As I mentioned, there is some people that have an appreciation for ASCII graphics, I don't personally happen to be one of those people. I'm also not one of those people that need bleeding edge graphics either, Towns and Gnomoria are two of my favorite games and while they don't use ASCII graphics, they aren't even remotely close to being cutting edge by any stretch of the imagination, but I also have an appreciation for such games as Cities in motion, anno 2070, Borderlands 2 and very much the old Impressions city building games.
I can't remember the exact quote but it was in one of the aGoD videos, something along the lines of 'if you can see blood and gore in DF with it's ASCII graphics, then you've got one hell of an imagination.' The first time that I heard that I literally nearly choked on the pizza that I was entertaining my taste buds with.
As I mentioned, DF is an extremely deep game but it's UI completely holds it back from the masses and that's truly a shame because the depth of game play is there and if it was more accessible / approachable by the masses (not only the ASCII graphics but the UI especially) I think they'd have a blast playing it (with one of the graphics packs as the masses are really not going to get into the ASCII graphics, for that matter I still wonder why we even refer to them as "ASCII graphics", aren't they really just text letters and symbols? Not really graphics at all, right.)
I did just recently read that somebody had modded DF so that it can now have a full mouse UI in the game. That should certainly help, put that together with one of the nicer graphics packs and it might start appealing to more people. I hope for Toady anyway that it does as it could turn into more donations for him.
Not surprising to me I still have friends that are gamers that had never even heard of DF (until I asked them about it), as somebody once said, it's popular amongst the people that have heard of it, but relatively unknown among the the overall gaming population.
Anyway, 3 hours and 2 minutes and counting until release time.