Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is an amazingly original game. It's basically a city builder (ignoring Adventurer mode, as I do), but with the best procedurally generated, umm, everything, of any game I've ever heard of. Yes, this includes Spore (which isn't out here yet, but there's been much written on its procedural generation, so I'm fairly confident here). Yes, I'm serious. Every single dwarf (of which there can be hundreds) and every animal and every monster is managed individually, on the fly, transparently. For the dwarves at least, the game rolls up a personality and uses that personality to interact with everything around them, constantly. The terrain is procedurally generated, and interacts in complicated (if not always realistic) ways with everything else in the game.

In short, at any given time, any range of absolutely crazy stuff can happen, giving a very, very massive "whole is more than the sum of its parts" feel. The Saga Of Boatmurdered gives a very good feel for the staggering complexity of this game.

Unfortunately, absolutely everything about playing the game is harder than it needs to be, and the interface is truly atrocious. I don't mean that it's character based: I couldn't really care less about that (although Dwarf Fortress Graphics does make the game more palatable, even to a long-time roguelike player such as myself). I mean the user interface itself is horrifically baroque, and everything you want to do is more complicated than it needs to be. I've written about this in great detail at The City Building Game I Want, but in short, a game should not be utterly unplayable without a vast, massive wiki, and this one most certainly is.

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