Nethacked
It feels like the last week has just disappeared out of my life. There's a one-word explanation for that - Nethack.
Once I used to be a passionate gamer. I would spend night after night solving quests, exploring, and yes, shooting and cutting and killing. In one sentence, my video gaming career started with an Atari clone at a friend's place, then my own
Dendy, then Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Swiv 3D and others at friends', then my own PC with notables like MDK, Fallout, Baldur's Gate, StarCraft, Quake, and finally Counter-Strike.
I then got into hacking the FreeBSD ports collection, installed it on all of my desktops and the open-source experience was enough of a "game" for me ever since.
Cell phones. My first one was Samsung SGH-300 which didn't have any games. Then Siemens M50 and Nokia 6310 which couldn't entice anyone with tiny screens and stupid gameplay. Then Panasonic X700 S60 smart phone with 1GB miniSD card. It could run thousands of cool games, and was a distraction, but luckily it also had a tiny screen and some strange S60 implementation which was very slow and somewhat incompatible.
A few weeks ago I got a used Panasonic SA7, the current GSM top-model of the brand. It's not a smart phone, but it has an update J2ME implementation which runs quite a lot of games very smoothly. I tried a couple of versions of Gameloft's Asphalt, Worms Fortress, the preinstalled Sonic the Hedgehog - and somehow the old craving for gaming has visited me once again.
I looked at some "Top Linux Games" lists - and was quite bored. Too much FPS entries. There's Freeciv and Wesnoth, which produce more yawns than interest in me.
At last comes this familiar, but obscure word - Nethack. I've heard it was an old text-based RPG, and somehow I've always thought it was a BBS-based MUD. I guess I'm not geeky enough for a text MUD. Little did I know.
During the last 6 days, I have probably spent over 60 hours as a "@" chasing "b", "F", "o", "c" and other monsters, looting in "(", eating "%", reading "+", wearing "=" and "[", drinking from "{", and, ultimately, killed by "J" and others. Nethack is a perfect ASCII-based game for me. Love at first sight, so to say. I've always dreamt about a game like this.
And I feel Nethack is just a start of a long way for me. I'm tasting Slashem at the moment, and I'm planning to try Angband (and brethren), and maybe some older rougelikes. If you're like me, if you spend a lot of your time in a 80-column terminal, and you haven't tried Nethack - just do it. It runs on most platforms imaginable, from Atari to PlayStation Portable, but you'll get the most out of it on a good old Unix box.
There are graphical front-ends for Nethack and Slashem, but as far as I am concerned, they are burying the whole concept of the game. So if you're a poor Windows user, telnet to nethack.alt.org and hack away!
Main.YuriMalykhin - 21 Dec 2007:
ты это, наркоман, лучше перл выучи, чем гамать