I’m not big on computer games. Usually “I don’t have the time” to deal with them. Or rather, spending so much time on the computer at work, I’m quickly fed up with sitting on the computer. Also, I get frustrated quickly at times, when I can’t make progress or repeatedly fail. So I usually only play computer games on vacation.

So, as for games I played (recently-ish)? Roughly sorted by time last played ascending:

  • Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in my childhood (in no specific order):
    • Civilization 1, 2. Yes, the original one! If I remember correctly, I always got destroyed sooner or later… - FreeCiv is an open source game inspired by it.
    • 3D Pinball Space Cadet. I spent hours on that one. Never quite succeeding on hitting the targets…
    • Anno 1602. I think the first game I searched for cheats to improve my chances… - Unknown Horizons is a similar game in open source. 3
    • SimCity 2000 4 - LinCity-NG is a similar open source game.
    • Need For Speed III
    • Empire Earth (quite like Age Of Empires, as I found out later) - As far as open source goes, 0 A.D. is probably the closest?
    • “Die Völker” (apparently, “Alien Nations” in English, “The Nations” was actually the sequel. Yeah, what?). I sunk quite some time into that one as well.
    • “Funk-Flitzer”, which was on a “Mickey Maus” comic magazine. Go search for “3-D Ultra Radio Control Racers”.
    • Worms 2 - Hedgewars seems to be the open source alternative.
    • Moorhuhn, Winter Edition
  • Sometime later deep in the past: Minecraft (I stopped way before Microsoft acquired it), recently followed by Minetest, or rather, Luanti (Though, “it’s just not the same anymore”. I’m not sure what exactly it is, maybe my changed mindset, maybe I liked the original soundtrack and game elements more…).
  • Starbound, very shortly
  • OpenTTD: Trains and buses! Though, admittedly, I never quite “got it” (why do you have to manually “park” passengers on train stations, instead of unloading them completely, so they continue taking the train?)
  • Dwarf Fortress. Go with LNP if you wanna give it a try, or the Steam version.
  • Stardew Valley (on Android tablet)
  • Factorio - Shaking my head over the people arguing over how to perfectly optimize everything ;). I disabled biters in recent play-throughs, it got to annoying for me.
  • Terraria. Another one where I had to resort to the Wiki for the bosses.
  • Cattails: Wildwood Story. Got through the main story, had to resort to YouTube for looking up how to beat the final boss.
  • Turing Complete
  • And, the most recent one, dotAge

The latter 5 one is a “turn-based village builder”, with challenges. I guess I can kinda compare it to Dwarf Fortress, as in, it can be incredibly hard, and you have to build a civilization 6 and take care of it, as in terms of food and drink, for example. Only you don’t have to deal with goblin or forgotten beast invasion, but, basically, nature. And DF doesn’t have tech research… Okay, maybe they’re not comparable after all.

The first play-throughs are rather rough, since you will only unlock additional content, such as farming, with play time. So your first villages will cease to exist quite quickly, I think. That’s expected. Probably to show you the failure modes?

From personal experience: Don’t build some new buildings too quickly. The game allows you to build them even though they’re “useless” at that specific point in the game, and you need additional tech research to make them usable.

Screenshot of the game dotAge, of fairly early game play.

  1. Go drop archive.org a small donation, won’t you? ↩

  2. You can actually still play it thanks to DOSBox ↩

  3. Not sure about the current state. The port to the Godot engine seems still to be a WIP. Last blog post is quite some time ago, but the GitHub repo is active. ↩

  4. I didn’t like SimCity 3000 as much. And don’t get me started with Cities: Skylines. ↩

  5. Yes, kinda unfair I only go into detail into one. I wanted to start “reviewing” only this one, but then thought, “well, might as well list all games I played so far”. Maybe that’s a chance for future blog posts. ↩

  6. General advice seems to be not to go over 50 in dotAge. In Dwarf Fortress, you have to deal with the pesky Nobles instead. Something similar seems to exist in dotAge as well? ↩