Welcome to Installment One of Ghavrel's Entirely Free and Fabulously Entertaining Games, the only source for semi-coherent reviews of free games on this board that had its name changed so that the acronym thereof could be a palindrome!

This review will be of NETHACK, one of the oldest games still in development! That’s right, NetHack was released in 1987 and continues to be updated (although the last full release was in 2003). This means, among other things, that it predates the Internet by a fairly significant margin. This has a few consequences. Firstly, the graphics. Or lack thereof. The game is in ASCII, but HALT! Before you are scared away like the outright graphics-loving ninnies that you so undoubtedly are, be calmed; for there are a great many also free versions that impart beautiful tilesets and the occasional isometric perspective to gamers such as yourselves!

The second, and less avoidable than the first, thing, is that this game is hard. You thought Demon’s Souls was hard? Maybe it was; I’ve never played it. But this is hard, too. It is a FUN CHALLENGE FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY.

Third (i have broken so many rules of style with this numbering list), the DevTeam has thought of everything.

Everything. These italics are not for show. I am as serious as Serious Cat running Happy Chair over with a Serious Truck full of Serious Pie. I am as serious as the Internet, which is Very. Serious. Business.

FOR EXAMPLE. There is an enemy known as the cockatrice. It can turn things to stone by hissing at them (sometimes) or by touching them (always). Or if they touch it. Or if they touch its corpse. Unless they’re wearing gloves. Which means that if you come across a cockatrice corpse and you’re wearing gloves, you first ought to wonder why the hell that cockatrice is dead (unless you killed it, of course), and then you ought to consider the fabulous possibilities of wielding what is essentially an enormous rubber chicken of +5 bazillion Turn Shit To Stone.

Of course, you should also consider the various dangers of holding said enormous rubber chicken. Like if your gloves catch on fire and burn away. Or if you’re burdened (read: overencumbered) and fall down some stairs. Or if you step on a landmine and survive (lucky!) and fall into the resulting pit that stepping onto a landmine creates (not so lucky). Every single one of these things can happen.

In short: The DevTeam has thought of everything.

Finally, NetHack is influential. Blizzard credits it as an inspiration for Diablo. As WikiHack (yes, there’s a NetHack wiki) puts it, “NetHack is history: Descending from Rogue, NetHack has 26 years of development behind it. It is one of the few computer games widely played by people who are younger than it. From this history arises a kind of authority.”

So, what’s the point of NetHack? Plotwise, it’s a typical hack-and-slash. You (I’ma quote Wiki here, k?) “must retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, found at the lowest level of the dungeon, and sacrifice it to his or her deity. Successful completion of this task rewards the player with the gift of immortality, and the player is said to "ascend", attaining the status of demigod. In addition, a number of sub-quests must be completed, including one class-specific quest.”

But before you do that, you get to choose a few things! “Before playing a game, the player is asked to name his or her character and then select a race, role, gender, and alignment, or allow the game to assign them. There are traditional fantasy roles such as knight, barbarian, wizard, rogue, valkyrie, priest, monk, and samurai, but there are also unusual ones, including archaeologist, tourist, and caveman. The player character's role and alignment dictate which deity the character serves in the game and "how other monsters react toward you. "”

You aren’t going to accomplish this on your first try. Or your second. Did I mention you don’t get to start from old saves? You don’t get to start from old saves. There’s saving, and you can circumvent this if you really want to (I have), but when you save, the game overwrites your old save and closes, and when you start the game up again and choose what save you want, you go there. You can only have one save file per character, and once you die, it saves that to the relevant file. So no going back to the winged demon boss time after time again and trying to figure out how to kill it.

SO! For the two or three of you who’ve gotten this far and think it’s worth a try (and it is worth a try; remember how I’m reviewing ENTIRELY FREE AND FABULOUSLY ENTERTAINING games?), a few links. They go from most traditional graphics (read:virtually none) to least traditional (3D? Haven’t tried yet). I recommend Vanilla, but using the graphics tiles that come with the game and replace the ASCII. The link at the bottom is to the Wikipedia article on NetHack.

Vanilla NetHack (ASCII graphics, rather difficult interface, but the Windows version at least has graphical tiles): http://www.nethack.org/v343/downloads.html

Falcon’s Eye (isometric graphics view, mouse-based): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon%27s_Eye

Vulture’s Eye (a fork of Falcon’s Eye): http://clivecrous.github.com/vultures/

noegnud (Apparently 3D. I have no clue. Looks like you’ll have to compile things for yourselves, but I know a few of you can do this. Good luck): http://github.com/clivecrous/noegnud

WikiHack, the NetHack Wiki: http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Stay Tuned for the next Installment, where I talk about Dwarf Fortress, a game with even worse graphics and an even steeper learning curve! Trust me, it's better.

THIS HAS BEEN GEFAFEG!