NetHack

The Good
Everything. Control, Script (that is, if you call it a script) characters, random generation, all the monsters, all in all, it is a very well-done game. Some might argue "Oh, the graphics suck." So what? Who ever said Graphics were everything? At first, I thought it looked a bit strange, but the tiled (graphical) version attracted me towards it, and I was hooked. I even know of kids who like this game! There is so much depth to how it works, I mean, how many games are there where you can wield a cockatrice corpse and turn people to stone with it? Or, how many games are there where your pet will rob shops for you, and where you can pray? Also, how many games use 75% of the letters on the keyboard, with extended commands, in addition to the arsenal of functions already available? And how many games can send you your e-mail while you're playing?

The Bad
The difficulty can always be a pain. Explore mode is alway available, though! And it's a great way to learn the game without dying at experience level 2. I still don't see how anyone could beat it without backing up save files, as Nethack deletes the save you were working off of (that is, if you saved at all) when you die, and dying can happen fairly often. Also, there is no in-depth story to it all, which would be nearly impossible, as content is randomly generated. And yes, the graphics are inferior, but hey, There's always Falcon's Eye. Also, there is hardly any sound, as music is only played while you use instruments, and even then, I couldn't get my soundcard to work...

The Bottom Line
My personal favorite computer game. A truly edifying gaming experience. Definitely not a game that you want to play because of its superior graphics. A very fun game. If you think it looks strange, and don't play it because of that, it's your loss, as you are really missing out.

The Good
The gameplay. It all comes down to that in Nethack. A quick description of the idea of this type of game: you descend into a randomly-generated dungeon, with an ultimate quest in mind. There is no way to save your game - once you die, you have to start the game over with a new character.

Nethack is basically just a hack-and-slash game, but there is so much to it that it never ceases to amaze. There are literally thousands of items and creatures. The important part of this is that all the items and creatures interact in just about any way imaginable.

The standard example serves well to exemplify the spirit of the game: lets say you kill a cockatrice. They're not easy to kill, seeing as how they can turn you into stone with their touch. But you've killed it. Now what do you do with corpse? Well, if you have rubber gloves on (so you don't turn to stone), you could pick up the corpse and then wield it like a weapon, so that when you hit enemies with the corpse, they themselves turn into stone. But the best part is this: lets say you leave the cockatrice corpse. Monsters could then come and use the corpse themselves to try to turn you into stone!

This is not an isolated example. This is not "one small feature" that has been added to the game. The whole game is like this!

Perhaps another small example would help. There are quite a few shops in the dungeons of the game. You don't have much gold to buy items in the shops though. Can you find a way to steal stuff in the shop? But of course! You could send you pet in and hope it picks up something you want. Having trained it well enough (training your pet is a whole other story), you can then call it back to your side, where it returns an item pilfered from the store. But perhaps your pet is dead. So you find a pickaxe, hide it in a bag so the storekeeper can't see it as you come in (they check this kind of thing), pick up an item, make a hole in the floor with the pickaxe, and drop down to the next dungeon level, safe from the storekeepers vengeance. Just don't expect to go back to the store any time soon...

Did I mention this game is free? And open-source? And available for any platform? (DOS, Windows, Linux, Amiga, Macintosh....)

The Bad
As much fun as this game is, it isn't the best game ever. It is almost certainly the best hack-and-slash game ever, but hack-and-slash has its limitations. As much depth as the game has, you are still just going around a dungeon, killing things, and doing some quests.

So, after a while playing, it can become a bit monotonous. So you leave the game for a while, but soon you return, to discover something else fascinating about the game, and then you play for a while longer.

The Bottom Line
Just try it for yourself. The ASCII graphics and keyboard interface can be a bit overwhelming at first, but it really only takes half an hour to get used to the game.

Once there, this is the kind of game you will be playing, off and on, for decades. Literally. Most people haven't beaten the game until they've played it for years - I doubt anyone playing knows everything about the game. It is a unique experience, and a great addition to a gaming library.

The Good
It is comprehensive: it has great scads of races, of items, of dungeons (quest levels, a Sokoban game, the Gnomish Mines &c.); even the kitchen sink. It never gets old: just when one thought one knew it all, some new thing leaps out. After NetHack, every other game pales and is boring.

The Bad
It is hard, probably the hardest game I've ever played. It'll keep drawing you in and killing you off. Just as NetHack has more items, monsters and types of levels than other games, so too it has more ways to die: being killed outright; starving; choking to death; eating too much food; poisoning; petrification; being crushed by boulders; falling down stairs; donning an amulet of strangulation; and so on and so forth. It is a tough game.

The Bottom Line
Well worth playing. It's available for nearly every platform, and there's even a GUI (Falcon's Eye, I believe) available. It requires thought and consideration--there's no such thing as an unfair death (or any other negative occurrence) in NetHack: it's always winnable, and always possible to think one's way out.

The Good
One word - Depth! I mean the game is HUGE. You never know everything about this game. There are countless files including information about every aspect of the game and the files are huge and full of information. The game includes many small jokes we and my friends laugh at still. The Quantum Mechanic is still one of the best monsters in any game! For all poor students this game has one incredible plus side - it's free! The source (in C) is also available if you're interested in programming.

The Bad
It took a long time to get into the game. At first I just couldn't play it. The graphics looked too poor. Well I remember the old wisom, "Graphics don't count, as long as the gameplay is good" and started playing.

I found one bug (I have played the game for maybe 4 years) and reported it. Now their homepage lists the bug as "fixed for next version". So bugs are NOT a big problem!

The Bottom Line
Download this game. There are no bad points to doing it. (Except that you may loose all your friends and family...)

The Good
Its easy with its own complexity, fun and relaxing yet gets the heart pumping. The outcome of the game is the same but the gameplay is usually unpredictable due to the randomisation of the placement of items and monsters.

The Bad
The game only contains ONE objective: to get the gem. The animal that follows gets in your way. The animal the follows you steals the good things such as goblin or hobbit corpses.

The Bottom Line
Nethack is simplised solo game not to much unlike World of Warcraft. You stroll around a dungeon, getting stronger as you kill more monsters and are faced with even stronger monsters. HOWEVER the game has an objective; unlike World of Warcraft, to collect the Gem of some wizard and return it. The objective is simple but the journey is not.

The downside is there is only that one objective

The Good
Everything. The interactivity is outstanding for a roguelike RPG game. You can pick from 13 different types of characters, and 5 different races. That's a pretty wide range of gameplay right there.

The Bad
I wrote this review for the Windows version and not the DOS version because the DOS version has no graphics. This was a bit of a bother for me, so I tried the Windows version and was even more amazed at the game because it had some graphics this time.

The Bottom Line
Simple. The absolute greatest game of all time. I've played a LOT of other games, beat them, passed them all, etc. And then... I went back to playing NetHack - the game I could never beat. Best PC game of all time - 10/10.

The Good
this game has it all !!! from items, to npc's, monsters, mazes, and you even get to have you own pet !!!!

The Bad
1. It's hard as hell, i mean, almost everything and anything can and will kill you 2. gameplay isn't very good. most of the cool commands are hidden within the docs of the game 3. text graphics is so yesterday..... 4. the turn-based mechanism of the game allows the computer to "cheat" 5. it has too many options

The Bottom Line
it's an RPG, one of the best, and it's free !!!! something like ultima, but with more options, better gameplay, and less graphics!

The Good
What's likable about this game? Well, you have to go back waaaaay back in time to understand. Back in the time of green CRTs. That's right, the yellowish beige monitors connected by a serial cable to a Unix server in universities back in the early eighties. I'm no historian, but from what I can recollect is that back then, people relied on a few Unix games, notably one named "adventure", but these were text-based adventure games. Rogue came in with a more complete full-screen interface, then came hack, then came nethack.

What is likeable about nethack? Well it's an easy way to get back to that period, with a game that has been ported to many platforms and is still developed. The game is complex if you like high learning curves.

This is a handy game if you want to impress your friends by showing that an obscure operating system such as DG/UX or Tru64 can actually run a game instead of a business application, although Nethack is not what I could call a modern game.

I haven't played it enough to qualify it as a classic. I compiled it in my box and tried it out of curiosity. But it has a big following which makes me believe that there is more than meets the eye. Time will tell.

The Bad
Absolutely horrible and hard to master interface, but having been introduced to Unix systems in the nineties under the X Window influence, it's probably just me.

The Bottom Line
Nethack (and its ancestor, Rogue) has been best described by a Unix admin friend of mine many years ago as "The game were you fight with a semi colon".

So if you enjoy fighting semi colons, this game is for you.

The Good
This game has it all - including the proverbial kitchen sink.

The Bad
It's very very VERY difficult. Like, V-E-R-Y. Just when you think you're going to make it, you get stuck on some devious sub-levels, or choke on your food, or find a treasure zoo (more like a Pet Cemetary, usually), or... Hey, why did I write this under the "What didn't you like"-heading - the unpredictability keeps you humble.

Then again, you might complete the game in ten minutes. It's just a matter of not dying, really...

Uh, what was it that I was supposed to write about again... oh, yeah, here goes: you find loads more interesting stuff than you can ever hope to carry (most of them are cursed, anyway), the plot isn't too good (so you might as well have no plot at all), there aren't any interesting NPCs (or I haven't found them yet), and the mouse control (sic) is pretty useless (though I guess that's pretty much a truism).

The Bottom Line
Remember what I said about "NetHack" having it all? Well, it weren't no lie. NetHack has more depth and lastability than any other game I've seen. Because it "only" has character graphics and no sound at all, and because it is not a commercial venture, the developers have managed to fit so much little (and big) features in the game that you really don't pay much attention to the fact that the point of the game is just to kill a lot of baddies and explore one-screen dungeon levels until you can beat the big baddie. Well, actually, there is a lot more to the game than that, but you'll just have to find out for yourself, won't you?

In short, NetHack is to Rogue or even Hack what Dom Perignon is to Champale. (Haven't tried either one myself, but I've seen ads...)