ASCII stupid question and get a stupid ANSII

[lb_lee]

Mori: In these trying times, we have focused on the important things: making our first animated GIF of ig/noble Hack103 deaths. We been saving screencaps of the impressive ones a while, might as well icon ‘em! (Will upload them when home.)

Rogan and I both got dragoned (no shame there), and he got killed by a cadaver somehow and also a dead cockatrice (a totally separate means of death). I got my ass grassed by a nurse and a giant eel.

Turns out Rawlin remembered Hack103 with delight. (favorite class? “Wizard. Best stuff.”) We made him a profile and he promptly died by “poisonous corpse,” yet another totally separate death from cadaver or dead cockatrice.

At this point, Bob joined in. “Watch and learn, whippersnappers! I was playing this before you were born!” And got wiped by “a contaminated potion” that he SWORE he’d tested.

”Wow, you sure showed us!” We said, to his displeasure. “We didn’t have that one yet!”

Comments

[storyheight]

i just got the Post Title :D

[lb_lee]

The full line from the song (NetHack, by RobBalderDotCom) is:

Chauncy fought the Oracle, he knew that it was chancy,
For when you ASCII stupid question, you get a stupid ANSII.

We cannot claim credit for that one!

[beepbird]

I'm so delighted by that title. Quality puns. Any guesses how the cadaver one happened?

[lb_lee]

We can’t claim credit for the pun; oddprophet clocked the source in the comment below yours!

So, for context, in Hack103 hunger is a constant problem, and starving to death is generally considered among the worst deaths, long and slow and horrible. Because proper food is often hard to come by, you will (and must!) eat a lot of dead monsters. Different corpses have different effects: some are poisonous, some are harmless and just taste bad, some provide useful or necessary superpowers, while others knock off some HP. Best guess is Rogan either ate tainted meat (a separate status than poisonous meat, caused by a corpse left too long) or was desperate enough for a certain superpower that he ate a dead monster without the HP to survive it.

Hack103 is the only media we know of where you eat zombies but they never eat you. (They are harmless and taste bad.)

I see that Rob Balder reference

[oddprophet]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlPgy0ysoJk&pp=ygUSUm9iIEJhbGRlciBOZXRoYWNr

Re: I see that Rob Balder reference

[lb_lee]

Eh heh heh very good. :3

[manglefox]

We still miss Hack! We’d need a working WinXP comp and a really ridiculously expensive screen reader to make it work I think, but it was so much fun, cause we played the text-only version.
But we’ve found something similar that works on our phone. Only it involves card matching. Can’t eat dead monsters but there’re so many fun ways to die.

[lb_lee]

Aw! How did y’all make it work on XP? Did y’all used to have a super pricey reader or something?

[manglefox]

High priced screen reader with necessary cursors that let us use the keyboard. There’s a free screen reader with necessary cursors but anything higher than xp doesn’t work for some reason.

[lb_lee]

Mori: What? That totally sucks! Depending what you run, you might be able to get an old XP OS from archive.org or something and do a dual-boot... but that's a lot of work just to play a silly old game.

...that screenreader probably doesn't work on Linux either, does it? FLACCID.

[chanter1944]

I know this is the most ridiculous reason to comment, but this post's subject line is still making me giggle. XD

[lb_lee]

It’s a line from a song about the game! oddprophet linked the source earlier in the thread, it’s worth a listen!

[paradox_in_flux]

i'm deeply curious about the dead cockatrice death; from what i remember of my high school lunch break nethack adventures, there's about a million ways to get got by the rubber chicken, though i don't know how many of those date back to the original. do y'all happen to remember which way it got you?

-Mercury

[lb_lee]

Mori: The rubber chicken was a later addition; we never made it to full-blown NetHack and Hack103 has no rubber chicken.

Knowing Rogan, he probably died either by accidentally picking up the cockatrice corpse without gloves (we have DEFINITELY died that way by randomly teleporting atop one with auto-pickup turned on), falling down the stairs while wielding one, or somehow fumblefingering a command so badly that he somehow accidentally tried to eat it. Either way, his ass got petrified.

(Wielding a dead cockatrice as a weapon and making rock gardens of all that oppose you is a ridiculous Hack trick, but stupid fun.)

I appreciate that there’s at least four different ways for an already-defeated monster to kill you. The last laugh!

[lb_lee]

Rogan: you forgot choking.

[lb_lee]

Mori: FIVE. FIVE different ways for a monster corpse to kill you!

[paradox_in_flux]

hack is a cruel, cruel game/generator of bizarre deaths

-Mercury

[lb_lee]

After almost forty years, Hack is still the game we mentally use as a comparison point for "does this game encourage you to try stupid shit just because you HAVE to know what stupid bullshit will happen?" (We have definitely read a scroll of punishment twice, because those scrolls are rare enough that WE HAD TO KNOW. WE HAD TO KNOW IF WE WOULD GET A MATCHING SET OF HEAVY IRON BALLS.)

[paradox_in_flux]

oh, sorry, the rubber chicken isn't an actual item in nethack but an affectionate player nickname for a dead cockatrice used as a weapon, and i think it's so funny and creates such a fantastic mental image that i can't pass up a chance to call it that whenever possible

OH NO, the teleport autopickup death... that's horrendous. falling down stairs is such a classic way to get got, same with fumbling into eating it. i think my favourite in modern nethack is what happens if you throw one up in the air above you without wearing a helmet, the death message is really goofy: "petrified by elementary physics"

-Mercury

[lb_lee]

OH NOOOOO that's a wonderful name that we will never not use anymore! (We started playing Hack at such an early age that most of the monsters we had never heard of before, so most of our imaginings of what the monsters look like are... scary frowny-faced big letters, hahaha. So we never reached the point of envisioning what wielding a dead cockatrice would LOOK LIKE in reality, but it TOTALLY WOULD LOOK LIKE A RUBBER CHICKEN!)

"Biologically contaminated orange juice" is probably the death that made us throw things, hahaha. (It's what happens if you drink poison while poison-resistant... and yes, we found out the hard way. We were SO MAD.) Teleporting atop a dead cockatrice is DEFINITELY up there as stupidest death. And I'm POSITIVE we've managed to die by heavy iron ball at least once...

"Petrified by elementary physics" is peak nethack.