Fear my Retro!!!!

DosBox, with an AWESOME frontend GUI I found...slicker than slick and kickin it old school! "Bless your weapons and GO!" WOOHOOOO!!!
(oh...and my first youtube video ever...even got the 'congrats on your first video email!')

One squad will be sufficient!

Remember when System Shock looked good?

Or how about when we thought of ways to make Space Hulk more intense?

Good times... good times.

Okay, now I know we are closing some kind of cosmic video game circle when I find a meme poster/picture/thing (seriously, the inventor of the entire meme concept needs to be killed before he comes up with it) involving a nice retro game, and when I look at said game, my first thought is "I have to download this and play it!" The meme image thing was comparing learning curves of various games, putting this retro-y style game way harder than World of Warcraft, Halo something-er-other, and some other damn game... but it still looks awesome!

Check out Dwarf: Fortress

Curiosity was kicking this kittie's ass. I downloaded the Dwarf Fortress to a thumb, unzipped on same thumb, and ran it on said thumb. Now that I typed that, I realize that may be why it was running slow, so I won't bitch about that yet (based on what I saw, I won't bitch anyway).

First thing of note, the opening splash screens and credit type pages... done in animated ASCII characters and looking full-on awesome! You have to see it to understand... lemme see if there's a video...


Okay, so once that's all done, you get a menu, the first choice of which is to create a new world. As I didn't have a world, I went with that option. Then the world building choices... how big, how many races, how diverse should wildlife be, how tame should the world be, how many years of backstory, and some others... I took a medium map and 125 years of history (I think you can go over 1,000...).

Then the world building begins, and this was just awesome. It makes an ASCII planet, then terraforms it over X amount of time, so the start of a river here will eventually wear its way through the continent to there, and these volcanoes will make mountains over yonder...ETC. Then it sticks the 200+ rock and mineral types into places where you would normally find them, based on the same algorithms used to make the world. All this time, it's using several built-in name generators to name everything... the Blighted Plains, the Ragecliff Mountains...oceans, settlements, rivers, forests, bogs, deserts... everything gets a name. It shows a list of what it's doing in a general form, but doesn't go into specifics. If you know the rough legend of the world ASCII symbols, you can kind of see if a forest is getting bigger or thicker, or if an ocean is receding, things like that. At some point, it puts in 'people' settlements, and makes some small roads to connect the largest. Then it drops in the flora and fauna. This all takes about 10 minutes (again, on the thumb)...

THEN. Then... it gets set up to run the 125 years of history. It throws out a random number of hero types, gives a line for how many are dead, and another line for important events (all just numbers right now). Then it starts counting from year 0 to year 125 (warning...this took about 20 minutes on the thumb. Test non-thumb before running with 500+ years!!!). It doesn't tell you these events, but in year 1, there were several hundred events, the number of heroes increased (because more were found?), and the number of dead started to rise. I had no idea what any of it meant, so I started watching the map. HEY, that city just disappeared when the events went up! Another city (Dwarven) just popped up in the mountains! That port city just got bigger, and each year for 10 years you can watch the progress of a road being built from it to the next big city...five more years and the brown road (dirt?) turns into a gray road (paved?)!!!! Without knowing what's going on, you can WATCH the world take shape, see how many heroes are born or found, how many are dying...bridges and dams change the course of water. SO MUCH going on I just want to keep creating worlds to watch them grow!

So after that half hour, I went through the semi-easy process of creating a character, and BAM... in the game world. I can't say much about it, as it was driving me mad. Like if you just keep moving south, the map keeps COMPLETELY changing... which I understand when you enter a city (did that), but I couldn't figure out if sometimes I was just hopping from one elevation to another or what. I need to get a color-coded list of all of the landscape symbols so I know what I'm walking over when the map switches. I did manage to enter a building, and couldn't figure out how to talk to the dude right next to me... so I hit ESC and went into key bindings to find the key for talking...and looking, and searching, and inventory...

UGH... you hit the talk key (or look!) and you get an X you can move around to crosshair what you want to look at or who you want to talk to. A little confusing at first. I shut it off a little after that, as I was NOT in the right mindset to keep going... because... key bindings. This game uses EVERY key on the keyboard! EVERY EVERY! 'l' being a lower-case 'L' is used for looking. 'L' being an upper-case 'l' is used for searching! Or is lower k used for searching, and upper L is...holy crap I can't remember! t is talk, c is open or attack or some damn thing...

After about a half hour of heading southeast, a line popped up and said I discovered a river. Um... okay. Save, and exit. More on that when I get the right mindset to try again!

Update on the Dwarfs. Rather than putting my thumb in and copying the file over to the laptop, I'm downloading it fresh. while doing so, I perused over to the DF wiki. Learned some more awesomeness.

Something I gathered from the features list on the main page, is your built world is persistent, for as long as you want. You can fire up a world, go into Dwarf Fortress mode and run a successful fortress, or have your entire clan killed. You can fire up a new game, with a new fortress, and start trading with your old fortress, or send your new dwarves to kill whatever killed your old clan. I understand this concept, but what I just read on the wiki gave me that warm fuzzy feeling inside:

copy/paste: In adventurer mode (also called "adventure mode") you create a single adventurer (dwarf, human, or elf) who starts out somewhere in one of your generated worlds. You can receive quests, venture into the wilderness to find caves, shrines, lairs, abandoned towers, and other towns and settlements. You can even visit your abandoned fortresses and find whatever riches were left to be guarded by the creatures that sealed their fate.
Unlike fortress mode, adventurer mode is a sort of advanced open world version of rogue or nethack
taking place in the same procedurally generated worlds used for
fortress mode, but you control a single character in a turn-based manner
rather than manage a group of creatures acting in real time.

Good god! If possible to get a good grip on the gameplay, how frickin awesome (and time consuming) could this be?! I wonder if you ran two instances of the EXE, could you have your two characters hook up and kill things together?!

Oh hell and DER! Scrolling down the wiki page for adventure mode, I decided to just drop the damn link. For anyone wishing to try the game, about 'that far' down the page, there's a description of every skill and attribute for character creation (which would have been helpful)... further down, there's the key commands, done in a nice graphical chart system, and kinda presented in a step-by tutorial manner. First section is menu browsing, next step is basic character movement, next is basic world interaction... Keeping in mind the game can run windowed or full screen, it would not be difficult to keep this wiki open behind the game!

Dwarf Fortress wiki: Adventure mode

Any further reviews for this game? I'm trying to catch up once again and I re watched the video... I've been to the site and it does look very interesting. Kinda reminds me of ZZT meets Rogue.

Yeah, here's an updated review: I have yet to survive a FIRST night in the game! If the bogeymen don't getcha, the bandits will! Oh, and snakes... and a quick helpy-helperton: there's a bajillion and one ASCII symbols and colors for each that denote different things. Instead of being all open area like the aforementioned Rogue or Nethack (or ZZT), every "square" of the landscape has a symbol, for green grass, brown grass, dirt, sand, many types of weeds, many many types of pickable herbs and veggies and such, rocks, boulders, broken branches... it almost hurts! Now, one COULD turn on the 'look' feature and just peruse, but remembering every little ASCII symbol will make your head explode twice. SOMEWHERE in the WIKI pointed at earlier, there's lists of all the symbols and their colors. The game can run windowed, and I seriously suggest having the browser open in the background with a tab set on the key commands, and a tab set on the ASCII symbols (because it's REALLY hard to at first differentiate between a grove of saplings and a flock of poisonous snakes)

I still haven't tried Fortress mode. Not sure if I want that level of gaming responsibility yet. The wiki makes it sound fun, and maybe a little easier to get started, but solo adventuring is my MO... rather solo dying shortly after night falls EVERY time. Oh, apparently as long as you're in a city/town before nightfall, you will be safe. Maybe next time I will go to town and rest for 24 hours, just to say I survived a whole day! I still recommend at least giving it a shot... it doesn't install... just unzip and click the EXE... even transfer to a thumb!!!