I've never played, but I've read a lot of interesting post play narratives of the video game Dwarf Fortress. It is notorious for it's bad UI, but also for its eerily verisimilitudinous, emergent dwarf behavior.
Boing Boing has a nice post today about artist Tim Denee's pics of the saga of the fortress Bronzemurder. The maps, the situation, the randomness of it all feel very oldschool to me. I thought if you never play the game you might enjoy taking a gander at these pictures.
I tried to play Dwarf Fortress but the UI just killed me. I couldn't figure out how to do even simple things and didn't want to spend hours at the wiki reading to figure it out. My brother is a total addict though and sometimes regales me with tales of what the dwarfs are up to.
ReplyDeleteThere are 3D tile sets if you have difficulty with the 2D UI of Dorf Fort.
ReplyDeleteBoatmurdered is the classic Dorf Fort tale and very whacky.
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/
http://lparchive.org/LetsPlay/Boatmurdered/chapter2-1.html
4chan's /tg/ (NSFW site) plays it lots. The random worldgen and 'tude is very fun but yeah the game is not easy to play. I'd still suggest downloading it and genning a few worlds, the detail's plunderable if nothing else.
Some archives of 4chan Dwarf Fortress threads
ReplyDeletehttp://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=dwarf+fortress
also look for Dorf or Dorf Fortress in the tags
Again, NSFW site. Also since it's originally from an imageboard site, click on the images to expand them to their original fullsize.
such an awesome awesome time sink....
ReplyDeleteI keep hoping someone will produce a nice frontend for the complex engine.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the links, Ghoul.