I <3 Dwarf Fortress

I know I bullet-pointed this game in my back-from-the-internet-dead post, but after watching several hours disappear yesterday, I feel it deserves more than that.

For the uninitiated, go read about Boatmurdered, then go play through this tutorial. Or if you're the just-jump-in type, download it directly from the Bay 12 site.

This is probably the first game that I have ever had to watch myself to make sure it didn't ruin my life. I never missed a commitment to play EVE, never sold my blood to pay for my WoW habit, but I'll be damned if I didn't start playing DF one saturday night and didn't stop until I started hearing birds chirping outside my window and realized it was 5 AM. It is that enthralling.

DF is sandbox gaming in its purest form; it gives you a world, some dwarves, and a few supplies, and then says "have fun". Fun can be finding hilarious things to do, like equipping every noble's quarters with a "mandate lever" that floods their room with water/magma/captured goblins. Alternately, some people will have their dwarves create some impressive meagconstructions. Or if you're OCD, you can try to build the perfect fort for whatever it is you want to do.

In an ordinary game, seeing "losing is fun" in the in-game help would raise alarm bells, but that's because those games have neither dwarves nor fortresses. If a miner gets pissed off, it is not uncommon for him to grab his pick and go on a killing spree. If one of the guys that he murders has a friend that was already on edge, he may then decide to go off some dwarves as well. This can quickly spiral out of control, especially if your population is already on edge from some other problem. Or you could simply have a doomsday device blow up in your face (your fort does have a doomsday device, right?). But however you go out, failures will often result in stories ranging from mildly amusing to "it hurts to laugh, but I can't stop".

In short, this is the kind of game that has been left behind in the modern era of mass marketing and insanely powerful 3D accelerators; it is a game that is made not to tell a story, sell an engine, or to provide a venue for competition, but simply something to be played and enjoyed.