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[CypherLH]

So I just discovered LCS after being a Dwarf Fortress fan and sometime-player for years. Was up waaay too late last night delving into LCS.

I'm wondering if there are any other games out there that are anything like LCS? It seems like an untapped genre to me. (that is, text/ASCI based Strategy/RPG/whatever)

[a1s]

You mean roguelikes? Yeah, there's a couple of them.
Sarcasm aside, Prospector is a 'text/ASCI based Strategy/RPG/whatever' that used to be pretty good (I'm sure it still is, I just haven't played it in a while) and there's a lot of people on the forum who play it, so you can talk to them.

[CypherLH]

Well LCS is more of a text/ASCI strategy game than a regular rougelike, although it does have those tactical sequences admittedly. I'm wondering if there are other similar text/ASCI strategy oriented games out there.

BTW 'prospector' does look awesome, looks almost like Dwarf Fortress in space, crossed with 'star flight'.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

The game that most recently reminded me of LCS was The Last Federation. It isn't text/ASCII, but like LCS, it works in two layers: The meat of the game takes place in a menu-driven and very open-ended strategy game about influencing a political simulation, and underneath that is a turn-based tactical sub-game in which you can directly intervene in conflicts.

[Liberal Elitist]

You could try out another game Jonathan S. Fox worked on (in fact, unlike Liberal Crime Squad, which has loads of developers, he's the ONLY developer for it): Zombie Survival Squad. Currently at version 3.3.2013 (i.e., it was released on March 3, 2013). It's written in Python 3 using the libcotd library (similar to curses but better).

Also, there's the 1983 game Oubliette for DOS and Commodore 64, which Liberal Crime Squad was inspired by. You can get it here and there are additional Oubliette-related downloads, such as the manual, here. On a modern computer you get the best experience playing it if you run it in DOSBox (which is cross-platform). I personally recommend using DOSBox SVN Daum builds by Taewoong available here, they are MUCH better than the vanilla DOSBox from the official DOSBox website, and are the best way to play DOS games. Those builds have a lot more options than vanilla DOSBox including the ability to emulate nicer hardware (better video and sound cards). You may also want a DOSBox frontend as well... D-Fend Reloaded is one for Windows that allows you to use many of the extra options from the DOSBox SVN Daum builds if you set it up correctly. But a DOSBox frontend is optional.

Now for other political games that are retro, look at the political games section at the Home of the Underdogs. Note that they list "Liberty Crime Squad", a misspelling of "Liberal Crime Squad". Anyway they have a bunch of retro political games to pick from... and most of them are DOS games that are best run in Taewoong's DOSBox SVN Daum builds.

Other retro games you may like are the various text adventures... the most common type of text adventures were ones designed to run on "Z-machines" (short for "Zork-machines"), designed for the text adventure Zork. This was actually the first virtual machine that ran bytecode that was cross-platform, allowing the same text adventure to be run on all sorts of different computers, such as DOS computers, Apple computers, Commodore 64, Amiga, Tandy, etc. Z-machine games were made by the company Infocom and were in a variety of genres. You can play any of them using the Frotz Z-machine interpreter, which has been ported to basically every operating system (see also here for Frotz downloads... on Windows the one to pick is Windows Frotz 1.17 by David Kinder, the Windows Frotz versions by Rich Lawrence aren't at all as good). You can find a list of Infocom's Z-machine games here complete with detailed descriptions of them, although you'll have to download the actual Z-machine ROMs for those games on another site (not linking to that, find it yourself). Additionally, you can play the earliest text adventure game, Colossal Cave Adventure, in Frotz... it is actually freeware, originally written in 700 lines of FORTRAN code for the PDP-10 computer in the early 1970s. It was the first ever adventure game for computers, and the adventure game genre is named after it (originally it was just called "Adventure" but nowadays people call it "Colossal Cave Adventure"). It is the source for several memes such as the "XYZZY" cheat code for many games. I recommend going here to get it as a Z-machine game you can run in Frotz... get Advent.z5, it is the best version. That last link also has a bunch of other freeware Z-machine games. The Infocom games like the Zork series are actually proprietary abandonware, but you can find them online. I'd recommend trying out Colossal Cave Adventure (as the Advent.z5 file played with Frotz) first.

Another retro game I highly recommend is NetHack; it is an open-source dungeon-crawling roguelike game that has its own copyleft license, the NetHack General Public License, which actually predates the GNU GPL (which first came out in 1989) and is based on an even earlier GNU copyleft license from 1988. Still, NetHack is quite an excellent game and I love it; it was continuously updated for many years, then development of the main version of NetHack stalled, and now there are several forks. I like playing it with a modern interface rather than its original text-based one. I highly recommend Vulture NetHack as the best way to play NetHack. Vulture NetHack is available both for vanilla NetHack as well as several of the forks such as Slash'EM and UnNetHack. UnNetHack is generally considered to be the best variant of the game, better than vanilla (which hasn't been updated in over a decade), Slash'EM, SporkHack, and various other variants. UnNetHack is currently at version 5.1.0, available here. I think the Vulture version of UnNetHack might be using an older version of UnNetHack like 4.0.0 but I'm not sure. UnNetHack even has a tutorial mode to teach the game to new players, something badly needed in the game. Oh yeah, and if you want traditional ASCII "graphics" instead of an actual graphical tileset, all the NetHack variants offer that (well, except the Vulture variants of course, since the whole point of them is to add fancy-looking graphics and sound).

Finally, I'd like to mention the game Dracula in London, an old DOS game that has quite a few similarities to Liberal Crime Squad. You have a squad with 6 members, you go on raids in something similar to site mode, you can review your equipment, etc... it's actually VERY similar. Check out Dracula in London here. (Again, since this is a DOS game, I recommend playing it in Taewoong's latest DOSBox SVN Daum build, for the best experience.) The goal in Dracula in London is to have all your members survive and defeat Dracula. This was one of my favorite games back when I was a kid. Oh, and it has music that is meant to use the PC speaker. And it does quite a good job at using Code Page 437 characters for graphics in most of the game (although a few parts of the game are actually done in graphics modes instead of text modes, but most of the game is in text modes using line-drawing characters). Quite a lot of similarities to Liberal Crime Squad indeed, I highly recommend this game to any fan of LCS. As for the license, Dracula in London is public domain freeware, but the source code is not available unfortunately, as it came out before the idea of open source was widespread, in 1988, the same year as the first version of NetHack (I am sure the author would have released it as open source if he knew that that was a thing).

EDIT: I thought of another game, an online political simulator called NationStates, where you simulate your own nation. It's all web-based, you play it in your web browser. The game is a bit slow, as you have to wait for real-life days to pass for things to happen, and there's only a small amount of stuff to do on any real-life day in playing that game, that you can usually get done in just a few minutes. Basically that game simulates a nation, politically, and you are the leader of the nation, and each day you get another issue to decide on, and have several different choices for that issue, each of which affects your nation in different ways. Except instead of having a small number of issues like Liberal Crime Squad (only 20-something), it has hundreds and hundreds of different ones, a vast variety. There are also statistics on your nation that are all affected by each issue... the number of those is around 30 or so I think. You can do very radical things in the laws and sometimes there are many options... for instance it's possible to not only legalize public nudity but make it MANDATORY, so that wearing clothing in public is illegal. Instead of having drugs be illegal, or legalizing them, you can put mind-altering drugs into the water supply so that everyone is high on drugs all the time. Some of the issues have lots of options but some only have a few, and for some of them, ALL the choices look bad and if you choose any of them it might have what you would perceive to be a negative impact on your country... if you encounter an issue that doesn't have ANY options you agree with and you think choosing any of them would make your nation worse, you can dismiss the issue, maintaining the status quo on it, and avoid having it change your country. This game also has some multiplayer aspects... there are regions, which are groups of nations, and some of them are open regions anyone can have their nation join, and others are closed regions that are invite-only. And regions get to have nations that are delegates to the World Assembly (the World Assembly in this game used to be called the United Nations, until the real-life United Nations' lawyers sent a strongly-worded letter to the creator of the game telling them not to use the name "United Nations" without their permission). It has a General Assembly and a Security Council just like the real United Nations, and in each one, if you are a World Assembly member nation, you get to vote on World Assembly resolutions. The General Assembly can pass resolutions that make changes to the laws in all World Assembly member nations (so if you want complete control over your nation and its issues and statistics, keep it OUT of the World Assembly). The Security Council passes resolutions commending or condemning various nations (these have no affect on the game and are just for vanity), as well as resolutions to "liberate" regions that have been invaded. Part of the multiplayer system is the regions, again, and people simulate wars and invasions... and people can take over a region through an "invasion" by moving World Assembly member nations into it, having them elect a new World Assembly delegate, and then the new delegate ends up with complete and sole administrative control over the region (if the founder of the region is no longer an active player of the game, that is). They can then do whatever they want with the region, such as kicking out nations they don't like and banning them, censoring posts on the region's webpage, redesigning the region's description to have a message talking about their successful invasion, etc. There are various invader groups that go around doing this. Then there are various "defender" groups that try to undo invasions, and Security Council resolutions to "liberate" regions are one of the tools in the defender groups' arsenal. The other tool defender groups have is to carry out invasions of their own, except they don't call them that, and the point of invasions by "defenders" is to liberate those regions from the control of the invaders, and let all the nations who got kicked out rejoin, and get things in a region back to the way they were prior to an invasion. Oh, and because of the importance of the World Assembly, you're only allowed to have 1 World Assembly member nation per person or IP address... you can have as many nations as you want in the game but if you personally have more than one World Assembly member nation at the same time you get banned, it's against the rules. So most people playing the game have multiple nations they control but only one World Assembly member nation they control. If you just want to keep things simple, you can just play as a single nation and just focus on running your own nation and not involve yourself in any of this regional politics or World Assembly stuff that's multiplayer. Anyway, this is an interesting game that a lot of people have tried but usually most players eventually get bored, and after they don't play it for 30 days, their nations cease to exist... that's what happened with me, I played it for about 9 months before getting bored with it and letting my nations cease to exist... and I had founded a region and ruled it and gotten a bunch of other people to have their nations join. So after my nations ceased to exist, this turned it into a founderless region and a ripe target for invaders and defenders to fight over. But if I ever play the game again I can reactivate the nation that founded that region, and if some invaders took it over, I can kick them out and reassert my control over it. So it's an interesting game but the fact that there is so little to do each real-life day, combined with the fact that you have to login almost every day to keep things up-to-date, well that slow pace makes it rather boring eventually, at least for most people... for instance me, I stopped playing it. Then again, I usually stop playing games after awhile, and switch to other games instead. It's hard to keep playing the same game for a long time without getting bored with it and wanting to play a different game. But if a game is good, then after I haven't played it awhile I'll go back to it again, which is what kept happening with Liberal Crime Squad and why I eventually started programming on it.

But to be honest, none of the games I've listed above that are somewhat similar to Liberal Crime Squad are ones I personally think are better than it... I like Liberal Crime Squad better than any of those games I've listed above. There are some games I like maybe a little better than Liberal Crime Squad but they aren't in the same genre at all and have almost nothing in common with it. For instance, the fan translation of Final Fantasy 5 for the Super Famicom is one of my favorite games of all time... I love that game's "Jobs" system and all the abilities it gives characters, it is so versatile and customizable. I also like Final Fantasy 4 and 6 a whole lot too but those are better known, and of course Chrono Trigger is also very good. Another example is Arcanum: of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, one of the best single-player RPGs for computers ever made, which is for MS Windoze... it still has an active fan community nowadays and has various patches and utilities to improve it from the vanilla version of the game (it is similar to the Fallout series and actually its lead programmers were people who had worked on both Fallout and Fallout 2 but then left to start their own company called Troika). Arcanum is one of the most complicated games ever, but in a good way that's fun. There's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, which I just love because it is so easy to mod and hack that game by editing various .ini files and it's my favorite from the Command & Conquer series. As a tribute to Command & Conquer you'll notice "Kane" is one of the male first names you can get in Liberal Crime Squad now. And there's Warcraft III, probably my favorite game made by Blizzard Entertainment, which is somewhat of a hybrid between a RTS (Real-Time Strategy) and RPG (Role-Playing Game). There are also some various open-source games I really like too, like FreedroidRPG, an awesome game where you play as Tux the penguin and fight robots (it's an action RPG similar to the Diablo series). In fact I even copied something from FreedroidRPG into Liberal Crime Squad, namely the silly poem based on an Internet meme "Roses are red, violets are blue, all my base, are belong to you." That's OK though because both games are GNU GPL games under the same license. In FreedroidRPG, Tux the penguin uses that as a pickup line on a beautiful woman who turns out to be a humanoid robot. FreedroidRPG runs perfectly fine on MS Windoze even though its main character is the Linux mascot. Another nice open-source game is Stendhal, an MMORPG that runs on Java SE 5 or later on any operating system that supports Java SE 5 or later, and has cool-looking retro 2D graphics that look similar to classic games (although they are not identical... the graphics were done by the contributors to the game and are all under GPL compatible licenses); that game has lots of quests, all sorts of different monsters to fight and items to collect, and is played by people from all over the world, you are especially likely to encounter Germans and Brazilians playing the game and speaking their native languages to each other, even though the game itself is in English. And there's Dink Smallwood, which, like the original Colossal Cave Adventure, is an adventure game, except it's much better, with graphics, sound, lots of humor, and it's just fun... Dink Smallwood was originally a proprietary game that was sold for profit, for a short time, then it was turned into proprietary freeware, then the original developer of the game agreed to let fans of the game make an open-source clone of it called GNU FreeDink under the GNU GPL, and now it's being ported to stuff like Android and iPhone by the original developer... Dink Smallwood's main game is fun and there's also lots of mods for it called D-Mods by the fan community... it is a very moddable game. Liberal Crime Squad also has a small bit of tribute to this game... "Dink" is available as a first name for male characters and "Smallwood" is one of the many last names you can get... actually I think someone else added those names into the game earlier on, not me. The original Dink Smallwood game is Windows-only but GNU FreeDink works on Linux and other operating systems, and is part of Richard Stallman's GNU project. Speaking of Richard Stallman, I should probably add his last name as one of the available last names in Liberal Crime Squad, so that you can play as him. Richard Stallman appears as an NPC you can interact with in Stendhal, except in it he's called "Stichard Rallman". Oh and I've put tributes to other stuff in Liberal Crime Squad... one of the available female first names is "Vampira"... she was an actress who played in the movie Plan 9 From Outer Space, that's a tribute to Ed Wood movies. You may have heard of her or of "Elvira", a more recent imitator of hers, whose name is also available as a female first name in LCS. Vampira actually sued Elvira for copyright infringement, for copying her whole schtick... and lost. Hmm... what other games are awesome? The Myst series... I really liked it... with those different worlds and those linking books. And one of my favorite games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System is this RPG called Crystalis, which was ahead of its time and not at all as primitive as other NES RPGs. What else? There's a really simple game I play called HoDoKu, an open-source GNU GPL sudoku game... it's the best implementation of the sudoku game out there. It runs on Java and is cross-platform as long as your platform supports Java, and they also have a Windows version of HoDoKu which is exactly the same except the Java .JAR file is compiled into an executable .EXE file with its own icon and it has an installer. My mom's favorite game is this shareware game called Snood. I used to play it years ago but got bored with it. HoDoKu and Snood are both really simple games to pass a little bit of time, they aren't like real games where you have characters and items and fight monsters and save your progress. Oh yeah, and 2 last RPG games that are great are Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, both originally for Sega CD (i.e., play in the Kega Fusion emulator), but later ported to the original Sony PlayStation (i.e., play in the ePSXe emulator). Oh and Sword of Mana for Game Boy Advance, playable on the VisualBoyAdvance-M emulator, is also a great RPG. And lastly I'd mention 2 other Blizzard games, Diablo 2 and the original StarCraft. So those games I mentioned in this paragraph are games I'd recommend that are completely unrelated to Liberal Crime Squad and in entirely different genres, not even remotely similar to it, except FreedroidRPG has one of the same jokes in it and I Liberally copied that joke word-for-word under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later because I knew it was just about the only thing from that game that would fit in perfectly in THIS game, and the GNU GPL is all about Liberally sharing stuff between GPL'd projects.

[CypherLH]

Wow, thanks for the very in-depth answer! I have some stuff to check out tonight.

[FinetalPies]

Nethack is actually one of my most very favourite games

[Azerty]

[...]

I agree with you Liberal Crime Squad is a very good game, both in itself and as a gateaway to roguelikes - although I've not yet tried other, except for Dwarf Fortress, which run very slowly on my pre-2009 Amilo.

Does many management games, such as Hamurabi- typo voluntary - are existing - text-based games whose the objective is to simulate a kingdom and other, such as the ones in this book?

[jergen]

There is this old game called Floor 13 (released on both DOS and Amiga in 91/92).

"Somewhere in London is a secret organization that is based on the 13th floor of an office building. The sole purpose for this organization’s existence is to keep the current British government in power at any cost - specifically, that means helping the current Prime Minister keep ahead of his competition in the polls."

Screens and a longer description here --> http://www.mobygames.com/game/floor-13
can be downloaded here --> http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/140/Floor+13.html (both dos & amiga version)

It's text based (with pictures).
It also has a random mission generator + some storyline missions.
Really cool game, hard as hell. Save often!

[BigD145]

Arcanum: of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, one of the best single-player RPGs for computers ever made, which is for MS Windoze

You've sold me. GOG's current 60% off also helped.

[Azerty]

Arcanum: of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, one of the best single-player RPGs for computers ever made, which is for MS Windoze

You've sold me. GOG's current 60% off also helped.

This game looks interesting but I've not the money nneded to buy it.

[Liberal Elitist]

Arcanum: of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, one of the best single-player RPGs for computers ever made, which is for MS Windoze

You've sold me. GOG's current 60% off also helped.

Ah, there's a number of patches if you want the best experience with Arcanum. The main one is Drog Black Tooth's Unofficial Arcanum Patch. Apply it to the Arcanum game after applying the official 1.0.7.4 patch from Troika. The latest Unofficial Arcanum Patch is version 091225 (December 25th, 2009). You'll also want the high quality townmaps and extra content, which are options in that patch. The other patch to install is the High Resolution Patch, also by the same guy, Drog Black Tooth, version 1.1a. Well those are the 2 main ones for a good experience. The High Resolution Patch is optional, if you want to play the game in the original 800x600 resolution you don't need it, but if you have a wide-screen monitor you'll probably want it so the picture won't be distorted... and the resolution can be anything from 800x600 up to your monitor's maximum resolution. Whether or not to use the High Resolution Patch is a matter of personal taste, but the Unofficial Arcanum Patch is most definitely extremely awesome and all the Arcanum fans use it, at least the ones using the English-language version of the game (Russian-speaking Arcanum fans have their own Russian-language unofficial patch that they use). But Arcanum is a game that still has an extremely dedicated fanbase over a decade after the game came out, centered around the website http://terra-arcanum.com/ and its forums. Its final release was a bit buggy but once you apply the final version of the Unofficial Arcanum Patch it's pretty much bug-free, plus that patch is aimed at preserving the game the way the developers originally intended it to be and fixing bugs and unintentional mistakes and restoring deleted content, rather than modding things to be different just for the sake of being different. The developer of those patches, who goes by the name Drog Black Tooth, is an extremely skilled programmer and reverse engineer who did very excellent work, but after awhile there was some serious drama and he stopped working on them, which is a shame because he was doing really great work and he improved Arcanum a whole lot into one of the best games ever. Drog Black Tooth isn't his real name, Drog Black Tooth is also the name of a giant ogre in the game that likes to eat halflings (halflings are what Arcanum calls hobbits, but basically they are the same thing as hobbits from Tolkien's work such as Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit). The game used the word halfling instead of hobbit just because they were overly cautious and didn't want to be sued by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Anyway there are a ton of different approaches to the game Arcanum... you can try and be a fighter who is just big and strong, you can try and be a charismatic smooth-talker, you can try and be a master thief who is stealthy and can steal anything, you can try and be a great wizard and master of several types of magick (the game spells it magick instead of magic), or you can try and be a great technologist who builds hi-tech contraptions out of parts you find lying around (you can even build a giant robot with a machine gun). And the game takes place in a setting rather similar to Victorian England around the time of the Industrial Revolution, and is all full of social commentary about things like race and class, although this is with races like humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, ogres, gnomes, halflings, dark elves, etc., as well as a bunch of half-breed races like half-elves, half-orcs, and half-ogres. So it mixes together a somewhat historical industrial revolution Victorian England setting with a fantasy setting that also has magick. And magick is often depicted as a dying art that is being replaced by technology and progress, throughout the game. And the game world is extremely large and complicated and full of many different quests. And you have all sorts of things about you that change how NPCs perceive you, not just your attributes and skills but also your alignment between good and evil, your alignment between technology and magick, various reputations you've gotten for your deeds, etc. Every town has its own police and if you do something illegal, expect them to all attack you and try to kill you if you ever visit that town again. The largest city has a gang war going on between 2 rival gangs and in part of the game you get to join one of the gangs and help them wipe the other one out. Also, you are the sole survivor of a blimp crash that happens at the beginning of the game and you immediately get a follower then, named Virgil, who thinks you are the Messiah of his religion, the reincarnation of a great elf who once ruled the world for a thousand years under peace and had a religion founded to worship him. And there is a band of assassins out to kill you called the Molochean Hand so if you ever tell anyone about the blimp crash and you being a survivor, they will try to kill you. You can summon demons from hell and bring the dead back to life (either resurrected as fully alive, or brought back as zombies), and teleport, and you can mind-control someone into being a slave, you can build all sorts of bombs and guns and weapons, and you can seek out experts and masters in various disciplines and train under them to become masters in those disciplines yourself. There are altars to various pagan gods around the world of Arcanum and there's a quest to sacrifice certain items on each of the altars in a specific order to get the maximum amount of blessings from the different gods (if you mess up the order the gods will get angry and curse you instead). There is a race of lizard-people with a human captive and you can try and use diplomacy with them or you can just kill them all. You can actually kill anyone in the game. And the final boss at the end gives one of the most epic speeches ever, about how he thinks that all living being suffer and that suffering is a terrible thing and that he wants to end all life so that he can end all suffering and after that everything will be at peace, and he gives quite an eloquent defense of the idea of killing everybody, and you actually have multiple options, you don't just have to fight him, you can also choose to join him in his quest to kill everybody, or persuade him to let you kill him without fighting back, among other options. There is a dispute between 2 inventors about who invented the steam engine and one of them is meant to represent Bill Gates of Microsoft (his name in the game is Gill Bates, or Gilbert Bates), and a down-on-his-luck inventor who claims Gilbert Bates stole all his ideas from him and wants revenge, who symbolizes Apple, and is named Cedric Appleby. There is a rotting pile of bones whose ghost tells you about a place where you can get a vial of dragon blood to bring him back from the dead, and indeed you can do this and bring him back to life and get him as a follower, it's kind of epic in the game, more than it sounds here. There is a whorehouse in the biggest city where you have a selection of girls, and also a sheep, that you can have sex with if you pay money, and you can do this whether your character is male or female. There is a dog you can get as a follower, who is actually one of the best followers you can get... never questions what you do, unlike some of your other followers like the human or humanoid ones that get upset if you get too good or too evil for their tastes. There are little old gypsy women outside most towns that sell magickal stuff. If you play the game as a stupid character or idiot savant, all your dialogue options sound really stupid and hilarious, and the game is quite different than if you play as an intelligent character. If you play as a very charismatic character with high persuasion skill, you can persuade almost anyone to believe almost anything to quite a ridiculous extent. If you go around naked in public you get very funny reactions. I could list 100 more things like this in Arcanum. There's so many odd, interesting, and funny things in the game it's almost impossible to list them all. And it's even better with the Unofficial Arcanum Patch installed (which is especially important if you want to be able to get all the endings). Arcanum is similar to Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 except way way better, since the 3 lead guys who made the first 2 Fallout games quit that company and started their own company Troika to make their own games, and Arcanum was the first game they made, the one that follows the creative vision of what they wanted to do but couldn't do at their previous employer. They made 2 other games after Arcanum before Troika went bankrupt, and the bankruptcy was mostly since it's hard to be an independent game developer if you don't have good access to the retail market or good publicity or marketing, even though Arcanum was a top-rated game that won all sorts of awards from critics. Their 2 subsequent games didn't do quite as well, even though they are also good games, and Troika had spent more money developing those games than the money coming in from selling them so they went bankrupt due to low sales. Kinda sad especially since the games they made were all actually very good and had such huge amounts of time, effort, and painstaking detail put into everything.

So yeah Arcanum is really one of my favorite games ever, and most of the critics rated it as the best game made in the year 2001, which I would definitely agree it was. Another game made that same year that was the same genre was Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, but Arcanum is much more complex than Diablo II, which is mostly a simple hack and slash game where you go around fighting monsters and getting good equipment and there isn't too much plot or characters. The only real problem I have with Arcanum is that often you find yourself in a situation where you realize you made a mistake earlier on in the game which wasn't obvious then but now it is coming back to haunt you, and then you can either go back and try and load a savegame from before you made that mistake (Arcanum has savegames and lets you save a bunch of different ones, it isn't considered cheating or savescumming, it's part of the game), or you can continue playing regardless of the mistake you made and suffer the consequences (for instance, you might not get to have a certain follower you wanted, or succeed at a certain quest you wanted to do - usually consequences that aren't THAT bad, and don't actually prevent you from beating the game, they just prevent you from having the game go the way you would like it to go). So other than the constant regrets you get when playing the game (thinking stuff like "I wish I could go back and do things differently, and I REALLY COULD, but then I'd have to redo hours of gameplay and all the stuff I've done since the mistake I made"), it's a really awesome game. This is one of those games that people can play for years but still never beat... NetHack is another one like that. And even if you play it many times repeatedly the game is always full of new surprises and things you didn't realize were in it. You can also attempt to play the game with various conducts to limit your activity, like playing it as a pacifist who never uses violence is a good challenge, as is playing the game without any followers of any kind and dealing with everything solo without anyone to back you up, or another challenge is to not ever use any magick or technology of any kind, or you could take the ultra-violent challenge to kill absolutely every living thing other than yourself in the entire game. An excellent choice in a game, regardless, I am sure you will love it.

[Azerty]

There are also the games Cataclysm, crash developped during forty-eight hours for a competition and whose developpement was halted, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a community release of the former.

They are survival game in a Zombie apocalypse and very realist - it's basically "Dwarf Fortress meets Resident Evil."

The only problem is that I don't know how to make it work on my computer, with its Lua files.

[KA101]

There are also the games Cataclysm, crash developped during forty-eight hours for a competition and whose developpement was halted, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a community release of the former.

They are survival game in a Zombie apocalypse and very realist - it's basically "Dwarf Fortress meets Resident Evil."

The only problem is that I don't know how to make it work on my computer, with its Lua files.

I haven't messed with Lua (grabbed the Windows pack but haven't touched it since) and DDA runs fine on my WinXP laptop.  Linux?

[Azerty]

There are also the games Cataclysm, crash developped during forty-eight hours for a competition and whose developpement was halted, and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, a community release of the former.

They are survival game in a Zombie apocalypse and very realist - it's basically "Dwarf Fortress meets Resident Evil."

The only problem is that I don't know how to make it work on my computer, with its Lua files.

I haven't messed with Lua (grabbed the Windows pack but haven't touched it since) and DDA runs fine on my WinXP laptop.  Linux?

I downloaded the Wondows terminal version on a Windows 7 OS, and the program seems to freeze when launched.