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I’m fairly sure that Dwarf Fortress is a secret government project to locate mad people. Anyone who can not simply comprehend but appreciate something so archaic in presentation and labyrinthine in gameplay has probably got their name on a list somewhere. One day they’re to be recruited to help design a new atomic bomb that cures cancer and defeats Space Nazis or something. Fifty years later the biopics they inspire will sweep the film award season and give us cause to consider that maybe international surveillance and secret government projects aren’t to be feared after all. This all might seem far fetched to you but it makes more sense to me than Dwarf Fortress being a thing someone made for other people to have fun playing.
Anyway, Rimworld is like Dwarf Fortress except it’s actually possible for tiny brained simpletons to enjoy. A small group of adults crashland on an earth-like planet and must try to survive long enough to build a new spaceship and get the fuck back to civilisation. Unlike the bloke from Factorio the people in this game require food, shelter, sleep, medicine, clothing as well as tedious shit like love and validation from others. Perhaps best summarised as Don’t Starve meets The Sims (Simsworld, perhaps?). Oh yeah and occasionally you get attacked by roving dipshits.
Once you start playing a dumptruck will unload an imperial fuckton of statistics and interface options onto your poor brain but after about 30 minutes and some slightly helpful tutorial messages I found I could tackle the initial learning hump. Rimworld is a game of minutiae, a game where the designers started working on mechanics and systems and never bloody stopped. Once you figure out the basics of food and resource gathering you’ll quickly assume a comfortable rhythm of growth and discovery that I’m sure leads somewhere fulfilling. I wouldn’t know, I can hardly get my colonies very far before some awful shit goes down.
Rimworld’s greatest quality, I’d argue, is its storytelling aspect. Not traditionally I mean, rather that anyone who plays it can regale you of all the weird and funny shit that went down. Here’s some of mine. I started one colony with a team of three randomly generated adults, two of them ladies and the third a shirtless bloke with high Melee skill with the trait ‘Dislikes women’. In another playthrough I had someone with a trait that compelled them to start fires but for some reason he kept trying to do it while it was raining. My first playthrough had a walking blimp of a man with the traits Nudist and Gay, and when I noticed the tailoring workbench could create a cowboy hat we had ourselves a faaaaaaaaaaabulous new sheriff!
But it can also get proper bleak when it wants to. I imprisoned one from a group of nearby raiders and converted them to my side. They got into what the game called a ‘social fight’ that ended with the new guy killing one of the old guys and immediately dragging him into a grave I had on standby. The deceased’s mum just started wandering around in a psychotic daze, the killer left unpunished as he’s now just one of the lads. In another run I was busy mining out a mountain of compacted steel before I noticed a constructed wall buried within the minerals. Curious, I cracked it open only to find a mad doctor and his army of killer robots was just fucking waiting for someone to dig too greedily and too deep and immediately they slaughtered all my guys like it was the fucking Balrog.
I think the emotional connection works in the game not because the characters transcend their role as tiny computer people but because they’re the only resource that doesn’t replenish itself easily. You go to an awful lot of effort learning what your dudes are capable of, mold their homes and workspaces, feed them, cloth them tend their boo-boos when the mean nasty raiders come to visit, day in day out and in a flash it’s all torn away from you. And you can’t just go to the pet shelter to pick out a replacement human that’s not how survivalism works.
I must confess pretty much whenever anyone died I considered that playthrough a wash. Peak emotional devastation occurred when a woman got badly wounded in a raid. We ran out of medicine to treat all her injuries so she developed an infection that could not be treated. She lived out her last hours in a trance, completely detached from the world around her as the groups only doctor looked on helplessly. Those two had just announced their engagement a few days prior. Fuck, how’m I supposed to load up that save file ever again?
Rimworld is a game about building sandcastles with your back to the encroaching waves. No, fuck that metaphor, Rimworld is a game about the meaninglessness of existence, the futility of all endeavour. There is no lasting happiness in this universe, everything will die and be claimed by entropy. Ultimate fulfillment is a goal that is forever shifting, never truly attainable at least not for long. Why not bombard yourself with petty entertainments, to distract you twixt cradle and cadaver? All you strive to be will be as dust.
……
I guess Rimworld’s ok then.
Have a pleasant week everyone.
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Always make cowboy hats never not make cowboy hats. Dieing from a power cable blowing up inside the habitat and starting a fire that kills everyone as they sleep is best way to die.
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Japan11800 Posts
Makes me want to play this game and get raided by roving dipshits.
In another run I was busy mining out a mountain of compacted steel before I noticed a constructed wall buried within the minerals. Curious, I cracked it open only to find a mad doctor and his army of killer robots was just fucking waiting for someone to dig too greedily and too deep and immediately they slaughtered all my guys like it was the fucking Balrog.
I lost it right here.
Thanks for the hilarious read sir.
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Good read.
Is your profession related to writing or at least do you consider it passion ? If it isnt , you certainly can make it somewhere in the creative writing industry.
Now i have no idea if i like the game or your writing. Somehow I cant stand the idea of me liking pixelated graphics game. It looks so ... blehh
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No, just a hobby. Can't imagine it developing into a profession unless I get stupid lucky, this is just for a bit of fun really.
Also, yay positive feedback, woo. Thanks.
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I have enjoyed playing Rimworld a lot over the past year or so.
I did die once when every squirrel on the map went mad, pissed off a group of people that were visiting and then turned on me. The visiting group took this rodent assault as a slight against them from me and joined in in gleefully beating the crap out of the colonists that had survived the tiny, tiny claws.
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5/5 would definitely enjoy more of your Rimworld Adventures!
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You're a good writer. 5/5.
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I enjoyed your post and just ended up ranting at you.
This seems great to me. It's evocative of my desires that usually fester IRL where I live in a sort of hyperspace trance. Every few weeks, months, days, or years I'll transform into a monster who joins the church of Satan plots the deaths of thousands and then watches in real time as it happens to someone somewhere else on the planet. It's all very Wiifi and most people don't pay any attention to it. It really doesn't worry me and I don't think that any real consequences are ever enacted against people who like me were born with a sort of virulent form of downsyndrome. It isn't real downsnydrome but it does function in this or that way isolating and curtailing various forms of psychosocial illness. Of course there are some gamers with this problem too.
Usually what happens is exactly like your story. People are too into role-playing in the casual gamer's opinion and sometimes the basis for a character is more important in some significant sense. Like the only purpose for this character's existence is to utterly annihilate kill and bring to fruition the plans of someone prestigious and who most people hold in high regard. Of course here we're looking at a plot twist if anyone opens door #3 which is always opened because plot-twist.
Anyway having arrived at plot-twist X in my own personal story or campaign line I then delve deeply into the idea of becoming a Satanist, acquiring lots of sex money and power and then quickly using my intellect I try to eliminate most hostile people and gradually find myself in a 5D world of avatars and aeons, aeons and K-pOp and then think about how my avatar can transform itself gradually over time into an aeon-avatar utopia. That usually fails and so then I go back and cancel my human life, begin a new aeon / new avatar and try to consider the most effective ways to torture people eternally. I wanted to live my life forever in Final Fantasy but never could either because clothing retailers are as bad as you say or because the people in charge of Final Fantasy are somehow not participating with the rest of us in some important way. Are they really living their Fantasy and why is it always do or die? Know I not but it seems like a dangerous scenario for anyone and everyone.
I think I wouldn't have these tendencies if not for niche experiences like the torturous conversion process of N->R or N->I, various different localities and pluralities of sim-Gods trying to make their way toward a more luminous future. I can see I'm part colour-blind. Sim-God obvious drives me fucking crazy and brings out the old Irish-Scotch battles in the extreme. Normally we eschew the role of religious conversion here and I do too. There will always be someone like me whose simple archetype, given the proper burial as you say, becomes increasingly restrictive in his behavior "no one would do this."
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No government is recruiting me :/...
Yoko was/is MK Ultra though.
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Your reviews of video games are well written and creative. If you ever decide to stop being a progamers, I really think you should get into writing.
I laughed throughout this one and the previous one (about Evolve and some other game).
Your descriptions bring up some very vivid images, and really explain the pros/cons of a game without being boring or obvious.
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I got Rimworld recent. It's a fun game.
One of my first rolls I got a fun trio: father and son, where the father started dating the son's ex wife.
the woman died of an infection, and the son ended up shooting the father on a rampage and headshot him.
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lol great review. Just got me to spend $30... keen to check it out
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On August 02 2016 03:25 QuanticHawk wrote:
I got Rimworld recent. It's a fun game.
One of my first rolls I got a fun trio: father and son, where the father started dating the son's ex wife.
the woman died of an infection, and the son ended up shooting the father on a rampage and headshot him.
Oh come on! You really wanna make me buy this game??? Arghgh
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On August 03 2016 00:22 Harris1st wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2016 03:25 QuanticHawk wrote:
I got Rimworld recent. It's a fun game.
One of my first rolls I got a fun trio: father and son, where the father started dating the son's ex wife.
the woman died of an infection, and the son ended up shooting the father on a rampage and headshot him.
Oh come on! You really wanna make me buy this game??? Arghgh
hahah. I balked at the price for an indie game, but I've already sunk 45 hours in a couple weeks.
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On August 03 2016 03:58 QuanticHawk wrote:Show nested quote +On August 03 2016 00:22 Harris1st wrote:On August 02 2016 03:25 QuanticHawk wrote:
I got Rimworld recent. It's a fun game.
One of my first rolls I got a fun trio: father and son, where the father started dating the son's ex wife.
the woman died of an infection, and the son ended up shooting the father on a rampage and headshot him.
Oh come on! You really wanna make me buy this game??? Arghgh hahah. I balked at the price for an indie game, but I've already sunk 45 hours in a couple weeks.
I'm trying to decide between Fallout 4 and this both at $30...
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EPT
