Dwarf fortress
Created | Updated Jan 25, 2009
Dwarf fortress is an extremelly deep sand-box game. (Deep as in filled with things)
This is the link for the home site: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/
The game is mainly about taking a party of initially seven dwarves, equiping then, skilling em and then sending then off to colonize some place in world for no specific reason. And you even get your own huge randomly generated world with its very own huge randomly generated geograph and huge randomly generated history, and it even adds whatever you do on this world to its history, and also allows you to play as a single humanoid creature if you so desire.
beside having your own worlds, you will be satisfied to know these worlds are filled with stuff and details. LOTS of stuff and details. You can make all sorts of things out of all sorts of things, and these things are in great number. For example: You can kill a kitten and make bone bolts out of its bones, then shot these bones out of metal bows you made by making a metal bar out of a metal ore and coal in a furnace and then smithing it into globins that will likely die, leaving their clothes and maybe armor wich you can sell to elf caravans in exchange for exotic violent animals wich you can breed, train and use to kill the elven caravan the next year just for irony or as revenge because they didnt want to buy your wood stuff.
The geology is also impressive, being very varied and realistic, even having the right soil types on top of the right rock types, althought most of the thousand of different rocks do the same things and value the same, what makes the game's policy of informing you and pausing ever time you find a new rock type kinda anoying.
There are also many kinds of animals to have pleasure killing, if you are in that sort of thing. Spamming from the common and pathetic fish and flaming snakes to the also common powerfull, bearded, wine-soaked and emotional fragile dwarves. There are more than 100 different species.
Just like everthing else, the fighting system of the game is also very detailed and interesting. Ever creature has several individual limbs, the main ones containing organs, and all limbs and organs can be damaged individually, to several levels and causing different effects. For example: Cutting your enemys legs will make him fall, cutting his stomach will make in vomit and bleed to death, cutting his lungs will make him stop breathing, and cutting his head will make him stop caring for all the stuff you are cutting off him and go take a nap.
Now, lets talk about the half-flaw half-source of comedy parts. First of all, the graphics are... symbolic, as otherwise no computer on the world would run it. Symbolic means that you need some experience to tell the grass apart from trees, and also you only get to see one plane of the 3-dimension world at a time. After some experience thought you wont be seeing green points and lines surrounded by suspisciously smaller green points, but actually grass, trees and open space.
Other important thing is that while the developer (On singular, making it a even greater feat) is strugling to make it deep and realistic, he has only managed the first part. Several aspects of the game challenge the rules of physics to aburd levels. For example: The amount of rocks you can place in one tile is equal to the amount of rocks you have to place into places, or, saying it the short way, whatever amount you want, while the earth you remove from the earth while digging will be mysteriously "dealt with".
There is also the striking generalized stupidity of the dwarves and the world. Examples: dwarves will not interrupt what they are doing at the moment for no important thing in the world, except scary things like being on fire, and usually they will not do very usefull things after such interruptions. Also fire breathing creatures will often die on the fires created by thenselves, and dragons are especially notorious for beliving they are fire-proof then they actually arent.
The interface is also not a sea of flowers... NO MOUSE! Well, actually, there is mouse, althought I never managed to figure it out how to use it, what pictures the interface rather nicely.
Suming it up, dwarf fortress is a great game with an absurd replayability value, But you gotta have balls and brains to survive the clumsiness of the interface and the overall unforgiveness of the world and its habit of revealing too late that certain things work against what intuition and logic were especting. However, as the game's strongest hit phrase states, Losing is fun!
AND its forum is filled with people whilling to help you and share their stories of how they got absurd dwarves to do absurd things on absurd places.
This is the link for the home site: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/
The game is mainly about taking a party of initially seven dwarves, equiping then, skilling em and then sending then off to colonize some place in world for no specific reason. And you even get your own huge randomly generated world with its very own huge randomly generated geograph and huge randomly generated history, and it even adds whatever you do on this world to its history, and also allows you to play as a single humanoid creature if you so desire.
beside having your own worlds, you will be satisfied to know these worlds are filled with stuff and details. LOTS of stuff and details. You can make all sorts of things out of all sorts of things, and these things are in great number. For example: You can kill a kitten and make bone bolts out of its bones, then shot these bones out of metal bows you made by making a metal bar out of a metal ore and coal in a furnace and then smithing it into globins that will likely die, leaving their clothes and maybe armor wich you can sell to elf caravans in exchange for exotic violent animals wich you can breed, train and use to kill the elven caravan the next year just for irony or as revenge because they didnt want to buy your wood stuff.
The geology is also impressive, being very varied and realistic, even having the right soil types on top of the right rock types, althought most of the thousand of different rocks do the same things and value the same, what makes the game's policy of informing you and pausing ever time you find a new rock type kinda anoying.
There are also many kinds of animals to have pleasure killing, if you are in that sort of thing. Spamming from the common and pathetic fish and flaming snakes to the also common powerfull, bearded, wine-soaked and emotional fragile dwarves. There are more than 100 different species.
Just like everthing else, the fighting system of the game is also very detailed and interesting. Ever creature has several individual limbs, the main ones containing organs, and all limbs and organs can be damaged individually, to several levels and causing different effects. For example: Cutting your enemys legs will make him fall, cutting his stomach will make in vomit and bleed to death, cutting his lungs will make him stop breathing, and cutting his head will make him stop caring for all the stuff you are cutting off him and go take a nap.
Now, lets talk about the half-flaw half-source of comedy parts. First of all, the graphics are... symbolic, as otherwise no computer on the world would run it. Symbolic means that you need some experience to tell the grass apart from trees, and also you only get to see one plane of the 3-dimension world at a time. After some experience thought you wont be seeing green points and lines surrounded by suspisciously smaller green points, but actually grass, trees and open space.
Other important thing is that while the developer (On singular, making it a even greater feat) is strugling to make it deep and realistic, he has only managed the first part. Several aspects of the game challenge the rules of physics to aburd levels. For example: The amount of rocks you can place in one tile is equal to the amount of rocks you have to place into places, or, saying it the short way, whatever amount you want, while the earth you remove from the earth while digging will be mysteriously "dealt with".
There is also the striking generalized stupidity of the dwarves and the world. Examples: dwarves will not interrupt what they are doing at the moment for no important thing in the world, except scary things like being on fire, and usually they will not do very usefull things after such interruptions. Also fire breathing creatures will often die on the fires created by thenselves, and dragons are especially notorious for beliving they are fire-proof then they actually arent.
The interface is also not a sea of flowers... NO MOUSE! Well, actually, there is mouse, althought I never managed to figure it out how to use it, what pictures the interface rather nicely.
Suming it up, dwarf fortress is a great game with an absurd replayability value, But you gotta have balls and brains to survive the clumsiness of the interface and the overall unforgiveness of the world and its habit of revealing too late that certain things work against what intuition and logic were especting. However, as the game's strongest hit phrase states, Losing is fun!
AND its forum is filled with people whilling to help you and share their stories of how they got absurd dwarves to do absurd things on absurd places.
