onsafari

i know who the foul culprit is! i refuse to play NetHack, because ... well, because I'm already crack addicted to too many other games, really.

It's evil! As if I weren't already wasting my day on this dang thing...

Level 20 of the dungeon, or character level 20? I know I've done the former, but possibly not the latter. My boyfriend is a Nethack demon and has won the game several times (which you frankly cannot do without spoilers). It's a fascinating game, though -- so much wit and detail. You can try nearly anything clever and they've gotten there before you. Luckily for me, said boyfriend rigged a cheating, er, a saving system, so I can take some risks and get killed and restore from where I last saved -- the lack of which makes regular Nethack really evil. So much work to get to a certain point, and then splat, sometimes with no warning.

A new version just came out -- I'm tempted, very tempted.

On the site they said that no one had ever won the game. I'm very relieved to know that they're wrong. :)

The new version has a "save" feature, but you can't restore from saves in previous versions. I haven't mastered the saving-before-dying part yet. :P

Oh, no, many people have won. I wonder if anyone ever won without reading a single spoiler, but the Oracle gives you rather blatant 'spoilers' if you give her enough money so maybe it's possible.

Nethack has always had a crude 'save' feature, in that you can save your game and come back later (the idea of playing continuously to the end is truly scary; I think it takes Ken 40-50 hours of gameplay to reach the end, and he knows exactly what he's doing). What it doesn't have is the ability to restore a game from the last save point after death. (They didn't introduce that in the new version, did they?) This is generally called 'cheating,' but it's almost the only way to get the necessary experience to make progress. That, or playing in Explore mode, but that's so dull..

Aaah, that makes sense. I'm such a newbie to this...

I know NOTHING! I am INNOCENT!

*cough*

Methinks thou doth protest too much!