BioWare was and is iconic PC developer. From PC gamers, to PC gamers - with love and panache So it was, I agree.

Dragon Age Inquisition was from "corporate owners and shareholders" to console market.

Us, Planescape and BG/BG2/ DA/DA2 fans should find WASD at expense of mouse click fine? And really enjoy mushroom husbandry as nice time killing stratagem - over good and profound story telling?

I do believe the shareholders were satisfied. Maybe less so us traditional BW fans.

Dwarf Fortress tries to be fair in at least one way. The dev deliberately avoided any of the Skinner box mechanisms common even in single-player games because he feels that taking advantage of psychological tricks to get people interested is cheating.

Back to OP's topic, Dwarf Fortress breaks all kinds of game design rules for UI and gameplay. Sometimes it's a case study for why those rules really shouldn't be broken, but sometimes it points towards interesting things that I hope future games will pick up on.

Why is "a game should be fair" a fundamental rule of game design? Granted there is really no set "fundamental rules of game design" (as there is for animation) but I have never seen "fairness" mentioned before in this context. A game can be unfair, but extremely well designed.

For one good article see - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132341/the_13_basic_principles_of_.php

Another thought I had: It could be considered a rule that, when a game offers multiple difficulty options, the higher difficulty settings should be more difficult than the lower ones.

One example of a game that violates this is the game Hodj 'n Podj. One of the mini-games is a pac-man clone. If you play that mini-game standalone, you gain lives as you score points. On harder difficulties, the entire game (including your character) is faster and you get more points, but lives still require the same number of points to earn. As a result, on harder difficulties, you get extra lives more frequently, making the game easier.

Some RPGs with difficulty settings give you more XP on the harder settings. Icewind Dale is an example of this. In Dungeon Hack, higher monster difficulty will award you more experience for killing enemies, allowing you to level up faster.

Some Touhou games have spell cards that are easier on harder difficulty settings. "Ice Sign - Icicle Fall" could be seen as an example. On Normal difficulty, this spell card is tricky. On Hard difficulty, the spell card is replaced with a different one that is actually easier. (On Easy, this spell card is actually easy; just stand directly in front of the boss and you can't get hit.) Touhou 15, I believe, has a spellcard that is more random on Easy/Normal than on Hard/Lunatic.

I would say very few games really break fundamental rules of game design. mostly because I am unsure what those rules really are.

But as for games that just push the boundry's of traditional design there are several

Giant's Citizen Kabuto:
Most team based games are even matches. at least on a player level. Giant's cares not for your Ideas of game balance and gives your team more players to compensate. You have meccs the race of fairly traditional soldier dudes, Reapers, magical wizard fish people. And Kabuto A giant monster on par with godzilla.

Its a 3 way free for all with bases resource management and a large focus on teamwork as individually your outmatched. Unless your kabuto... then just go ham.

La Mulana:
Oh? your going to whip every section of the wall for secrets? Well here's your secret DEATH LIGHTNING. Now figure out what that switch actually did.

Shin megami tensai 4:
Training demons is mostly worthless. No you can't save your demon's in the pc. you can't name them either. or have more than one of each kind. also they level up very slowly after 4 levels. and leveling them up has no benefit for fusions. also play coins are actually useful here. O_o

Myth:
Friendly fire and Physics in a RTS game? what is this?

Games that just seem to make poor design choices are even more numerable:

Shogo: mobile armor division:
There is bullshit enemy placement around every corner. Just fire the gun as soon as you round the corner. Also hostage civilians that sometimes carry guns... to shoot you with.

This reminds me of an interesting quote from Rob Elwood:
"Commercial games want you to win.
NetHack doesn't care if you win or lose.
Slash'em wants you DEAD."

(Slash'em page: http://www.slashem.org/)

Seriously, it can be thrilling at times, to play a game and not to be not sure, if you have any chance at all.
So I think, unfairness in games can be a legitimate concept, depending on the game.

It can even be fun at times to play an impossible game.

I think Z counts, the RTS by the Bitmap Brothers. Specifically talking about the original, apparently the recent port messed things up. They intentionally added an insane amount of randomness, on small scale the outcomes of encounters are very unpredictable, sometimes a single injured soldier will shoot a tank's driver, allowing him to take it over and giving you a powerful unit capable of turning things around. Sometimes an exploding tank's turret will smash into your units and keep you from taking over a sector and then things just snowball from there. At times a single lucky unit will make it into the enemy's fort and win the game. Z just goes against tons of the most fundamental rules established by other strategy games and still manages to be an engaging and brilliant experience.

QWOP, with its cumbersome controls and all.

What exactly are the "Fundamental Rules of Game Design", is this a written book or manual upon which all game designers the world over agree as binding rules for their profession?

Because you know, I would have thought that "Releasing a game which is stable and complete software, with no excessive bugs that make the software difficult to use" would be 1#, but it seems many publishers don't agree with me on that.

Here is another example. In SaGa 1, there is a weapon called the SAW that is supposed to have a chance, equal to your STR score, of killing any enemy whose DEF < your STR (or maybe <=, but certainly not >). Unfortunately, the programmer messed it up, and it actually kills if DEF > STR. Players then discovered that the final boss could be instantly killed with this weapon.

When a game is remade, it is expected that they would fix any bugs they know about, right? Well, the game got remade for the WonderSwan Color, and they deliberately left that bug in! (You can't say they weren't aware of this bug because it was a rather famous bug.) It couldn't have been difficult to fix; just change the comparison in the code. (I believe the bug could be fixed in the original by changing a single opcode.) Therefore, the only sensible conclusion is that they deliberately left the bug in.

A later game in the series, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, actually made a reference to the bug. There is a book in the Imperial library describing an axe that slew a god, and if you manage to obtain that axe and use its special attack, the animation is that of you using a chainsaw. (Note that this is an anachronism; the setting, which has an ancient mythology feel to it, does not have the technology that would allow a chain saw to exist.)

I have read that the original IBM PC version of Wizardry 1 apparently left in the Identify glitch from the Apple 2 version (supposedly because fixing it would be "unfair to new players"), but have not been able to actually get that version to run to verify this,

In the original version it was a bug, but when the game was remade for the WSC, the behavior was intentionally left in. Basically, what was originally a bug was later treated as the way the game was meant to work.

Note that the SAW does not actually work on weaker enemies. If your STR is in the 100-199 range (displayed as 99), there are only two enemies in the entire game that it works on: the final boss and that one invincible fire bird that attacks you randomly in the fourth world. In other words, it is easier to saw a god to bits than it is to saw up a lowly goblin.

Incidentally, I read that canceling attack animations in fighting games was originally a bug. I am not familiar with that genre of video games, however.

a recent post reminded me of the Wario Land series. Wario Land I was a traditional platformer, but II and III? they take your ideas of hit points and lives and throw them out the window. Wario was completely indestructible and could only be knocked back or stunned by most enemies. however status effects were in full swing and some downright rediculous situations could be engineered involving vampires, polar bears, a ball of string, and FIRE.

Interestingly, I just thought of an interesting game idea. What if you had a game that combined the most distinctive aspects of Syoban Action and Wario Land 3? Like in Syoban Action, the game would punish you for doing reasonable things, and it is possible to get hit after hitting the flag pole. Like in Wario Land 3, enemies could inflict all sorts of status ailments when they hit, and being hit would sometimes be necessary. I think that would make an interesting platformer that would be very different from a traditional one.

Are you 15? Go play some streamlined COD MW9000 or Bioware's next cinematic relationship emulator
Seriously, I won't suggest you touch any game older that 6-7 years.