I thought this was interesting enough to post about. Us old time roguelike players are of course familiar with the classic game "Nethack". For those who are unaware, Nethack was an Ascii game that was about two generations removed from the original Roguelike game, "Rogue". There was "Rogue", then "Hack", then "Nethack" (this is a bit of a simplification -- but the the thing is that "Hack" was a variation on "Rogue", and "Nethack" was a further variation. And if you could play one of them, you could quite easily pick up any of the others and not feel completely lost. Well, coming to Steam real soon, is "Vulture for Nethack". The thing about Nethack is that it has quite an arcane interface compared to more modern, streamlined games. Part of it is that there are just SO MANY different commands in the game, and so many different options and what not. Well, I haven't tried it myself (I actually haven't played much of any Nethack in ages), but Vulture promises to make Nethack a lot more accessable to modern audiences. It adds a slighlty more modernized look, menus, etc. Note that I HAVE tried other Nethack versions that promised the same thing, and found them to be even more awkward than the ascii interface, with icons that were unrecognizable, menus that were simply difficult to use, and so on. So I can't say how Vulture will compare to those I've tried in the past. But it's certainly something I'd keep an eye on. If anyone has actually used Vulture for Nethack, I'd be curious of your take on it.
I have played it beginning to end multiple times. I greatly prefer the tiles GUI over the ASCII mode that I started with. Slash'em was what I played once I figured out the original Nethack. And I had to disable soldiers and commanders and all the other military titled characters since they would start with RPGs and machine guns and blow up or mow you down at a great distance. I never used the mouse to play like they are doing in that video. That is crazy to my view. One single misclick equals death.
I probably played more Rogue than Nethack, or Hack. And it's been so long that I don't remember a lot of the details. But it might be fun to give it another try. The other versions that I mentioned, I tried on my I--pad and on my Android phone, and I found both of them quite awkward. Part of it may just be that everything was too small for my eyes to deal with on those formats. But I have to admit that in the video, that Vulture looks quite a bit better than whatever it was I was playing with on either of the other two formats.
