
The Greatest Game You Will Ever Play - llambda
http://thegreatestgameyouwilleverplay.com
======
eropple
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.

~~~
ImperatorLunae
"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.

~~~
billmcneale
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 :-)

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

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

 _click_

"Oh"

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jonnathanson
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.

~~~
britta
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.

~~~
jonnathanson
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.

~~~
cjoh
It's not just the design -- the writing is quite good, too.

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

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

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5hoom
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!

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

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cellis
Maybe this is revolutionary web design?

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britta
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.

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tluyben2
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
So i found this thread on Lion + Nethack on Reddit:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/g9f5o/future_net...](http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/comments/g9f5o/future_nethack_for_intel_macs/)

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 :)

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steve8918
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.

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DiabloD3
For those that want people to watch your game, or to watch other people's
games, use <http://nethack.alt.org/>

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kenneth_reitz
This site is absolutely gorgeous.

~~~
colomon
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.)

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

~~~
rcfox
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!

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

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xbryanx
A great way to learn the Vim navigation keys.

~~~
eru
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
I switch to qwerty to play NetHack.

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dkersten
Not bad, but Progress Quest is better.

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dbbo
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.

