Note: If you’re reading this and this is all there is, come back in a few hours and I’ll have more flavor text for you. I don’t write this stuff in advance. For now, have this relationship chart of Kat, Theo, Lars, and Akila. (And yes, I’m confirming this, as if it wasn’t obvious enough already, Akila does have a crush on Katrina.) Also,for some reason the auto – posting is acting all screwy again and is posting stuff att the incorrect times. Sorry if it messes with your schedule. Also, the comic will be TWO YEARS OLD in about a month! (And still no 1st year Tshirt. Sorry.) My goal is to have that animation done for the two year anniversary of the comic. It’s coming along well.

So I decided to do yet another game recommendation thingy.  Just a note: This game isn’t for everybody.

What if I told you there was a game with hundreds of different creatures to tame or kill, an infinite number of worlds to settle, and thousands of randomly generated monsters to defeat? Would you play it? What if I told you it’s a sort of city building game, with a voxel – based construction system that influenced Minecraft, a population system so detailed it allows you to know every citizen’s likes, dislikes, fears, qualities and skills? What if this game also had an adventure mode, where you can set off on a grand adventure of exploration, choosing from at least 50 different races to play as, and has a combat system detailed enough to allow you to grab specific limbs of enemies, to hold them down or target things as specific as individual toes? What if I said that as this adventurer, you could raid a tower taller than any manmade structure, defeat the wizard at the top, and gain the ability to summon undead servants to follow your commands? Would you play it? What if, after all this, the game is free?

Well, this game exists, but, sadly, it looks like this:

The game is called (drumroll please), Dwarf Fortress, and everything I said in the above paragraph is possible, but everything is rendered in unicode characters. All that content came with a cost, and that cost was graphics. Now, before you stop reading this and go play Skyrim instead, let me say that this game was made by (more or less) one man over the course of 18 years. It’s not an easy game to learn to play, and it’s very hard to get good at (you will lose invariably in the game – there is no way to win), and due to the graphics, requires a decent imagination – but if you do get into it and get over the learning curve (which is more like a learning cliff), you’re in for a good time, and if you can find other people that play it (I’m told the forums are one of the most respectful places on the internet), you can have fun telling each other tales of when your hired human bowman killed a 30 foot long skinless alligator with a blessed crossbow, before heroically bleeding out. (This is true, and happened to me in-game.) It’s marvelous fun. I don’t expect most people to go play it, and I expect even less to get into it, but I hope someone reading this finds it and enjoys it. You can get it for free at bay12games.com. If you need help (and you will, trust me), they have a very in – depth wiki to help you out. (Speaking of which, I’ve got a few references to it in the comic, mainly on the page for the cave dimension.) Go try it! It’s free, so if you hate it, it didn’t cost you anything! If you liked it, great!

Have fun out there guys.

See you next week.