How LC Squandered His Friday:

[Lmns Crn]

I built dwarf fortresses.

I don't know what to say about this game, except that it's incredible. You command a handful of dwarves as they carve a mighty hall out of the side of a mountain, gradually turning it from a tiny settlement into a grand civilization. (Okay, so most of the time, it seems to spiral down into hilarious catastrophe instead.)

The way it works is a lot more sophisticated than the graphics might lead you to believe. There's a very complicated set of crafting processes you can put together, and you can make all sorts of fine dwarven goods to trade to the caravans that come visit. The game remembers what's happened, so your craftsmen will decorate items with scenes of the past. (So if you do poorly, you may have some really nice engravings of dwarves that are on fire and/or being slaughtered by elephants.)

I recommend that you try it out. Strike the earth!

[Raelifin]

I tried that a while ago and the user interface coupled by the lack of instructions left me very confused and frustrated. It looks like such a cool game in theory, but figuring out how to do things like make/move beds and doors and stuff was entirely too painful for me.

[Lmns Crn]

Yeah, I've been relying heavily on the wiki  for assistance.

I'm so close to being able to smelt steel! If only my craftsdwarf hadn't gone on an insane, murderous rampage incited by lack of choicest ores! :(

[Ivar]

I too gave this game an hour or two worth of "try" and I couldn't get past the interface and graphics...which is a shame because it seems like such a cool concept and game.

[the_taken]

Strange. One of their "features" is "Extended ASCII character set rendered in 16 colors (including black) as well as 8 background colors (including black)." Now, how much work do you have to put in to displaying letters before you consider it a selling point of your product?

And only 8 background colours? WTF would that matter?

Edit->  Next time, I'll look at the screen shots before commenting.

[Raelifin]

I think what Bay 12 needs to do is release the source. This would let people add art (which might take away some of the novelty, but I think would be a good idea, generally) and write a tutorial function into the main game.

Open source = solves everything. :P