This is what we'd expect minimum today
http://linux.duke.edu/~icon/sshots/nethack.png
Aaaand this is what it's usually played as
http://www.nongnu.org/nethack-el/nethack.png
Yeeeeeep. Pretty ghetto. The guys that made this were laying the foundations of the "Old School" in terms of games man. This is some pretty damn old stuff. It's like...I don't know, the Dungeons and Dragons put into DOS with only one quest available.
Lets do the on-a-whim review, eh?
Sound:
If you hold down the shift key long enough, you get an interesting motherboard beep when windows notifies you of the sticky keys bullshit. That's about it. Listen to something while you play it. I guarentee it won't enhance the gameplay.
Graphics:
In all seriousness, that second picture is not the only way how to play nethack. In fact, it comes with both nethack.exe and nethackW.exe, the latter being a sort of ...low-tech graphic-heavy version, pictured below-
Not much...but it's better than this I suppose.
Replay: Pfftt, you finished? You must've cheated. Try again!
Gameplay: You are...Whoever the fuck you want to be. There are the following roles/classes: Archeologist - Barbarian - Caveman - Healer - Knight - Priest - Monk - Ranger - Rogue - Samurai - Tourist - Valkyrie - Wizard. Each has it's own special sets of abilities, talents, characteristics, and alignments (There are only three: Lawful, agnost- I mean Neutral, and Chaotic). You get a pet, usually a cat or dog (Knights get a Pony) but they gain experience and will grow into bigger things (my pony's a warhorse...whoop dee dooo!). You can tame other monsters though, which is pretty bitchin.
Lets touch on the quest- You are chosen by ...some divine fucking force or something, iono, to go and get an amulet. It's kinda lame, but it's not that easy. The amulet's apparently a pain in the ass to get back to the surface once you get it (It prevents teleporting and will make you get hunger faster). Get the amulet and return to the surface asap, amassing as much phat lewt as you can.
Items- Got your basic set up here: helms, gloves, boots, chest protection, weapons, cloaks. Easy enough. You got tons of scrolls, the best way to figure out what they do (identifying them) is to read them and hope you don't die. Same with spellbooks. Spellbooks teach you a spell to cast. Wands cast certain special spells. Tons of potions, with the same identification method as scrolls. Every item has a weight. You can hurt yourself if you overburden. Crazy shit, never had that problem in Diablo or Diablo 2, eh? You also have food. If you don't eat, you starve, simple. Oh, and Gold weighs ...actual weight, so thats cool, I guess. There are about a dozen uses for the towel in this game.
Go around, killing shit, sacrificing it to gain favor with your god, blow shit up, get awesome artifacts. I have yet to need to grind for levels in this game, however, I die...For stupid reasons. It is also time-sensitive and will only show certain monsters at night/day and may show them asleep if at night or if they're noctournal.
They have a phrase in nethack. It's "The developers think of everything". I dare you to test it out.
Lynx: http://www.nethack.org/
Got any questions? Put 'em here.
Got any comments? Shove 'em up your ass!
Is your name "Strayed"? Go fuck yourself and your glow-in-the-dark dick you care so much about before you even think about spewing another stream of pure homosexual bullshit!
=============Tips====================
If you're playing on a private server, such as your own computer, then you can back up your character files. You know which one it is, it'll have <your windows login name> dash <character name> dot "Nethack-saved-game". It'll be only visible once you save, and it gets bigger each time you go down another level and explore some more. It saves everything, so back it up at least once. I've got three locations personally, long term, mid-term, and short term stuff, you know, if I decide to do some really drastic thing, I save and put it into the long term or the midterm file. Also, longterm could be like...a weekly save thing if you're playing casually, just incase the short and middle get fucked up. But of course, backing up your own game is considered wrong, but that's a decision I'm willing to ignore fully.
Also, changing your windows calandar/clock is considered cheating as well, for full moon days grant you an extra point of luck, new moon days grant you a -1 point of luck.
If you find yourself dying too often, just try #explore. It's like...the ultimate in cheats-enabled, so of course your score isn't recorded, but you'll learn a lot more.
I'll add any more tips as I remember them...
