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Anomaly, kenshi.
Garry’s Mod…. what a rabbit hole that was…
Dwarf fortress
So like, yes, I totally agree.
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.
This, sadly, is no longer true for the Steam version of the game. It comes with a (pretty good) tile-set, which is enabled by default.
I still think, the old ASCII art and keyboard-centric UI was better, but well…
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.
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 😉.
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!
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:
Wow! It does take some brain training to start seeing something more, but after watching a couple of minutes i can totally relate!
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).
https://youtu.be/9ejgsGgH__M?si=RFsdfaKLiCgjhr7p
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.
I feel like I’m missing something, what does the title mean?
Games that maybe don’t look the best or maybe older, but it doesn’t matter because the gameplay runs deep
Abiotic Factor. Looks like it should have come out in the early 2000s, but so tight.
Super Metroid
… 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.
Nioh 2
Another point for Nioh 2. Still the single best souls-like for pure gameplay if you give it the chance.
Truly, a gift that keeps on giving for 200 hours. And it somehow has replay value.
Sekiro for me, for similar reasons.
Both these games look good? Sekiro is beautiful
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.
arcadey
Only from the perspective of Orbiter and Elite Dangerous maybe.
I’ve been chasing the high from Elite Dangerous on my HOSAS setup for years. Thankfully, the recent updates have breathed some new life into the game.
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.
Has been on my to-try list. The old one I mean, I don’t have the new.
Been looking for a spiritual successor for 25 years but nothing scratches that itch.
With that said the game is widely unbalanced and full of totally broken strategies, which somehow doesn’t make it less fun.
Endless Lege—naw, forget about it.
A game I played as a youth, but was bought and killed by Sony that has been resurrected by passionate devs
Infantry Online https://www.freeinfantry.com/
OMFG! YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Medieval 2: Total War
Also, Backpack Hero
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It’s the Dwarf Fortress of zombie survival games.
Factorio.
He said game, not crack sir.
Cackles in 5700 hours worth
Okay, then Cities Skylines 2.
Lemmings. Always Lemmings. !lemmings@lemmings.world
I always hated it as a kid. All hundred iterations of it, despite always playing with them a little.
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.
