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Now that was a good weekend
Over the past few months, as many of you will already have noticed, I've been making an unusually determined effort not to suck at NetHack. I am delighted to report that at the weekend this effort finally produced its intended result, and I managed to ascend my first character. Since I've been sucking at NetHack for something approaching twenty years, this is really quite satisfying.
Aside from the various tactical problems within the game, my biggest problem with NetHack recently has been that I can't sleep when a game is going well. People laugh when I say that, but it's true: because NetHack doesn't let you replay from your last save point, the further you get the more there is at stake if you make a mistake, so I get more and more nervous and cautious and stressed and try to plan ahead, and when I take a break from playing and do something else I keep jumping up and thinking ‘ooh, I know what I need to do, better write that down before I forget’. This gives me rampaging insomnia (or ‘sleep resistance’ as I tend to call it), which (a) causes me to be useless at work if I'm at work the next day, so I feel guilty, and (b) to add insult to that injury, it also makes me play NetHack badly so that I do make the fatal errors I was trying so hard not to.
I've tried a couple of pharmaceutical solutions to this problem (Nytol and the like), but they didn't seem to help at all. This weekend I went for a completely different and rather simpler approach, which was to go to Mary's excellent flatwarming party on Saturday night and drink a large amount of very nice bubbly. That produced something resembling a normal night's sleep, and although I was a bit dopey the following morning I was together enough to finish the game without doing anything fatally stupid.
So that's a significant personal achievement, an excellent party and a lot of very nice bubbly. Altogether, I feel, a good weekend.
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I've found in the past that not only does it disturb sleep, it's hard not to want to keep playing beyond the point of actual competence to do so. That may just be me being a touch obsessive and addicted, of course. The result, inevitably, is "oh, nearly finished, I must just do the last few levels... oh damn, dead on the Elemental Plane"
Right now, I have weaned myself off Nethack, which is good. Unfortunately, this is mostly by superceding it with a worse addiction to Angband. I'm not sure if this is a move from heroin to methadone, or from milder drugs up to heroin...
(On the other hand, yay! 42nd level Mage! Dead uniques all over the floor! Dead Dracolich too, although that was slightly worrying... Ahem. I'll shut up now.)
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That said, I probably would have pulled an all-nighter for this game if I had turned out to be unable to sleep on Saturday night, just on the grounds that it would have been the most useful thing to do with my time. (Probably fatal for the Valkyrie too, what with all that bubbly, so it's just as well I slept :-)
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And bugger, you beat me to it.
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Although not on the same level of Nethack I've been getting very involved with Wesnoth (www.wesnoth.org) recently. Open source fantasy tile based strategy/war/rpg game. Very addictive - and of surprisingly high quality.
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You should post your success to the nethack community.
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Time to go for the naked atheist vegetarian chest conduct.
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That so needs to be a conduct. I've never used Elbereth (then again I've never got very far either!).
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Now we're even so you can drop this ridiuclous notion that I'm better at it than you.
Bet you beat me to the next one (mine was about 18 months ago, and I've not seen the Sanctum since, as far as I recall).