Thursday, April 22, 2010

Random Shots: A Tale Of Dwarves And Ancient Evils

  • The accepted wisdom is that EVE Online is more fun to read about than to play. Well, it's not the only one. There is a little game out there called Dwarf Fortress. (That's actually the subtitle, but they call it that anyway.) I love reading people's stories about their adventures in the game, even if DF is completely impenetrable to me.

  • I first learned about Dwarf Fortress through a link to Something Awful's Let's Play transcript of their Boatmurdered fortress. It may start off slow, but you have to hang on until Update 11 wherein one of the player's starts to channel Deadwood's Al Swearengen. It's one of the funniest things I've ever read.

  • Well, DF has spawned another great story. Found via Rock, Paper, Shotgun, nomad(tim) from the NZF Forums brings us a story of his own fortress, Bronzemurder. (Those dwarves pick some effed up names, don't they?) Told over the course of ten illustrations, we see how hubris brought this great fortress low. nomad(tim)'s design and artistic choices are impeccable. If I could buy bound copy of this story, I would.


© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.

4 comments:

  1. The Bronzemurder story is awesome, I caught the link via RPS the other day as well. I've tried a few times to learn Dwarf Fortress, but I can never make any sense out of the ascii. I think it's like trying to see the code in the Matrix. The Bronzemurder story has made me think about trying it again, apparently there are some mods to allow for sprites instead of ascii, that may be just what I needed.

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  2. I really enjoyed that story, great find. I really enjoy roguelikes with ascii graphics, but I've never tried Dwarf Fortress.

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  3. Dwarf Fortress does also have the EVE-like learning curve. I haven't been able to surmount it yet, but I might have to try again.

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  4. I think DF makes the EVE learning curve look flat.

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