NetHack Falcon's Eye PC Jaakko Peltonen 2000

NetHack Falcon's Eye

Jaakko Peltonen released version of NetHack Falcon's Eye for MS-DOS and Windows 95-XP from 1999-2001. NetHack Falcon's Eye is a Rogue-like notable for its icon-driven interface, mouse-driven control and isometric perspective that features wall-tile transparency. NetHack Falcon's Eye is so-named because its perspective is isometric; that is, its playfield is presented in top-down ¾ bird's eye view (the falcon being a bird of prey).

The object of NetHack Falcon's Eye is to delve the dungeons of the Mazes of Menace and recover the Amulet of Yendor; the motivation for doing so being wealth and/or fame.

Players select one of 13 classes and choose gender, alignment and race. Otherwise, players may opt to randomize their character. Characters are constituted by six "AD&D" stats as well as HP, AC and Power aka Spell Points. Characters level up via experience points (XP).

Players explore random dungeon mazes made up of corridors and chambers while fighting monsters, looting treasure and negotiating doorways, traps, stairways and ladders. The character is accompanied by a pet companion. Impressively, an Indiana Jones-style rolling boulder trap is "animated".

Naturally, players must manage items, spells, encumbrance and hunger.

NetHack Falcon's Eye auto-scrolls the screen as the character moves about, but players can manually scroll the screen away from the character as well. The user interface of NetHack Falcon's Eye is icon-driven and features pop-up menus, an automap and an inventory. The hardware mouse-cursor is context-sensitive.

NetHack Falcon's Eye requires an i80386DX-33 MHz CPU and 16 megs of RAM, but a Pentium 90 CPU is recommended. The Windows version requires DirectX 3.0.

NetHack Falcon's Eye displays in 256-color SVGA 800x600. However, its playfield can take advantage of higher resolutions but its pre-renders and menus do not scale above 800x600.

NetHack Falcon's Eye audio consists of ambient sounds, action sound effects and tunes that play at intervals.

NetHack Falcon's Eye was distributed digitally and extracts to hard disk drive with no installer. The install size is 12 megs and consists of 150 files.

Criticisms (just little things):

• The move-to tile should be bounding-boxed
• Not all sprites have drop-shadows
• The menus and text are too small even in the lowest resolution (800x600)

That said, NetHack Falcon's Eye is great game.

cf. Diablo of 1996.

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