NetHack is a great game. You should play it, if you haven't. It's way cooler than this newfangled Modern Warfare 2...
I played on and off on nethack.alt.org for a while. Doc and I have a semi-serious dick-measuring contest over our pitiful high scores, but NAO is not really the best environment for this. For one thing, the Web interface is.. bad. Like, really bad. Like, it's just a list of disjoint PHP files that spit out tables. There isn't really any integration anywhere. The biggest sticking point is that I can't jump from a high score table to the dump log of that game: rather, I have to go look through the index of that user's dump logs, and find one that looks right. Which is even harder since nowhere outside the dump log list shows time of day!
Anyway, uh.
The other problem is that NAO is utterly dominated by insanely high scores. Neither of us have ever broken six digits, and there are only a handful of ascensions amongst all the people we know who play the game. Meanwhile, NAO's high score list is full of dicks who overflowed the score counter.
So, the idea came up to run our own little NetHack server, so we can more easily compare high scores among people we actually know. And, of course, so we can dick around.
So I did it. I spent about a week
patching the heck out of NetHack, mostly adding a bunch of interface patches-more than NAO, in fact. I wrote a little IRC bot that reports deaths, wishes, bones file ghost kills, and milestones within the game plot to
irc://irc.veekun.com/#cafe. And doc and I are gradually coming up with our own
Web interface. It'll be pretty cool when it's done.
I bring this up, though, because my current game is further than I've ever been.
I found an early wand of wishing. As in, the first three dungeon levels. It's appropriate; the same thing happened in my very first game, and this is the first time it's happened since. Silver dragon scale mail, speed boots, and gauntlets of power set me up pretty well for the rest of the game. I have every resistance, I have a massive collection of items, I have almost every spell. I have the Bell and the Candelabrum, I've mapped the whole dungeon, and I know where the vibrating square is.
For some perspective: the furthest I'd gotten before this was finding the Quest entrance level. Not the Home level; the main dungeon level that leads to the Quest. I wasn't high enough level, so I explored a bit further, and I ultimately died on the floor below. Kinda sad.
I haven't actually played in four days, now, because I don't want to wreck my game. 8)
Anyway, if you want to play, telnet nethack.veekun.com. I'm hoping to clean up the score list in the next week or two.