I want to take a second to tell a story though, about the graphics in this game. I hope to explain why this game actually has the best graphics ever.
Context for some folks: the game is entirely rendered using ASCII characters (for the purpose of this story. I know, I’m leaving out detail, it’s okay). So the goblins in Dwarf Fortress look roughly like this
g
A dog looks like this
d
And a dragon looks like this
D
Learning to play Dwarf Fortress can be tough at first because there’s a soup of letters and other typing characters on the screen and your brain needs to convert that into a scene that makes sense. But here’s the thing … eventually that’s exactly what your brain does! You stop seeing the semicolons and hyphens, the letters and the strange formatting characters like “╥”. You start to see rivers and grass, tiny people working hard, a bustling metropolis, an invading horde.
And the creator of this game hasn’t simply cut corners on making the game look good by using ASCII tilesets. The grass (made of commas or single quotes) sways in the breeze. Running water shimmers. Cherry trees gently rain cherry blossom petals during certain seasons. There’s actually a ton of little details there for your brain to pick up and immediately upscale into high def for you. It’s delightful. And sometimes terrifying.
Sometimes something new will happen. A creature you’ve never seen before will approach your little community. It will be represented by some letter and your brain will render that for you in the way it has been taught to do. Your eyes see a d and you see a dog. Your eyes see a D and you see a dragon. It’s bigger than a dog. Most things are, no big deal. But you’ve been deceived.
You watch as a band of dwarfs approach the dragon. The creature is quite still, right next to the round trunk of a tree that looks like this O. The brave warriors are still far from the creature. You’ve built whole dinning halls, with wooden chairs and stone mugs and carvings decorating the walls, that could fit within the space separating the warriors from the capital D dragon. One canny dwarf let’s loose an arrow at the beast. It zips through the air like this -
As it approaches the Dragon, which is surely just to Iike a dog but a bit larger and green right, time begins the slow. It ticks. And ticks. And hell is unleashed. Flames jet from the Dragon. Unending flames pouring like red ink in billows that quickly fill the vast space and enrobe the dwarven warriors in a superheated death that pushes in and flows past and even through the band until flickering flames fill virtually all space to one side of a capital D that you will never, ever, mistake the size of again.
My scalp tingled and it felt like my skull was over heating when my brain spontaneously supplied all the extra graphical details for that particular scene. I’ll never forget it.
Can you share screenshots of what you’re describing? It’s send awesome and I’m very curious about it, but I can’t find anything similar on search engines.
Took me ages to find anything, but here’s a dragon encounter in adventure mode. It’s a bit slow because it’s turn based, but at least it has dragon fire in it, albeit not as great as described above:
The video above has the ASCII style graphics I was talking about. This video shows a dragon attack using a different tileset. (This video begins with some loud music).
You can see in this one how the flames billow and spread.
So you’ll have to imagine what the combination is like. You’re already in a headspace where your brain is filling in details not supplied by the ASCII and then the world just explode into flames.
These other tilesets have their advantages. But I’ll never give up the text-based rendering of the world - I’ve had too many great experiences to give that up.
My understanding is that the steam version released with no ASCII tileset, but there is one now after an update. I bought the steam version but haven’t played it much at all, so I haven’t confirmed this myself.
Yup, you can play the ‘post steam’ version via steam or free download and get the ASCII characters, however you are still forced to use the mouse to play it, which doesn’t work for me, so I stick with the old 47 release and just play that forever I guess!
Yep. In addition, there is now a free build of version 50.xx on the official website, which uses the same code as the Steam version, but does not include the tileset and the soundtrack.
I tried that free build on the weekend (because I didn’t want to bother with installing Steam on my ARM64 laptop), and it still looks as amazing as always. Now I just need to learn the keybindings for the Steam version - because using a mouse with ASCII graphics feels just wrong 😉.
Any AWD Lambo in Gran Turismo. Especially after getting used to powerful RWD supercars.
With FWD cars you start out with, you can pretty much go from full throttle to threshold braking back to full throttle as aggressively as you want while taking turns. As long as your speed is low enough to go around a corner, you’ll make it and if you make a mistake, you have a chance at recovery.
With RWD, you’ve gotta be super careful with the throttle on turns. If you try the instantly apply full throttle approach, you’ll end up spinning out when the rear tires (that provide stability) lose traction. A lot of the videos of people fucking up their supercar are instances of being too aggressive on the throttle when they weren’t going perfectly straight. I’m not sure how accurate Gran Turismo is for this, but you can give it full throttle while cornering, but you have to ease into it slowly. You don’t have much opportunity for correction, though with careful throttle control you can sometimes turn it into a drift, though that usually doesn’t work out unless you plan on drifting going in to the turn.
With AWD, just point the tires in the direction you want to go in and give it full throttle. Start losing traction? Try more throttle. It was a fun moment discovering this, after being used to the RWD approach. Might need to max out your tires and tune your suspension for stability to get these results, though. Just angle the tires outwards a bit for camber, go as low as you can without seeing sparks, and add some downforce on the front and back and it feels a bit like an F1 car.
Though the actual F1 cars they have are pretty awesome, too. A step closer to the arcade style racing where you didn’t need to learn the brake button.
Master of Magic. It's basically the Civilization gameplay loop, but adds fantasy creatures, magic spells, hero units and loot. There's a recent remake but it just doesn't capture the same vibes as the original, at least for me.
Such a lousy multiplayer game though. It was designed to give the better player handicap so their lead only increased over time, since you were awarded with more lemmings for the next level if you won the previous one.
X4. Come for the arcadey spaceflight simulator, stay for the galactic-scale empire building, leave for another save file once the Xenon start sending multiple I-class battleships against your Teladi allies but they cannot muster the strength to repel them and the entire gate network falls because you were too busy solving the Paranid Civil War.
… Might and Magic Book One: Secret of the Inner Sanctum… Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Restoration of Erathia (vanilla)… Invisible, Inc… Severed Steel… Solitairica… Griftlands… Hand of Fate
I don’t have a favourite unfortunately. No ranks. But I’ve played a lot more and these shine for gameplay first amd foremost. Some, like the first, are gameplay only (as was the requirement in the era, there was not much more to go by) whereas the others if you remove the flashy bits in ways which wouldn’t affect the gameplay, they’d play really good… just fine.
Rimworld definitely makes it harder when you’re doing well. You can control the parameters a bit though in the storyteller settings. It depends on your colony’s wealth, number of people, how long it’s been since something ‘bad’ happens (colonist dies or gets injured), etc.
This is advice I’ve given to new Rimworld players, and I hope it was helpful. The game (on most difficulties) is itching to give you the next “scenario.”
Building your wealth in valuable equipment is not very good at the start of the game, because your town’s silver value will go up much faster than its defensive/offensive capabilities. You end up putting a target on your back for raids.
Better to build a surrounding wall and set up trap corridors than to worry about getting everyone a gun.
I’ve had success doing that too. Buttload of traps. The raids that will circumvent your traps are definitely a problem though. Also the raids that just have a bunch of grenadiers can destroy your defenses in no time.
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