Time wasters

I play a lot of flash games when I'm procrastinating so I thought I'd share the truly deserving games every 3-4 days.

Today we'll be talking about Desktop Dungeons. This is a fun, little roguelike than can get challenging fast. To those who think their moves through will find the game challenging, but a fun way to spend a 5-10 minute break from studying or while eating lunch.

You start the game off with a choice of 5 races and 4 classes, unlocking more as you complete dungeons. Each race reacts differently to glyphs, spells that you find on the ground. A human, for example, gains more attack whenever you convert a glyph. A gnome, on the other hand, will receive mana potions. Each monster is a different challenge. The meat men deal low damage, but have high health. Goblins attack quickly and have the "first strike" bonus, but they have far lower health than a meat man.

Each dungeon has a floor boss that must be defeated to unlock your next class. The bosses are "suped-up" versions of their lackeys. Because every monster is different, each boss must be tackled differently. Some classes or race combos might be better versus certain bosses. A priest does 200% damage to undead, so a human priest who gets attack bonuses from gylphs will do far more damage than a gnome thief.

I'm barely scratching the surface, and I could write so much more, but I feel TotalHalibut's video covers and explains a lot more than I have time to write.

You can download Desktop Dungeons here: http://www.qcfdesign.com/?cat=20 (Only 4.3 MB!)

Free trade returns!

http://services.runescape.com/m=news/the-wilderness-and-free-trade-will-return
That's right folks! Free trade and the Wilderness will return to Runescape on Tuesday, Feburary 1st. Hopefully Jagex was right and their bot detection software is up to the challenge. How do you plan to prepare for this monumental update? Leave a comment!

The Wilderness and Free Trade may be returning to Runescape.

There's a healthy dose of nostalgia for you.

http://www.runescape.com/wilderness

Runescape. The name alone brings nostalgia to many people, myself included. The game has gone through many changes, some good, some bad. The most "hated" update was the removal of free trade and the wilderness.

For those who don't play, the wilderness was a zone in the game where players could fight each other. The one who died would lose most, if not all, of their equipment. The winnter would loot their corpse. Many people made accounts strictly for player killing. A good percent of the games population was centered around this one feature.

Free trade is something you'll find in any game. You could ask your buddy to loan you that brand new cool sword, or help out someone starting the game with a set of armor and a weapon. They limited what you could do to only so much, so instead of being able to give your friend 100k worth of gold and equipment, you could only give them 10k every 15 minutes. All items in the game were given set values. A big auction house styled system was put in place. The economy was forever changed.

The group dedicated to player killing were enraged. The Wilderness was replaced with the Bounty Hunter minigame. While it delivered a player killing minigame with a chance to earn loot, it was not even close to being the same and was severely broken it it's own rights. There were massive riots in-game for many days afterwards.

But Jagex did not do this to lose a large chunk of their playerbase. The game was bloated with bots being funded by stolen credit cards. Jagex was being sued, and the outlook was bad. So they removed the problem. No longer could a person steal a credit card, make a plethora of accounts funded by that stolen credit card, bot on those characters, then sell the loot they received for in-game gold which they sold on RWT (real world trading) sites.

Jagex did not have to worry about being sued into non-existance and players did not have to compete with the 20 to 30 bots at fishing spots or woodcutting groves. Seems like a win-win situation for both, right?

But there was still the fact that you could not really make money from Pvping or help out newbie friends. Now Jagex is saying their bot detection is much better than it was all those years ago, and they feel confident that they can handle bots and rwting without resorting to a "nuke everything" button.

Over 1.2 million people have voted. 91% voted for the return of free trade and the wilderness, 7% voted no, and 2% said they did not care either way. Voting is closed, and the fate of free trade and wilderness update will be revealed on Monday, Janurary 17th.

So what do you think? Did you vote yes? no? What are your most fond moments of Runescape? Leave a comment!

First post!

Hey-o! I Finally jumped on the blog bandwagon. I plan to use this site for my Let's Play videos, as well as vidya game news and video clips I find interesting/bizzare/funny/etc.

I'm looking at one to three blog posts a day, maybe less. All depending on what I find and what's happening in the vidya world. Feel free to add me on Steam or PSN.

Steam id-xxxever
PSN-TarnishedLegend