Dungeon Runners is about as fun as a drug addiction. It’s an unabashedly grindy dungeon crawler that owes its roots to Diablo while desperately trying to ripoff World of Warcraft. As far as freely available, massively multi-player, online role-playing games without subscriptions go, it’s better than a lot of what I’ve played in the past, but it’s still not great. It’s meager; it’s mediocre. It does manage to rise above the average in a few areas, however: the game’s terrific sense of humor can be found nearly everywhere from the naming of weapons to the kind of non-player characters you meet. But then other areas are rather low: I constantly keep a helmet on my level six warrior — not for the armor points, but because he’s so ugly that I can’t stand to look at his pouting grimace anymore. So, why do I keep playing?

I don’t review games too often, but when I stumbled across Lex Venture: A Crossword Caper the other day, I knew I had to say a few things about it. I’ve really been digging this great game. It’s a kid-friendly, Scrabble-esque puzzle game that is very fun, but also very challenging.
The premise of […]

Except for the cases where an advertisement showed me a product I was actually interested in and maybe even gave me some piece of useful information, I’ve generally been insulted and annoyed by the majority of the ones I couldn’t outright, completely ignore. I’ve seen just about everything from blatant product placements in major motion pictures to being told I wasn’t cool unless I had the latest gizmo by the very people who made that gizmo. In a lament voiced by The Rolling Stones over 40 years ago, I’m just the latest version of the dude who can’t get no satisfaction.

Video games are an expensive hobby — for PC gamers, it’s even more so. When you adjust for inflation, it’s plain to see that the price of consoles have come down quite a bit. In 1977, an Atari 2600 cost $199 — that kind of scratch would almost net you a Wii, these days. For a few dollars more, you could own a new Xbox 360 Arcade at only $279. In the PC gaming world, however, this kind of cash would just about cover the cost of a decent video card — and that’s just one component. You still need some RAM, a case with good air flow, a capable motherboard, and a CPU — none of this is cheap. If you already have most of the components you’ll need to build a new system, you can usually save yourself a few hundred bucks, but for the modern-PC gamer who’s just starting out, you’re looking to spend over $1000, easily. Oh, and don’t forget the monitor!