During the 80 hours or so that I spent away, or ignoring, the woman-not-quite-yet-my-wife I learned some amazing things about Nethack.
Nethack is a game of luck and strategy. Yet, like the card game freecell, it is (almost) theoretically possible to beat every single game. Why? Because for every bad thing that can be done to your poor adventurer there is (almost) always an available counter-measure.
A secondary name for laptop is pillowtop.
Nethack is one of the oldest games still in active development.
If you play Nethack, the adventurer you control (almost) always lives a very short amount of time. There are no restarts in a real game of Nethack. You live, you adventure, you die, and that’s it.
For whatever reason, I started chronicling my Nethack adventures with screenshots. Incredibly nerdy. And no I nerdily present the chronicles to you.
Jdawg the Orc Barbarian is born.
Jdawg, the extremely unlucky Orc Barbarian dies.
Jdawg goes six feet under.
But death won’t stop me. I reincarnate as Andrew*, the sweet transvestite Human Valkyrie.
Things are looking bleak for the blind Andrew.
Andrew buys the cross dressing farm.
Andrew gets a resurr-erection.
Little, brown, different.
Andrew, the sweet tranvestite valkyrie wererat befriends Barfy.
When the full moon disappears, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi Andrew is not.
I’ve gave up playing transvestites. Time to play Jim** the Wizard. Wow, this guys looks pretty good.
Jim the Wizard, killed by damn, dirty apes.
Wizard needs food, and a nicer god, badly. (Another Incarnation of Jim about to bite the dust.)
The short version: our god might be happy this time, but it doesn’t prevent Jim from biting it.
* * *
When you die, Nethack sometimes places the equivalent of a burial ground for your fallen character in the game. You can run into this burial ground, along with disgruntled ghosts, in future spelunking attempts. Every other time in my life I had given up playing this damn game. This time something inspired me to keep playing. Maybe Harry Potter had inspired me to keep playing Wizards, but I kept playing. About 75 times later, something miraculous started to happen. I started to win… (to be continued).
*The real Andrew is really not a transvestite.
**The real Jim is a wizard, but only with computers, not pagan witchcraft.