The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play

http://thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com

by llambda • 15 years ago

132 49 15 years ago

thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com

kenneth_reitz• 15 years ago

This site is absolutely gorgeous.

colomon• 15 years ago

Yes, more design effort seems to have gone into that site than into the game itself!

(Nethack is very cool, mind you, it's just strange to have such beauty advertising it.)

cellis• 15 years ago

Maybe this is revolutionary web design?

DiabloD3• 15 years ago

For those that want people to watch your game, or to watch other people's games, use http://nethack.alt.org/

johnswamps• 15 years ago

Great site. But if you're interested in roguelikes I'd suggest starting with Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup instead (http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/). Nethack's really showing its age these days and is missing a lot of key features. Crawl is more accessible to newcomers and is less tedious to play. But it is very much a roguelike in the spirit of Nethack.

kibble• 15 years ago

I agree. NetHack has heritage (and nerd-cred) going for it--but in terms of raw playability, DCSS has it beat, hands-down. Crawl might also be the most active modern roguelike in terms of development (a rotating cast of a dozen+ active developers working consistently over several years), whereas, to my knowledge, all the modern NetHack forks are the works of lone developers.

For players new to roguelikes, I'd also have to recommend DoomRL (http://doom.chaosforge.org/) as a fantastic game, and its shorter length might appeal to more casual players.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

I've spent far too much time playing the Android port of Angband on my phone.

jcmhn• 15 years ago

I suggest brogue [http://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/] as a better starter roguelike. It looks nice and plays like a dream.

bhickey• 15 years ago

I'd like to add that the crawl devteam is really friendly and receptive to patches. Development is very active and I find it tremendously good practice to read a codebase that's been developing for the past 14 years.

Just today the team took a patch of mine to simplify poisoning!

ido• 15 years ago

And if you find even Crawl too intimidating, you can try my roguelike - Cardinal Quest - whose Classic edition is now free to play on Kongregate:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/idoyehi/cardinal-quest

guard-of-terra2• 15 years ago

Seeing as comments turning into a list of roguelikes:

ADOM is one of the best roguelikes. It's closed source but very deep and high quality. http://adom.de/

POWDER is a little graphical roguelike targetted at portable game consoles and PDAs. But you can play it from PC. It's reasonably quick and have a very fun and orthogonal skill/spell/item system. http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=release

JoachimSchipper• 15 years ago

TOME (http://www.te4.org) is ADOM-ish (reputedly, haven't seriously played ADOM) and pretty fun. I found the level generation a bit repetitive, though.

aw3c2• 15 years ago

Also POWDER: http://www.zincland.com/powder/

Graphical, short and really easy to get into. Runs on a multitude of platforms, also GBA and other consoles.

kleim• 15 years ago

Lost Labyrinth is a nice graphical roguelike. Games are relatively short but it has a high replayability. http://www.lostlabyrinth.com/

steve8918• 15 years ago

I've been playing this game since the early 80's when it was called Hack, first on my friend's original IBM PC and then on my XT clone.

After a while, my friend's diskette got an error on it such that reading scrolls of identify would crash the game, so he finished the game without reading a single scroll. I have to admit I was impressed by that.

I still play it these days, but mainly when I'm flying on airplanes. It's perfect because it will last hours on my laptop since it's not power-intensive.

5hoom• 15 years ago

When I saw the headline I really hoped it would be about Dwarf-Fortress or NetHack & not some metaphorical "Greatest Game".

Not only is it all about NetHack, it's one of the loveliest bits of web design I've seen.

Bravo!

makira• 15 years ago

I don't know about spending countless hours in NetHack, but... wow! great site! Designer: http://www.ryanbaudoin.com/

jdludlow• 15 years ago

After reading the headline, my reaction was "Yeah right. It's not better than NetHack."

click

"Oh"

eropple5• 15 years ago

Eh. I've ascended in NetHack four times. It is a good game. It might even be a great game. But to call it "the greatest game you will ever play" is hubris; the game has really serious problems once you figure out how to reliably get past the first ten dungeon levels or so. It picks back up again by the time you're going back up with the amulet, but almost all of Gehennom is just a grind. I've lost more characters to boredom than I have to deaths when in Gehennom. I think that a lot of people conflate an RNG with potentially nasty outcomes with depth or intricacy, which, coupled with the game's age, gives NetHack a bit more of a shine than it'd otherwise get.

This is, however, a really fantastically designed website.

psweber3• 15 years ago

Knowing how much time, experience and knowledge it would take to ascend even once, I know you have played a hell of a lot of NetHack. It's a great game. Just admit it.

eropple5• 15 years ago

Playing it a lot does not imply greatness, however; I've played a lot of NHL 12, which doesn't make it great. It's good, but not great. I played it a lot because I had a lot of classes with Unix terminals and was frequently bored.

Nethack simply does not hold up to continued scrutiny. Games which I consider to be great--Total Annihilation, say--do.

ImperatorLunae• 15 years ago

"This is, however, a really fantastically designed website."

I disagree. At first glance, I thought this was another zombo.com. I'm guessing it's a text adventure, but the site spends more time bragging about its legacy, not explaining what the game is, as if the legendary status of this game should be obvious to us mere mortals. The design is good from an aesthetic point of view, but not from a "getting your point across" view.

eropple5• 15 years ago

Good point. I was speaking aesthetically.

billmcneale• 15 years ago

Agreed. The web site also completely breaks text search since it's a mix of text and graphics. Just search for "nethack" and you will see your search miss half of the occurrences.

Maybe the author's design sense could be put to good use by improving Nethack's graphics :-)

tripzilch• 15 years ago

> the legendary status of this game should be obvious to us mere mortals

As indeed it should. It's Nethack! :)

Groxx• 15 years ago

Noooo! The DS link is busted! Seriously, stuff like this is why I got that flash cart...

rcfox• 15 years ago

Can't help with the link, but have you seen POWDER? http://www.zincland.com/powder/index.php?pagename=about

There's a DS port for it too!

Palomides• 15 years ago

am I weird in finding the fade-in rather distracting? also the layout of the body is visually too complicated?

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

I think I agree about the body layout. It's like all the text is just little to big and jam-packed and busy.

dkersten• 15 years ago

Not bad, but Progress Quest is better.

dbbo• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I understand this story. Is it basically "check out the design of this website" or am I missing something? I thought, and the site confirms it, that Nethack has been around for quite awhile, so that's certainly not news. Roughly half the comments so far are about how good/bad the game was, and the other half are about this website, so I'm not sure what is supposed to be piquing my intellectual curiosity. I also don't mean to put down the site or the game. I'm just not sure what I'm looking for here.

xbryanx• 15 years ago

A great way to learn the Vim navigation keys.

eru• 15 years ago

Didn't work for me. I use nethack's number pad option. But with a Dvorak layout, the standard navigation is just too confusing anyway.

AndyKelley• 15 years ago

I switch to qwerty to play NetHack.

tluyben2• 15 years ago

I know Nethack and I've played it a long time ago. I thought now; ok for old time sake, so clicked on Mac. No Lion... So they might want to update that. Port install nethack installs the terminal version, so it does compile :)

knowtheory• 15 years ago

So i found this thread on Lion + Nethack on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/g9f5o/future_net...

Which points to a Cocoa port of Nethack here: http://code.google.com/p/nethack-cocoa/downloads/list

I'm going to give that a shot :)

jonnathanson2• 15 years ago

The game and its relative merits vs. age notwithstanding, this is a really cool website. It packed quite a lot of text/information into one page, and more important, it got me to read every single line. I was not bored in reading the text wall; I was actually excited about it. The site turned reading into a game -- which is thematically appropriate to its message, not to mention simply fun.

There's a great lesson in product-launch website design here. (Again, putting aside the fact that NetHack isn't exactly "launching" these days). This lesson would seem to dovetail nicely with the "Bury Your Sign-Up Button" article linked the other day.

britta2• 15 years ago

There are many interesting and thoughtful aspects of this design, but I found the fading effects and low-text-contrast parts distracting. Just something to consider if you're taking inspiration from it.

jonnathanson2• 15 years ago

I think that's a fair critique. It's not a perfect execution, and there are some distractions in it. I still think, however, that the user experience is novel and interesting, and that it has a great thematic consonance with the subject matter.

If I were launching an e-book, for instance, I might use something like this page as a demo of sorts.

britta2• 15 years ago

I'd like to see another site marketing Nethack to young people. I came across it when I was 12 (on some freeware Mac games site), which meant that I ended up spending a huge amount of time practicing using text-based navigation, combining text commands for interesting results, finding and reading documentation, and unknowingly absorbing a bit of the culture of people who muck around with software. (I also learned a lot of new vocabulary, from "comestibles" to "quench" to "wakizashi"!)

Fast-forward to when I was 15 and getting interested in software: I was introduced to using a command line interface for real-life tasks, and it felt slightly familiar instead of totally bizarre - a valuable feeling for beginners.

wazoox• 15 years ago

For those needing more palatable options, there's the pretty graphical interface to NetHack, Falcon's Eye: http://users.tkk.fi/jtpelto2/nethack.html

The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play

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