Dwarf Fortress is an independently made game by Bay 12 Games, and is currently in Alpha. Because of this, please take the graphics, UI, and sound reviews with a grain of salt. However, it is unlikely this game will ever be finished, which is why this may also be considered a review.

Review done during v0.28.181.40d.

Dwarf Fortress

What do you get when you mix ASCII graphics, short, angry people, a complex system that allows you to construct entire towers made completely out of fat, and a user interface so unintuitive it’s like pushing the fat kid into a pool of molasses? You get the sadistically awesome game known as Dwarf Fortress.

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World of Warcraft is one of today’s largest online games, with over 11 million subscribers, each one paying $11 to $15 a month on fees. And yet, the game itself plays like a generic action RPG – You run around, cast spells, and fight the same monsters over and over, with some varying tactics based on whether you get additional creatures attacking you, or if the enemy is resistant to an element. For the most part, you use the same moveset over and over again, repeating a set – For example, a battle in Warcraft can go as such: You run up to an enemy while attacking, cast a beneficial spell which heals you for every swing, then do an offensive move, and then recast the healing spell once it wears off, and then repeat from there – means that for the most part, the game is a monotonous grind of whittling away one monster’s health down to nothing only to go to the next, with the occasional new monster type thrown in.

With such an obvious grind in a game, why does it have so many subscribers?
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“Good Games You Haven’t Played – And Why” provides gamers with insight to games that are rarely played gems among the many. This article’s game is Ghost Master, a PC strategy game. These games are chosen from personal experience, and feedback would be much appreciated.

Ghost Master

Most games require a gamer to be good or bad. Either you kill someone because they looked at you funny ten years ago, or you go through the Temple of the Black Death God of Doom to rescue some little girl’s stuffed bear from Cthulhu. This game says “Bugger all that noise.” and proceeds to go around trolling everyone out if it’s mansion.

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“Good Games You Haven’t Played – And Why” provides gamers with insight to games that are rarely played gems among the many. This article’s game is Live-A-Live, a turn-based RPG for the SNES. These games are chosen from personal experience, and feedback would be much appreciated.

Live-A-Live

Live-A-Live is a game created by Squaresoft for the SNES in 1994. It was only released in Japan, due to several anatomical jokes that I’m sure if I mentioned would make the editor throw my article into the trash, let alone get past censors. It was a strange game with an odd sense of humor and a battle system unseen before.
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