After about two years, Dwarf Fortress – the most intricate world-simulation sandbox ever – has seen a major release, and an astonishing amount has been added to the game. New additions include new plants and animals, more complex trees, more interesting fortress reclamation, more detailed civilisation, social, and political models, and much, much more.
Arx Fatalis is actually really rather a cool game. Think Ultima Underworld, fully jazzed up and with a nifty story full of surprising twists. I might produce a review of it at some later stage.
Arx isn’t a new game by any stretch of the imagination, being more than eight years old, and it had persistent performance issues except in the lower resolutions and on some specific hardware. Nevertheless, a patch (1.21) suddenly appeared which fixes all of that – although it actually maybe feels a little fast now.
Apparently it is the final patch for Arx Fatalis, but it is accompanied by the source-code under the GPL 3 (with a couple minor exceptions).
Something a little unusual this time around. One that you can play right away.
From the very skilled – and I might even be inclined to suggest ‘artistic’ and ‘spectacular’ – Andrew Plotkin comes a sterling piece of short interactive fiction. It’s compact and lovely, and not too difficult.
Seven dwarfs, a wagon with tools and supplies, and a landscape rich in raw materials. Set up a colony, protect your dwarfs, expand and grow rich.
That’s Dwarf Fortress, perhaps the deepest and most intricate sandbox simulation game I’ve seen, and I have been meaning to write it up for a long time.
Where did this come from?
While it’s not really very complete, Energy Tycoon has come quite a long way in production and polish without seeming to catch much attention.