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Ugly Game? No, Beautiful Story

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PC title Dwarf Fortress may well be one of the ugliest video games of all time. It does make for one hell of a lovely picture book, though.

An introduction: before there was Minecraft, there was Dwarf Fortress. It's part world-builder, part-RPG and in its raw state, played using ASCII art as though we'd never left the 1980s.

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Don't sell the game short on its visual shortcomings, though; it's a deep game, and a thriving community has sprung up around it, at its lightest serving as the glue that holds an otherwise primitive game world together — at its densest coming up with stuff like this: Matul Remrit, the illustrated tale of one particular game of Dwarf Fortress.

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Of all the things I love about video games, this is thing I love most. Games that set their claws so deeply inside someone that they don't just play it, they live it, coming up with stuff like this in their spare time.

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Below is a trailer for the story; you can read the thing here, or here, and you can check out Dwarf Fortress here.

[thanks Kevin!]