Business Hours Are Over, Baby

It's party-time. We're saying goodbye to a few colleagues, so here is the festive table before it got summarily destroyed by rampaging employees.

The un-fail-cake is hiding at the back, with Good Luck! written on it in my best icing handwriting (which, for the record, is so much harder than normal handwriting as a leftie, because you're not allowed to smear icing writing). The Christmas decorations are simply because we wished to decorate, and they were the only decorations to hand.

The plan is Easter eggs and plastic daffodils for this year's Christmas party.

Time for a Room Lovely

If you're not sure what that is, check this. I've thought time and again that a blog should be about the things that interest me, as much as it should be about the things I think should interest others, and I don't know, maybe it's because I've been struggling in the kitchen today (the first cake turned out remarkably torus-shaped) and I have a whopper of a headache, but I feel the need to share one of my more obscure pastimes. To wit: NetHack.

Incidentally the cake is for my dearly-departing colleagues, and will be coffee in flavour, with coffee-flavour butter icing in the middle and Mars Bar icing on top (which is a couple of bars nuked in the microwave until all melty and delicious and just smeared on top and cooled down). The oversized doughnut (or "fail-cake" as Ian delights in calling it) will remain carefully concealed at home until the evidence can be more thoroughly destroyed. Mmmm.

Another incidental prior to my actual official ramblings (yes, they haven't even started yet), is that I am currently trying out the new blogspot interface. It looks bigger and emptier than before, so I suppose that must mean it is now "streamlined" and "minimalist"...so things should either speed up because it isn't filled with crap or things should slow down now I can't find the buttons I need anymore...we'll see how it goes. In any case, I was distracted by the stats on my blog. Some very interesting ones!

• Thing of note the first: Apparently I'm not the only one who reads it (yes, this surprised me too).

• Thing of note the second: It has been read by someone (or something) in places as far afield as Canada and India. Wow. Big shout out to those places...

So anyway, going back to the original point of the post, what is NetHack and why is it lovely?

I could say that NetHack is a Rogue-like dungeon exploration game. I could say that it is all represented in ASCII characters. Neither of these things would have meant anything to me when I first started playing, and certainly wouldn't have been the reason that I have been playing for about ten years and don't plan to stop any time soon.

The image above is my current game. I'm playing a knight called Dan. It's going pretty well at the moment. I'm the @ sign in the room left of the middle at the top of the screen, with my pet orange dragon (D) to the left. There are lots of gems (*) buried in the rocks around the dungeon, and a fair bit of gold ($). There's an up staircase (<), and a down staircase (>), and a few other bits and pieces. I'm on Dungeon Level 7 here, though I have reached the Castle level (though not completed it).

So what's the attraction? Well, it's such a carefully wrought game, you can't help but fall in love with it. Every game is different from the last, right down to dungeon layout. The messages you receive as you play are genius. The number of different ways you can die are, frankly, unfathomable (I've died a lot and I've probably done it <1% of the different ways you can). It's a hard game, and requires you to really think about your next action: if you're down to a few hit points, what's the betting that you can kill the monster attacking you? Is it better to run away? Or maybe try out that potion you've yet to identify, in the hopes that it might be a potion of full healing?

I've ascended twice, which is a fancy-pants way of saying I've won the game. The first time I was playing a wizard, and for once didn't die of starvation a few levels into the game. The second time I was a valkyrie, and just hit everything around me.

So the game itself - you start at Dungeon Level 1 and go down. Monsters start out pretty easy, and get tougher as you get further, so you start with newts (:), goblins (o), grid bugs (x) and jackals (d), then end up with dragons (D), titans (H), arch-lichs (L) and other unpleasant beasties. You pick up stuff as you go, either from dead monsters or just left in rooms, but you don't know what it is without experimenting or reading a scroll of identify (assuming that you've managed to identify said scroll, that is).

Fairly early on, you come across two down-staircases on one level. One leads further down the dungeon. The other leads to the Gnomish Mines. These are about 8 levels, a bit tougher than the main dungeon because of the wide open spaces (plenty of room for monsters to be generated in, and not many places to hide), so I tend to dip in, perhaps grab a pickaxe if it's convenient, and scarper back to the main levels. A few more main levels down you reach the Oracle Level, which has a big blue @ in the middle of it, ready to dispense his wisdom...for a price.

The level directly below that has two up-staircases, one leading back from whence you came, the other leading to the Sokoban levels. The Sokoban levels are 4 puzzle levels (each progressively harder than the last) where you have to roll boulders into pits/holes in the floor. At the end there is a "treasure zoo" - a room where each square is filled with gold and a monster, and a closet with either a bag of holding or an amulet of reflection (both very useful).

So, having completed Sokoban, I tend to wander back to the Gnomish Mines, and try and get as far as Minetown (which has a few shops and a priest who can grant you a better armour class). If I'm feeling brave then I'll go down further and complete the end level of the mines (one of three versions, all have a luckstone, again very useful). If not now, I come back later.

Then a few more levels down the main Dungeons and you hear a telepathic message from your Quest Leader, and somewhere there's a magic portal to transport you to the Quest Levels. You have to be a certain level of alignment with your god/dess, and a certain experience level to be accepted on the quest - otherwise you're sent back to a) be better at being chaotic/neutral/lawful or b) kill a few more beasties. This happens to me nearly every time I find the quest levels!

Anyway, get the experience, improve the alignment, and you're in. If you've successfully identified a wand of death, even better. There are a few filler levels, then you get your Quest Nemesis level (which is different for every class that you play. The knight has to defeat the dragon Ixoth, the valkyrie must defeat Lord Surtur and so on). The nemesis holds the Quest Artifact (usually something awesome, like the knight gets the Magic Mirror of Merlin) and the Bell of Opening, which you need later on.

Okay, so Sokoban, Gnomish Mines, Quest levels completed, what's next? If you're lucky, it's Fort Ludios. It's a secret level which is only reachable by a magic portal in a vault room (a 2x2 room filled with gold) somewhere between the quest level portal and Medusa (we'll get to that in a minute). It's tough, but so worth doing, because if you survive the treasure zoo, the hordes of soldiers, the four dragons, the giant eels and Croesus himself, you get tons of food, gold and precious gems, and possibly dragon-scale armour and a fair bit of experience. One room only, so when everything's despatched, back to the main dungeon and continue down.

Medusa is the next milestone. She sits in meditation on an island (yeah, don't ask me how the dungeons have water levels above rock levels, they just do). If you don't have levitation, reflection and the ability to see while blind, then you need to get these things, otherwise you'll struggle to cross to the island, and defeat a monster who can turn you to stone with her gaze. Fairly easy then, though if she reads a cursed scroll of teleportation, you then have to chase her across a number of levels, which is a pain. Beneath her level are a few labyrinthine levels, then the Castle.

The Castle is tough (surprised?). It has hordes of monsters, a couple of barracks of soldiers, it's surrounded on all sides by a moat with sharks and eels in. The spellcasting monsters are the worst - I often genocide liches/arch-liches/demi-liches before this point so they can't curse all my stuff and summon more monsters. But again the rewards are worthwhile, because there is a wand of wishing hidden away. This is how I acquire much of my "ascension kit" (the kibble most useful when attempting to win).

To progress further down, you need to fall through one of the trap-doors in the castle, or make a hole - no down-stair here! This takes you to the last of the main dungeon levels, the entrance to Gehennom. Lots of monsters including mummies, zombies, vampires and ghosts. Then you enter the Gehennom levels. Most are just labyrinths again (hard because lots of traps, lots of monsters, and no quick ways to find staircases). There are a few with named demons you have to face: Juiblex (he has his own swamp level), Baalzebub, Orcus and so on. Then you have to find yet another level with a second up staircase. This leads to Vlad's Tower. Vlad the Impaler is a nice easy kill compared with most of them (as long as he doesn't read a cursed scroll of teleportation, otherwise you're chasing him all over the place again). And when he dies, you get his Candelabrum of Invocation, which you need later.

Heading back to the main Gehennom levels again, you start finding an interesting-shaped and impenetrable construction in the middle of the level. This is the wizard's tower. You'll want to steer clear of that for a while, and concentrate on clearing out the levels of some of the monsters. Eventually you reach the bottom (or is it?) - no more down-staircases. Instead, you'll find a vibrating square somewhere in the dungeon. Mark that, and get ready for a mad dash! Bless everything you need, make sure your loot is handy to pick up somewhere, that your exits are clear. You're going wizard-hunting.

Ascending the tower isn't too bad. A few monsters, generally nothing too complicated. It's a pain if the Wizard of Yendor wakes up too early, but hey, it happens. He's at the top of the tower, meditating away. Kill him (preferably as quickly as possible, usually with a wand of death), and pinch the Book of the Dead from his corpse. Now, everything needs to be done as efficiently as possible, because the wizard keeps. coming. back. "So thou thought thou couldst kill me, fool."

So, race down to the vibrating square, open the portal to the bottom-most level - Moloch's Sanctum, cut swathes through the hordes and hordes of monsters, and reach the secret room where the Amulet of Yendor is held by the priestess or priest there. Kill them, steal the Amulet, then get upstairs as fast as possible. If all this has gone as planned, then upon reaching Dungeon Level 1, you don't leave the dungeon for the world outside, you get transported to the Elemental Planes. You dig your way through the Plane of Earth, fly through the Plane of Air, levitate through the Plane of Fire, and float through the Plane of Water (easily the least taxing of planes, as long as the flipping wizard doesn't appear again!). From there, you reach the Astral Plane, your final destination. Tons of heroes and angelic beings to defeat, not to mention the small matter of Famine, Pestilence and Death (does that make you War?), before finding the correct altar on which to sacrifice the Amulet. Do this, get bathed in glory, ascend - success!

It's intricate, involved, convoluted and at times just plain evil. Best. game. ever.