h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

(Yet Another Stupid Death)

What do you want to eat?
This cockatrice corpse tastes terrible!
You turn to stone.
DYWYPI?

You know, 'w' and 'e' are VERY close together...

I had six resistances, reflection, extra luck, and was very fast when I died. I also had a pet ghoul, but it was useless, so I'd left it.

-----
Farvel Angril the Valkyrie...

You turned to stone in The Dungeons of Doom on dungeon level 6 with 102260 points,
and 179 pieces of gold, after 24733 moves.
You were level 12 with a maximum of 125 hit points when you turned to stone.
-----

Nice score, eh? Due mostly to the heaps of gems in my pack (I'd identified all colours of glass).

All my top-scoring characters died by cockatrice. You'd think I'd have learned to be more careful by now.

Yeah, now I'm becoming more of an experienced player, I'm learning the pleasures, and the pains of c*ckatrices.

My top score is still 24752 though.

Nice score, Pete!

Gems are always a good way to get a high score. ISTR that you get a penalty for dying, but not if you escape... but I've never taken advantage of it.

... now where did I put my smiley...

Well, you just have to get used to the fact that NetHack is cruel. The DevTeam (people who wrote NetHack) decided not to warn the player before doing stupid things like eating lethal corpses on the grounds that it was a part of the game.

BTW, I just subscribed to the article... seems I wasn't before, as I completely missed your discussion with Orcus.

People are usually subscribed to their own articles, but I guess as I was the one who created this that is not appropriate.

The DevTeam are very very cruel, but that's what makes NetHack so damn addictive. Before NetHack it was literally only the Final Fantasy games (only IV, V, VI and perhaps VII) that captivated me in the same way.

~

Ah, FFVII... the longest game I've ever played. (except maybe UO and Elite, which are endless)

I've been playing a demo of "Uplink" lately... very cool game, which I could imagine being very addictive.

I've not even _heard_ of that!

Bah. All this talk of NetHack is clearly putting me off work. I have a project deadline on Friday!

Oops... in case you don't know what Uplink is, it's a strategy game where the player is a freelance cracker. (They call you a hacker, but I refuse to use the word in that context.) You use password crackers to gain access to admin accounts for stealing/deleting data, forging logs etc. It's more interesting than it sounds from that description.

... anyway, this is OT...

Aha. OK.

Heh, my first simulpost.

I don't believe you. Someone who's been around as long as you must have had more than one.