Mobile Gaming, Meet Nethack
Mobile gaming has taken off in recent years, getting more and more sophisticated. Games that used to be the exclusive domain of the console and desktop platforms have made their way onto mobiles, and the graphics get richer and more beautiful every year.
For the adventure and role-playing gaming crowd, sometimes they ask for something new they haven't tried before. And eventually, they'll run into the most venerable old-school geek on the forum who asks them, "Have you tried Nethack?" And no, they haven't. It hello, you can get the free download of Nethack for Windows CE right here. So they download it, they start it, they take one look at it, and they say, "You've gotta be kidding me!"
No, we're not kidding. Nethack is the adventure game with perhaps the widest and oldest following in all of video game history. You'd never guess from looking at it. The text-mode version of it looks like this:
The graphics mode isn't much of an improvement. It's a simple 2D tileset which looks like this:
There's usually a development effort underway to make a fancier 3D graphics front-end for it, but these projects stall and start again, and they'll probably never come out for the mobile platform anyway. But the flat mapped version have been out there for the mobile platform for years, since Nethack doesn't require anything more than standard VGA.
OK, what's the attraction? Nethack is simply the deepest, most involving game you have ever seen. The game-play is a standard dungeon-crawler; if you've played Blizzard's Diablo series, it's much the same game logic. But 100x more involving.
There's 13 different roles to play, as Archeologist, Barbarian, Caveman, Healer, Knight, Priest, Monk, Ranger, Rogue, Samurai, Tourist, Valkyrie, or Wizard. Each of them will present unique strategies and attributes. In addition, you can pick from five races and three alignments, for additional varieties in character. The game is surprisingly long and difficult to win. Just a list of the ways to die in Nethack should make that point clear. There's an even dozen categories of item, and a nigh-infinite variety of monsters and characters to slash your way through.
The motto of Nethack is "The devteam thinks of everything", so commonly repeated that it is abbreviated to TDTTOE. Everything you say? Yes, everything! For instance, if you kill a unicorn - no mean feat in itself - you can sacrifice its body on an altar. But beware - depending on your alignment, the altar's alignment, and the unicorn's, this might please your god, make it angry enough to smite you with lightening, or even change your own alignment to another god's. You may chose to eat the unicorn's meat instead, which has a chance of giving poison resistance. But no matter what, a killed unicorn always leaves behind a horn. The horn can be wielded as a weapon, or dipped in a potion to help identify it, or cure blindness, confusion, hallucination, stunning, or sickness. But while it's alive, you might try chucking gems at it first from a safe distance - this can either identify the gem or improve your luck if the unicorn graciously accepts your gift.
They think of everything. If you encounter a sink, you can drink from it, which may have various effects. If you kick it, you have a chance of finding a ring or summoning a succubus or other monster. If you're stuck levitating, you can maneuver to fly over the sink, which will cause you to land on the ground again. You might even summon a water elemental, who might either be nice and grant you a wish or be aggressive and spar for a fight. If you already have a ring, sinks are handy for identifying it, if you don't mind losing it. You can tell by the actions of the sink when you drop the ring - the sink might vanish for a ring of teleportation, or make the flies angrily buzz for a ring of conflict. And there are two cases where you won't lose the ring anyway - one where the sink will regurgitate it for a ring of slow digestion, and one where you'll find it in the sink again, for a ring of searching.
No, really, everything! A cockatrice can turn you to stone. Even if you kill it, and then touch it, it turns you to stone. But not if you're wearing gloves! If so, then you can safely carry the cockatrice corpse, and that means you can wield it for a weapon. Fence with your cockatrice, but be careful of your footing, for you can trip and fall down the stairs and hit yourself with it. Oh, but if your character is female, and can polymorph, you can always polymorph into a cockatrice, lay some eggs, polymorph back, and when the eggs hatch, they'll be your pets. they'll fight monsters for you. Don't pet them.
We could go on all day, but you get the point. Here is a guide if you get stuck or just want to explore. But you really don't know what you're getting into, and it can really get addictive - don't say we didn't warn you!
Filed Under: Product Reviews • The Internetz
