NicheWords-Dwarf Fortress

Well, Dwarf Fortress and hobbit fever, because I've just come across this from Air New Zealand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc&feature=g-logo-xit

I sometimes wonder if more advertisements took the story route to this extent, whether we'd get tired of it.  Perhaps you'd run out of stories.

In any case, just as Air New Zealand took inspiration from Middle Earth, it's easy to see how Dwarf Fortress was inspired by it.  Both feature brave, and curiously stupid dwarfs, digging down a little further than is generally considered advisable.

Of course, you can trace the idea of 'deeper is bad' to the idea of Hell being underground, which is why we have such delights as Diablo as well.  But Dwarf Fortress is different from more or less any other game, and it's certainly inspired Paradox for one, with their suspiciously named A Game of Dwarves.

A cynical man might think that Paradox had taken notice of all that player comparison between Crusader Kings II and A Game of Thrones, and sneakily appropriated the GOT title, as well as the DF concept.  But that would be a very cynical man.

Anyway!  Dwarf Fortress is the game that swallowed up six or seven hours of my time last night, so I ended up in bed at half three in the morning.  It's one of those games - you never notice the night passing, or if you do, you don't care.  Think The Sims, mixed with Minecraft, mixed with masochism.

It's monstrously hard to learn - you will go through fortress after fortress, with each concept and tool only gradually becoming clear.  And too often you'll pour five hours or so into the game, to discover that you've missed something, very, very important.  Like, five hours constructing a complex system of moats, redirecting entire rivers and building retractable bridges.  Only to find that goblins can actually swim.

The dwarves are your main enemy though, even if goblins try to kill you.  Because if you can't keep your dwarves happy, they will tantrum, throwing your fortress into mindless chaos, defenceless to the outside world.  And, sadly, dwarves become unhappy whenever a loved one dies.

And they die.  They die a lot.  Sometimes they can't understand the importance of being inside the walls when goblins attack.  Sometimes when ordered to collapse the roof of a building, they do so while standing on it.

Plus they breed like rabbits, to the point where immigrants are distinctly unwelcome.  The only thing that will rival the complexity of your plumbing and defenses will be your death chambers and cemetaries.

Still, it's the complexity and difficulty that make the game appealing.  You feel that you're achieving something, just by surviving another year.  And there's always more depth to uncover, with an almost ludicrous number of features packed in.

It's not a pretty game mind, though mods are out there to make it look at least passable.  But if you like a challenge, and dream of digging up a pathway to Hell, it just might be for you.