In Brief: Two Freeware Gems for the PC

Madness Interactive, based on the meaninglessly violent Flash animation series, is a 2D arcade shooter with a distinctive look and relentlessly frenetic and difficult gameplay. It is available at the creator's website. I strongly advise you to download the standalone fullscreen executable version, because the inline browser version is crippled by the mouse moving outside of the gameplay window.

Why do I find this trifle so fascinating? It is an FPS distilled into its quintessence, all superfluities removed. It's a casual game, accessible on the first playthrough (it uses the WSAD controls standard on first-person shooters since the original Half-Life), but the difficulty level is such that I have beaten the game only once in my life. Give it a try and see if you can stop playing it, because it is a superior game to the vast majority of commercial first-person shooters released in the past decade. (If you start to get bored, try playing it with some cheats enabled!)

On the opposite end of the complexity spectrum is Dwarf Fortress, a game that I first encountered in the UK edition of PC Gamer in December 2006. It was in alpha at that point. It is still in development. This is not a bad thing, as it is fully playable and has been for years. It is probably the most in-depth simulation I have ever encountered in my twenty years of gaming, yet at the same time it does not suffer from the "spreadsheet syndrome" endemic among hardcore roleplaying and strategy games because the world has so much personality. Oh, and it's in text mode. Yep. 16-color ASCII. This way, the focus is entirely on gameplay. Graphical overlays are available from the community, but the original "graphics" are iconic and quickly grow on most players.

The game generates a unique world with every new game, and the objective of the player is either to construct a thriving dwarven cave city out of trackless wilderness (so-called "Fortress mode") or travel about the countryside slaying monsters (in the more traditionally Roguelike "Adventure mode"). What I just said does absolutely nothing to convey the true depth of this game. The developers are extemely ambitious, and this project shows no signs of petering out.

Exercise caution. This game's learning curve is more of a precipice, so be prepared to die frequently and read lots of in-game help, wikipedia entries (currently a little out of date, but still useful) and forum posts. Remember Oregon Trail, how it was fun even when half of your family died of dysentery or drowned trying to ford a river? It's like that, except with volcanoes, goblin child-snatchers, cave-ins, rampaging elephants, and dwarves going insane and murdering their best friends before starving to death. The unofficial motto of the game is "losing is fun." To see one example of why, check out the [in]famous SomethingAwful.com succession game: the saga of Boatmurdered. You will laugh even you don't give a shit about Dwarf Fortress and never want to play it.