cock is one of my favorite tastes. not only that, but balls smell amazing. it makes me go a little crazy on it to be honest. like, i cannot get it far enough down my throat to be satisfied. i’m only satisfied when i feel those intense, powerful, salty, hot pumps of cum down my throat. when i sit back on my heels, look up at you with cum all over my mouth and slobber running down my neck, hair all fucked up and wipe my mouth with the back of my arm and ask you if i did a good job and you cannot even speak because i’ve drained all of your energy out the tip of your dick….. that’s when i’m satisfied.

(Steam Release)

Frankly, I'm a bit of a pessimist, and when I heard DF was making big pushes to be more "accessible" for its Steam release, I assumed we'd be looking at a developer-approved official tileset and... that'd be about it. I heard about the mouse controls but was not particularly hopeful that they would be more useful or clear than the keyboard shortcuts that already existed. I'll admit I was wrong! You'd be forgiven for not realizing that the game under the hood was originally designed as an ASCII-only project where gameplay more closely resembles "inputting missile launch codes" than swirling analog sticks. The official tileset and mouse controls alone are worth full price for anyone who, like me, has been fascinated by DF but been unwilling to spend the time learning how to gather all the info I need.

The game is still relatively hard to parse, but if you've played one of DF's many spiritual successors (or games inspired by those, in turn) then this shouldn't be too tough a task for you. Especially given the tutorial, which is actually quite good at explaining what's going on and how not to fail instantly - probably the biggest hurdle to learning DF before this point. It's still the same game, it still has its legendary level of detail and its quirky gameplay mechanics - if you're not used to games where fluids and creatures can travel diagonally, you better learn - and it's still possible to lose it all to the zaniest bullshit on the planet.

I think it's finally helped me see the appeal of DF firsthand - I'd dabbled with the game over the years but never enough to fully grasp what I was doing, so my forts were small and rapidly became failures, never interesting enough to have me doing a deep-dive on the wiki for optimized bedroom designs. It's easy to hear about things like cats dying due to an error in calculating feline Blood Alcohol Content and become intimidated, but Bay12 have been smart in where/how the level of detail gets increased. Most of it's in the worldbuilding or systems that run in the background, meaning that savvy or passionate players can opt into interacting with these elements without it being required of new players. All this info turns the fortress itself into a character - a canvas marked by each being that passes through it. Losing in every bizarre way possible is its own fun, of course, but there's still something to gain from watching your dwarves build a legacy and a culture all their own.

I have this good friend whose taste in games seems to be constantly crawling backwards in time. From the PlayStation 1 to old arcade cabinets, to the Atari 2600, and now to this primitive little text delight. Of course, I'm grateful - I don't exactly stay on the bleeding edge of the gaming scene but at the same time my feet are pretty firmly planted in the contemporary indie game community, itch.io and all that and it's nice to get some perspective from the past especially when I've on some level been yearning to really give it a chance.

Hamurabi is a quaint little resource management game that despite its incredibly simple gameplay loop and primitive representation and programming manages to be an engaging bite-sized game the whole way through. In this game, you are Hamurabi, the ruler of some unknown land. Every year you are to divvy out the crops between being food for the people, being currency for acquiring and selling your land, and being planted for future harvests. The objective of the game is technically to have as much land as you can by the start of year 11, ignoring population and bushel count, but the consolidation of every single in-game transaction to heavily involve bushels in some way allows for every year of action to be a heavily considered and decisive move towards your goal. The short factor of the game helps this too, it's just long enough where you can really get the ball rolling but also short enough that if you are to catastrophically mess up it's no real skin off your back.

By year 5 of my first playthrough I had derived all of the non-random code that the game relies upon - it's all pretty simple math - but even when I had these things figured out and I had a calculator and notepad by my side jotting down random formulas and conversions, it was just as fun in this mode of play as it was kind of winging it. This takes the prize for the oldest game I've played, and manages to be surprisingly robust despite any apprehensions you might have about playing a game that was made before your parents were probably born.

it's not pretty, it's nigh impenetrable, it's only fun if you make your own fun, it's never gonna be finished, overall it's a mess, but it's so resolutely its own thing and unlike anything else -- and in particular completely unlike the games that keep coming out that try to sell themselves as dwarf fortress knockoffs -- that i can't not love it.

this may sound weird but i genuinely believe if more people had the time and resources to pursue their personal creative projects, this is what a lot of them would look like -- just setting off on a journey in a completely unexplored direction and making something that no one has ever made before. just as an example of that, it's invaluable to me. world heritage stuff