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Nethack: The Best Game on your Mac
It has spawned numerous websites, user groups, mailing lists and Usenet topics. It has been around for decades and yet it still has uncounted adherents. It is, perhaps, the best game you can install on your Macintosh. It is Nethack. Nethack is a first player adventure game. You enter its dungeons searching for treasure and fighting off monsters like trolls, and dragons, and newts as you become embroiled in various quests depending on the type of character you play: elf, ranger, knight and so forth. Sure, it has crappy ASCII graphics and a learning curve that is, to say the least, steep--at least for the purists who play it in Terminal. (There is also a Carbon version available, but it somehow fails to match up to the good old ASCII style with its intricate character-based commands.) Playing Nethack can take minutes, days, or when you start getting good at it, months. Many Nethack players have been doing so for decades because it's that good a game with that level of intricacy, humor and detail. So if you've had it with Bejeweled and Chess and those Big Bang Board Games, consider investing a few hours or days into learning Nethack with its long term entertainment payoff.
Terminal Tip: ASCII-ify your Videos
I'm kind of on an ASCII kick this weekend. Having already brought you ASCII banners, I thought I'd follow that up with ASCII video playback. Apple's ASCII Movie Player, which you can download here, allows you to view any QuickTime compatible media from the Terminal. Above, you see last week's episode of Heroes--that's Peter, in case you didn't recognize him from the screen shot. The ASCII Movie Player disk image contains a compiled Universal Binary application file. This means you don't need any developer tools to compile or run this utility. Drag a copy into your favorite folder (it doesn't have to be /Applications; /usr/local/bin might make more sense), launch Terminal, navigate to the executable and run it from the command line. e.g. % ./ASCIIMoviePlayer /Volumes/Data/Downloads/Heroes/X22-Heroes.m4v With ASCII Movie Player, you can play any media that works with QuickTime. So if you've got Perian installed, for example, you can ascii-fy your DivX or Xvid videos as well as your MPEG-4s and QuickTime MOVs, and so forth. And, since QuickTime also allows you to open and display still images, you can use ASCIIMoviePlayer to load and display most digital photographs. As a rule of thumb, display looks best with white-on-black rather than Terminal's default black-on-white. To switch this, select Terminal -> Window Settings, choose Color from the Inspector pop-up and update the Normal Text and Background Color settings.Update: colorized version can be found here. Update 2: Both Mplayer and VLC provide ASCII art output using the -libcaca module. (Caca stands for Color AsCii Art.) In VLC, use Settings > Preferences > Video > Output modules > Advanced options > Video output module > Color ASCII art video output (courtesy of JeffreyAtW over at Digg). More details here. In MPlayer, the AAlib supports black and white ASCII conversion and cacalib supports full color ASCII. Details here. mplayer -vo aa videoname or use mplayer -vo caca videoname for color ASCII (but with a performance hit due to the colors).
Mac ASCII Invaders
If you're in the mood to shoot down some aliens, Mac ASCII Invaders plays exactly the way you expect it to: left and right arrows to move your weapon, the space bar to fire. This is Chuck Houpt's Macintosh port of Thomas Munro's ASCII version of Space Invaders.It's a "termlet"; you install the software into your Applications folder and double-click to run. It then launches Terminal for you and loads up all the backgrounds, font colors and the software you need to run the game. You'll see the Mac ASCII Invaders icon close from your dock and be replaced with the Terminal icon.Mac ASCII Invaders is SmileWare. Houpt writes: "If it makes you smile, please pass the smile along."
Terminal Tip: Create a text banner
Want to create a "Happy Birthday" or "Congratulations" banner? Want to skip all the "how do I get a large font to print sideways?" stuff? The command line "banner" command may help. It allows you to create a sideways message that you can open in TextEdit, print out and (with a bit of help from scissors and scotch tape) hang from the rafters. The banner command defaults to an old style text width of 132 characters, so you'll want to tell it to keep that width down to 72 or 75 if you're going to use TextEdit's default font. (You can always play with the font sizes in TextEdit and the width in the banner command if you want.) Use the -w flag to set the width and put the text you want to bannerize in a string. The bit about "open -f" pipes the results into TextEdit. banner -w 72 "Happy 75th Birthday" | open -f
Mega Man meets Pedobear in an ASCII duel to the death
The original Mega Man series is well regarded as one of the most challenging sets of 2-D action titles around. What kept them outside the realm of hair pulling madness is the logic found within the design. Spikes are bad and should be avoided. Falling in a pit is worse and running endlessly to the right is the path to victory. Jinsei Owatta No Daibouken ("My Life Is Over's" Big Adventure) is what happens when you throw all known Mega Man conventions out the window and design a game built for sheer masochistic pleasure. With ASCII graphics and 2Channel flavor, it was one of our favorite gaming fixes this weekend.We'd like to extend this delightful challenge to you, the Joystiq readers, as it provides just the type of brain training your gaming mind needs on this Monday morning. Only instead of doing multiplication tables, you'll be trying to figure out just how to get over that first jump and how to keep Zangief from crushing your tiny ASCII frame. Keep in mind that the game has yet to be completed, so once you finally make your way to those iconic "boss" gates, the game is over.After you're done beating yourself up, be sure to check out our video play through after the break.
