2Doods1Blag

his game has physics that, although not perfect on the scale of modern games, it is well done for such a small production team. It does have some strange, but absolutely hilarious things that can happen, however. The ASCII aspect can be changed by the simple and quick installation of a tileset, which can add images to almost everything included in the game.

The game itself is slightly complex to learn, the inte

There are some games in the world that just don’t receive the attention they should. Some are small production games that are unable to advertise, others are ones that are made by two people.

One of these games, is Dwarf Fortress. Made by only two people, Dwarf Fortress is a very advanced, free, 2D ASCII game. Now, the mere mention of ASCII immediately puts people off, but it shouldn’t. T

rface turning away most would be players. Tutorials are easily found on Youtube, and looking for the Dwarf Fortress wiki can help you drastically. Even asking on the forums will get you a lot of help. If you lack patience however, this game may not be for you.

There are two modes to this game: Fortress mode, and Adventurer mode. We’ll get back to Adventurer on another review.

To start in Fortress mode, you first need to generate a map, which is easy enough. You press enter a few times, and you’re set. After that, you start Fortress mode, and pick which region (incase you have more than one) and find a suitable location to start. This can be difficult if you don’t know what to look for, so there is a handy Finder that lets you pick what you want in your map. Rivers, Aquifers, Magma pools, Magma pipes, bottomless pits; There’s a bunch of extras you can look for with the finder. It will search all suitable locations, and will move your screen to the spot, and you can Embark right there.

Now, you can do a few things here. You could Embark with a random group of dwarves, with unknown skills, (all for the extra challenge) or you can set up what skills your dwarves have, and what equipment you start with. You get a group of 7 dwarves in the very start, and your starting equipment is usually food and alcohol (more specifics on that later) as well as an Anvil, which is worth lots of points, and you can return that to add skills to your dwarves, or buy more stuff you need. After you have chosen what you want, you can embark.

The best choice would to either immediately dig downwards if you are on flat terrain, or to dig into the side of a mountain, hill, or cliff, depending what’s there. I recommend maps that have stuff like Loam or Sand in them so you can build farms to grow food for your hungry little dwarves, since mountainous maps with lots of stone prevent the growth of plants, and calls for the useage of animals such as dogs, cats, cows, and horses to slaughter and feed your dwarves. This is the most attention demanding way of gathering food.

As you play, you may come across hostile creatures, most common are Goblins, which do like to besiege your Fortress sometimes, having up to 100, or even more attack. You can have your own military of dwarves with maces, warhammer, axes, crossbows, spears, and swords. You can also have wrestlers, which are great at breaking bones and incapacitating others. There are also traps of all kinds, which allow you to completely destroy enemies, by cutting them into pieces, (which is shown on the screen, and their body parts will be in several locations around the corpse itself) or capturing them. If you’re feeling extra tricky, you can build a drowning chamber, or a chamber you flood with magma. The sky is the limit in Dwarf Fortress.

You trade seasonally with caravans from the Human, Dwarf, and Elven civilizations.  These caravans can bring rare, or much needed supplies to your Fortress, such as alcohol, wood, weapons, armor, cloth, food, and much other items. You can either pay for these with coins you have minted, if your Fortress is high-end, or you can trade with your own crafted goods. Humans have a tendency to like anything simple that you may have crafted, such as wooden or stone toys or mugs, or bone jewelry. Elves on the other hand, despise anything wooden you made, and they will occasionally complain to you about all of the wood you are chopping down. This makes them irritating to most players, and they tend to devise ways to slaughter the Elven caravans when they arrive.

Dwarves are very sensitive beings at first, becoming depressed if their friends die, and even going into moods that either cause them to find ways to kill themselves, or going berserk and attacking and killing whoever they can. They usually meet their demise at the hands of a skilled Axe dwarf, however. Such events can cause tantrum spirals, which causes all dwarves to become saddened, and maybe cause them all to go on a rampage or attempting to kill themselves. Keeping your dwarves happy isn’t too difficult, however. You can do things such as having a Statue garden for them, or installing a waterfall.  (which is a more advanced construction for those who aren’t new to the game) It is also key to keep plenty of Alcohol around.

Alcohol keeps dwarves happy, and takes away their thirst. Not only that, but they work faster when they have had a good drink. If your dwarves are forced to drink water, they will not only be slightly unhappy about it, but they’ll work a whole lot slower. Almost all dwarves have a note in their personality that says “Needs a drink to get through the working day”.

The game is simple, but it is also very advanced if you try to do hard things. You could make a tower out of soap, or you could build an arena with a Megabeast in it (titan, colossi, dragon, etc.) for your most skilled Champions to battle, or maybe you could make a glass pyramid. The sky is the limit in Dwarf Fortress, and there is hardly enough time to explain it all.

Too long; Didn’t read? Let me sum it up in a few sentances.

You can build a Fortress either above ground, or below ground, and fight off armies of hostile creatures.

You can devise gruesome or intricate traps to take care of less-than-favourable dwarves, or with your enemies.

You can build mega projects, anything that comes to your mind, it can probably be done.

The game is still in its beta, but it is very well executed, and is still being updated to this day. A newer version with massive improvements will be released within the next few weeks.

Let’s give it some number ratings.

Gameplay: 9/10. There are so many things you can do in Dwarf Fortress, it’s unbelievable. Sometimes, strange glitches will come up, and it may either corrupt your save, or ruin your entire Fortress. These are uncommon, but do ruin your day if you haven’t saved your game in some time.

Graphics: N/A. This game is very, very far from being completed. For now it uses ASCII graphics. There are several tilesets you can find and download, and some of them make it much more easier to understand what’s going on.

Sound: 6/10. There is no sound outside of the ambient music, which is disappointing. The music itself is good, and you can listen to it for hours without becoming irritated by it. However, there are no sounds of battle or work in the Fortress yet, but I expect to see these in a future update.

Re-playability value: 10/10. Every Fortress has a unique design, and your encounters with the local creatures and residents change with each one. No two Fortresses are exactly the same.

Overall: 8.5/10. This is a very well done game in its early life, and it deserves every chance it can get.

For more info than anything I ever gave you, please visit these sites.

www.bay12games.com/forum/

http://dwarffortresswiki.net/

Don’t be put off by the complexity. It’s easy to learn if you have help from a tutorial. CptDuck is the best example of a tutorial giver on Youtube.

You know what to do now.

-Kekkimaru

STOP MAKING PC PORTS. Seriously. Every fucking PC port you have made has been complete garbage and not even worth playing. Even something like Stubbs the Zombie (which should have been easy considering Halo already had a decent port on PC) was fucked all to hell.

You may be asking yourself what brings me to this sudden rage about Aspyr Media? Well, I just spent 2 FUCKING HOURS installing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (I installed the complete Autodesk Inventor 2008 Suite which was 4 DVDs in less time) to get treated with this piece of trash.  When I started the game up, I get greeted with this nice little launcher…

I shrugged it off and figured I’d get more in depth options in game.  Hardly the case.  I went to options and selected “Audio/Video” and I get brightness and volume sliders.  Seriously, what the fuck?  Not even a high or low graphics setting.  I would have supplied a screenshot of the options in game but, for whatever reason, I can’t take screenshots in game (it instead gets a picture of my desktop).

I can’t even play the game because it runs like shit and only gets shittier when things blow up.  Thanks Aspyr for ruining yet another game.

Final message directed at companies everywhere: STOP CONTRACTING ASPYR TO PORT YOUR GAMES!!!  Have you honestly never played a game they made (Click here and scroll down to the list of PC games)?  Have you even bothered to look at the sales of games they port compared to the console counterpart?  Has the sales even come close?  Without bothering to research this, I’m going to say no.

Fuck Aspyr.

-Raptor

Are we really doing this, Valve? Are we really going to start acting like every other shitty game developer with their shitty marketing gimmicks to earn a few extra bucks at the extent of the consumer? I mean, I overlooked Left 4 Dead 2 with the “Pre-order now and receive a fucking baseball bat and early demo access”, but giving an offer for TEAM FUCKING FORTRESS 2 just to buy L4D2? There’s a rant I should have made pertaining to the hats in TF2, but I’ve had it so many times with so many other people that posting it here just wouldn’t feel like fresh rage anymore.

Valve, why are you pandering to the casuals that play a SHOOTER for ACCESSORIES? Why are you making yourself out to look like some fat slob of a company that only wants money and pisses on their cust-…

Actually…

Now that I remember it…

Where is HL2EP3?

I guess there’s nothing to see here after all, it’s just Valve being Valve, I guess they have to go get money to feed gabe every hour by any means necessary

-Kekkimaru

I am damning my sheer willpower. I bought Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie for $10, and that was over $9000 too much. I always give a game a little room to improve, but around the half way point, I realized exactly what kind of shit I got myself into.

Crap controls, shitty AI, repetitive and brain-dead puzzles, shitty AI, annoyingly retarded injury “visual effects”, shitty AI, distractingly inappropriate music, and shitty AI. Seriously, half of the fucking game was a glorified escort mission.

Like Haze, it is merely playable. I only finished it for the easy achievements (which are all completion-related), and because it’s 6 hours long. Unless you’re a die hard King Kong fanatic, there is absolutely no reason to choose this over any of the millions of  other FPS games.

Also, professional reviewers can suck my fucking cock for praising yet another shit game.

Well, I’m too busy actually playing borderlands to write a review, so enjoy the pretty box art and contemplate on why you’re not playing it too.

No.

Seriously.

Go play Borderlands RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

Quicky Rating: JESUS CHRIST IT’S IN BOLD, RED LETTERS! GO FUCKING PLAY IT!

~Kekkimaru

Yeah, I know it’s been a long while since an update but get over it.

If you play this game expecting the same simulatory feel that Operation Flashpoint or ArmA has, you will be EXTREMELY disapoint.  If you are even somewhat a fan of OFP or ArmA, you will still be disapoint.  This game is anything but a simulator.  It is another tactical shooter most like Ghost Recon except with shitty AI.  I ran at a bunker of guys with guns blazing and killed them all.  The worse part?  I didn’t even get shot.   Hell, they hardly even shot at me even when I was 5 feet from them!  What else is shitty about this game?  How about the fact you have a HIT DETECTOR!  Last time I checked, our weapons don’t tell us if we hit our target or not.  Also, bullets don’t travel in a straight line regardless of what this game tells you.

What’s nice about this game?  If you are lucky enough to actually get shot, you will bleed out without the help of a medic.

Quicky rating – shit

-Raptor

Haze is a sci-fi first person… shitty ass Halo clone, exclusively for the PlayStation 3. You play Shane Carpenter, a college man retarded enough to join the Mantel army and fight the rebels because he believed the propaganda media. Mantel uses a drug called Nectar to enhance their soldier’s senses and physical ability, which is a gimmick that is more punishing than it is useful. Nectar is limited, and what Nectar does is make you run faster and see enemies easier. That would be fine if you had the option of seeing enemies without it, but the Mantel campaign is made up of intentionally dark levels, there is a constant motion blur, and the resolution is poor enough to be a PS2 game. As if the game wasn’t crippling your vision enough already, there are scripted sequences where you go into “Nectar disruption” mode and it completely blurs your vision and goes black and white, until you pass a certain area.

The core mechanics of this game should be very familiar. You have 2 weapon slots, ammo is displayed on your gun, armor repairs itself, and there are vehicles with bad controls and multiple position options. These features are so angelically original that you could say this game has a halo around it’s head. Lastly, there is almost no variety to be found. There are only 2 types of enemies, 8 types of generic guns (at most), and almost no interesting environments.

Haze simply has no redeeming qualities. Instead of listing the good and the bad, we’re going to do this based on Haze’s standards.

Mediocre: Console shooting controls, originality, variety, graphics.
Abysmal: My god the story, writing and voice acting are HORRIBLE.
Conclusion: Fuck this trash, go play a better game like Dark Sector or Too Human.

There are probably very few people in the world who have played Super Mario World as much as myself.  I’ve grown up playing this game at my grandmothers house when she would babysit me during the summer.  I know every secret and every exploit there is to be known (a few of which I am in the process of recording a video demonstrating).  I picked this up so I could play it on my DS as I was not fully satisfied with the SNES emulator for DS.  I have to say, I was quite disappointed with it.  The difficulty level got lowered from easy to even easier.  A few of the major changes are not going down to little Mario when you get hit while equipped with a cape or flower.  Instead, you just lose the power up and are at big Mario.  Another major change is the addition of the ability to choose who you want to play as.  I remember arguing with my cousins about who would have to play as Luigi (no one likes weegee).  Now, I can easily choose if I want to play as Mario or Luigi for any level.  Normally, this really wouldn’t matter but that’s not the case.  Luigi has actually re-gained his floating ability from Super Mario Bros. 2.  I’m not really complaining about this too much but it just makes the game easy mode.  You don’t even need a feather to float around anymore.  There are also a few bug fixes that are nice.  The real major one I’ve noticed is when bouncing off enemies consecutatively, it doesn’t break.  By break, I mean after you bounce off enough enemies to get 3 extra lives, the message that pops up is gibberish.  Now, it just keeps giving you 3 lives at a time (although the old way gave you more much faster )

Aside from the aforementioned changes and minor changes to Mario and Luigi’s sprites, the game seems to remain fully intact.

I also thought I’d point out, I’m still able to beat the game in under 15 minutes! C:

The Good:  Pretty straight forward port of the SNES version

The Bad: Controls are slightly annoying (the GBA only has 2 buttons + shoulder buttons so this is expected) and the game is much to easy.

Overall Score: 8/10 (The SNES version would have recieved 10/10 in case you were wondering)

Why? Because the Nintendo Wii and DSi are fucking garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love Nintendo. I grew up with the SNES and N64 and I love them to death. I am also one of those odd doods who is a fan of the Gamecube, mainly because of the massive amount of excellent first-party games Nintendo shelled out (Pikmin is greatness). The DS Lite’s touch screen technology works great and the handheld has many great games.

Then the Wii came out. The prospect of using motion to control your games had me excited for a while (It’s Nintendo, what could possibly go wrong?), but now I am damn glad I was never able to pick one up when it first came out. You can read all the little details in my System Comparison, but needless to say, having bought my PS3 before my Wii (and now owning a 360), my experience with the Wii has been entirely underwhelming.

First of all, Nintendo’s game support has been mediocre. The only franchises they care to support are Mario, Metroid, and somewhat Zelda, although TP is a Gamecube game. Sure those franchises are great, but what about F-Zero, Pikmin, Wave Race, 1080, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, and Kirby…? Or how about a brand new franchise that isn’t part of this garbage “Wii <insert>” series that they think fills the void? The last time they made a new real franchise was 8 years ago when they made Pikmin. The sad part about this scenario is that Nintendo actually has the audacity to rerelease Gamecube games under the “New Play Control” label, with minimal improvements, and expect us to take it. You can buy the gamecube games cheaper when used and play them on the Wii anyway. 3rd Party support has been even worse. Games like The Conduit are just plain garbage, and whenever someone says “good for a Wii game”, god kills a kitten, because good for Wii obviously isn’t good enough.

The wiimote is a joke of a controller. I honestly can’t think of an example of when the Wiimote would be functionally better than a normal controller, aside from rails shooters. The motion control is slow and gimmicky, making it useless when the classic or gamecube controller are compatible (which every game should have, but don’t). They obviously know they fucked up because they released the MotionPlus, but I refuse to pay Nintendo even more than the $270 the system costed just for something that should’ve been in the system in the first place, and something I doubt will have much support aside from crappy minigame collections and sports games.

Now let’s talk features. PS360 does what Nintendon’t, and the Wii has never dropped in price. That is all (read comparison).

Now most recently the DSi has come out. What excitement does it provide you may ask? Take the DS Lite, take away support for GBA games, add in 2 shitty cameras with some editting software, then add a game download service that only ever has been supported with clocks and calculators. Wait, that’s not all! The price is the best part, a smooth $180.

It makes me sick that Nintendo has been easily dominating the market.