Game 186: Hack (1984)

Hack [v. 1.0.3]

Independently developed on Unix systems from 1982-1984; ported to DOS in 1984

Date Started: 20 April 2015

Date Ended: 24 April 2015

Total Hours: 7

Reload Count: 6 characters; 16 reloads on final character

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 30

Ranking at Time of Posting: 101/184 (55%)

Here's one reason that roguelikes are awesome: while anyone reading this post could identify a roguelike in an instant, to the uninitiated (which, let's face it, is most people), they don't look anything like games. They look like work. An average person glancing at my monitor thinks I'm using some kind of retro graphing calculator or an early DOS version of AutoCAD. He thinks, "Man, I always knew Chet was smart, but whatever that is is hard core."

All week, I've been in a series of meetings and events that didn't exactly require my full concentration but had people hovering around my computer frequently. The Savage Empire was definitely out, as were most of the other games on my upcoming list. I needed a roguelike. Since I kicked Angband to 1993, the next obvious choice was the original Hack.

I can't remember why I missed Hack when I first passed through 1984. I probably looked for it but couldn't find it or didn't try very hard. Having already played Rogue and the first generation of NetHack, I rather expected that Hack would be an obvious evolutionary step, perhaps halfway between the two. (Reading the posts on both will greatly assist roguelike novices in understanding this one.) Instead, I was surprised to find a game that was almost indistinguishable from the first versions of NetHack. By the time of its DOS release, Hack had left Rogue far behind, and the improvements made between this game and early NetHack are few and subtle.

The opening screen from an early version of NetHack. Note how similar it is to the screenshot at the top of this post.

     
Some history is in order. Rogue was created by Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold on Unix systems at a couple of University of California campuses in 1980. My understanding is that they didn't intend for it to be open-source software; in fact, they eventually marketed it through several companies, with varying degrees of success. But other programmers found it easy enough to knock off, and they generally made their creations open-source. This led to the entire roguelike genre.

A fortune cookie message hits a little close to home.

       
A game known as Hack was first programmed in 1981 by Jay Fenlason and other students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts. [Ed. This sentence originally said 1982, but El Explorador de RPG confirmed a 1981 date in his coverage.] By most accounts, the game was essentially identical to Rogue except that it featured more monsters. (Some sources say that it had shops and pets, but Andries Brouwer says those were his additions.) In any event, Fenlason et. al. released Hack with an open-source license a compilation tape from the nonprofit group USENIX. This tape found its way to Andries Brouwer, a mathematician, computer scientist, and professor at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amesterdam. Brouwer greatly improved the game from its Rogue roots and introduced most of the elements that distinguish it from earlier incarnations, including:

• Multiple classes that start with their own inventories
• Shops
• Pets
• Intrinsic attributes gained by eating corpses
• Complex interactions between monsters, items, and the character, such as a dragon's breath hitting other enemies in your path or destroying your scrolls
• Ability to backtrack to previously-visited levels
• Special rooms like vaults and "treasure zoos"
• Ability to write on the floor
• "Bones" files 
• Fortune cookies with associated "rumor" messages
• A special set of levels on which the Amulet of Yendor is found

The adventurer stumbles into a killer bee hive.

There's still plenty of opportunity for later development by Mike Stephenson and the rest of the NetHack development team. The item and monster lists are about half of what modern NetHack aficionados are used to; there's only one way up and down; you don't get the option to identify your possessions or see your intrinsics when you die; there's no "blessed" status or altars; there are no spells or spellbooks (making the wizard class a dubious choice); and while "pray" exists as an option, the manual is quite frank that it doesn't do anything. But the basic structure of NetHack is here, and it's clear we need to credit Andries Brouwer as the most important founder of the game.

Shops are a particularly welcome addition.

Brouwer released the game on Usenet in December 1984. He offered a patch a month later, an updated version (1.0.2) in April 1985, and a third version (1.0.3) in July 1985. The three versions show as much evolution as we see from Hack to the first NetHack. Adjustment of luck based on phases of the moon first appeared in 1.0.2. Designation of the lower levels as "Hell" (and the need for fire resistance) also appeared in 1.0.2, as did the Wizard of Yendor in a special square in the middle of a level (in the first version, the Amulet of Yendor was found under a rock). Version 1.0.3 first required players to reach Hell via teleportation, and it also introduced "wizard mode" for the first time.

In October 1985, Hack 1.0.3 was ported to DOS by Don Kneller, who would later port Moria. Kneller didn't seem to know Brouwer by name, crediting the development of the game only to "several people at the Stichting Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam." Reading his notes on the game, we come across this shocking paragraph:

Saved games have no special protection, so you can save a game and make a copy of the save file. Then, if you die trying something risky, you can use the copy to restart your game from the same place.

     
Folks, this is the author of the first PC port of Hack telling us that it's okay to save-scum. Imagine the time I could have saved myself with NetHack a couple years ago.

Hack offers six character classes: tourist, speleologist (later replaced by the more common term "archaeologist"), fighter, knight, cave-man, and wizard. Version 1.02 introduces the ability to specify sex. There are no attributes other than strength. I played a little with each class and finally settled on a knight to go for the win. Having already won NetHack 2.3e and NetHack 3.0.9 legitimately, I didn't feel any particular compulsion to do this one the hard way. I backed up my save file before each new level and ended up reloading 16 times.

If my adventurer is killed in Hell, where does he go?

I didn't find it very difficult to survive within the first 15 levels as long as I took my time. Beyond Level 15, as the monsters get harder, the game becomes a lot deadlier--particularly since the game caps the character at Level 14 (a liability that continues through the early versions of NetHack). It's important to improve strength as much as possible through Potions of Gain Strength and eating Royal Jelly (from killer bee hives) or spinach, as well as weapons and armor through Scrolls of Enchant Weapon and Scrolls of Enchant Armor. Eating the right creatures conveys fire resistance, frost resistance, regeneration, invisibility, and other intrinsics. I was never able to get poison resistance, and I'm not sure what other intrinsics are available since you can never see them and never get confirmation of their acquisition.

Strength increases a point.

There are fewer options for getting yourself out of tight situations than in NetHack, and I learned to prize various wands and scrolls, including Wands of Teleportation--which send monsters off to a random location--and Scrolls of Teleportation, which do the same thing for the character. While you can get ESP by eating floating eyes, there are no blindfolds in this version, so the ESP only helps when you get temporary blindness from eating rotten food or getting blinded by yellow lights. As with later versions, teleportitis and a Ring of Teleport Control are the most important intrinsic/item pair in the game.

Below Level 25, the levels become a series of mazes. Paradoxically, the game becomes a little easier in the maze section because each level has a dead-end in which a Wand of Wishing lies beneath a boulder. You have to have a pick-axe or a Wand of Teleportation to get rid of the boulder (there might be other ways), but a couple of those wands goes a long way towards finishing your ascension kit. Unfortunately, there are no Scrolls of Recharge in this version.
 

After Level 30, the maze levels are designated "Hell," and you need fire resistance (either a ring, or by eating a dragon) to survive. You also have to find a way to teleport into it. There are no down staircases after Level 29, so the only way to reach Hell (and the Amulet of Yendor) is via level teleportation. Later versions of NetHack give you several ways to accomplish this, including Cursed Scrolls of Teleportation and level teleportation traps, but in this version, the only way I could find to reach Hell was to read a regular Scroll of Teleportation while confused and in possession of a Ring of Teleport Control.

The Wizard of Yendor and the Amulet of Yendor supposedly appear at a random level between 30 and 40, but I found him right away on 40. He's surrounded by a wall, which is surrounded by a moat, so you need some mechanism of getting past the water and the walls. I found that a Wand of Fire evaporates the water and a Potion of Levitation lets you cross over it. As for the wall, a Wand of Digging or a pick-axe do the trick.

The Wizard is a pushover in this version, since there's no real magic or magic resistance. I killed him quickly with my sword, and grabbed the Amulet from his body. This version's Wizard doesn't resurrect and harass you all the way to the exit.

Once you have the Amulet, the rest of the game--just as in the first versions of NetHack--is a breeze. All of the up staircases are in the same location in the maze levels, so once you find it on the Wizard's level, you just have to keep hitting CTRL-period to quickly pass through all the other Hell and maze levels. Once you get to Level 25, you have to navigate from staircase to staircase, but the game remembers the maps from previous visits, and if you have teleportitis, it's a simple matter to just teleport yourself from the down staircase to the up staircase.

When you go up the staircase from Level 1, the game tells you your score and number of moves.

For someone who has played a later version of NetHack, Hack feels fairly primitive. But just as I noted with Moria in the previous year, Hack was undoubtedly the most complex, tactical game of 1984. It's not until 1985-1986 that regular RPGs start to rival roguelikes in the complexity of their mechanics, and as late as 1990, no commercial RPG has come close to the Hack/NetHack line in the complexity of inventory and inventory interactions.

On a GIMLET, this game gets:

• 0 points for not even the slightest description of the game world in the manual.

• 3 points for character creation and development. The selection is limited and the level cap is a huge turn-off.

• 2 points for NPCs. You know what gets those two points? The pet. I forgot to reward other versions for this addition. I typically abandon the pet because I find it annoying to constantly maneuver around him, but it's still a unique and interesting element of the game.

• 5 points for foes: a terrific variety of monsters with special attacks and resistances.

I wouldn't have minded if this had waited for a later version.

• 4 points for magic and combat. The combat system is deceptively sophisticated with all the item-based tactics you can use, but there's no magic system to speak of.

• 6 points one of the best varieties of equipment that we've seen to date, and the ability to use items in complex (but logical) ways to solve puzzles.

A mid-game inventory shot.

• 2 points for the economy. You might get a store on an early level, might not. If you don't get one, there really is nothing to do with the money you find except score extra points.

• 2 points for a main quest with no decisions or branches

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface, all for the interface, which is intuitive and well-documented.

• 4 points for challenging gameplay that, while linear for each game, offers a lot of replayability.

The final score of 30 is better than anything else in 1984 so far, but a little lower than the 36 I gave to the first edition of NetHack. The variance actually surprises me a little because I feel like it played about the same, but looking through my notes, I see that NetHack offered enough features to get an extra point here, an extra point there. In any event, it's hard to recommend Hack for modern players with more advanced versions of NetHack available, but I'm glad I played it for its historical value.

I hope to get back onto a regular schedule next week and continue on with The Savage Empire. I have no idea why I have this kind of lull every single April.

*****

For further reading: Check out my posts on Rogue, this game's antecedent, and my posts on NetHack v. 2.3e (which followed Hack) and NetHack v. 3.0.9.

Moria: Older and Fouler Things than Orcs

Chester scores a critical hit against something. A worm waits nearby, and there is a wand on the floor.

Moria's basic problem is one of exhausting length. You have to explore twice the number of levels as Rogue and each level is five times as large. If you had an invincible character and did nothing but rush from each level to the next, it would still take a good 3 or 4 hours to reach Level 50. With the necessary amount of exploration, grinding, and occasional visits to the surface to restock and refresh, all required to survive at the lower levels, you're looking at 30-40 hours, easy, for a successful game. Over such a long period, it's very difficult not to make any blunders. There can't be many people who have legitimately won Moria.

As I write this, my character is on level 17, and I fear I'm already save-scumming, as Chester was killed for the first time back on Level 13 by a human zombie. The bastard attacked me right after I emerged battered but victorious from a battle with an orc shaman. Since then, I've had to reload two more times, mostly because I'm pressing downward faster than I normally would.

My last screen playing the game legitimately.

       
As I noted last time, the large levels, which take up about half a dozen screens each, are regenerated and randomized every time you visit, including the placement of up- and down- staircases. You can't immediately return to a previous level, as the staircase vanishes behind you every time you transition. Sometimes it seems that you've explored the whole level without finding a staircase, but inevitably a secret door opens into another entire wing of corridors and rooms.

The randomization has some positive aspects. For one, you don't have to worry about finding every secret door and exploring every room. If you think you'd like to spend more time on a level to grind and find treasure, the easiest thing to do is go back up one level then find another down staircase. Boom--everything is refreshed and restocked. It also means that the staircases are viable ways to escape, permanently, from enemies you don't want to fight. And while the respawning and randomization means that returning to the surface without a "Recall" spell is a nightmare, I still like it better than Rogue, where you could only move downward after exploring each small level. NetHack, which offers compact and permanent levels (while still allowing backtracking) is, I must say, better than both.

The game includes the need for both light and food, but they're such trivial challenges that I wonder why the developers bothered. In 17 levels, including a lot of backtracking and holding down the "s" key while I wait for hit points to regenerate, I think I've eaten maybe 4 meals. Even if I'd had to eat 6 times that number, they're so cheap up on the surface that it doesn't really matter. Similarly, torches last for 4,000 turns by default and cost almost nothing. I've yet to run through my original stock of 10.

Every level has a ton of secret doors. As with other roguelikes, you have to be standing next to them to find them when hitting (s)earch, and as with other roguelikes, each individual "s" has a very small chance of success. More than once, in the early stages, I got trapped on levels where I could find no stairways. I knew there were secret doors somewhere, but all the searching in the world wouldn't reveal them. This is one reason I consider a spellcaster with "Find Hidden Traps/Doors" essential.

Moria uses 46 letters (23 lowercase and 23 capitals) plus two symbols to represent its creatures. Except for some common D&D derivations (kobolds, orcs, dragons), the list is mostly not derived from Rogue, though it is derivative of CRPGs in general. We have giant animals (giant ticks, giant ant, giant bat), undead (zombies, vampires, wights), classic monsters (ogres, harpies, golems, elementals), and a few inexplicable ones (quylthulgs, yeeks, icky-things). Although only 48 characters are used, there are more than 48 total monsters, as many of them are differentiated by color (white seems to be the weakest) and sometimes type; for instance, zombies and skeletons come in elf, orc, human, and other varieties.

A "Grape Jelly" drains my mana from afar.

The usual effects are here. Worms, giant centipedes, and snakes poison the character, though thankfully poison wears off quickly and only saps hit points, not strength. Some creatures (e.g., giant cobras) cause blindness, others fear, others confusion. A few unmitigated bastards drain experience levels. There are a handful, like "worm masses" and giant gnats that are self-spawning; they can easily make more and more of themselves faster than you can kill them, allowing them to overwhelm the player.

A "Detect Monster" spell reveals the extent of a giant gnat infestation. I think I'll go the other way around.

One huge difference between Moria and other roguelikes has to do with the speed variance between the character and various monsters. Innate dexterity, strength, weight, weapon weight, and various special items determine your speed, and each monster type has a speed hard-coded. On early levels, most monsters are a lot slower than the character, allowing players to make quick getaways if hit points get too low. But starting around Level 10, the player starts to encounter monsters who have multiple moves and attacks against even relatively fast characters. This makes it very hard to run away. I understand that boots or rings of speed are particularly prized by this game's players, but I've yet to find either.

As with any roguelike, inventory is a huge part of the game. Your maximum inventory is limited by strength and weight, but even the strongest characters can only carry 22 separate items. This doesn't include equipped and worn items, which appear on a separate list. One innovation that I like is the ability to designate a primary weapon and secondary weapon, with the "x" key instantly reversing them. This makes it simple to switch between melee and ranged weapons, or between a weapon and a pick for bashing into walls.

Switching to a pick to clear out this rubble.

There are weapons, armor, amulets, food, potions, rings, scrolls, staves, and wands, and the usual roguelike conventions apply. At the beginning of each game, each effect is randomized by color for potions, by incantation for scrolls, and by types of metal for wands. Only through experimentation or a Scroll of Identification can you start to learn that a "red potion" is a Potion of Blindness and a "tin wand" is a Wand of Fire Balls. Many items are cursed and can only be removed with a Scroll of Remove Curses or a comparable spell. Unique to this game are colored mushrooms, which have similar effects as potions.

Items aren't scattered randomly like in Rogue. In Rogue, you had as much chance of finding a Scroll of Genocide on Level 1 as Level 20. In Moria, items seem to get better as you move downward. Rings didn't start showing up for me until about Level 8, and amulets not until about Level 15. Even within a category, items seem to get better as you go down.

Perhaps the most useful item in the game is a Scroll of Word-of-Recall. If you're in the dungeon, it takes you back to the town. If you're in town, it returns you to the maximum dungeon level that you've ever explored. They're sold in the town, so you generally don't want to use your last one until you have enough money to buy a new one.

The seasoned adventurer returns to town to spend some of his hard-earned gold.

Word-of-Recall scrolls are really the only things that make returning to the surface tolerable. I occasionally manually walk back down the levels after visiting the surface--it's good for grinding and wealth-accumulation--but nothing's more frustrating than trying to fight back up 15 levels. I can't imagine trying to do it at Level 40. The scrolls don't work instantaneously, so you can't use them to escape death. Instead, you cast them and then wander around for about 20 moves before they teleport you.

Partly because of the scrolls, both the town and the economy remain extremely important throughout the game. The town sells most, if not all, of the game's magic items, so if you have no luck finding a Ring of Resist Fire in the dungeon, you can always try your luck at the magic shop. I think--but I'm not sure--that the inventory updates based on the lowest level you've managed to achieve in the dungeon. I've been noticing more advanced items in the shops as the game goes on. In any event, magic items, scrolls, and potions are expensive, and you don't get that much money during exploration. You always have an incentive to tunnel into the walls for every last gold piece, to sell unwanted items, to increase charisma, and to bargain with the shopkeepers.

Some of the cool stuff available for the right price.

Finally, let's talk about spells. I like the system. Both mages and priests have a selection of spellbooks, each with 5-7 spells. Spellcasting characters come with the first level spellbook in their field, and you have to buy (or find?) more to get the higher-level spells. With every level you increase, you can select one new spell to learn out of any of your spellbooks, as long as the spell level is equal to, or less than, your character level.

After you've learned a spell, it costs mana to cast. Mana is precious. For my ranger, at least, it's only enough to cast a couple of spells before he has to regenerate, so not enough to make a successful combat spellcaster. Mages could probably do better. There's a chance of failure, based on your intelligence and level, every time you cast. Mana regenerates significantly slower than hit points.

I use a rare offensive spell against a Grey Ooze. Generally, missile weapons are the better option.

I find certain spells absolutely essential for effective exploration. I've already talked about "Find Hidden Traps/Doors," a Level 5 spell, without which I would have been stuck many times in areas in which I couldn't find the exit. "Detect Monsters" is also extremely valuable to get a quick sense of the area around you. I cast "Light Area" (a Level 5 spell) every time I enter a darkened room.

I just recently got "Teleport Self," which serves as a nice "Hail Mary" in a tough combat. I'm looking particularly forward to reaching Level 23, at which point I can learn the "Identify" spell and I can stop relying on scrolls. Other useful ones in between include "Recharge Item," "Create Food," and "Remove Curse." I frankly don't know how a pure warrior class gets through this game.

I just bought this spellbook. I look forward to learning some of these.

Permadeath might be necessary to truly beat the challenge of Moria or any roguelike, but it's not necessary to the player's enjoyment of the game. I think Moria without permadeath (and perhaps a smaller dungeon) would be at least as fun as anything that came out in 1983. Through its extensive item and monster lists, it captures the spirit of tabletop role-playing games better than most other CRPGs. By saving once every two level transitions, I still preserve the sense of really not wanting to die, but without the utter despair that comes with losing a Level 20 character on Level 30 of the dungeon. Except for the absolute landmark games in the genre, I fear you're not going to see me play more roguelikes like this.

As for Moria, even with save-scumming, I don't expect to win very soon, so we'll probably move on to Quest for the Unicorn. I'll keep playing Moria in the background and we'll see how long it takes.

Game 173: Moria (1983)

Moria was first released in 1983; I'm playing a DOS version from 1988 that, as far as I can tell, maintains the basic structure, mechanics, and spirit of the original game.

      

Moria

United States

Independently developed and distributed
Released 1983 on VMS systems; ported by various developers over the years to multiple platforms, including DOS, in 1988, by Don Kneller
Date Started: 23 December 2013

     

If we ignore graphics and sound, both of which should matter least to an RPG player, Moria is second only to Ultima III as the most advanced game of 1983. In considerations of equipment, economy, and monster variation, it not only surpasses Ultima III but any game released in 1984 and most games released in 1985. Again, we have to note that reliance on ASCII characters and only the most primitive sounds freed roguelike developers (in this case, University of Oklahoma students Robert Alan Koeneke and Jimmey Wayne Todd) to focus all their attention on logistics and mechanics. NetHack remains my highest-ranked game when it comes to the uses and variety of equipment, and only a few games rival it when it comes to the variety and special attacks and defenses of its monsters. I knew nothing about the roguelike sub-genre when I started this project, and my exposure to it has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my blog.

Moria is arguably the second roguelike game, after Rogue itself. Hack is often credited as a 1982 game, but as far as I can tell, it wasn't released until 1984, which of course matters most when considering a chronology. Wikipedia's chronology of roguelikes gives several others that supposedly precede Moria, but all of them are quasi-roguelikes retroactively labeled. They precede Rogue itself (Beneath Apple Manor, DUNGEON), show no awareness of Rogue (Sword of Fargoal, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Cloudy Mountain), or don't have the full complement of roguelike features.  To review, these are usually given as:

• Turn-based movement, ideally with no activity during the period between player actions
• Randomly-generated areas
• Abstract representation of graphics, usually with ASCII characters
• Permadeath: while you can save a game for later play, the death of a character results in the erasure of the saved file (or it's erased on every startup)

These four elements seem to be on everyone's list. Most of them also feature some kind of complex logistics associated with items, including an identification system, creative ways in which they interact, and a large variety of items to wear, wield, and use. 

The frequency and permanence of this screen separates roguelikes from normal RPGs.

Moria is certainly a good roguelike and a good CRPG for 1983, but it's somewhat unsatisfying playing it after NetHack. Unsatisfying and disconcerting, I should say, because the game looks like NetHack and yet operates under different rules. Some, but not all, of the commands, items, and monsters are the same. Having invested an absurd number of hours in NetHack last year, it was very difficult to re-learn the interface and conventions of a visually-similar but mechanically-different game. Ultimately, NetHack is a much better game, but of course it's also much later. In discussing the game, I'll try to make more comparisons to Rogue, its predecessor, than NetHack.

A typical Moria screen. On Level 1 of the dungeon and character Level 2, I fight a giant white centipede, who happens to be standing right next to a kobold. Another centipede awaits me in the room beyond, as well as a potion.

Moria's main quest is to descend into the mines of Moria and slay a balrog. (The two names are  lifted from the works of an obscure 20th century British author.) There's no other back story or context to the game world. The game begins above-ground, in a town with multiple shops and a handful of crude NPCs. From here, the player descends into 50+ levels of randomly-generated dungeons, slaying monsters, increasing levels, and finding better pieces of equipment on the way. Assuming the player makes it that far, the balrog is found somewhere around Level 50. Killing it immediately and victoriously ends the game.

Several characteristics of dungeon generation make Moria significantly different from Rogue and, ultimately, NetHack:

• The dungeon levels are very large, occupying multiple screens.

• Although you can move both up and down in the dungeon (and return to town), dungeon levels are randomly-generated every time you visit. There's no need to exhaustively explore a level, as you only have to go down and then back up to regenerate the level with new monsters and treasures.

• Because of the random generation, all staircases are one-way. Upon arriving on a new level, you must find new staircases both to go down and to return to upper levels.

• Monsters respawn extremely slowly on levels you've already cleared.

I found the game relatively easy in its early stages. It's quite hard to die in the first five or so levels, except through carelessness or really bad luck. Because enemies hardly ever re-spawn, you usually have very large, cleared "safe" areas in which to dither around and regenerate hit points. Enemies are relatively weak, and conditions like "poison" are only temporary and do not affect attributes, only hit points. Finally, because you can get a brand new level just by leaving and returning, you don't feel the same obligation to explore every corner that you do with Rogue.

White worm masses replicate and swarm, leading to a rare early-level death if you're so stupid that you take them on.

In the later stages, on the other hand, Moria can be a real bastard. Harder monsters may get multiple movements to your one (more on speed variances in the next post), making it hard to kill them and impossible to flee them. Perhaps most important, the sheer number and size of the levels increase the cumulative probability of death. NetHack took a long time to win because of the difficulty, but my actual winning game took less than 8 hours of actual gameplay. In Moria, I've played twice that long only to die on Level 20. You don't so much "win" Moria as outlast it.

As with other roguelikes, inventories can get out of control very fast.

I'm going to cover each of the major sections of the game in detail (most in the next post), but before I do, let me simply mention some of the main differences from NetHack for those of you stuck (as I was) in a NetHack mindset before playing:

• There are no intrinsics (save the "abilities" that we'll talk about) and no eating of corpses.

• Enemies don't drop any equipment and only rarely drop treasure. Valuable items are found randomly in the dungeon, not on slain foes.

• While items can be "cursed," the effect is simply to make the item non-removable. It is not a worse item, intrinsically, than a non-cursed version. There are no blessings.

• Items cannot be used in conjunction with each other.

• There are no special encounters like thrones, sinks, and fountains.

• There are no alignments or religious system.

On the other hand, Moria does have a number of its own innovations, including a town level and more complex shops. It had a full array of attributes, races, classes, and abilities before NetHack did. In keeping with its Tolkien source, you can "mine" valuables directly from some walls. There's a useful distinction between "equipped" items and "inventory" items and a bigger selection of magic items and effects. Combat mechanics are a bit more complex, and there are more ways to extract yourself from encounters (like spiking doors). While I still think NetHack is superior, I would easily put Moria ahead of Rogue for enjoyment.

Although every dungeon level spreads across multiple screens, you can bring up a small-scale map to help you navigate.

It's taken me so long to post about Moria because I really wanted to win the game and tie everything together in a single posting. At this point, having invested a few dozen hours in the game since December 2013, I have to say that you're not likely to see a "won" posting without an asterisk. While I'm convinced that the game is beatable with time and patience, I simply don't have the stamina to go through another NetHack experience. As I write now, the lowest level I've reached is 24. As I finally start this series of (probably three) postings on the game, I'll do my best to play honestly, but I'm also going to allow myself to copy the saved game every 2 or 3 levels. We'll see how far I get before having to resort to restoring one, and how much save-scumming I have to do after that to reach the final screen.

In creating your character for Moria, you choose your sex and race from a list of eight options: human, half-elf, elf, halfling, gnome, dwarf, half-orc, and half-troll. (The origin of the latter is perhaps best not imagined.) They have the normal D&D-inspired strengths, weaknesses, and class restrictions; for instance, halflings are good at thievery, only humans and half-elves can be paladins, and half-orcs and half-trolls are dumb but strong and best suited as warriors.

The game then rolls for age, height, weight, social class, and the game's six attributes (the standard D&D set of strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma). You get a cute little "background" paragraph for your character, which varies depending on your race and sex selections but is also heavily randomized. For instance, one random roll for a half-elf might give you:

Your father was a Green-Elf. You are one of several children of a yeoman. You are a credit to the family. You have dark brown eyes, wavy blond hair, and an average complexion.

Another roll for the same character might produce:

Your father was a Grey-Elf. You are the illegitimate but acknowledged child of a serf. You are the black sheep of the family. You have blue-gray eyes, straight black hair, and a very dark complexion.

It's just simple sentence substitution, but it's still a little fun.

A character background for a dwarf male.

The attribute rolls are fairly generous, and it's not hard to get everything in the double digits with a few SPACE bar entries. It's best to focus on the attributes. Weight matters a little, for carrying capacity and bashing, but I don't think the other statistics (age, height, social class) have a significant effect. The background doesn't really matter at all except for role-playing reasons.

After accepting the attributes, the player selects a class from those available to the race. Only humans and half-elves can choose from every class: warrior, mage, priest, rogue, ranger, and paladin. Finally, depending on all of these factors, you get a ranking from "very bad" to "superb" in eight skills: fighting, bows and throwing weapons, saving throws, stealth, disarming, use of magic devices, perception, and searching. These are immutable throughout the game and basically tell you how to best play the character. [Later edit: This last sentence was an artifact of an earlier draft and is incorrect. The skills are not "immutable"; they change with levels, attributes, and items.]

I've had a lot better experience playing a spellcaster in Moria than in the early versions of NetHack. Spells are much more useful here, particularly since they don't fade away from your spellbook. I'll cover the system in detail next time, but suffice to say that I consider "Detect Monsters" and "Find Hidden Traps/Doors" to be particularly vital, and I wouldn't want to rely on scrolls for these.

I haven't had a lot of luck relying on magic for combat, however, so strong martial skills are still important. After experimenting with a variety of characters, I've settled on a half-elf ranger as my best option. With the right stats, he starts at least "good" in every ability, which can showcase almost everything the game has to offer.

The final character sheet.

The game starts in a town level of six buildings: two magic shops (one for priests, one for mages), a weapon shop, an armor shop, a potion shop, and a store that sells exploration sundries like rations, torches, and iron spikes. (I can't remember this staple of tabletop RPGs showing up in any other computer RPG.) Item selections are partially randomized and remain quite relevant even at advanced levels. Particularly useful are potions and scrolls that increase your attributes or improve your weapons and armor. The problem is that the further you explore the dungeon, the further you get away from the town, and the longer it takes to backtrack and trade. This makes "Word-of-Recall" scrolls, which automatically whisk you between the town and the lowest explored level, a necessity.

The player starts out with a reasonably good default selection of items and an amount of gold influenced by starting attributes—the game actually compensates for lower scores by giving the player more starting gold. I generally found it was best to save the shops until I'd explored a few levels. There's a bargaining system, but gold is plentiful enough that I haven't bothered much with it. [Later edit: This last sentence is also the artifact of an earlier draft, and it's laughably wrong. The economy actually plays a major role in the game; gold is not that plentiful at higher levels, and every gold piece you can save makes all the difference. I apologize for the error.]

Bartering for iron spikes in the shop.

The town is also full of the most annoying NPCs that ever existed, including drunks, street urchins, beggars, blubbering idiots, rogues, and lepers. They swarm you, begging for money (rogues even steal it), stumbling into you, and you have to keep acknowledging their messages. There's no "talk" option in the game that makes them useful. I soon found that while there's no reward for killing them, there really isn't any penalty either.

If "more beggars than a Eurostar stop" isn't already a phrase, consider it coined.

After exploring the town, it's time to hit the dungeon, where—just as in any roguelike—you have to master a long list of keyboard commands (many varying whether you use uppercase or lowercase or a CTRL modifier), fight monsters, collect treasure, and slowly grow more powerful.

As with any good roguelike, there's an exhaustive in-game list of keyboard commands. If anyone's playing along with me, here's a tip you won't find in the manual: the DOS version recognizes only the right CTRL key, not the left.

This seems like a good place to break off. In the next post, I'll talk about the game's mechanics, including monsters, inventory, combat, and magic, and then probably spend a third post on the endgame if I can reach it.

   

****

   

Further Reading: Rogue (1980) was the game that inspired Moria. The Moria line continues with Larn (1986), BOSS: Beyond Moria (1990), Castle of the Winds (1992), Parts One and Two, and Angband (1993). Were you looking for the PLATO game? That's Moria (1975).

Game 71: NetHack 3.0 (1989)

        

NetHack [3.0 series]

United States

The NetHack development team 

The series includes 11 public releases between July 1989 and February 1991

Date Started: 24 June 2012

 

To recap what I'm doing with NetHack: the game poses a bit of a chronology problem since it was under continuous development from 1987 to 2003. As reader Ryan ("Pipecleaner Creations") put it in early 2011: "To play NetHack 3.4 is to play a 2003 game, not a 1987 game." Thus, I decided to follow the lead of the NetHack wiki and regard the game as occurring in six "versions": early NetHack (culminating in 2.3e), the 3.0 series, the 3.1 series, the 3.2 series, the 3.3 series and the 3.4 series. These were released between two and six years apart between 1987 and 2002, and I thought approaching it this way would allow me to periodically check in on the development of this seminal roguelike.

I had originally determined to play the last version of each "series," but it turns out that it's harder to find the older versions than I would have thought. Instead of 3.0.10, I'm playing 3.0.9, which is the last version I could find somewhere whose instructions I could understand. This particular version was released in June 1990, and it appears that 3.0.10 didn't offer any substantive changes, so I don't feel like I'm missing anything.

I'm starting 1989 with NetHack because I expect I'll be playing it all year. My big goals are to a) get through all of 1989's games by this time in 2013; and b) "ascend" in NetHack by the same date. And I'm determined to do it clean, and without spoilers (unlike my Wizardry V fiasco). To that end, I'm preparing to create exhaustive documentation about every monster, object, effect, and encounter that I find in the game. I'll play it amidst and in between the other games from 1989, posting when I have something new or interesting to report--or when I need a slight hint.

If you're new to the blog or the concept of roguelike games, the genre was spawned by Rogue, a 1980 game that was the first game I blogged about in detail. Most roguelikes feature:

• Graphic minimalism (as you see in this posting, all of the graphics are simple ASCII characters)
• Randomly-generated dungeon levels
• Gameplay that is turn-based but nonetheless quite rapid
• A quest involving the retrieval of some kind of treasure from the depths of a dungeon
• Permanent death (you can save, but the game erases your save file when you die)

Because of their unique challenge, I think roguelikes tend to be played by a different sort of gamer than many other types of CRPGs. They also tend to be developed independently, rather than commercially, although some people think of action CRPGs like Diablo as roguelikes with better graphics. I'm not convinced. Permadeath is such a key feature of the roguelike genre that I have to regard any game that avoids it as fundamentally different.

Early in my gaming career, I made the mistake of equating graphical primitiveness with gameplay primitiveness. I regret my ignorance but I find it understandable: the roguelikes I had played before NetHack--Rogue, Larn, Wizard's Castle, Amulet of Yendor, Mission: Mainframe--didn't exactly push the envelope when it came to plot and roleplaying opportunities. In the middle of Mission: Mainframe, I stopped to complain that: "Roguelikes don't reveal new bits of story as you play. They don't offer NPCs. They don't do anything different than [what you experience on the first level] except get harder." Helm chided me in the comments, and within a couple of weeks, I was playing NetHack and realizing that everything I had said about "roguelikes" was wrong. A few months after that, I was absolutely floored by Omega, an independently-developed, shareware roguelike that offered a staggeringly unique character-creation process, the first join-able factions, the first complex use of alignments, and the first multiple endings in CRPG history [Edit: this last part wasn't true. Wizardry IV did it earlier than Omega, and there were probably some others, too]. Threadbare graphics do not mean threadbare gameplay.

Since the beginning, NetHack has been developed by a team and, I believe, has always been offered for free. Beyond that, I'm not going to try to get too much into the development history of the series. (Wikipedia's summary is here.) The game has such a fervent community and so many fan pages online that I doubt I'll be able to contribute significantly on my own blog. I suspect that if you're reading my NetHack entries, you're not so much interested in learning about the game as learning about my particular perspective on the game. It would probably make sense to review my January 2011 postings on version 2.3e first. My understanding is that the 3.0 series introduced over three times as many monsters, new objects and dungeon encounters, new levels, an alignment and religious system, and new classes. I think it would be nice if food poisons you less often, but I don't see anything about that in the release notes.

The complexity of the game is evidenced in its vast command list. You can call up the list quickly with the ? key, but I made myself retype it just so I would increase my chances of remembering. Almost all the letters--both upper and lower case--and all the special characters trigger some action: equipping and unequipping weapons, armor, and rings; picking up and dropping things; opening and closing doors; eating; renaming monsters and objects; drinking potions; reading scrolls; casting spells; searching for secret doors and traps; paying your bill in a store; throwing and using objects. You can even write notes to yourself on the floor. The game is complex enough that if you don't have any writing implement and just write with your fingers in the dust, the letters actually degrade over time. Wow.

 
Beyond the standard commands, there are a host of special commands, and I'm almost afraid to find out where they come into play. Forcing locks and turning undead make sense, but when am I going to have to "dip an object into something" or wipe off my face?

One of the most significant aspects of NetHack gameplay is figuring out the nature of the various objects that you find. Weapons, armor, potions, scrolls, rings, wands, and other objects are given generic names when you find them; except for the occasional scroll of identification (which you first have to identify!), only wielding, wearing, reading, and drinking them reveal their true natures (and sometimes not even then). Each time you play, you have to decide how cautious to be in your use of unknown and potentially-deadly items.

Each type of character starts with a different set of equipment. The "archaeologist" starts with a fedora and bullwhip.

The overall mysteries of the game come in several forms:

• The strengths and weaknesses of various monsters
• What happens when you eat the corpses of various monsters
• What certain objects do
• How to use various objects and commands together with the environment

I understand that these aspects of the game have been exhaustively documented on various fan sites, and people are still discovering them today. Many readers have encouraged me to read these "spoilers." I might eventually. For now, though, I intend to try it clean, which means I'd ask you not to give me any spoilers in the comments, save perhaps some light hints, unless I specifically ask for them. In all cases, please comment only on things that I specifically mention in my postings. My biggest mystery right now is what I'm supposed to do with a kitten--but I'm not asking for help yet.

Just to keep things interesting, I decided to let the game choose my class each time I play. My first character of this session, Chet, was a "tourist." He showed up in the dungeon wearing a Hawaiian shirt, wielding darts, and overloaded with a variety of food, scrolls, and potions, along with (of course) a camera and a credit card. Already we have some mystery, as I don't know if those latter two items actually have any use. Chet was accompanied by a little cat, who I named "Bix" after my second-favorite jazz trumpeter.

The opening room contained a sink, but I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. As I explored the surrounding area, I was killed by a newt. I hope Bix got out okay.

I just hope it was a big newt.

Not an auspicious beginning, but I have a whole year.

Game 55: Omega (1988)

     

Omega

United States

Independently developed and published as freeware
First version released in 1988 for DOS; continually updated to 2010
Date Started: 21 May 2011  
    
Within about 10 minutes, Omega went from being a game that I was going to blow through to get to Pool of Radiance to a serious contender for the most intriguing discovery since I started this blog.

This quasi-roguelike was written by Laurence Brothers, apparently while he was at the Rutgers University Department of Computer Science (that's where he wants me to send his check). It's "roguelike" in its basic appearance, with ASCII symbols representing the game world and its denizens, its use of upper- and lower-case keyboard commands, and its permanent death. It isn't a roguelike in its complexity. This is a game with multiple dungeons and villages, quests, guilds, shops, locked and unlocked doors, alignments, dialog with NPCs, houses you can burglarize, and a ton of other features I've barely scratched.

Exploring a small village and talking to a guard.

Where the game really won me over was the option, at the beginning, to create a character or "play yourself." This is the most original character creation process I've seen outside Ultima IV. The game proceeds to ask how many pounds you can bench press, what you got on an IQ test, what percentile you scored on graduate and undergraduate entrance exams, whether you have training in martial arts or play a field sport, whether you can dance, what your other hobbies are, whether you're "accident prone," whether you "play video games" and, if so, whether you get high scores, whether you can cut a card deck with one hand, whether you get sick frequently, whether you smoke or have high blood pressure, and a host of other questions. My favorites were: "Do animals react oddly to your presence?" and "Do you have ESP?" The game also wanted to know, for some mysterious reason, whether I'm Irish.

After you answer, the game has you sucked into your computer a la Tron:


I don't want to reveal too much about myself, but suffice to say I got an intelligence of 15, a constitution of 14, strength and dexterity of 11, agility of 10 (I shouldn't have said I was "accident-prone"), and virtually no magic power--this is the first CRPG to punish me for being an atheist. Statistics matter, as I soon found out with another character:

Ouch.

If I had known that my first character would last only minutes, I wouldn't have spent so much time creating him, though. The game is mercilessly lethal. Within the first few hours, my handful of hapless adventurers had died by trying to crawl through a hedge, drowning while crossing a small pond, accidentally attacking a guard, rupturing a hernia while trying to lift a portcullis, starving, getting blasted by a priest the moment he walked into an abandoned temple, falling from a mountain, getting brained by a "ricochet," and half a dozen other ways. Half of the time, I'm not quite sure why I just died.

What is that supposed to mean?

The game starts in the City of Rampart, a large town with an arena, a jail, a palace (I am told to return when I am famous), several guilds, a library, an apartment building, a casino, a Colosseum, restaurants, shops, a Department of Public Works (where you can "go on the dole" if you're poor enough), a bank, a cemetery, mansions to burglarize if you feel like it, a poorhouse where you can donate gold, and lots of other buildings I haven't explored.

Orgullous joins a mercenary legion.

My first character, Orgullous, joined a mercenary guild and got a short sword and some leather armor; entered a match at the Colosseum and defeated "Federico the pencil-necked geek," winning 50 gold; bought a suit of chain mail at a shop called Julie's; bought some fried chicken to take on the road (exploring the wilderness requires a lot of food), and got killed a few steps after he stepped outside by a storm.

Fighting in the arena.

My most successful adventurer, Cauthon, joined the order of paladins, who decided he was good after he donated some money to the orphanage. They gave him a spear and a horse to ride. He bought some armor at a shop, some food, and headed out. Within moments, he got stuck in a "chaos storm," which had killed one of my previous characters, but Cauthon survived it. The game told me this was a "learning experience" and advanced Cauthon several levels. A weird voice on the wind said, "The Eater of Magic can be found on an island." I wandered east, having to eat every few steps, and then suddenly, in a forest, something cast a spell that caused me to go blind and I was killed by a brigand.

Outdoor combat on the "tactical map."

Aside from the overall peril, the most difficult part of the game is the inventory, which is divided between stuff you can carry or wear and your pack. Transferring stuff around is a bit cumbersome. When you first pick up an object, it is "up in the air," and you can determine whether to put it into your pack or equip it somehow. If you put it in the pack and later want to use it, you have to first take it from the pack, after which it returns to "up in the air," and then put it in your "ready hand." This translates to about eight keyboard commands just to eat a piece of chicken.


The second difficulty is that I really have no idea what to do. In my explorations of the outdoor area, I've encountered a couple of villages and a temple, but no hints as to the main quest or even side quests. The game documentation says that there are a number of ways to "win" and that consulting the oracle is a key to one of them, but I haven't found the oracle yet. Hints (but light hints) from anyone who's played the game would be welcome, 'cause I'm getting slaughtered here.

Still, I want to fully explore this one. I realize that the later versions of NetHack transcend what is normally thought of as the limitations of a "roguelike," but this is the first game that has really made me feel it's possible to create a full and interesting world without anything we'd think of as "graphics."

My new character, Steevil, is created, and I'm going to try to make it alive long enough to explore the Goblin Caves the manual insists are just south of the starting city.