Dwarf Fortress is a freeware game with an ASCII graphics – Wait-don’t-leave-it’s-awesome-I-promise – engine and several great user-generated tilesets that make it look as good as anything on the N64 ever did. It’s an amazing hybrid of a game, combining the basics of SimCity, Oregon Trail, the Sims, and Civilization; there is no “winning”, there is only maintaining an increasingly-bizarre kingdom of drunken surly dwarves with very particular demands.
“Why on earth,” you’re asking yourself, “would I want to play a game with N64 graphics on my PC?”
Let me outline a quick example of the depth of play and I think you’ll know whether it’s for you. I dug out a bedroom for one of my dwarves in granite because I knew he liked granite. I had one of my engravers carve murals into the walls and floors, and then I placed a nice bed, a cabinet, and a chest into the room. Making the bed alone required the services of a woodcutter, a lumber-hauling peasant, and a carpenter. The other two pieces of furniture were slightly easier to make. Anyway, so I finish engraving the room, and a few (game) days later I notice that my dwarf is unhappy. He’s been drinking good booze (brewed from plants which I grew, into barrels made in my carpenter’s shop…) and enjoying his job as a mason, but he’s very upset nonetheless. I can’t find anything obvious in his likes and dislikes, but then on a hunch, I examine the engravings in his room. One of them is an engraving of him fighting a bunch of cave spiders. I check his likes and dislikes again – ack, cave spiders? He hates 'em!
I move him into an adjacent room of similar quality, and hire a different engraver (who is not infatuated with cave spiders) to do the artwork. I double-check that the murals are cave-spider-free. His mood improves measurably, and a few days later the items created at his stoneworking shop show a marked improvement in quality and value.
In short: you grow food, you brew booze, you mine stones and ores, you train and equip an army, you trade with caravans, and you begin to earn a reputation abroad for the decadence of your fortress. You attract migrants (and their pets), nobles, and invading armies as your reputation grows; feed the migrants (and keep their kittens from overpopulating the fortress), satisfy the nobles’ capricious demands, and slaughter wave after wave of goblins & kobolds. The silliness that happens along the way will have you laughing, wincing, and tearing out your hair.
(ETA: I recommend getting the latest Mike Mayday graphics pack and spending an hour or two at the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, the user-maintained user manual - jumping right in is sure to confuse and frustrate you.)
