http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/
Anybody played it? It's amazing- a huge learning curve, but the payoff is fantastic.
For those not in the know, it's a management simulation (it's WAY too detailed to be called a game) in which you start out with a small group of dwarves in the wilderness and must attempt to eke out an existence while supplying your group with food, drink, entertainment and safe housing. The level of detail is insane - each dwarf has all their body parts tracked right down to individual teeth, and this level of environment tracking leads to some incredible interactions - read some stories on the forums for some hilarious stuff that's not scripted but happens due to the sheer detail of the game world.
Random world generation includes erosion algorithms to carve out mountains and rivers, about 1,000 years of history is simulated to generate civilisations and their mythology - it's nuts. A big part of the game is mining rocks, the distributions of which all follow proper geological patterns. Real physics is used throughout the game so if a dwarf's hand is hacked off you can see it go skidding along the ground from the impact.
You can do a crazy amount of stuff in the game, so people challenge themselves to create huge monuments or extravagant killing devices. If there was ever a game where your only limit is your imagination, this is the one.
It's still under (very) active development so there's some really cool stuff being implemented right now - minecarts being a recent addition. Read the development blog on the website linked above for an idea of how ridiculous the game is (in a good way) and some hilarious stories, especially when he's debugging things.
Unfortunately it needs a pretty beastly computer and it's highly CPU-intensive. The graphics by default are ASCII, but plenty of people have developed graphics packs to spruce things up a bit if you want.
I've been playing it for several years now. I'll drift away from it every now and then, but as soon as I get back into it I'm instantly hooked and can't put it down. I must have spent a good couple of hundred hours playing it! It's entirely moddable too, so you can add in extra creatures or make them easier/harder to kill if you want.
Anyway, I can't really cover how amazing this game is here without rambling on for hours. I'd really recommend picking it up and having a go. As I said, the learning curve is steep - mainly due to the interface, but some of the mechanics of the game are pretty complicated - but there's a great wiki and an amazing community on the forums who will help people out straight away, as well as pitching crazy ideas for creating traps to bathe goblins in magma with, or how to set up a gladiatorial arena where you can make captured zombie capybaras fight to the death with your dwarves that have gone insane. Stick with it and you'll be rewarded.
And remember - losing is fun!
Edited on by Wheels2050
I used to have a blog link here. I'll put it back up when the blog has something to read.