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June 9th, 2008
02:15 pm - Best Dwarf Fortress artifact ever
Sirab Rithz^m, "The Warmth of Bulwarks", an Alder ring
This is a Alder [sic] ring. All craftsmanship is of the highest quality. On the item is an image of a dwarf in deer leather. The dwarf is dead. |
If you've never played Dwarf Fortress (think a roguelike version of Dungeon Keeper) boy howdy is you missin out on some truly stoopid fun. Especially when you accidentally flood your fortress with magma, or when 75% of your settlement dies during the winter and one of the few survivors goes berserk and runs around the wilderness trying to get into fistfights with deer. This is the reason why DF's motto is "Losing is fun!"
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The power curve in DF leads to some truly great outtakes. I had a fort with a Legendary mason, who could put up bridges in the same amount of time it took most dwarves to cross them; one day, his masterpiece bridge *got dirty*.
When Mr. Bridge is dirty, Mr. Mason is not your friend.
He threw his child at another dwarf hard enough to kill both of them and cover the hall in blood and gore.
Dwarven mothers will use their kids as shields in combat. This certainly sounds like a game I want to be a part of. I read that as flooding your fortress with manga. I live vicariously through the Let's Play thread on Dwarven Fortress, somehow I just didn't get the hang of it the last time I tried it.
(This is probably a good thing since the last thing I need is another game to be addicted to.) My favourite Stupid Death is having a miner dig a tunnel from a frozen biome into an aquiferous one: the water from the aquifer pours into the frozen tunnel and immediately freezes, plugging the tunnel with a dwarf ice-cube.
Dwarf Fortress is really illustrative of how strategy games are most fun at a particular point in the learning curve, when you've got a basic handle on how to play but still haven't learned how to avoid grotesque screwups.
I'm at the point in DF now where, if I don't get utterly shafted before the first immigration wave, I don't have much to worry about. This is much less fun than the days when I had to constantly deal with Hilarious Fuckups. I'm thinking about giving it a rest until counter-invasions get implemented, at which point there'll be a whole new level of hilarious instability to play with. Sadly, the answer to that one is 'the fortress had a good hunting/butchering/tanning/leatherworking production chain going and the biome supported a lot of deer'.
Really, from the structure of the rest of the game you'd think that all dwarves would be fantastic pervs who compete ferociously for Obscurest Sexual Preference, but in fact they're very boring people who hook up with the people they hang out with most, remain diligently in their marriages, and never remarry if widowed.
(Except for the Dungeon Master, who typically wears nothing but twelve jewel-studded vests and a spiked glove.) |
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