隨意門(2) Half-Life and The Orange Box

曾推出知名FPS如Counter-Strike, Half-Life的Valve公司在十月會推出一個名為The Orange Box的5-in-1 combo。其中一個超爆笑的遊戲名為Portal。

Portal是一個以第一身觀點玩的puzzle game。在遊戲中你拿著一支『隨意門槍』打天下，這槍可射出一紅一藍兩個隨意門，由紅門走進去就會由藍門出來，倒轉亦然。到底有甚麼好玩？看這個官方trailer就可以明白。

不想等的話，其實Portal的前身是一個學生project的成品，名叫Narbacular Drop。在Nuclear Monkey Software就能免費下載。

StarCraft 2: "Hell, it's about time"

今年是StarCraft年：首先是FFG的Starcraft: the Board Game預定今年推出。其次是Blizzard的StarCraft 2終於有聲啦！雖然發售日還沒有，但有screenshot總好過甚麼都沒有…又要儲錢買新display card了。右圖是本周新圖之一。

NetHack revisited

The thousand-word essay was not enough to describe all the features and peculiarities of the game, so here is the second part.

The Beast Within

Food is essential in real life. It is also important in sophisticated games such as NetHack. Regarding food, most creatures can be classified into 4 types: omnivores (humans), carnivores (cats and dogs), herbivores (horses) and metallivores (rust monsters). If you need to eat but do not, you quickly feel weak (reduced strength), and will eventually faint and die of starvation. The most readily available food source is the fresh kills you make. Corpses (except lizards) eventually rot and decompose, but before they do, they provide important nutritions for you or your pet.

Eating is good in other ways too. It grants you new abilities, known as "intrinsics" in the game. Eating giants may increase your strength. Eating poisonous corpses (not exactly a good idea) may grant you poison resistence. Eating an invisible stalker makes you invisible. Eating a werewolf turns you into a werewolf.

You can only kill monsters and eat their corpse after they die. Some creatures, like purple worms (from Dune), can eat monsters whole. A purple worm can eat your pet demon and digest it in one turn, giving you lots of frustration.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Stealing is bad, but it can be very rewarding. The foolhardy way is to just grab everything and run, but you cannot get out unless you first kill the shopkeeper, who is a very strong fighter. Not a good idea. You can also try teleporting your way out but you will never be welcomed in the same shop again.

Your pets can do these dirty tricks for you. If you tame your pets by feeding them regularly, they will pick up objects and bring it to you, even objects in shops. A large dog can even fetch a chest.

Yet Another ... Geek Pun?

Like it or not, humour is an essential part of the game. Sometimes they are coded into the game. If you are hit by a quantum mechanic, you are teleported and your position will be very uncertain. Eating spinach can increase your strength. So can a lump of royal jelly if you managed to run into a beehive and kill about 30 angry killer bees.

The game is also full of puns. If you eat an apple or a pear while playing a UNIX version of the game, you get a "core dumped" message. Eating a sprig of wolfsbane (wolf-s-bane) cures lycanthropy. If you levitate across a kitchen sink, you sink and fall to the ground.

A collection of harmless messages can be very funny. NetHackers even give this an abbreviation: YAFM or Yet Another Funny Message. One recent one I encountered is like this:
Kaablamm! You hear an explosion in the distance! --More--
You suddenly realize it is unnaturally quiet. The dog bites!
What really happened? Someone far away set off a landmine, while I am just entering a graveyard.

There are many ways to die. You can die by colliding with the ceiling, you can choke to death by eating too much. You can get thrown off the back of your steed. You can die by repeatedly throwing a cockatrice corpse up until the damage send you to heaven. There is also an abbreviation for this: YASD or Yet Another Stupid Death. Some adventurous players continuously try to find new ways to die! The owners of alt.org posts a list of top types of deaths on the website.

NetHack: a cheaper yet better version of Diablo II

I assume nobody understood what the valkyrie post was about. So if you do not mind reading a long, boring essay I will try explaining my favourite game, NetHack, here.

"Let's play a different game than what we're playing"

Diablo II screenshot

Have you played Blizzard's PC game Diablo, or Microsoft's Dungeon Siege? They are a type of games commonly known as dungeon-crawling or hack-and-slash games. There is a common formula to these games: An evil power has risen, and you, the "adventurer" must rush to save the day before the world is destroyed. You begin as a squire, a "level 1" character with weak fighting skills. Battles after battles, you defeat minions sent by an evil wizard or demon, learning new spells and abilities on the way. Replacing daggers with long swords, ring mails with enchanted plate mails, you fight your way to the final chapter, where you get a hard-earned, glorious victory. Then you see the ending movie and credits screen, and start again with the hard-core mode.

Now ditch the handsome 3D graphics and movies. Remove the multiplayer functions. Replace the 3-CD installation set with a 2MB archive and, with a little imagination, your adventure can be even more exciting.

Simplicity is beauty

More than 20 years ago, Rogue was born. Wildly popular (I suppose) among computer gurus, the game was later expanded into something called Hack. Hack was bundled with many BSD-compatible UNIX systems including SunOS 4.1, on which I first played the game while trapped in University laboratories at night. Later I found NetHack, a hugely enhanced version of Hack. I installed it in my GNU/Linux box and played it again and again, trying to beat the game but failed.

NetHack screenshot

These games, collectively called roguelikes, all have a very similar interface. Originally running on computers with 80x24 text only computer terminals when arrow keys were not popular, the game was operated from a standard QWERTY keyboard using HJKL as navigation keys, much like the VI editor. The whole game is presented in the terminal. Instead of animated 3D pictures, The dungeons are drawn using ASCII characters. The @ sign is a human, f stands for felines, including cats and tigers, and % represents food. It looks cryptic at first, but with a little training you can get used to it very easily.

Everything, including the kitchen sink

It is often said that "the DevTeam thinks of everything" (TDTTOE). Having a plain interface does not mean the game is plain. On the contrary, it allows more possibilities that any modern PC game could offer. In NetHack you can start as one of the 12 roles, including Archeologist, Samurai, Valkryie, Barbarian, Wizard and Tourist(!). You goal is very simple: go down the dungeon, steal an amulet from the invincible Wizard of Yendor. After escaping alive, you will then enter the astral planes, fight some elementals and angels, sacrifice the Amulet of Yendor to your deity and ascend to immortality.

Throughout the game you may encounter more than 300 different types of monsters, grouped by similarity into 57 groups, using all uppercase and lowercase letters except I, as well as characters like @ and &. There are many different types of scrolls, potions, wands and artifact weapons. It even has kitchen sinks with peculiar properties, imported from SLASH'EM, itself a derivitive of NetHack.

The DevTeam did not invent all the monsters and items themselves. Most of them has roots in folklore and novels, including Nazguls from J.R.R. Tokien's Lord of the Rings, Medusa and the Mjollnir from Greek and Norse mythology, the Excalibur from King Arthur legends as well as magic lamps filled with Arabian Nights Djinns. They even provided these references in the documentation.

I have already told you that the adventurer is allowed to bring a pet into the dungeon, but did I tell you they have default names? If you play a Samurai, your dog will be called Hachi, the loyal dog of a Japanese professor; if you play a Barbarian, your dog is Idefix, whose owner was a fictional Gaul barbarian named Obelix in Asterix, a French comic book. There is a section in wikipedia about Mythology and fiction in NetHack.

These characters and items are not just for decorative purposes. Most of them retain properties true to the legend from which they are born. If you are worthy enough, the Lady of the Lake may bless your sword into the Excalibur when you dip it into a fountain. On the Medusa Island, you will find a status of Perseus, stoned to death by Medusa. If you break the statue you may be able to find a shield of reflection (polished shield from Athena the goddess of war) and boots of levitation (winged sandels from Hermes the messenger from the gods). Like in Lord of the Rings, the Sting warns you of orcs' presence by glowing blue, and cuts through spider webs instantly. You may even have sex with a succubus and die of exhaustion.

Items can be combined to form the most bizzare effects at the strangest moments. What would you do when you need to cross a river? In a PC game there is usually only one way: talk to a villager, who will tell you that you can find a lever in the bushes to lower the drawbridge. In NetHack, to name a few, you can steal a pair of water walking boots, fly using a potion of levitation, freeze the water with a spell, or swim if you can breath under water. If you have the strength, you can even chain a heavy metal ball to yourself using a scroll of punishment, throw the ball to the other side and drag you across.

Say Grace

Two weeks ago a Ukrainian jumped into a lion cage. He shouted "God will save me, if he exists" but a lioness killed him before any god could save him. In NetHack this will not happen. For one thing there are tigers, panthers but no lions. In addition there is a deity system. There is a God to provide you guidence and to attend to your needs. If you are in your deity's favour, you can #pray and they will protect you from almost any trouble you run into. Monsters will not attack you when your deity is listening to you, and nice things will happen. You may be completely healed, your items may be uncursed, or your deadly food poison might just go away. If your God really likes you, you may also be granted an artifact with immense powers.

You have to pay for all these, though. To earn their favours you may need provide sacrifices. Corpses of powerful beasts work best but geckos are nice too. If you do not have their favours, things could go really ugly. When you annoy your God by talking too much, a heavenly thunder may strike you in your face, or your God may send an angel to hunt you down.

Messing with the dead

When you play the game matters. NetHack uses the computer clock to determine what may happen. During a full moon, dogs howl and werewolves are more feverish. On Friday the 13th, you have worse luck. If you insist on playing at midnight, undead do double damage.

In the game there are some randomly generated special levels. One of which is the bones level. When a character is killed, a bones file may be generated. The dead character becomes a ghost that haunts the place where he is killed. Somewhere during your game you may run into this level instead of the usual dungeon maps. If you manage to kill the ghost and whatever that killed him, you win a great prize and may take the possessions of the poor guy. Beware, adventurer! Most of his possessions may be cursed. If you are playing alone on your own computer you will only find your bones files, but if you want to meet new undead friends, you can transport the dead through a third-party application, appropriately named Hearse.

Alternatively you can play online like I do. Simply connect to nethack.alt.org through telnet, create an account and you can join the adventure.

My first valkyrie past Medusa ended up like this

                  ----------
                 /          \
                /    REST    \
               /      IN      \
              /     PEACE      \
             /                  \
             |      hokuto      |
             |     4096 Au      |
             |   killed by a    |
             |     minotaur     |
             |                  |
             |                  |
             |       2006       |
            *|     *  *  *      | *
   _________)/\\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/|_)_______

Farvel hokuto the Valkyrie...

You died in The Dungeons of Doom on dungeon level 28 with 277663 points,
and 4096 pieces of gold, after 24746 moves.
You were level 16 with a maximum of 147 hit points when you died.

I should probably genocide minotaurs instead of gelatinous cubes next time.

Interesting and sad moments

Apart from getting through the Medusa level for the first time, there are some more interesting and sad moments, such as ...

Ah-mui turned into a blue dragon after I fed her some chameleon meat


Ah-mui later polymorphed herself into a monkey. Poor her. She was so naughty to stir up a dragons' nest for me.


Surrounded by dragons and orcs and trolls, Ah-mui died a horrible death...


Revenge is never sweet; It tastes like a cockatrice corpse and dragon statues.


Getting rid of Medusa is easy if you have the right tools

Which NetHack Monster Are You?

 #   |.
###e#+.
     |.

If I were a NetHack monster, I would be a floating eye. I see and sense absolutely everything that happens around me. I just don't do very much about it.

Which NetHack Monster Are You?

What is NetHack?

The 3 principles and 8 virtues of ...

The 3 principles are

• Truth
• Love
• Courage

The 8 virtues are

• Honesty: scrupulous respect for truth - the willingness never to deceive oneself or another (pure truth)
  
• Compassion: nonjudgmental empathy for one's fellow creatures (pure love)
  
• Valor: the courage to take actions in support of one's convictions (pure courage)
  
• Justice: the devotion to truth, tempered by love (truth and love)
  
• Sacrifice: the courage to give of oneself in the name of love (love and courage)
  
• Honor: the courage to stand for the truth, against any odds (truth and courage)
  
• Spirituality: the concern with one's inner being and how one deals with truth, love, and courage (truth, love and courage)
  
• Humility: perceiving one's place in the world, not according to one's own accomplishments, but according to the intrinsic value of all individuals
  

What is "..."?