Today’s post is by Fred Crawley:

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Title: Dwarf Fortress

Format: PC, Mac

Released: August, 2006 (Alpha version)

A cyan full stop flickers clumsily across a field of green punctuation on a black screen, and I push my tongue out of my mouth in concentration as I search for the right key.

Open next to the game window is a browser tabbed to the gills with wiki pages, and a wordpad document of my own confused notes – by the time I have finished rustling through them for the information I need, however, the little bright dot has disappeared.

When it blinks up again, I triumphantly stab the pause button and rattle the arrow keys until the cursor is hovering over my adversary. With a newfound sense of confidence I press the ‘k’ key (k stands for ‘look’, of course) and watch as the word “dragonfly” appears in a sidepanel.

I have identified an insect, and feel the warm cortical spasm of a rat receiving a pellet after leaning on a lever. In any other game, this feat would be too minor to even feature in gameplay, but here it is my first triumph over a notoriously baroque interface, and I am genuinely excited. Read the rest of this entry »