(no subject)

[swestrup]

I stayed up late playing Slash'em (my favorite Nethack varient), so I only got out of bed at 2:00 pm today.

My morning e-mail contained a letter from HB, with whom I collaborating on a book. The plan we had come up with was that when we wrote a first draft of any chapter, we would not attempt to get it right, but just to get it down. As a result, I sent him a truely awful draft of the intro for said book, and I got his editing of it this morning. Bleck. I essentially handed him a turd, and he polished it. The results are as esthetically pleasing as they sound. I'm going to have to have a talk with him sometime today and explain that my first-draft prose needs more of a rewrite than a polishing if the results are going to be acceptible. I sure hope its just a case that he was unwilling to make major changes in fear of bruising my ego, and not that he doesn't see what's wrong with the prose...

Comments

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Gah, nethack. I have never, ever, been able to get far in that game.. maybe to level 4, then I die. Or to level 10 or so, if I use saves, but I STILL die. Argh.

[swestrup]

Well, I'm not good at it. I've never actually won, but I've done better than you. I typically die somewhere in the gnomish mines, something like 8 levels down, when I'm level 12 or so. I have gotten much, much deeper on occassion, once getting all the way through the hells until I got whacked by demogorgon. My very worst game ever was me first. _sps_ had introduced me to the game. I started in a 2-by-2 room with no doors. I spent the next 100 turns searching for a door. When I finally found one I was dying of hunger. The door promply opened and a giant rat killed me while I fainted from hunger.

Now, a friend of mine, Pierre, is VERY GOOD at the game. In fact, his is one of the names that pop out of the game when you ask for its history. (As does _sps_ by the way). Once when he was playing version 2.4 or so he won the game with a FIRST LEVEL CHARACTER. It took him something like 50 moves to get to the level with Yendor, steal the amulet, return to the first level and ascend the staircase. GAKKKK! (I actually saw him play that game, so I know its possible. The method he used doesn't work anymore though. The dev team changed the win conditions after he reported his feat...)

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Hm. I would assume he used some kind of way of dropping through the floor to get to the lower levels without finding the staircases?..

[swestrup]

Its been years, but lets see if I can remember how he did it. He was playing a wizard and as I recall he started the game with:

1) a ring of teleport control
2) a ring of fire protection
3) two scrolls of teleport
4) two potions of confusion
5) a wand of death
6) a mirror.

At which point he called me over and said "Watch! I have everything I need to win!". He then drank a potion of confusion and looked into the mirror. That told him where Yendor was. He then read one of the t-port scrolls while still confused. He mispronounced the words and did an inter-level teleport. Because he had a ring of t-port control, it asked him which level he wanted to go to, so he chose the one with Yendor on it. He arrived on that level (which was a hell level and would have killed him, but he had fire resistance). He waited for the confusion to wear off then ran up to Yendor, and zapped him with the wand of death. He then grabbed the amulet, drank the second confusion potion and teleported himself back to level one. Then he just walked up the stairs.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Sneeeaky.. verry, verry sneaky ;). I bet they fixed it by making the wizard immune to 'death'?.. making the ring of tport control not work right when confused?..

[swestrup]

Stranger than that. It used to be that the Wizard of Yendor was on a random level of the hells, and whenever you got there by staircase he would teleport to another level. So, you needed to know the trick about the mirror to know what level to teleport to.

Now he stays on one level and its easy to get to him, but he doesn't have the REAL amulet anymore, just a fake plastic copy. You have to find a magic square on the lowermost level and use a bell, book and candelaubra (each of which has a guardian) to open a gate to a realm where the real amulet is. If you get the amulet then when you go up the stairs from level 1, you find yourself on the elemental planes. You have to fight your way through Air, Earth, Fire and Water to the Ethereal plane where you can sacrifice the amulet to your god in his main temple. THATS how you win now.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

..maybe one of those digging thingermajigs?

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

Intelligence is a much greater multiplier in that game than pretty much any other video game I can think of. Cheating at life :)