Video game recommendations!

College Confidential Community
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<p>Post links to your favorite video games! (Especially if they're freeware or shareware.)</p>

<p>Ancient</a> Domains of Mystery, which is kind of like NetHack, but more complicated. You'll need to know the Guidebook[/url</a>] inside and out to make head or tail of this game. But it's cool because it feels a lot more RPGish and alignment actually matters and you get a lot of choices as to what part of the game you do first and stuff.
[url=<a href="http://nethack.org/v343/downloads.html%5DNetHack%5B/url">http://nethack.org/v343/downloads.html]NetHack[/url</a>], the best damn videogame ever.
[url=<a href="http://angband.oook.cz/quickband/%5DQuickband%5B/url">http://angband.oook.cz/quickband/]Quickband[/url</a>], an Angband variant that's only 12 levels long (so it'll take you a few hours instead of a few months).
[url=<a href="http://foon.co.uk/blackshift/%5DBlackshift%5B/url">http://foon.co.uk/blackshift/]Blackshift[/url</a>], which my friend described to me as a cross between Portal and NetHack.
[url=<a href="http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=3144%5DBioMenace%5B/url">http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=3144]BioMenace[/url</a>] is an impressive platform side-scroller that I used to play day and night when I was little.
[url=<a href="http://www.gameover-games.com/games/bubble/%5DBubble">http://www.gameover-games.com/games/bubble/]Bubble</a> Bobble Nostalgie. You get to kill monsters by shooting bubbles at them and popping them. And the characters are adorable.
Age</a> of Empires, which I used to like but it's not free so this is just a wikipedia entry on it.</p>

<p>This was intended to function as an extension to the other thread.</p>

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<p>a lot of people here seem to play nethack, but what is it? whats the purpose of the game?</p>

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<p>The stated purpose is to go down to the bottom of the dungeon and recover the Amulet of Yendor. But there's a</a> lot more about it that makes it special:</p>

<p>1) Quirky sense of humor -- for instance, there's a monster in the game called a "quantum mechanic" and when he dies he sometimes leaves a box with a cat inside called "Schroedinger's Cat" which can either be dead or alive.</p>

<p>2) Permadeath -- once your character's gone, he's gone forever. The save function only exists as a means of pausing your game and letting you return to the real world for a while. When you reload your game, your savefile is deleted.</p>

<p>3) Insane difficulty -- this goes along with permadeath. Winning takes real skill, and it's usually months or years before you win the game for the first time. But NetHack won't kill you arbitrarily. There are people (few</a> and far between) who've won 60% of their games. And usually if you die, five minutes later you'll think of something you could've done to save your character.</p>

<p>4) No graphics (or bad ones, if you play the tiled version) -- most NetHackers like this because it lets them focus more on the actual gameplay.</p>

<p>5a) Lots of object interaction -- you can basically do anything to anything. Like the dungeon contains fountains you can drink from. But you can also do things like dip potions in them to dilute them, dip weapons in them (which usually rusts them if they're made of metal), apply a pickaxe to them to generate pools of water...</p>

<p>5b) The most-often cited example of this is the cockatrice, which is a monster whose touch or hiss can turn you to stone. If you kill one, touching his corpse without gloves can also turn you to stone, as can walking over one without gloves while blinded (if you're blind you try to feel objects on the floor), or falling downstairs while wielding one, or throwing one up in the air and having it land on your head. You can also wield one against monsters, which has all sorts of interesting uses ;) As they say, "the DevTeam thinks of everything!"</p>

<p>6) Randomly generated dungeons -- dungeons are randomly generated for the most part, so you get a different experience each time you play.</p>

<p>...That was much too long for a post about a video game. But hey, it did consume my life for all of junior year.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
</p>

<p>5a) Lots of object interaction -- you can basically do anything to anything. Like the dungeon contains fountains you can drink from. But you can also do things like dip potions in them to dilute them, dip weapons in them (which usually rusts them if they're made of metal), apply a pickaxe to them to generate pools of water...</p>

<p>5b) The most-often cited example of this is the cockatrice, which is a monster whose touch or hiss can turn you to stone. If you kill one, touching his corpse without gloves can also turn you to stone, as can walking over one without gloves while blinded (if you're blind you try to feel objects on the floor), or falling downstairs while wielding one, or throwing one up in the air and having it land on your head. You can also wield one against monsters, which has all sorts of interesting uses As they say, "the DevTeam thinks of everything!"

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Haha. But if you look at the source code, can't you see all possible interactions you can get from object to object? I don't know, it used to seem awesome for a game to have so much open-ended gameplay. But it isn't really that open-ended so long as you're playing yourself as a slave to someone else's imagination </p>

<p>(I don't know. I kind of think I'd like procedural generation more - generation not just of dungeons, but also of items and item interactions. This is why I'm looking forward to Spore [but apparently it isn't as open-ended as it seems]).</p>

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<p>Well, you can. But that's like saying we know all the words in the English language, so we can see all possible works of literature...what matters isn't the interactions themselves, it's how they're used in the game. But it does help to have a larger set of interactions to start out with because then you have more control over what you do. (Much like it's nice to have a language with a lot of words because then you can fine-tune the tone you give to your writing.)</p>

<p>P.S. The NetHack source code is also unreadable. Or at least that's what the programmers who try to work on it say ;) A lot of people do read spoilers though (compiled by those brave enough to read through the sources anyway).</p>

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<p>Hm. Good point. Of course we know all possible interactions in chess and checkers but those don't detract from making the game fun. But nethack is just [you vs the world], where the world is centered around you (your actions have immediate and predictable effects - there aren't such things as the butterfly effect), so then it kind of seems like the number of possible interactions then becomes a lot less than the number of possible interactions you'd see in another game.</p>

<p>(btw I guess this is also why I kind of dislike mmorpgs, since you can't really do anything to the game world). there are god games but those come without goals or anything that make the game fun. </p>

<p>
[quote]

P.S. The NetHack source code is also unreadable. Or at least that's what the programmers who try to work on it say

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Intentionally or unintentionally? Since if intentional, that like, defeats the point of open source. Or something.</p>

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<p>I used to play Kingdom of Loathing if you like free games, pretty funny and fun game. Dunno how it is now though (this was a few years ago)</p>

<p>Other than that...</p>

<p>WoW and Battlefield 1942/2</p>

<p>And soon.. Starcraft 2</p>

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<p>Out of the Park Baseball. It's $20 or so but it's an excellent stats-based baseball sim. It's a lot like the old Strat-O-Matic game.</p>

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<p>lol nethack sounds really creative and awesome</p>

<p>i wish i was smart...</p>

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<p>fizix, I'm trying to play, but I always die of starvation. How do I eat?</p>

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<p>lol, sounds like a challenging game :p</p>

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<p>Oh. It's "e"</p>

<p>Haha, fun game. I still don't get a lot of it though.</p>

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<p>It takes a while. The commands are kind of unintuitive. =/</p>

<p>By the way, you can also #pray if you're really low on hitpoints or you're starving or something. But don't #pray too often or your god will get angry.</p>

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<p>I'm not a fan of video/computer games but I really like Onslaught and tower defense games of comparable quality.</p>

<p>[url=<a href="http://onslaught.playr.co.uk/%5DOnslaught%5B/url"&gt;http://onslaught.playr.co.uk/]Onslaught[/url&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p>

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<p>My bf is pretty good at Onslaught, reaching level 700.
He and his sister's bf, however, LOVE LOVE LOVE Super Smash Brothers. I don't like it at all.</p>

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<p>Roller Coaster Tycoon
Starcraft
Warcraft III
Popkart (aka Kartrider)
Guild Wars
Gunbound
Counter Strike</p>

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<p>oh god. ur asian right? ^ to be exact korean.</p>

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<p>roller coaster tycoon is pretty awesome.</p>

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<p>NetHack is fun! </p>

<p>I've only gotten to level 6 so far though. What's a decent level?</p>

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<p>buuummmmmppppppp</p>