Given the incredibly infrequent posts of the past few months, I think it's time to declare this blog over. I started this blog when I was playing a lot of serious Warcraft, sifting through all the feral druid theorycrafting. I had a lot of fun doing playing WoW and doing the research but eventually got tired of the game and worried about the lack of return on my time. I don't miss WoW at all. It's a fun game and if I had nothing else to do I'd gladly play it, or Rift, or whatever. I suspect sometime in the next few years I'll get deeply into whatever new MMO is again. But for now, I'm glad to be playing other games (Lego Star Wars III), flying airplanes, and doing various non-game projects.
I just read a nice article about how modern action RPGs owe a debt to the Roguelike game tradition, which reminded me of the year in college I played a lot of Nethack 3.0j. Even back then I was writing about games, on rec.games.hack. I finally managed to win the game but I couldn't find my post about my Ascension, so instead I'll close out this blog with a stupid death post from December 30, 1991. (For context: eating corpses in Nethack confers useful buffs.)
I haven't won nethack yet, so this death particularly hurt me.. I find that I do stupid things when I have been playing for a long time. What's the record for physical time to solve the game? It took me about 3 hours to get to dlevel 21..
There are no doubt spoilers here.
Playing a priest, lousy strength (10), lousy intelligence (10), but a very convenient spellbook of haste self.Early on (dlevel 3?), I found an armour dealership that had, among other things, a cloak of displacement, a blessed +1 cloak ofprotection, boots of speed, and some gauntlets of power. Fairly convenient when you have enough tripe to convince your pet to shop for you. AC goes to -4.
along the way, I run into a blessed potion of invisibility. "Do you wish the invisibilty to be permanent?" Sounds good to me ;)A couple of lucky sacrifices got me Fire Brand and Frost Brand.
Next thing I hit was a bones level. The character I found had *14* rings on him, and me with only one blessed scroll of identify. Such a shame. I settled on the ring of warning and the ring of conflict,and tossed the rest of them down the sink.
Ring of conflict + invisibility + speed = nothing kills you. I took out a huge beehive (7x4), a barracks, a treasure zoo, a big throne room. No trouble at all, they didn't even attack me. It was ridiculous. Somewhere along the way I realized my warning was useless and traded the ring of warning for a +5 ring of protection. AC -12, in case anything tried to hit me.
So what killed me? That treasure zoo was full of neat corpses, including a black dragon corpse. So, I ate it. It was tough swallowing the whole thing, but I was ok. But one level farther down I killed a violet fungus, ate it and choked to death.
ARGH! Nothing was going to kill me. I was invincible. And I choked to death on a violent fungus?! Sigh. There is a bones though with lots of nifties. If I ever get to level 21 again..