Dwarf Fortress - a new tempting time-waster?
Recently I read an article in the german webzine Telepolis about a quite unusual game, Dwarf Fortress. At first I thought, well yeah another of this small games which would be able to entertain me for an hour or two but after reading the article and digging through the games website and wiki it really seems to turn out as a huge enjoyment.
In fact, this game doesn't have fancy graphics or an easy user interface, quite the contrary. You have to cope with a, at first at least, disturbing ASCII-graphics-interface and an unintuitive menu system. But these hurdles are soon forgotten when one gets into the extremely deep environment where one cannot directly control the dwarfs but rather tell them what to do. If they then really follow your orders depends on the current state of the dwarf as well as his mood and running orders. The complex interactions between the many elements of this yet-to-leave-alpha-status game seem like the individuality of a hundred Tamagotchis thrown together and distilled.
I'm not completely able to express my curiousness about this game so I'd rather like to point you to this small introduction and the followup posts on that in the archives of that page. You have to read the posts from bottom to top, sorry 'bout that. Also have a look at the Dwarf Fortress Wiki for more info.
Update: Also, I imagine if someone unfamiliar is watching someone other playing DF it must look like as if the player is looking at the Matrix itself. I really have to take care, that I wait with digging deeper into Dwarf Fortress until my exams are over this weekend.