Dungeon Crawler games are a subtype of Roleplaying game where you… well, crawl through dungeons. They probably spawned from the labyrinthian dungeon maps of the old “Advance Dungeons & Dragons” pen and paper RPG, and were spearheaded in the 80s and early 90s by SSI (Strategic Simulations, Inc.) who had at that time bought a full AD&D license to develop into computer games.

Secret of the Silver Blades from SSI, DOS screenshot

The SSI games were bulky. There were lots of stats and strategy involved, from character creation to the unwieldy combat system. I never liked the SSI games a lot, until EOTB came. “Eye of the Beholder” was a game of a new breed – more accessible to casual gamers (I guess one hour per day after school is casual), and graphically more interesting than the old generation. I played that game for hours on end.

Eye of the Beholder 1

Game mechanics in Dungeon Crawler games are straightforward. You walk through the dungeon with your party (the party composition is still – 20 years later in the MMORPG era – similar: Two tanks, a rogue, a dwarf warrior, a mage and a priest) and encounter monsters. They drop experience and items when killed. Some doors are open, some locked, some must be opened by solving puzzles. The deeper the party goes into the dungeon, the harder the monsters are to kill – until the boss encounter, which is usually the single most challenging fight in the game.

In the old days, we made maps with squared paper because automaps did not yet exist – every game with an automapping feature was regarded as a luxury. There were pages and pages of neatly-drawn maps in the tips and cheats section of computer games magazines. Oh, those times…

Fast forward 20 years.

Yesterday, I downloaded a new game called “Legend of Grimrock” from the Steam store; it set me back a mere 13.99€. Compared to fullprice games like EOTB, that’s a joke. Grimrock is true to the idea of a Dungeon Crawler, but it has vastly improved graphics and sound. After reading a couple of favorable reviews, I decided to try out for myself – after spending almost 150 hours of playtime on Skyrim (which is quite the opposite of a dungeon crawling game), the confined space and limited-choice gameplay mechanics of Grimrock were a welcome change.

Grimrock character generation screen

Like its predecessors, Grimrock first lets you create your party. There is usually two members of the fighting caste, a ranger/rogue type and a caster involved. Stats are configurable as well as race and name, but if you want to jump right into the game, you can have a randomly generated, but balanced party.

After a short old-school drawn intro, the four prisoners are cast into the tunnel system in Mount Grimrock, a prison mountain fortress. And now the action starts.

A dungeon in Mount Grimrock

You can walk and turn with the keyboard (WASD for the win). Turning is only possible in 90-degree angles and if you walk, you always take one step forward at a time (about 3 feet). Each character can equip one item in their left and right hand, respectively (such as a bow and arrows, or sword and shield as seen in the picture above).

Monsters come in all kinds of shapes and forms. So far, I have seen giant fungi, skeleton warriors and archers, spiders and other dungeon-dwellers. They are nicely animated, all in the old school of Eye of the Beholder (repeating animation cycles and not-lifelike behavior).

A group of four skeleton warriors attacking

A big difference to its ancestors: Grimrock has a well-working automapping feature which really helps in the maze-like dungeons.

Grimrock automap

After the first levels, there are a lot of tricky fights that challenge your abilities of “crowd control” (a phrase from MMORPG lingo which roughly means (“line up monsters so you can finish them up one after another), “kiting” (run away from monsters so you can kill them with ranged weapons while they follow you) and character management.

Other features include a lot of interesting puzzles, including teleportation, clever use of monster traps and line-of-sight puzzles. Level 4 (which I currently play) is completely made up of those puzzles and gives a very challenging environment. Lots of fun!

The magic system involves spells being created with 9 different magic symbols and scrolls that tell you these spells. There are “magic bombs” for one-time use as well as wands, staffs and other accessoires. Of course, there are lots of items scattered in the dungeons that improve your heroes’ armor, fighting skills or simply provide food. Health, antivenom and other potions can be mixed with a simple interface and some ingredients also found in the dungeons.

All in all, I can wholeheartedly recommend “Legend of Grimrock” to everyone who wants to relive the old days of Eye of the Beholder and other dungeon crawling games. Go buy it, it is currently (July 10; availability may vary) on sale at gog.com for a mere $7.50 (Disclaimer: I have never bought there; buy on Steam if unsure).

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Red Dead Redemption 100% Completion

Now, I can still complete the “Undead Nightmare” DLC addon (which seems rather hilarious and like a lot of fun). I still have “Brütal Legend” and “Uncharted 2″ to complete, too.

What should I play first…?

This — if optimized and built upon by other developers — might change the state of Starcraft league play a lot. After all, this game (and its predecessor) is one of the most-played competition games worldwide, with five-figure prize money for good players.

I foresee this being the new chess, with fixed openings (i.e. build orders) that are put up against each other. The only difference to chess: You can’t see the opening that your opponent will use and thus can’t react until you make first contact.

There’s also an iPhone app doing something like that: $2.99 in the Appstore.

• There will be an SD and a HD version of the game
• The SD version will be a 700MB download, the HD version will be around 1.5 gig
• The SD version will be priced at $0.99, while the HD version will be double the price, $1.99

Carmack states that id took a “little slice of RAGE” and focused on the quintessential “shooter values” of shooting, hitting and surviving.

The name of the game: “Mutant Bash TV”. Oh, I’m so looking forward to that game. I so hope it will be in the german AppStore.

The article is full of technical details that show how awkward some of Apple’s OS design decisions seem to be, while others are just great for game development. If you are a game and/or programming geek, go read it here!

Step 1: Make an alt.

Step 2: Level it to level 15 using the starting zone quests and the first followup zone.

Step 3: Queue for random dungeons.

Step 4-120: Run random dungeons until level 80.

While waiting for your dungeon queue, you can quest or grind boars or level a profession.

Really not much to it, eh?

Portal is a very nice casual game, with a steep learning curve and lots of mind-boggling tricks to it. You should download it now – the promotion only lasts until 24th of May

Usually after a such leak, warnings ensue that the downloads will be trojaned, you shouldn’t install untrusted (i.e. pirated) software, that your WoW account might be phished, etc.

In this case, however, it’s quite easy to see if the Alpha is authentic. And from all I can see, it is. The installer is digitally signed by a Thawte Code Signing certificate issued on April 30th, 2010 to… Blizzard.

The installer (which merges new content with a copy of your “normal” WoW installation) downloads files from a CDN that is also used for the official WoW downloads. The included realm list has the “official” testing realms in it. The WoW.exe is probably signed, too (didn’t actually check yet).

So, it’s authentic. But what good is it?

You need a sandbox (a minimalized realm server software) to run it and as of now, I don’t think there is anything resembling gameplay. You can run through empty landscapes and check out the new Barrens etc., but no NPCs are where they should be. You can spawn them or morph yourself into them (which is neat – I was Onyxia for a couple minutes) and supposedly you can also play the two new races already. I’d guess the first cease&desist letters are already on their way to whoever is offering sandbox and alpha downloads – so get them while they last (or wait for the final release).

With regards to a release date – my guess would be it will be the usual November release. The Wrath of the Lich King “Friends & Family” alpha version was released on May 20th, 2008 and the game was released on November 13, 2008. Seeing that Cataclysm will have a whole bunch of testing-heavy features (flying in Kalimdor will require very thorough testing due to the geometry changes), I’d presume that pushing the alpha out 3 weeks earlier won’t influence the release of the final game a lot.

Seriously. A lot of comment spam arrives here, and the vast majority of it are regarding manuals that tell you how to get massive amounts of WoW Gold. Some even claim you can reach Gold Cap (the informal word for the maximum of 214748 gold, 36 silver, 48 copper that any one character can hold in their bags) in a mere weeks.

Let me tell you: 99% of these guides are complete and utter crap. From the ones I have seen so far, most are uselessly outdated and consider information that is either completely trivial or just not universally feasible.

An interesting note is that these gold guides are mainly promoted with “affiliate programs” that give the affiliates a higher commission percentage than what the original author earns. This leads to what? Spam, massive amounts of it  – polluting the Google index and my (and other) blog.

This pisses me off. That’s why I’m gonna give you guys a couple tips for free, should you not have them figured out by yourself.

Free WoW Gold Guide

This is a couple things I have seen and done myself, not really rocket science.

As an endgame raider, I spend around 1000 to 2000 gold per week just to keep my character raiding. This money mainly goes into repairs, enchants and gems. Repairs because I’m a tank and I take massive amounts of damage. Also, because my guild does *not* have the Lich King on farm. And because I’m dual-specced with Melee DpS, I can even have two completely broken gear sets in one raid run!

Fortunately, flasks, some gems and fish feast is provided by my guild, but everyone is expected to chip in as much as they can. I do so by submitting mats, the odd gem or other valuables that I have no use for to the guild bank, and by occasionally donating money.

However, if you spend 2k per week, you either have to have an intake of about the same or a large stash hidden somewhere (or pay gold farmers which I do not do). If you’re still levelling, there’s even worse money sinks:

• maxing out the crafting professions costs several K to several 10K per profession
• Flying skills
• Mounts, Flying mounts
• Respeccing to accomodate new abilities
• Dual Spec
• Reenchanting and regemming your gear

However, my tips are from 80s for 80s. I will put a couple tips for alts and newbies later, but wanna jot down my thoughts quick.

Dailies

Do your dailies. Really. They are an awesome source of income and can net you about 400G per day if you play your cards right. I would recommend doing them in the following order:

1. Tournament dailies in Icecrown: These give 10*12 Gold if you still need rep with the major Horde cities, and 10*12 + 4*10 gold if you don’t. That nets you 160 Gold in a playtime of about 20 minutes. If you take a friend, you’ll avoid the hassle of doing TFA (“Threat from Above”) and BBTC (“Battle before the Citadel”) alone. All other quests are soloable and take no more than 15 minutes to finish, excluding flight times.
   Some quests are random, out of a pool of 4 or 5 different dailies. If you get a quest called “Gromok wants his snobolds”, you have to fly to K3 and catch snobolds with a net. There is a daily quest called “Overstock” in K3 that can be done simultaneously with the former one, netting you another 12 Gold basically for free.
2. Dailies in the Storm Peaks (Sons of Hodir): These are equally awesome, since they are all very close to the same quest hub (Dun Niffelhem) and rather quickly done, albeit heavily farmed. Should not be a problem to do them in another 20 minutes if you’re halfway decent geared and not a total idiot. 6 quests, 13 gold each, 78 Gold.
3. Dailies in Zul’Drak: These dailies are actually quite annoying and I don’t do them myself. However, since they are on a timer, you are guaranteed to be done with them in under 20 minutes. Nets 50 gold and extra loot.
4. Fishing daily, cooking daily: usually done in a couple minutes, another 12 - 30 gold (depending on loot from the bag of fishing surprises).
5. Total from dailies: 330 Gold in one hour.

I will update this posting from time to time with other crap that I know.