Nethack

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Anyone play Nethack? It's an ASCII/Tile based RPG that's incredibly complex and unforgiving. People play for years without winning because the knowledge required for ascension is so daunting. Most items are randomized with each new game..'a murky potion' might be poison in one game and healing in the next. You have to know the various ways of identifying items...for instance, with a wand you can try to write in the dirt with it...if you get a message about the bugs on the floor disappearing, it's teleportation or invisibility. If they stop moving, it's paralysis or death.

I played it a while back but could never get very far in it. By far the two most annoying things about it were having to eat constantly when every second food item is poisonous or rotten, and random things like falling into a pit from the first floor, taking another step and falling again then being surrounded by 5 enemies way above your level.

If you're going to play Nethack, at least play a version with graphics. Falcon's Eye is a good Nethack GUI.

That's Nethack for you. The RNG (Random Number Generator) giveth and taketh away. It's equally likely you'll be zapped with a wand of death, or find a wand of wishing, in the first room.

The food issue generally isn't too bad once you've learned some things, like what corpses are safe to eat and which aren't, as well as never eating a corpse that's not fresh. You can also pray for sustenance if you're starving. if you zap yourself with a polymorph wand and polymorph into your own race, your hunger level will be reset ("You feel like a new man!").

I've been playing it for around 20 years. Not that you would be able to tell, since I lack the patience to get really good at it. I like it with graphics if they're not too elaborate, but I still think it's great with plain ASCII. My (aspie) kid is much more advanced at Nethack than I, and also likes to play Rogue (which came before Hack, which came before Nethack) and ADOM (which came after Nethack and is pretty awesome).

I love ADOM its own way, but it's a bit too complex for me. Nethack just requires you to know how the game works, which is daunting but doable. ADOM, being even more complex than Nethack, requires you to know how the game works, and how to bend rules to your advantage.

Yes, this is exactly how I feel about them too. It's similar to how I liked playing side-scrollers (mainly Commander Keen) but I was never able to get into more elaborate RPG-types like Ultima.

I love Nethack, though I haven't managed to successfully beat it yet. I've gotten as far as the endgame with two different Valkyries, but they both died in strange ways.

I also enjoy Crawl and POWDER. I liked ADOM for a while there, but it was so very difficult that I gave up on it. The only roguelike game I've successfully beaten so far is POWDER, and I still have no clue what the name means.

I love a good Roguelike, with Rogue itself having been one of my first PC games. Yet I've still never finished NetHack. Right now I've been playing Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer on the DS, took me a while to actually finish the main dungeon on it but now theres more harder dungeons to go through.