Burrito for 20070921

I'm now calling my summary posts 'Burrito's instead of 'TwitterWrap's, because they really don't have anything do with Twitter.  Why "burrito" instead of something more exotic like "gyro"?  Well, the site is called Don Juan's Romantic Mexican Food, not Theo's Mediterranean  Cafe, now isn't it?

Now that we've gotten that trivial clarification out of the way ...

Sports

My throat is sore and my body exhausted from attending my first Stars game of the (pre)season.  Both Wife and myself had a lot of fun, but not quite to the level of a regular season game.  I think during the preseason there should be a general admission cost of $10, and seats should be FCFS. It's stupid to have the lower bowl almost completely empty, with the upper bowl sparse. Let the upper-deck people move down and see what they're missing, and build a stronger atmosphere in the building. A variant of this would be to allow people to sit in any available seat after the second period.

Ian 'Lappy' Laperriere, in a totally classless act, cross-checked Jussi Jokinen in the face after play had stopped late in the third period.  I seriously hope that the league is reviewing the incident and hands down a 1-2 game suspension.

Baby

Tuesday night we went to this huge consignment sale for babies / expectant parents.  It started at 9:00pm, which means we didn't get out of there until near midnight. We got some good deals on furniture and clothes, but I have been pretty exhausted ever since.

We've been looking at names, using a Google Spreadsheet to consolidate names we've found from NameVoyager and Nymbler.  I'm hoping we can negotiate a deal during the off-season so that we don't have to take the name selection issue to binding arbitration.

Game Review: Dungeon Runners

Title:  Dungeon Runners
Publisher: NCSoft
Genre: MMORPG
Price:   $0.00 USD *
Rating:  B

Sometime last week I caught a link to a review of NCSoft's new MMO, Tabula Rasa, on Ars Technica. Inside that review was a link to another review, for Dungeon Runners. If not for this fortunate clicking, I may never have even heard of this game.  I know that my readership is slightly smaller than Ars, but I figure it can't hurt to put out my own opinion.

Acquiring the game was as simple as downloading and running the installer from the website. The installer downloads the modules needed for Dungeon Runner and the PlayNC launcher. The entire process took about 10 minutes on my ridiculously fast Internet connection -- your mileage may vary.

The most luring feature of this game is it's price: zero; goose-egg; nada. It costs no money to start nor continue playing for as long as you like, but of course there's always a catch. You do need a PlayNC account, so you can either create one or enable Dungeon Runners using your old City of Heroes login. I chose the latter, and was soon building my very own Dungeon Runner.

The character creation is lacking quite a bit.  The male models all look the same, except for their facial expression.  The hair colors and styles add only a slight bit more variety.  You can chose to start as one of three classes: Ranger, Fighter, Mage. This selection is only significant in that it determines your starting attributes and skills. Once in the game, you can purchase skills from any of the class trainers to become a "hybrid" character.

After creating your character you will be taken to the server selection screen. Dungeon Runners is different from many MMOs in that you can play your character on any server. On a Friday night, which is usually a "peak" time, each of their 6 PvE servers had between 100 and 150 players logged in, and the single PvP server had less than 50.  I have not played on the PvP server, as it's never really been my cup o' tea.

Upon selecting a server, you appear in Dew Valley, the newbie zone, with all of your fellow "n00bs". After walking around for just a few seconds you find NPCs with big yellow exclamation points ! over their heads, exactly like World of Warcraft. The quest system is intuitive if you've played any MMO since EverQuest, and by your interactions you will soon observe that this game is more about humor and fun than seriousness.

After obtaining a few quests, it's time for your first jaunt into a "dungeon", your very own instance of Dew Valley Forest.  With your cardboard sword and paper armor you set out to fight - you guessed it - wolves and rats. From this point, you will notice striking similarities between Dungeon Runners and Diablo - the "click-oriented" combat system, the square grid inventory, and your increasing dependence on health and mana potions. Dungeon Runners also expands upon Diablo's multi-level item rarity system, with "rainbow colored" items being the pinnacle of loot achievement.

By this point you've probably noticed, either on the website or in rainbow-colored text on the game UI, something about "membership". This is the "catch" that I mentioned earlier in this review. To become a "member" costs $4.99US per month. Membership benefits include: login queue priority, access to a bank vault, ability to use stackable potions, and "access to the highest quality in-game items".

While it is optional, soon you begin to realize how limiting it is to not be a member.  The login queue priority is insignificant, since even at peak times you can easily find a server on which to play. The bank access and potions may be much more significant at higher levels, but not right away. However, what the website means by "highest quality" items, it really means that if you do not join, you can't use anything beyond the equivalent of common loot.  By level 4 I was already acquiring items that were "membership only", and it must only get worse from there.

Overall this game is fun, and I find humorous the amount of parody this game plays against other MMOs. The environment feels like a graphical MUD, in which you can have "World Chat" enabled and not be completely spammed. I would enjoy getting together with friends once or twice a month for some "Dungeon Running", but I don't think it's worth five bucks a month to me.

Burrito for 20070918

Didn't quite have time to post last Friday, I know you all have been waiting in eager anticipation.

Sports

It's finally sports season again. The Cowboys have been posting up the big points for their first two games, and tonight is the first pre-season game for the Stars. Wife and myself are actually going to the hockey game on Thursday night against the Avs. I'm not going to follow hockey quite so intently this year ( i.e. I may opt to not watch a few games on TV, specifically west-coast weeknight games), but I'm still looking forward to it.

Games

I got in a little bit of game time over the weekend, though I should have been working on homework. I tried a new game by NCSoft called Dungeon Runners , and I plan to post a review soon. I am also wanting to have a look at Tabula Rasa, but haven't gotten to that yet.

Random

I spent an unreasonable amount of time on Amazon's Mechanical Turk trying to find that idiot Steve Fossett. I'm disappointed that he hasn't been found, and is probably distributed amongst the stomachs of several large buzzards now, but he really should have requested a radar follow.

Google Transit added DART routes to their system today. I didn't even know Google had a module for mass transit systems. Now I'll know exactly which train I must miss in order to be late for an event.

Apparently someone at work found the motivational posters, and Tina hanged them on the walls at the end of the rows. You know the ones; a random picture juxtaposed with a single large word and a silly phrase beneath ... like these, but not funny.

For the hell of it, I briefly looked at pet social networking sites, mostly for my own amusement. I think my dog can have his own Dogster page sometime after he learns to send email. During my research into this subject, I found SNIF, which is probably about the closest you can get to having the pet build its own social network. Interesting idea, and I look forward to seeing how it looks when they "go live", but it's currently an order of magnitude too expensive for widespread adoption, I think.

Burrito for 20070907

Critters

Friday morning we had an uninvited guest sneak into our house. Wife called around 10am to let me know there was a rat in the computer room ... but it has large eyes like a racoon, so maybe it isn't a rat. Oh by the way, it's hanging by its tail on a desk beam. "It is a Opossum?" I asked. "Yes, that's it, a Opossum!"

She had to leave for work, so I told her I'd look for it when I got home. After several minutes I couldn't find the little bugger, so I gave up trying. A little while later I found him tucked up inside one of our bookshelves. I grabbed him by the tail and dropped him into the waiting pet carrier. Not being park rangers, we had no idea what to feed it so we dropped in some string cheese and headed out to dinner.

We contacted a wildlife rehabilitator for relocation, which is when we found out that apples, not cheese, was probably better for its diet. It wasn't until Monday that we were able to transfer our little marsupial to a better home.

Speaking of critters, FatCat is finally back from his hospital stay and seems to be slowly recovering. He's on meds currently, and will possibly be put on a special diet next week.

Sports

Saturday night I attended my first ever professional soccer game, FC Dallas vs DC United, thanks to free tickets supplied by The Captain. The company was excellent, the environment was fun, and the game was awful. The keeper, "Super Dario", was quite the opposite of super and gave up 4 weak goals. The team was demoralized after the second goal went in during stoppage time of the first half.

I went walking all three mornings of the long weekend, and played tennis with Smurf and Fabio on Sunday evening. My feet, calves, and butt were all quite sore Tuesday morning. I didn't get in a full workout at the gym on Wednesday due to insufficient H 20 resources.

School

There was only one class this week due to the holiday, and my professor was out of town. So instead of a substitute lecturer this time she put together a 75 minute vlog lecture for us to watch. I've got homework due on Monday which has progressed very little but I don't anticipate having much trouble with it.

iHype

Wednsday, of course, Apple revealed its new iPod / iPhone line-up and pricing, much to the dismay of all the suckers that spent $599 on a telephone, only to have the price drop $200 less than 2 months later. The only iPod I've ever really been interested in is the nano, and I am not yet sold on the widescreen edition. The iTouch looks neat, but not within my reasonable price range. After all of the pricing announcements there was a huge wave of Apple products on Craigslist trying to sell to other suckers before the new pricing was well known.

Random

This is the most beat up vehicle I've ever seen. It's hard to tell from the picture (camera phones suck), but it has no doors, no windshield, and looks like it's been rolled a few times. It definitely caught quite a few stares from people traversing the parking lot. It was gone after lunch - we theorize that it was either towed or simply disintegrated on the spot.