Since I’ve bagged on about Matrix Games before and their high prices, I feel I should give them some credit when it’s due. Latest news is that the prices on games by Panther Games have dropped! Yes, you can get Battles from the Bulge for $60 instead of $80, Conquest of the Aegean for $40 instead of $60 and Highway t he Reich for $20 instead of $50.
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 1,100,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 47 days for that many people to see it.
In 2010, there were 53 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 129 posts. There were 175 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 119mb. That’s about 3 pictures per week.
The busiest day of the year was June 10th with 8 views. The most popular post that day was The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 1: “WTF?”.
The top referring sites in 2010 were bay12forums.com, df.magmawiki.com, stumbleupon.com, bay12games.com, and reddit.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for dwarf fortress tutorial, dwarf fortress guide, how to play dwarf fortress, dwarf fortress, and dwarf fortress tileset.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 1: “WTF?” February 2009
214 comments and 3 Likes on WordPress.com
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 2: “No, srsly, WTF?!” February 2009
102 comments
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 3: “Dwarf whatnow?” February 2009
32 comments
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 4: “It almost makes sense!” February 2009
45 comments
The Complete and Utter Newby Tutorial for Dwarf Fortress – Part 7: “A Mighty Fortress!” February 2009
47 comments
Die2Nite is an interesting web-based multiplayer game currently in beta. Built by French developer, Motion Twin, Die2Nite sees the player as one of forty zombie apocalypse survivors holed up in a town in a desert wasteland. Your job, each day, is to scrounge for the items your town needs to survive, to build the structures and defences required to keep the zombies out (they attack at midnight each night) and to keep a close eye on your fellow survivors – any of whom could seriously imperil your survival through incompetence or conscious effort! The good folks over at RockPaperShotgun have a decent write-up on the game, but the best way to find out about it is to play it, and to that end I have thirty beta keys for you to use!
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ServantCorps, who previously posted an AAR for the old game Conflict:MEPS, is now revisiting another old game, Hidden Agenda. Read along as he tries to subvert a game about rebuilding a banana republic in his “Lets Horribly Break Hidden Agenda” Lets Play!
Been playing a bit of League of Legends recently and I’m recommending to all my readers and buddies. It’s by the people behind DOTA, perhaps the most popular Warcraft III mod ever made, and it’s quite similar in style to the original. Players take a hero and then with their team mates must bash the enemy heroes on a colourful map populated by towers and creeps (NPCs advancing towards the enemy). League of Legends is totally free to play and although you can buy “Riot Points” to accelerate the unlocking of new heroes, skins, etc, they aren’t necessary and Riot rotate the heroes you can select for free every week anyway, providing a lot of variety for your no-dollars-down.
So why not give it a try? The link is a referral one that will give bugger all, I expect, but other than that, click-through and grab the free client and give the game a whirl! I did, and it’s a great game to slip in between more serious pursuits.
If you’ve not heard of Minecraft yet then where have you been? It has rapidly gathered a lot of indie game design love from people around the world, so much so that the developer, Notch, is reportedly having to convince PayPal that $600,000 is really the kind of money a same game developer can earn!
In essence, Minecraft is Dwarf Fortress as a single-player 3D experience (though you can collaboratively build on multiplayer servers as well). It’s very much a sandbox game and one with enough charm and sense of discovery to make the game a real experience, even at this early stage of development (Notch considers it an Alpha).
If you want to learn more than the good folks over at RockPaperShotgun are here to help you. They have started a new player AAR that is well worth the read. Start at the bottom of that page and work your way up. It’s a good read and it’s a great wee game!
Jeux Video has posted a French translation of my Complete and Utter Newby Tutorials for Dwarf Fortress. At least, I think he has! I don’t speak French, so what do I know?
One of the challenges of getting into Dwarf Fortress is that there are a lot of great mods, tools and additions that the new player won’t know about or could find daunting to install. To help people get over the hump LucasUP on the Dwarf Fortress forums has put together the Lazy Newb Pack. There is some great stuff in there; tools and utilities I hadn’t heard of, so I suggest you go have a look! Now might finally be the time to get into the new, 2010 version!
Kevin Snow has written, and George Kavallines has illustrated (SomethingAwful forum regulars?) a fantastic Dwarf Fortress AAR on the go over at Bravemule. The AAR is filled with fine art and great story telling as well as 3D representations of the map using Stonesense. It is well worth a read, especially as it’s written in a very Dwarf Fortressy style. Me, I love the Cat Missing picture a couple of pages in. So cute! And terrifying.
What’s better than Dwarf Fortress? Zombies! What could be better than Zombies? A Dwarf Fortress-style game about Zombies! Enter, Rogue Survivor. I haven’t had a chance to play yet – and the game is quite early in development, but it looks like it could be a lot of fun to try out. Go give it a shot!
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