Nethack is still my favorite roguelike game, even though I haven’t played much of it in the years since. Once you know basically everything in the game, even though it’s a lot, it loses much of its capacity to surprise. I should really dig into it again now!

https://web.archive.org/web/20210323181450/http://www.gamesetwatch.com/column_at_play/

I really would love to go deep on NetHack someday, I’m more of a DCSS and Angband guy but I’ve always appreciated it from afar.

I know that, in fact I’ve done that with my old Switch. But I forgot it.

> (Note: I’ve been told since writing this that you can still get images off using an SD card… although if you have a Switch 2 like I do you’re probably just as out of luck as it uses SD Express cards. I’ve yet to confirm cross compatibility with those, I don’t think I have the right kind of adapter.)

You don’t need to take the SD card out or use an adapter, just use a USB cable and plug the Switch itself in to your PC

This came up after the post went live, although in its way it makes it even more infuriating that the “simple” way of getting images off is meaninglessly restricted. I should probably edit the post to add this information in though.

Ah, thanks! I think it came together pretty well. I feel like I’m not as good at putting these things together as I was as a kid, I’m trying to get back into practice.

Magical Athlete has a touch of zero-player nature in that a lot of the fun is watching things unfold, more than it is in making decisions. So, I think there is something to that kind of game.

Also, if I don’t crosslink your post on the game from the Data General drives it’ll probably have slipped my mind, feel free to remind me!

Yay, hello! Thanks back at you, I’m glad that at least these games are preserved!

Your blog is such a resource, thanks so much for maintaining it!

I prefer to be half-glass-full on the amount lost: it’s honestly impressive how much still exists (compared to other mediums). I think adventures in particular had people being more inclined to preserve them. There’s hundreds of 1979-1980 TRS-80 programs from a company called Instant Software where about 95% of them are “lost”, but the one that’s an adventure is preserved. There’s a set of programs by Tom Sato for BBC Micro and the only one that’s been rescued is his “adventure” because it was copied to a tape called “adventures”. Nobody cared about his variation of Star Trek or Scramble.

Sometime in 2026 (likely summer) I’m going to play a lost game recently preserved off of Data General drives that’s absolutely enormous and completely unknown/undocumented, so there’s still more material coming through.

I think it’s rather a mind-blowing idea even now! I think it’s an idea whose time has come again.

I remember the games being a bit glitchy with odd bugs but the idea of moving a character from one game to another just blew my mind at the time.

You can also have situations where you chase monsters or have monsters actually have friendly reactions. It ends up sometimes feeling like a pitched battle in Doom where you can have encounters collide with each other.

While it doesn’t offer automated export, as I mentioned, you can screenshot your creations, get them transferred to your phone, then PC through the Nintendo Online app, and in that way get the content out into an image editor. Which is better than having it be stuck in the cartridge, which only had room for one project anyway!

Can’t wait to catch some flies, in addition to the other stuff!

Believable. If that’s the case, then we can expect that these lists will, if the trend holds, expand to about four times this size.