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Gaming: Spectating Nethack
Mon, 03 Nov 2008

I'm a closet Nethack nerd.

Nethack is a very complex and interesting dungeon-romp game, generally played out entirely in text (though various ports and lookalikes exist with simple or even very fancy graphical frontends exist.) This isn't a text adventure in the Infocom sense, but a top-down "Diabloesque" game (for more modern people, or a Temple of Apshai but actually fun game for old schoolers like me ;) Anyway suffice to say that it has such depth that very modern games barely scratch its surface (though they of course excel in other aspects, don't get me wrong.) So nethack (and many other Hack descendants such as Dwarf Fortress, Angband and so on) are worth playing even today.

This comes up because the 10th annual Nethack tournament is underway right now. One of those few times I can point at someone else and cry "Nerd!"

Anyway, I stumbled across this frightening and yet mega-awesome tidbit:

telnet nethack.alt.org

By which I mean in a Unix-like environemnt, just do that; in Windows, you can run a DOS-like shell and do that or use some shmancy telnet client. Anyway, telnet lets you essentially visit text displays on some other machine, usually for working on a server.. but in this case, it lets you play, or like some sick ASCII voyeur, watch someone else play Nethack.

You can of course download and play Nethack locally, but this lets you goof off without bothering to download it. But the main attraction to me.. is to watch someone, usually a far better player than me, play nethack. That is just downright nifty. I want spectator modes in newer games too, but this is really darned neat. Just can't wait for someone to scratch Elbereth into the floor with a cockatrice head and see what happens.

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