut scenes, in a day when Doom-clones were all about being arcade-action dungeon crawls, Bungie found a way to inject writing into their games, and tell an interesting and complex story, the sort that just doesn’t get told in games anymore because of the necessity of voice acting.

The story actually ends up kind of at odds with the rest of the game at times, though, by nature of how it is doled out. Here’s a couple of pages of exposition, now go kill a bunch of aliens to get to the next terminal to get a few more pages of exposition, etc. The player is basically a puppet of the various forces capable of teleporting them about, and so you never really get a sense of participating in the story. But really, now, it was 1994.

The other key feature that sets Marathon apart is the level design. Well, not the level design, but sort of the mission design. The levels themselves are just like any other game’s, really, but where Doom and the like have you matching coloured keys to doors until you find the exit, Marathon gives you much more interesting missions. Explore this map, find the fusion cores, bring them to the central power supply to bring the security systems online to help fight the aliens. Activate the four terminals to fire up the communications satellite, so that we can send an SOS (that will reach Earth in approximately 20 years), where each terminal is outside in the vacuum of space so you’ll constantly have to find oxygen supplies. Destroy all of the aliens on this level but try to save as many civilians as possible. Save as many civilians as possible but ferret out the ones that are alien clones triggered to explode. And so on.

The actual mechanics of going about zapping aliens actually struck me as kind of weak. Well, adequate. Not very exciting, however. It, like Doom and others, was back when monster AI consisted of “chase” and “shoot”. Unlike Marathon’s combat, though, I still enjoy the combat in Doom to this day, and not just out of nostalgia. Its weapons, monsters, and level design are just much more clearly bent around the idea of combat being the core of the gameplay. Marathon seems to be trying for something more, and so the combat itself just feels rather dry. However, as I’ve hopefully expressed above, I found plenty to enjoy outside of the combat itself.

While I was in Ottawa I managed to finish Marathon and Marathon 2: Durandal, and started to play Marathon: Infinity. Infinity is purported to be weird and incomprehensible, and I was looking forward to comprehending it if possible. But then we came back home, and so I kind of just stopped. I’ll get back to it eventually. I should note that Durandal actually improves on Marathon in pretty much every way, even the combat and graphics.

Durandal is available on XBLA, now. I don’t really know why you’d buy it there, except maybe for multiplayer I guess? In any case, if you want to give Marathon a try, everything you need is available here. Click “Get Marathon” on the top menu. To play you need a copy of Aleph One (the updated engine) for the operating system of your choice, and then a scenario, either Marathon (M1A1), Durandal, or Infinity. There are some additional packages to upgrade texture resolutions and such, that are optional.