Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is my favorite video game. Its depth is greater than nearly any other game I’ve played, it is simultaneously an adventure game and a strategy game. It sounds like a great game doesn’t it?

The first issue which most people have with it is that its graphics are all extended ASCII characters. It has extreme moddibility, and a decent tileset capability(I don’t use them myself). The second issue with Dwarf Fortress is that it has a terrible interface which nobody can figure out on their own, well I did that, but I was only persistent because of the amazing forum community which exists for it.

If you do nothing else, I’d recommend joining their forum, I was laughing a lot because of its jokes. The community is very nice, the nicest I’ve ever been a part of at least.

The entire world is procedurally generated, along with a history of everything that ever happened in it(making it somewhat easier to write about). The most recent release has also added procedurally generated Demons, and megabeasts(massive dangerous creatures which will challenge a well developed and even well defended fortress). The entire game is moddible via relatively easily read plaintext files, the mods are legal to distribute(for anyone who cares).

The fortress mode is a strategy game, it exposes the player to the most depth, making it possible to make ridiculous contraptions, many spanning many months in real world time to design. It is possible to build a simple binary computer out of the mechanical systems which transfer power and just so happen to work fairly well  as a Boolean system. The fortresses can be works of art, eg statues of armok which shoot lava at your enemies, or they can be simple massive sprawling utilitarian complexes. I’d recommend this mode the most, its what you play most of the game in. Remember this one last word of advice, it is a good end game challenge to build an incredibly complicated world ending device(floods the earth with water/magma/demons), if you can end it with your dwarves spiraling into a madness, that’s also extra points.

The adventure mode is what you use to kill pesky megabeasts which killed your last fortress, or just explore the world. It does not allow the player to build a castle himself(though that’s currently in the works). You can in theory kill every single living thing in the world in this mode(good luck), and it will move the world into the age of emptiness. If the player really wants to make a mark on the history of the world this is the way to do it, you can kill as many goblins as you want in fortress mode, but you can’t set their homes on fire in it.

The game is my favorite, and possibly the most complicated playable computer game out there at the moment, I think it’s very good, but you need a great deal of patience to learn how to play, therefore just enjoy it if you can, but don’t write to me saying that it is a piece of crap, because I know that it isn’t.