So we got a couple of copies of the retail version of Dungeon Runners today. One of the perks of the retail version (you can download and play the game for free if you wish) is that you get 6 months of “Premium” gameplay, and a Bling Gnome. Price is $20, and Premium access is generally $5/month, so its a good deal.

I’d played Dungeon Runners before and liked it well enough. It’s a semi-MMO. Towns are communal but dungeons hold only your party. It’s very hack and slashy, with tons of loot, each bit of which is rife with prefixes and suffixes. The whole tone is extremely tongue-in-cheek. Since I last played, the humor has gotten even more sophomoric, with fart jokes all over the place.

As to the Bling Gnome… well, he’s this nasty little creature that follows you around and picks up all the piles of gold coins that drop from creatures, which is pretty convenient and streamlines gameplay a good bit. He also has an ‘active skill’ that will cause him to pick up trash loot, eat it, and excrete gold coins, which he’ll then pick up for you. Every time he does this, there’s a chance he’ll excrete a nice loot item. The game play mechanic here is great, but honestly his little animation, complete with clouds of noxious green vapor, gets old pretty quickly. Since you target mobs by clicking on them, the gnome can get in the way, too.

I wouldn’t say the Bling Gnome is worth running out and buying the game for, but if you download the free client and like it, it’s very much worth the $20 for full access to the game (so called “Rainbow” items…the best loot, is only usable by paid accounts) for six months, and the Gnome is a decent convenience feature once you learn to ignore his antics.

So there’s a new Lord of the Rings game coming out from EA, Lord of the Rings: Conquest. In it, you first play through as the good guys, but the second half of the game has you playing for the other side, postulating a version of the story where Sauron got The Ring and ended up taking over all of Middle Earth. Along the way, you get to kill Gandalf, Aragorn, Frodo, Elrond… basically all of the ‘good’ heroes.

I guess I’m just hopelessly out of date, because I really have no interest in playing a game where I kill all the characters that were my heroes growing up. Nor do I have much interest in playing a game that has the audacity to re-write Tolkien’s history of Middle Earth. (I’m already in a high state of alert over Peter Jackson’s 2nd Hobbit movie, which will span the 40-odd years between when Bilbo returns to Bag End and the Expected Party of his one-hundred and eleventy-ith birthday celebration.) I’m surprised and a bit disappointed that the Tolkien estate gave this title the thumbs up.

I think this might be generational. If someone did a game where you killed off The Justice League, I wonder if that would be seen as ‘cool’ by your typical gamer? What about a game where Luke ended up lured to the dark side and ran around murdering Leia, Han Solo and the rest of the good guys?

I truly, honestly hope that the game flops and that developer Pandemic and EA lose boatloads of money on it.

Amazon has reduced the price of the Kindle to $359, which IMO is still $159 too high, at least.

Makes you stop and wonder though…if they were selling as briskly as Amazon implied they were, why the price drop?

I still think Amazon needs to subsidize the device. Sell it at a loss for $100 and make the money back on sales. Basically the videogame console model. All we (well, most of us) are going to do with the thing is buy more stuff from Amazon…seems like the more they get out there, the more returns they get, plus they get ‘word of mouth’ and ’saw someone using it on the train’ marketing going.

With all the fuss, I figured this blog would be somehow incomplete with me adding to the shrieks of excitement about Diablo III being announced. So… here we go: woot.

Whew. I feel better now.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Diablo I & II, and Blizzard makes some great games. But the cooking time between announcement and release is so danged long that I see no reason to get excited just yet. I mean, think about how everyone went nuts at Starcraft 2’s announcement…and we still don’t have a release date for that one.

My best bet: holiday season, 2010, we’ll have Diablo III, assuming we can afford to put the $8/gallon gas into our cars to go purchase it. And assuming we’re not all treading water from the ice caps melting. And assuming our robot overlords allow us free time for gaming.

So my project for the day was to re-do my ‘home theater’ setup. I put that in quotes because we’re talking, y’know, the living room, not a dedicated home theater in a separate room. My goal was just to get components plugged in so that I could turn them all completely off, rather than have everything in ’standby mode.’ Good for the environment, and good for the electric bill, right? But of course I didn’t want the DVRs turning off, nor the hubs.

Once I started pulling stuff apart…I was pretty amazed. I ended up with a huge pile of gear I really no longer need to have hooked up. First, my ancient Laser Disk player. I haven’t turned that on since I moved into this apartment a few years ago. Next, VCR. Can’t remember the last time I used that. DVD player? Just collecting dust, since the PS3 upscales DVDs so nicely. I found out I had a wireless bridge running that was supplying ethernet to the XBox. Not the XBox360, mind you…the old XBox. And speaking of the old XBox, tear it out and stick it into storage. I don’t have time to play all the new games I want to play; I’m never going to get around to playing those old XBox 1 games.

Now I was really getting into the spirit of things: I pulled out the #2 Comcast Box, and the Tivo that was hanging off it. I never watch Tivo anymore because I can no longer tolerate SD content delivered through an s-video cable (the best my Tivo Series 2 offers). I’ll either put the 2nd Comcast box in the office, or turn it in and save the $10 or $12 that Comcast charges me every month. I did end up re-connecting the Tivo just to see if it gets its podcasts (like Cranky Geeks) via ethernet, or if it somehow is pulling them now through the cable. I can’t imagine how it would be… anyway that still might end up going. I had an Airport Express out there to stream music from my computers to the stereo, which I last did about 18 months ago. And I never print to the printer hanging off of it. So out that went.

Suddenly, a brace of switch boxes and y-cables were no longer needed, so I got rid of those, several of which were powered. Which mean fewer plugs and so fewer power strips.

That whole side of the room looks so much neater and uncluttered now. I’m using 3 power strips. One will be ‘always on’ and has the Tivo, the Comcast DVR and the single remaining ethernet hub on it. One controls the receiver and the XBox 360. And one (plugged into a different circuit) controls the TV, PS3 and Sub-Woofer. So when I’m turning out the lights at night, I can just toggle off those power strips and all that energy going into keeping all this gear on standby no longer gets wasted.

Now my big challenge is… where to store all these gear I tore out!!?

Quick post for now, since I’m at work, but the first trailer for Joss Whedon’s new web-show, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is up:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

I try to avoid “Collector’s Editions” of games since the regular versions tend to be pricey enough, but this time I got sucked in. Gamestop has listed the Spore Galactic Edition for $79.99, currently scheduled to ship on September 7th.

Extras of this addition are:

• ‘Making of Spore’ DVD video
• ‘How to Build a Better Being’ DVD video, by National Geographic Channel
• ‘The Art of Spore’ hardback mini-book
• Fold-out Spore poster
• Premium 100-page Galactic Handbook

I’m banking on Will Wright being heavily involved in the Making Of video, and I’m interested in the Nat Geo DVD as well. I’ve heard the latter referred to as “The Human Toolkit” in other places, and it apparently uses Spore’s graphics to discuss evolutionary theory. I figure if I get 2 half-way decent DVDs as extras, that’s worth $20, and the rest of the junk and cool packaging are worth another $10.

Now let’s just hope the full game is 1/10th as compelling as the Creature Creator is.

I’ve decided that Etrian Odyssey II (for the Nintendo DS) is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s looks like it’ll be a long, long game and I’m not going to try to power through it.

I have to confess I was getting a bit bored for a while, feeling like I was doing the same thing over and over again, but then I happened to backtrack down a side passage of the dungeon and found a quest item I needed. Completing this quest opened up three more.

One of the three required a class I didn’t have in my Guild, so I created a new character and had to get him to level 3. I also needed to send out my “Collecting Party” to generate some cash, so I sent the noob out with the collectors to get some combat experience. We farmed a node until we were out of “farming points” for the day, then headed down (ok actually its up… you start on the ground and work up in this adventure, but I still think of it as down) to level 2 of the dungeon, but without my Troubadour I had no way to Sleep the Bosses that roam around down there, so we didn’t get very far before we had to run for the stairs.

It has been said before, but one of the neat things about the game is that the story is so ‘lite’ that we end up making up our own story. With up to 30 characters in a guild, you’re either going to give them descriptive and dull names (Fighter1, Fighter2, Gather1, Gather2, etc) or you’re going to come up with good names, but then have to attach some imaginative trait to them to help you remember what their role is. And suddenly these characters start to tell stories to you.

Eh, maybe its just the writer in me, but that’s what is happening in my game. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pull the wings off some VenomFlies in level 2…

I’m still thrashing around, jumping from game to game. I’ve been on a real old-school RPG kick lately but was getting the itch for something pretty and sparkly, so I ran out and picked up Lost Odyssey based on some friends praising it

Initial thoughts follow. I figure the game is old enough that anyone planning on playing it already has, so this is more for people familiar with the game. I’d love to compare notes.

Bad news first. Its locked up 3 times in 4 hours of game play. I don’t for a second think this is the fault of the game, since GTA IV locked up on me too (causing me to exchange it for the PS3 version). Nope, I think XBox 360 #2 is slowly breaking. But this means I tend to get really stressed out playing if its been more than 10 minutes since I last saved. I wish to heck I could get this on the nice, quiet, reliable PS3.

My first reaction to the game was “Wow, this is JUST LIKE Final Fantasy” which I guess we all knew, but the first town you visit is so reminiscent of the first town in FF XII that it was rather astonishing to me.
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Netflix users, just in case it got caught in a spam filter or something, Netflix sent out an email saying that it would be eliminating the “Profile” feature. This feature allowed you to have several queues per account. So if you have kids, you might have 1 queue with kid’s movies and another with stuff for the parents. Each queue worked individually, and you’d assign a number of disks to each queue. In my case, I had a “Series” queue where I put all the TV shows I rent, in sequence, and then a Movie queue for movies. I tend to watch movies only on weekends, but watch TV on DVD every day.

Anyway, it was a great organizational tool, and now its going away. Netflix isn’t saying why. Maybe they’re just trying to convince us to re-evaluate our memberships?

Here’s the email in full:

Important News Regarding Netflix Profiles

Dear Peter,

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.

Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.

While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

- The Netflix Team

Previews of Guitar Hero World Tour are hitting all over the web (I’ll throw a few links in at the bottom of this post). I was rather surprised to find that GHWT was offering a lot of what I was hoping for in Rock Band 2.

Let’s get the big bad news out of the way first. Your downloaded Guitar Hero III content will not work in Guitar Hero World Tour. Wow. I mean just…wow. That’s going to be a huge drawback to those of you who’ve invested in a lot of DLC for GH3. Let’s hope they find some way to change that, or to give you GHWT song credits based on what you’ve spent on GH3 DLC, or something.

That big ugly hobgoblin out of the way, the rest is all goodness. Of course they’re adding a whole band feature including an even more elaborate drum kit than Rock Band has. But as someone who generally plays solo, what had me smiling was the 5 career paths, one each for lead guitar, bass, drums and vocal, plus one for the whole band. And rather than just a list of songs you play in order, apparently these careers are going to be more open, letting you choose where you want to play next and so forth. Hopefully it’ll be a bit more ‘game-ish’ than the solo stuff in GH 3 and Rock Band.

Additionally you’ll be able to set up set lists of up to 7 songs, and play them in order without having to go back to the menus. Great for when you just want to kick back and enjoy playing.

The Guitar Hero World Tour guitar has been made a lot more realistic looking, and has a kind of ’slide panel’ on the neck for free-styling. It’s a bit larger than the other ‘fake guitars’ out there, too. Closer to full size.

But the really huge news is the Music Studio feature, which lets you create your own songs. You can capture them as you play, or go into an editor and get precise. Once you have a great song written you can share it with friends, of course. Apparently the editor gets pretty deep if you want to really dig into it.

It’ll be interesting to see what Harmonix does with Rock Band 2, but right now I’m thinking that I’ll jump ships and be a Guitar Hero fanboy for the next iteration. I really like the idea of being able to use a game to write songs! Not that I have an iota of talent in that department, mind you!

Check it out for yourself!

Guitar Hero: World Tour First Look (IGN)
Exhibit: Guitar Hero World Tour (Nukoda)
World Tour: New Details Galore (Game Informer)

Anyone who played Fatal Inertia on the XBox 360 will tell you that the game was not very good. So of course I was expecting it to be not very good on the PS3, but after trying the demo, I have to say that it isn’t too bad. In fact it was pretty fun. It looks great, the controls are nice, I found some shot-cuts, fired off some cool weapons…

In fact at this point the only bad thing about it is the price of the full game. Are they really asking $30 for it? I need to actually check the store because that just seems too high. At $20 I’d definitely pull the trigger, but $30 is a bit too high.

A quick update on my progress through Etrian Odyssey II for the Nintendo DS.

As advertised, the game can be a challenge. I’ve had more than a few total party wipes, which means Game Over. Actually one aspect where I think they missed out on some fun is forcing a reload after your party dies. Since a Guild can house 30 members, wouldn’t it be cool if you had the option to form up another ‘rescue’ party to set out from town? Oh well, maybe in EO III.

But the game is compelling. Thanks to the fans at GameFaqs I’ve learned at least one reason to have extra characters: there are resource nodes in the dungeons, but it takes a particular Skill to gather resources from them. Rather than devoting skill points to these Skills with your “main” adventurers, the suggestion is to create a set of “gatherer” adventures, and send them in to collect resources (which can then be sold for coin). You can gather once per node per gather skill point, so ideally you’d have a party of 5 gatherers with maxed out gather skills. But such a party probably would never make it to the resource to be gathered. So there’s a nice balancing act in building a party with a good number of gatherers and sufficient ‘fighters’ to keep them alive.

Good fun still. Looking forward to the weekend and the chance to put some serious hours into the game.

I recently finished Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the Sony Playstation 3, and even though the game has been out for over six months, I felt the need to review it just because I enjoyed it so much.

First let’s establish who I am, in gaming terms. I’m not an ultra-competitive, hardcore gamer. I’d call myself more experiential or narrative-driven. Or more simply, I play games primarily for the story or the exploration of a new world. Challenge doesn’t become important to me until it hits an extreme, either low or high.

I mention this because Drake’s Fortune isn’t a very difficult game (at least on the Normal setting) and it doesn’t have any multiplayer. It’s a linear romp from start to finish. My final save clocked in at ten hours and change, so its relatively short. There are hidden items to find and faux-Achievements embedded in the game, both of which might be enough to get you to play through the game a second time, but the narrative is what really drives this game.

You play modern-day treasure hunter Drake, who is convinced he is a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, even though there are no records of Drake Sr. ever having fathered a child. Drake Jr and his partner, Victor “Sully” Sullivan, are hunting for the lost city of El Dorado (and all its hidden wealth). Chronicling their journey is videographer and reporter Elena Fisher. During their adventures they’ll encounter ancient ruins, Nazi relics, and modern day pirates. While the storyline isn’t high-art, it’d make a wonderful Saturday afternoon adventure matinee, which in fact was what it was modeled on.
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I’ve been in an old-school gaming kind of mood recently, so when Angela gave me a shiny new DS Lite for my birthday, I went game hunting, and came up with Etrian Odyssey II. It’s got lots of old school RPG goodness in it, at least on paper. I’ve only done the first starter mission.

The first thing you do is create a “guild” for yourself. Guilds can have up to 30 (!) characters in them, and a party consists of 5 of those characters. Characters can be one of 12 classes (to start, it appears you can unlock more later) and you create them all. No pre-made characters or emo NPCs to join your group. When you pick characters for a party you arrange them into front and back rank. This feeling familiar yet?
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