Free Games What Need Playing: Kingdom of Star Dwarves Edition

Welcome one and all to another CFD! bi-weekly feature! This here is our new bi-weekly report on free games. Not just free games, but free games that are exceptionally awesome and you need to play. Basically, they’re Free Games What Need Playing.

Some may be browser-based and others might require a download, but they’re all free and very much worth your time. They won’t all be brand-spanking new, but just because they’ve been floating around the internet for a while doesn’t mean everyone has heard of them before, right? So with that in mind, I present to you this week’s Games What Need Playing.

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Slaves to Armok: God of Blood – Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress

(http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/)

As I watched my wife and her digging partner hollow out more tunnels that would eventually become the “cheap” migrant living quarters I received an urgent warning message. My hunter, Bayonetta, was unconscious. But how? Did she fall off a cliff? Pass out from malnutrition? Bang her head on a rock? I quickly tapped a few keys and zoomed to her location: she was fighting a cougar. I un-paused the game, hoping that maybe the cougar would just leave her there and I might get someone to her in time to bring her broken and bleeding form back to the fort and possibly keep her alive. She died about five seconds later. I dug through the records and realized what had happened: she was indeed out hunting, but I had neglected to give her a weapon. So she had attempted to wrestle the vicious beast barehanded. I did a little more digging and discovered that she also had been sharing a room with another dwarf. One whom she’d married and had a child with recently. “Man,” I thought, “when word gets out, Eddie Riggs is gonna go berserk.”

It’s not exactly a new game, but there are still far too many people in the world who’ve never heard of Dwarf Fortress. For the uninitiated, it’s basically the most comprehensive and expansive (among other “-ives”) fantasy sandbox world ever created. And it’s still technically in its developmental infancy with new versions containing various bug fixes and updates being uploaded constantly. Oh, and it uses ASCII graphics which can be both a huge turn-off and a mind-blowing retro homage. But don’t let that scare you off as there are a ton of fan made custom graphic sets that can ease you in to the nitty gritty.

So what exactly do you do in Dwarf Fortress? Whatever you want, really. The main game mode will procedurally generate a world for you, then it’s just a matter of outfitting your dwarven settlers, finding a good spot to build a fortress and getting your hands dirty. Of course there’s much more to it than that. The world generation itself is a glorious impossibility; creating a huge map with various terrains, ecosystems and other particulars, then simulating hundreds of years worth of history (which you can actually read about later, no less). You’ll watch kingdoms develop, fight each other, flourish and fall as the years speed on by, leaving behind ruins ripe for exploration or re-development if you so choose.

So once you have your site selected you’ll spend the rest of your game issuing jobs to your dwarves and watching them do them. Most of the time. You see, each individual dwarf is in fact an individual, and some of them (i.e. most of them) will often wander off in search of companionship, food or booze. If you can imagine the simulated life of a soon-to-be left in a pool with no exit ladder Sim from (what else?) The Sims, it’s kind of like that. Only less kid friendly and actually even more lifelike. Only without the semi-realistic graphics.

Dwarf Fortress is an incredibly complex game, and those who are considering plumbing its depths would do well to check out the forums and various tutorials before playing as it’s virtually impossible to “wing it,” but it’s also an amazing triumph of game design. If you get bored of (or intimidated by) the main mode you can also play around with the adventure mode which is more like a classic old-school ASCII RPG and will allows you to explore your newly generated world (including any old fortresses you may have created/lost) from a more focused perspective. And it’ll give you some incredibly amusing stories to tell people.

Star Guard

(http://vacuumflowers.com/star_guard/star_guard.html)

Guide the spaceman through the castle and defeat the wizard.

By all rights it makes absolutely no sense. Spaceman? Castle? Wizard?? No sense. But wrapped inside of this oddball game with the Atari graphics and sound is a fun and surprisingly beautiful action platformer. Star Guard‘s unique personality oozes through its animations and quirky character designs. Your lone hero isn’t actual “lone,” as he’s got a small platoon of buddies that will pop up throughout each level. It’s a neat little touch that adds quite a bit to the overall feel of the game. Sometimes they’ll die, other times they’ll actually help, but it all depends on whether or not you attempt to keep them alive in the first place. It’s controls are spot-on, too, as opposed to the “Almost, but not quite” nature of most other indie games in the genre, although I do find myself occasionally mixing up the Jump and Shoot buttons during heated firefights.

You have unlimited lives and some fairly liberal checkpoints in each level, but the real challenge comes in attaining high scores. You’re rated on time, kills and deaths, and as you’d expect, the idea is to make it through as fast as possible while killing everything and avoiding your own demise. The bite-sized levels (nine in all) can be played over and over again in Trial Mode to perfect your scores, but you have to unlock each level in Story Mode before you can start jumping to whichever one you choose. There’s also a Hard Mode if you’re feeling brave, but the normal setting is perfectly challenging enough for my taste.

I can’t stress enough just how shockingly “modern” this decidedly old-looking game really is. It’s in your best interest to download and play this game as soon as you’re able to. Assuming you can pull yourself away from Dwarf Fortress, that is.

Kingdom of Loathing

(http://www.kingdomofloathing.com)

It may seem a little weird to be mentioning Kingdom of Loathing, as it’s fairly insanely popular, but our very own Rob Thomas has demonstrated that there are indeed a handful of people in the world who have never crafted a meat car or delved into the depths of the Haiku Dungeon. For the sake of these cursed souls, we present you with a quirky, goofy, odd and free browser-based MMO.

At its core Kingdom of Loathing is pretty much your typical MMO. You’ll hunt mobs for loot and experience, complete NPC quests, craft your own items and contribute to the player-driven economy. However, there are a few gigantic differences to be found. First and foremost, you’re given Adventures every day. Adventures are a sort of renewable resource that allows you to perform different actions throughout the day such as fighting, crafting and more fighting. Every night you’ll “recharge” and gain more Adventures (with a maximum of 200), but once you use them up you’ll have to wait until the next rollover. There are items and rare equipment that can bestow you with more adventures, but even with these magical trinkets and stockpiles of booze (yes, booze) you’ll eventually run out. Or get completely shit-faced and stumble around drunk until the following day.

Even with these limitations, the game is an absolute joy to play thanks to its sense of humor. Everything in the game is either a crudely drawn stick figure or a crudely drawn something else, but a surprising amount of personality can be seen in each and every character and creature. You also pay for everything with (and make everything out of) meat. That’s right, meat is the currency of the Kingdom of Loathing. And it’s spectacular. Couple this goofy art style with some video game satire and full-on silliness and you’ll start to get a better idea of just why the game is so popular.

As with any free-to-play online game, there are ways they attempt to entice you to pay. In this case, making a donation will get you a Mr. Accessory, which is an accessory (duh) that not only bestows you with some nice benefits but can also be traded for other rare and desirable items. It’s by no means a necessity to purchase one of these smiling buttons (Pins? Patches?), but they do help. Still, I’ve been playing my Turtle Tamer, now a level 9 Bullfrog Overseer, for well over two years (off and on for extended periods of time. It doesn’t actually take that long to level) and have yet to pay a single cent. Not that I don’t want to, as I feel the developers deserve all kinds of compensation, I just hardly play at the moment and don’t have much disposable income.

If you’re still not sure, or you’re thinking about it but will probably forget and let this recommendation fade into the obscurity of your subconscious, please allow me to make one last attempt to convince you. The following is an encounter quoted verbatim from the Limerick Dungeon (found inside the Dungeon Full of Dungeons):