iNethack2 HD Review

@

The @ symbol has a lot of meaning for me and quite a few older gamers. Long before it was a part of user names on Twitter or even widely known as part of everyones email addresses, it was your player character in one of the best games ever, Rogue (1980). Yes, THE Rogue that is referred to when someone says (or writes) that a game is Rogue-like. Rogue begat Hack (1985) and Mike Stephenson made NetHack (1987). All of them share the same premise of an adventurer trying to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from deep in a dangerous dungeon. They all sported the same ASCII graphics with the @ as your character you moved through the dungeon. If you haven't heard of them, they are the precursor to games like Diablo.

iNethack was the original version of NetHack to grace the App Store, but it was removed in 2014. It is now back as iNethack2 due to the hard work of Future Shock Software to update the code and get it back out there for players. As a free download, there is no reason why this isn't already on your device. It is compatible with iPhone, iPod and iPad. Or play the latest version of NetHack online here.

Pick a class, any class

The basics of the game are simple. You tap the screen in the direction you want to go. Double-tap and you move in that direction until you run into something or a monster shows up. Run into a monster and you attack it with your weapon. Have a ranged weapon, use the correct command letter in the command bar at the bottom to throw something (or zap if you have a wand or spell) at the monster. Kill it and you gain experience. Don't and you likely are going to die. To help you in your travels you start the game with a pet (kitten or puppy) who can also fight for you in some cases. Warning, your pet can die. You will die. Horribly and often. All of the Rogue-likes share one thing, death is easy and permanent. With the right settings chosen you might even run into your ghost in the dungeon one day.

The Quest

DawnHack tileset and UI

Sounds simple right? It is and it isn't. You have to manage your hit points, collect enough food not to starve, and solve puzzles to make it all the way to the bottom of the dungeon and get the Amulet let alone make it back out again. I have been playing for 30 years and I have never won. I have never even had the Amulet in hand. Even using wiki pages or downloaded guides, I have never ever even been close. It is that hard. I have also never stopped playing. It is that good a game.

Sometimes you take a risk and a Water demon crushes you.

So, dungeon crawl, permadeath and deep gameplay are all here. You choose between a number of character classes and races at the beginning of the game. Your choice determines your starting stats and general equipment. Rangers start with ranged weapons and food, Wizards with wands, rings and spells, etc. Your pet can help you find out if anything you find in the dungeon is cursed or not (a pet will only reluctantly step on a cursed item). Your pet can even help you steal from shops you find along your journeys - you just have to train him or her to do so (by throwing them food when they do something you like). Wish for the right thing and you can have Excalibur in your hand, polymorph objects to change them into better ones, use Genocide scrolls to get rid of extremely dangerous monsters like the Basilisk. Pray to your god for help. Eat what you kill to stay alive. It is all up to you and all in the game.

Here's a death. A sad pathetic one.

Worried that ASCII, old school graphics aren't your thing, you can change it in your settings to something more modern. (Exit the game, go to Settings on your device, find iNethack2, scroll down to Tileset to find a new one. You can also change your character name there or make other adjustments to the gameplay. The game has in-game help to get you started on what the commands do. Don't forget to use s to search as there are hidden traps and doors all over the place.

Here's a better death.

Here's everything I killed on my dungeon crawl.

Don't take my word for it. iNethack2 and its predecessors are some of the best games ever. They are free due to the awesome work of very smart people making them available that way. Go get a copy or play online. You won't regret it. iNethack2 gets 5 Mick Happies. If you like it, buy a copy of Future Shock Studios' Interplanetary Drift to say thank you for making it available on iOS again.

Nostalgia Tinged (Game) Reviews

Last weekend we re-watched Dragonslayer, the 1981 fantasy film that made Dragons seem real and awesome. It is still a fantastic movie (4+ Mick Happies) that didn't require massive special effects to be good. Dragonslayer had a plot and fairly good acting for the time. What doesn't hold up about it is the musical score. The Disney 1950s sweeping music just doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the film. Hollywood should just remaster the special effects a little and put in a score with a darker tone and put this film back in theaters, it would be awesome.

The next day I happened to catch a tweet from the Bundle of Holding folks (think Humble Bundle) but for tabletop RPGs. The have a Traveller bundle going until the end of February 2014 that will basically give you everything you can think of from the Traveller game for ~$20 with some of the money going to charity. The minute I saw the bundle, it took me right back to playing Traveller with my dad as we rolled our characters and envisioned them through their military careers and now trying to make it as intrepid merchant-adventurers through the reaches of space. It was only a small mental leap to have me thinking about playing the MegaTraveller PC games (1 and 2), which I really liked. This sparked off even more random flashbacks to other games I loved back in the day (see more about them below). It also made me wonder if they hold up as well as Dragonslayer.

I played so many games growing up that I have to wonder how my parents put up with my fickle playing habits. When I say I played them, I probably spent hours and hours, often never finishing a given game, before moving on to the next interesting (shiny) game that came along. This is probably why, unlike books that I remember fairly well, I tend to have only partial memories of a few aspects of certain games or don't remember them quite like they really were. I guess you really had to be there.

Some of my fondest games were from the early days before graphics really took hold. From the SSI Computer Baseball game that I got a Christmas IOU from my dad for that came out months later. I played and played that game. Entering stats from my Bill James Baseball Abstract for the 1984 season so that I could replay the season as the Padres, keeping the stats for my team. Today you can get that same stat feel on your iOS device ($1.99) or on PC ($19.99) in the form of Out of the Park Baseball, which I have done in the last 10 years or so - creating your own fictitious baseball universe and running it out for 25 years or more. This may have been the start of my love of stat-driven sports simulations that would later lead to me buying multiple versions of the Championship Manager and now Football Manager games (which are all fantastic Soccer management games, all 4 to 5 Mick Happies - go get one or see my iOS review here.)

Also back in the minimal graphics days, I loved fantasy games. Some while growing up and others when I hit college. Here are some of the best I remember (some of which are still playable today):

Wizardry: Legacy of Llylgamyn - one of the best isometric first-person dungeon romps around. Released in 1983, it (and the rest of the Wizardry games) have been remastered, remade and now even exist as a free online MMORPG from Sony (though I haven't tried that). Wizardry: LoL (see what I did there?) was great - take a party into a dungeon and die. Simple as that with nothing more than some lines drawn on screen to give you a sense of where you are going. You can probably find it or one of the other Wizardry games to try somewhere, check them out - it's not Diablo or Path of Exile, but fun in its own way.

I did try to relive the Wizardry experience through another similar game, Oubliette, an obscure dungeon crawler that if you search hard enough on abandonware sites (not that I recommend doing that) you may find it though you will need DOS to run it if I remember correctly. It is the same dungeon dive with a party of characters, but I really liked the character generation process and that your characters aged and had to be retired (though they often died before then). I think you also had to type in the spell names you wanted to cast - so cool back in the day.

I also took the love of RPGs into the Sci-Fi realm as well with Omnitrend's Universe and Universe II games. I remember the multiple floppy disks and the huge binder for Universe - it was kind of like a choose your own adventure game on the computer in space. Probably not great, but loads of fun at the time. Universe II was a more expansive and polished game and if you can play it, it is worth the time, a lot like playing Traveller on your computer. Though I remember the look being better than the screenshots on the link above - perhaps that is due to time and/or my monitor and graphics card at the time?

Of course the other RPG game growing up was Rogue. If you don't know what that is and like RPGs, then at least go play NetHack, which is free to play online at the link or available for free on iOS devices here. Any of these are 5 Mick Happy dungeon dives with lots of depth. Give it a try. These were some of the first games to introduce permadeath and they are HARD.

In college I discovered the world of MUDs (Mulit-User Dungeons) and got into the player killing mayhem that is Genocide. This is a text-based game in which you compete with other players online to win matches - hour long games of team or individual based battles. It is, of course free to play (here) and is where I learned how to touch type. Yay, video games! For time when I wanted to key bash some computer-controlled monsters, I played Valhalla (now defunct). It has been spiritually remade as the mud Asgard's Honor and you can still do pub bashes of monsters that follow you when you run. A pub bash being where you drag a monster to the pub (the place where you can buy healing drinks and food) and the rest of the players online help you kill it while you tank (take all the damage). Best way to kill a big mob (monster). You haven't lived until you lag out in a major fight while playing online with a 9600 baud modem. Eek!

Also in college I had the fun experience playing multiplayer Warlords - a turn-based strategy game that had elements of war games with heroes that you took on quests. A really fun game that probably inspired the Heroes of Might and Magic and other games of that type. Warlords has been remade for iOS and can be found here. Sitting in a computer lab playing multiplayer with friends trash-talking you was simply the best.

The last game I will mention in the walk down memory lane was the very first Battletech inspired video game I ever played, Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception. An RPG where you were caught on a planet invaded by enemies. You had to steal a 'Mech and recruit support and get word out of the invasion. Fantastic game and ripe for conversion to our new touch interface devices. Though I remember the graphics being way better than the screenshots in the link. At the time, waging war in a massive robot on my computer was AWESOME.

Looking back at all of these games (some of which I am amazed are still playable after 20 - 30 years) I find that my memory is better than the reality of the game. Sometimes you can't go back and relive that same experience you had at that time and place. It also makes me think that there are so many opportunities waiting for someone to take these old classics and bring them into the 21st century and make them available to a new generation. Maybe the lack of graphics or arcade action would make them less interesting to gamers today. I like to think not. Certainly these games have shaped my tastes - I like simulations, RPGs and strategy games most of all. I hope one of these spark fond memories for you and if you haven't tried any of them, at the very least, try NetHack - its a classic and free and hard and fun. I still play it today.

Thanks for indulging my nostalgic look bad down memory lane.

FTL: Faster Than Light Review

FTL: Faster Than Light is a space simulator where you and your crew are piloting a ship trying to run from a Rebel fleet bent on stopping you from delivering key data to the Federation. FTL was developed by Subset Games (Matthew Davis and Justin Ma) and partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign. The game is available (Mac, PC, Linux) via the FTL website or through Steam.

I first heard about FTL from listing to the Major Nelson podcast where E mentioned that he was playing the game. From there I searched for the game and found the FTL website. There wasn’t much detail there, so I happened to come across this YouTube video of a play-through that gave a really good overview of the game:

FTL has minimalistic top-down graphics and real-time combat. You control all aspects of your ship from how much power you put into various ship systems to where you station your crew (they add bonuses as they become more proficient at a job – faster weapon power up, etc.) and how you upgrade your ship. The items you most have to manage are fuel, missiles, drone parts and scrap - the currency of the future. The controls are point and click and easy to learn and you can pause when necessary – which it is if your ship has been boarded, has a hull breach and is on fire – to help you think about where to move crew or what part of an enemy ship to target.

The basic elements of the game have you jumping (using FTL drives) to various spots in a given star sector. At each stop you may run into hostile ships, potential quests, black market stores or other challenges or dangers. At each you will have a series of choices to make that may help or hurt your overall goal to escape the Rebel fleet and reach the Federation. With each jump you make in a sector, it will (hopefully) take you closer to the exit point (where you can jump to the next sector) and away from the Rebel fleet (shown on the jump screen as a growing danger area you want to avoid – read you fight enemy ships every jump).

FTL doesn’t waste much energy on the graphics, but the sound is great and the game play is really engaging. It is similar to rogue-like games (Rogue, NetHack, etc.) in that death of your ship and crew is permanent. I found that it made me think fondly of NetTrek and similar minimal graphics starship games of the past. There are also Stats and Achievements to help you track how well you have done on each game. There are also multiple ship designs that can be unlocked by various achievements. I have played six games so far and unlocked one new ship design and haven’t come close to winning the game on normal, succumbing to a different death each time.

FTL is hard, fun and re-playable and at $10, you should go out and get it. If you wonder if FTL is right for you, watch the video above for a little while to get a feel for how it works and how quickly things can go from great to running at the edge of your seat. FTL gets 4 Mick Happies. Safe travels in the darkness of space.