@vacri I really, really love ADoM, but have never heard anyone else ever reference it. I think my favorite part of ADoM is the way that it handles magic, where your ability in magic decays from use over time, so it makes you careful about using magic more than most other RPGs I’ve played, including non-roguelikes.

I’ve always appreciated NetHack (and other roguelikes, like ADoM, Angband, SLASH’EM, and so on), but I really suck — I typically get to the first one or two major milestones in the game, then die because I like to try to do everything. If I try really hard to just survive, I can make it as far as halfway through, but my “I have to see/do/eat/drink everything… because it’s there!” side eventually wins in a moment of weakness, and I do something tremendously idiotic and get my character killed.

However, I enjoy them immensely (from the ASCII interface, the graphics/sound just takes away from the fun), and play them over and over again whenever I have a chance. I hope win one eventually, because I know I can, I just play… differently than the method required to actually win the game.

Definitely greatest game. I ascended once with a Ranger–had to try every altar before I found the right one, and ascended with next to no HP left. It was awful and I didn’t play again for at least three weeks.

Of course, then it sucked me back in and I’ve spent all the time since then dying in dumb ways. Like misfiring a cursed arrow and hitting a Minetown guard and then getting jumped in an open space by the whole troop, or reading an unpaid teleportation scroll on a L2 shop then getting murdered by Kops. But it’s a terrific game, and what jambarama said has served me very well during class. ;)

I’ve been playing for a few years now and I absolutely love it. It really is the greatest single player game ever made. The gameplay involved and complex. The deepest I can get before doing something stupid is Gehennom.

My favorite moments are when I manage to apply various, orthoginal game mechanics together into a neat solution. For example, there was once a leprechaun loose on a level that I wanted to kill.

Leprechans will go out of their way to pick up gold. So, I placed a bear trap and put my money in the middle, then went on exploring the level again. When I returned, my little leprechaun trap worked, and he was caught inside. It was simply a matter of bashing him to death with my sword while he was trapped.

Another time I was being attacked by a mind flayer, a very dangerous monster. I polymorphed myself into a cockatrice and let him try to eat my brain. He got himself stoned instead. Problem solved.

Then there is smashing dozens of soldiers in their own drawbridge, but this is a common tactic.

I have had plenty of annoying deaths too. I have run into trolls sleeping in zoos with wands of death more than once. Or there is the deadly poisoned arrow shot by a goblin on dungeon level 3. Some were my fault, like forgetting that the succubus took my gloves off before .. uh .. servicing me, forgetting to put them back on, and then picking up that cockatrice corpse. Or getting killed by simple stomach acid. Or just wanting one more bite of that giant corpse and choking to death.

I’ve got lots of stories, all from an ASCII interface. Greatest game.

[…] We already established that terminally incoherent readers love them some nethack. The nice thing about nethack is that it takes only few hundred kb on your drive, and provides you with endless tons of entertainment. But hell, you don’t even need to install it. All you need to taste the nethack goodness is telnet. […]

@Luke Maliak: On the note of the user agent plug-in, it also misread the Iceape I was using as a generic Mozilla. The user agent is “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070802 Iceape/1.1.4 (Ubuntu-1.1.4-1ubuntu2)”. Not that it really matters. I’ve been playing with a lot of different web browsers lately.

It is the greatest game!

Yeah, there is a little bug in the OS snooper plugin – it treats XP64 as Server 2003. I tried fixing it but last time I checked the user agent info provided by both OS’s is virtually identical.

Windows Server 2003? This is an MSDN version of XP64, dammit!

By the way, XP64 bites.

ADoM ftw. I never did like nethack’s anachronisms, whereas ADoM is pretty tight. Webpage is pretty sucky but the game is a lot of fun.

@Luke Maciak: True. Probably next time the Internet goes out I’ll try it again, since I don’t have many games on my computer that I can load in a couple of seconds (besides Patience and Kolf).