NetHack

The Good
What's likable about this game? Well, you have to go back waaaaay back in time to understand. Back in the time of green CRTs. That's right, the yellowish beige monitors connected by a serial cable to a Unix server in universities back in the early eighties. I'm no historian, but from what I can recollect is that back then, people relied on a few Unix games, notably one named "adventure", but these were text-based adventure games. Rogue came in with a more complete full-screen interface, then came hack, then came nethack.

What is likeable about nethack? Well it's an easy way to get back to that period, with a game that has been ported to many platforms and is still developed. The game is complex if you like high learning curves.

This is a handy game if you want to impress your friends by showing that an obscure operating system such as DG/UX or Tru64 can actually run a game instead of a business application, although Nethack is not what I could call a modern game.

I haven't played it enough to qualify it as a classic. I compiled it in my box and tried it out of curiosity. But it has a big following which makes me believe that there is more than meets the eye. Time will tell.

The Bad
Absolutely horrible and hard to master interface, but having been introduced to Unix systems in the nineties under the X Window influence, it's probably just me.

The Bottom Line
Nethack (and its ancestor, Rogue) has been best described by a Unix admin friend of mine many years ago as "The game were you fight with a semi colon".

So if you enjoy fighting semi colons, this game is for you.

The Good
This game has it all - including the proverbial kitchen sink.

The Bad
It's very very VERY difficult. Like, V-E-R-Y. Just when you think you're going to make it, you get stuck on some devious sub-levels, or choke on your food, or find a treasure zoo (more like a Pet Cemetary, usually), or... Hey, why did I write this under the "What didn't you like"-heading - the unpredictability keeps you humble.

Then again, you might complete the game in ten minutes. It's just a matter of not dying, really...

Uh, what was it that I was supposed to write about again... oh, yeah, here goes: you find loads more interesting stuff than you can ever hope to carry (most of them are cursed, anyway), the plot isn't too good (so you might as well have no plot at all), there aren't any interesting NPCs (or I haven't found them yet), and the mouse control (sic) is pretty useless (though I guess that's pretty much a truism).

The Bottom Line
Remember what I said about "NetHack" having it all? Well, it weren't no lie. NetHack has more depth and lastability than any other game I've seen. Because it "only" has character graphics and no sound at all, and because it is not a commercial venture, the developers have managed to fit so much little (and big) features in the game that you really don't pay much attention to the fact that the point of the game is just to kill a lot of baddies and explore one-screen dungeon levels until you can beat the big baddie. Well, actually, there is a lot more to the game than that, but you'll just have to find out for yourself, won't you?

In short, NetHack is to Rogue or even Hack what Dom Perignon is to Champale. (Haven't tried either one myself, but I've seen ads...)

The Good
The gameplay. It all comes down to that in Nethack. A quick description of the idea of this type of game: you descend into a randomly-generated dungeon, with an ultimate quest in mind. There is no way to save your game - once you die, you have to start the game over with a new character.

Nethack is basically just a hack-and-slash game, but there is so much to it that it never ceases to amaze. There are literally thousands of items and creatures. The important part of this is that all the items and creatures interact in just about any way imaginable.

The standard example serves well to exemplify the spirit of the game: lets say you kill a cockatrice. They're not easy to kill, seeing as how they can turn you into stone with their touch. But you've killed it. Now what do you do with corpse? Well, if you have rubber gloves on (so you don't turn to stone), you could pick up the corpse and then wield it like a weapon, so that when you hit enemies with the corpse, they themselves turn into stone. But the best part is this: lets say you leave the cockatrice corpse. Monsters could then come and use the corpse themselves to try to turn you into stone!

This is not an isolated example. This is not "one small feature" that has been added to the game. The whole game is like this!

Perhaps another small example would help. There are quite a few shops in the dungeons of the game. You don't have much gold to buy items in the shops though. Can you find a way to steal stuff in the shop? But of course! You could send you pet in and hope it picks up something you want. Having trained it well enough (training your pet is a whole other story), you can then call it back to your side, where it returns an item pilfered from the store. But perhaps your pet is dead. So you find a pickaxe, hide it in a bag so the storekeeper can't see it as you come in (they check this kind of thing), pick up an item, make a hole in the floor with the pickaxe, and drop down to the next dungeon level, safe from the storekeepers vengeance. Just don't expect to go back to the store any time soon...

Did I mention this game is free? And open-source? And available for any platform? (DOS, Windows, Linux, Amiga, Macintosh....)

The Bad
As much fun as this game is, it isn't the best game ever. It is almost certainly the best hack-and-slash game ever, but hack-and-slash has its limitations. As much depth as the game has, you are still just going around a dungeon, killing things, and doing some quests.

So, after a while playing, it can become a bit monotonous. So you leave the game for a while, but soon you return, to discover something else fascinating about the game, and then you play for a while longer.

The Bottom Line
Just try it for yourself. The ASCII graphics and keyboard interface can be a bit overwhelming at first, but it really only takes half an hour to get used to the game.

Once there, this is the kind of game you will be playing, off and on, for decades. Literally. Most people haven't beaten the game until they've played it for years - I doubt anyone playing knows everything about the game. It is a unique experience, and a great addition to a gaming library.