The Video Game Thread

[Jocephus]

i'm just not liking the way these pre reveal rumors are going...

[Arthur Dent]

This Dwarf Fortress games sounds fascinating:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/c ... -twin.html

[...]

The best answer to SimCity, and its only challenger as the most interesting simulation game, is just across the way from it at the MOMA exhibition: Dwarf Fortress. It is not so much SimCity’s monstrous offspring as its gifted, maniacal, extremely worrisome younger brother. Officially titled Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress, this bizarre, brilliant game by a Texan named Tarn Adams (working almost entirely on his own) has been a public work-in-progress since 2006, in which time it has, according to a 2011 New York Times Magazine profile of its creator, been downloaded about a million times. If SimCity is the video game as toy—inviting, open-ended, and subtly but unmistakably limited—Dwarf Fortress is the video game as folk art masterpiece: eccentric, over-the-top, and oddly affecting.

Dwarf Fortress puts the player in charge of a fledgling Dwarven colony, initially comprising seven dwarfs—a number that can, with the births and immigration that come with successful play, rise into the hundreds, but just as easily plunge to one or zero. You watch from above, pausing the action at will to give orders using a byzantine array of menus, but never directly controlling any of the dwarfs. The central principle of the game is an attention to detail that is frankly obsessive. Dozens of plants and animals are simulated, and hundreds of types of ore are modeled in the soil. Every dwarf has individual character traits, religious beliefs, affections, moods, and skills, and every limb and tissue layer of their bodies is modeled and tracked. (For a while, the melting point for the fat layer of the dwarves’ skin was set too low, resulting in instant death for any creature that got damp and then entered a warm room—baroque and violent bugs like this are very much in the spirit of the game).

[...]

[Jocephus]

5/21 is when we will learn how many customers microsoft gonna lose...

[Maclowery]

Dwarf Fortress is really fun. Another board I post on did a communal Fortress every few months, where each day a different person managed it. So, say, Jocephus would run the Fortress for like a week of game time, then post the save file, and say "Becareful, an invasion of rat men is coming through the forest to the south" and the next guy would do somethign else, then say "Hey I built up the wall on the west side and dug up gold up yonder".

If they ran with the idea and made a flashy version with the same-ish level of quirky game play, I'd try it.

[Mary1966]

I have an Xbox 360 Special Star Wars Edition I got last year and I haven't even played the Star Wars game it came with (too busy playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on my computer) and now it's going to be made obsolete. Well, I kept my Atari 2300 a long time after it was "obsolete," but it sounds like Xbox is discontinuing the playability of the game, so I won't be able to play it in the future even on my "old" Xbox.

[Mary1966]

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/ingam ... -6C9567907



Portal the Cake Mix now available on Amazon UK:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Portal-The-Cake ... xx10718-21

[Michael]

5/21 is when we will learn how many customers microsoft gonna lose...

Why do you think the next xbox will lose customers?

[obucard]

5/21 is when we will learn how many customers microsoft gonna lose...

Why do you think the next xbox will lose customers?

Always on dysfunctionality.

[Jocephus]

5/21 is when we will learn how many customers microsoft gonna lose...

Why do you think the next xbox will lose customers?

Always on dysfunctionality.

ya for that. even if that turns out to be true im sure they will be fine but i probably won't continue with them

[Michael]

Yeah, I thought MS had indirectly addressed the issue, but the rumor keeps popping up.