In other words, it totally helps if you were born in the former Soviet bloc.

Here’s my proof. I am still proud.
http://imgur.com/U6fo7

I love that game and have been playing for 8 years now. I’m totally reading that 334 pdf, probably when I’m supposed to be doing something else…

I haven’t played that one since 2004, so someone else give it a try and report back!

Other recommendations:

- If on OS X, make sure your terminal has some decent settings (font, color, nethack options, etc). Here’s a link to a terminal shortcut that takes care of those for you.

- Keep a window open to the Nethack Wiki to start learning what the hell everything is.

- Controversial,.. but while you’re learning the ropes, read about Save Scumming and set up a system to make it easy. This will help alleviate a lot of the frustration of dying, and let you explore and experiment a little more. Then, when you think you’re ready, stop using it and raise the stakes to nerve-racking levels.

- Wait until the next full moon to start your game. Every bit of luck helps! : )

While I’m at it: in what way is playing as am ampersand schizophrenic? While I agree that too much computer-game playing does result in “significant social or occupational dysfunction.” But how does it “manifest as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking…”

I mean, other than only walking sideways through doors, leading with your firing hand.

Speaking of which, there’s a *great* rogue-like for the iPhone, updated with a wry, wiseass flavor, called 100 Rogues. Review here: http://bit.ly/hnTroe

You can download it from http://roguelikefiction.com

It’s hard to find any info about it now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Thunderbolt

Never did finish that damn game.

The attorney hits!–More–
Your purse feels lighter.

My favorite Nethack pet: the purple worm. An army of tame purple worms makes things a lot more bearable on the Astral Plane.

The original Hack (pre-Nethack) had a nasty gotcha: wielding a cursed food item had the same “sticky” effect as wielding a cursed weapon. “The banana welds itself to your hand!”

And yeah, the pictures on ASCII nethack look better than the pictures on most modern video games (and a *lot* better than on the 8-bit or MSDOS PC games) – but they’re quite not as good as the pictures in the original Adventure. Compare “A nasty little dwarf throws a stone knife at you and misses” with the typical nasty little animated graphic of a nasty little dwarf….

Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup has a great design philosophy. It’s all about presenting the player with interesting dilemmas, and streamlining everything else. The “autoexplore” feature (used with care) is like a fast-forward button for all the boring minutiae like picking up piles of gold and exploring new areas.

All the information you need is available in-game, not like Nethack where you need to read piles of spoilers (or play dozens of games just to get the necessary information from the Oracle).
For ASCII haters, the “tile” graphics are not only excellent but actually add more functionality to an already-excellent interface. The religion system and skills system add many different twists to the game; not many games allow this degree of variety in playstyles. In addition to the normal fighters and wizards, you can be an orcish priest who develops a mighty army of orc followers, a pacifist healer, the toy of a capricious child-god who showers you with gifts or sets you on fire depending on how well you amuse him…the list goes on.

The other I’ll mention is DoomRL, based on the Doom games. It has only ASCII graphics so far (though tiles are coming soon) but amazingly enough they’re more immersive than any tiles I’ve seen in a roguelike. There are only about a dozen symbols and a dozen keys to know, and a full game lasts a half-hour at most. It’s so quick to learn that (unlike most roguelikes) you should really just download it yourself and try it rather than bother to read my opinions. It’s hard to describe how intense and tactical this game is.

I left Hack behind, though, especially when I discovered Wizard’s Lair II. With 4 colors and extended ASCII characters for terrain and monsters, it was Hack++, and created a game world as large and detailed as any “RPG” game I’ve played since.

Now, I have a friend who keeps trying to sell me on Dwarf Fortress…

I’m reminded of an easter egg that used to be in GCC (the GNU C Compiler). Richard Stallman (aka RMS), who was the head developer for GCC at the time, disliked the #pragma feature of the C language, considering it a botched design. The standard described it as an optional feature whose behavior was implementation-defined. RMS decided that GCC’s implementation would define the #pragma directive to mean “start a game of rogue”. Actually, the compiler would search for rogue, hack, and nethack on the user’s machine (I don’t remember the order) and play one of them if found.

GCC is much more boring and professional these days, unfortunately or fortunately depending on your perspective.

However, I do think it is virtually impossible to acquire the taste for that kind of thing if you don’t already have it. If you think you don’t like roguelikes, you probably never will.

I started reading the elven-pdf and I bookmarked a ton of roguelike sites, this is going to be great – I get more and more retro: first I started playing fallout 2 again. Then master of orion 2 followed, right after Jagged alliance 2. Freecol was another retro addition, and then i found a millenium 2.2 remake that runs in vista…

now nethack seems to be the next big thing for me :-) Although I very much enjoy the story of the elven archer, the abundance of “(laugh!)” etc is starting to bug me – and I still have 100 pages left or so!

I’ve been playing for 20 years, and have also never ascended. I blame my addiction for my utter failure to engage with less imaginative games such as: any with graphics or sound.

There are a lot of articles about it, this one has this graphic (impolite, perhaps NSFW) which is pretty funny. http://jayc4life.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/dwarffortress/

I used to play on my 1,1 MacBook which had the virtual numpad situation — that worked great for me. More recent Apple keyboards, including the aluminum wireless don’t even have that feature. I actually did buy a separate numpad just for it…! Totally worth it.

Also, add me to the list of ‘playing for years, zero ascensions.’ But we just keep going…

You’ll probably want a high-res screen, and there are a few niggling annoyances (pets aren’t indicated, you can lose part of the game’s 80-column-wide status/info bar at the bottom of the screen), but overall quite playable.

You’ll probably want a real keyboard, but you can do without one – tapping various regions of the screen either moves you, does appropriate actions in the chosen direction, or does appropriate actions right where you are).

I find it funny re: not being able to play without a number pad. hjkl, man. I bet you guys use emacs too :)