Dungeon Keeper Gold™

Dungeon Keeper has got to be one of my all-time favorite games. DK was a highly innovate game in its time, and it could be argued that it's still one of a kind even today. Not only is the idea of being pure evil a great change from political correctness, the game also contains magnificent humor. In the campaign you play an evil keeper, hellbent on conquering the goodly heroes of the overworld. The beginning scenarios are easy, but the difficulty can quickly ramp up. Patience is key, you must train your creatures to high levels in the Training Room, research new spells and rooms in the Library and expand your dungeon. You do not have direct control over your minions; they are autonomous. However, you can always pick them up and drop them wherever you want them to go; be it to engage in combat or perform training, research or build traps and doors to protect your dungeon. Different creatures are good at different tasks - Warlocks will help you research spells, Trolls are great at manufacturing, and Dark Mistresses love to torture enemy heroes that you capture and toss into the Torture Chamber. There are so many great things to say about DK - the variety of creatures, the unique style, the evil theme, and so on. The only negative thing I can think of is the combat, which is very simple. You simply drop your creatures on land that you have claimed, and the fight plays out by yourself. You do have the ability to cast spells, however. That and the fact that this is supposedly the low-resolution DOS-release, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the game itself, since a Windows version also exists. Highly recommended.

在我儿时的某个夏天，5岁？6岁？我已经记不清了，在我姑姥家的一台电脑上接触到了这款游戏。这台电脑上还有饿狼传说。地下城守护者对于当时的我来说是根本无法理解的，所以我在胡乱地操作了一番后，沮丧地发现游戏中的世界对我的指指点点毫无反馈。转而我就去饿狼传说里噼里啪啦的砸键盘了。就因为这样，我小姨之后总用各种理由推脱我的玩电脑请求。所以后来我也很少去我姑姥家了，再过多年我考学离开故乡后去姑姥家的机会也变得屈指可数。大学毕业后留在异地工作，直至今年年初，听闻姑姥去世的消息，细数大概有十六个年头没有与其相见。 其实游戏我去年买来的时候也玩的不是很明白。毕竟这个年岁，大部分精力都忙于生活奔波，偶有的休闲时间都用在那些机制熟烂于心的游戏。 但我会时不时的想起它。和饿狼传说一起。

There I am managing my peaceful Dungeon when Boom! A group of miscreants invade my dungeon and start killing my Minions! This, (and the even better Dungeon Keeper 2), are a great take on dungeons. As everyone else has pointed out, ALT +R will switch from 320x240 to 640x480 resolution. The game gets much harder as you progress through the Scenarios. I recommend doing multiple saves through each game. This is a simulation/RTS style game. The price is right and it is very entertaining!

I have very strong nostalgia for this game. It is one of the games I used to play like crazy when I was a teenager, along with Warcraft 2, Starcraft, Diablo (1 and 2), Daggerfall and the (Heroes of) Might and Magic series. I consider this era to be the golden age of PC gaming. It was all about having FUN. Nowadays gamers are nitpicky about details, like "are the reflections on the chicken sandwich realistic or not ?". But back then, even though graphics still had their importance, the only question was : is the game fun or not ? And how can a game were you basically play the Devil not be fun ? Building your dungeon, slapping your minions, killing heroes, setting up traps... You can litterally sink hours into this game and still crave for more. My only criticism, which I already had back then, is that the campaign tends to lean too much towards "Human Keeper vs CPU Keeper". I prefered mission where you had to kill heroes. But anyway, this game is a true classic. If you're a young gamer, it's a way to try for yourself what gaming was all about in the late 90's. If you're on older gamer like myself, then I don't have to explain further why this game is a must have. I play this game at least once a year (not to completion, because there are some stiff difficulty spikes) and I will continue to do so until it is no longer possible. And if the graphics are really unbearable for you, there are some very good mods that help a lot.

... to play this again after aprox 25 years. Especially with the KeeperFX mod, in which, among other things, a contemporary operation has been implemented. KeeperFX works flawlessly for me and I am just as fascinated by the game as I was when it was released. Many thanks to the developers who have worked so passionately on the mod and have lifted the game up into the current era!