ryan vincent jaeger

I was recently invited to rejoin the Clancore Design Group in efforts to steer their sound design and audio implementation needs in the right direction. They are currently working on an all original game titled “Mechnexus: Projection of Force.” I have decided to take up the offer as I have nothing sound design related going on at the moment, other than my mod for Crysis that will get off it’s feet in the future, and my personal musical endeavors…

I have a lot of old computer hardware laying around sitting in boxes, and I thought it would be a cool idea to display them on my wall. I first thought of nailing them through the holes usually in most PC hardware to an extremely large cork board, but then I thought of shadow boxes!

Shadow boxes come in many sizes and can be bought at pretty much any arts and crafts store. I bought a 9×11″ shadow box at Garden Ridge Pottery for $12(USD) and you can place pretty much any single slot PCI or AGP card in it with ease. (Sorry PCI/AT cards don’t fit)

I’m going to eventually get more and cover my entire wall with old PC hardware, but for right now this will have to do.

From top left to bottom right:
Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege 2, Neverwinter Nights, Company of Heroes, Command and Conquer: Generals, Grand Theft Auto 2, SIN Emergence, Ut2004, PlanetSide, Tribes: Vengeance, Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2: Special Forces, Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty, EverQuest, Star Wars: Galaxies, EVE-Online, World Of Warcraft, World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, RF online.

These are not all the PC games I own, I have left out bargain bin games, games with the old large boxes, and games purchased directly online…

Dungeon Runners is an action based online role-playing game that’s free to download and free to play.

At first glance when I entered Dungeon Runners I was immediately reminded of Dungeon Siege, with an art style similar to that of World of Warcraft. The a game world looks like it was created with tile sets, similar to that of Neverwinter Nights.

The game structure concept is simple. You start in an area filled with other players and the area contains all the quests and supplies you’ll need for the instanced zone(s). In a sense its just like Diablo2 with 3D meeting rooms (ala Guild Wars). Movement is WASD or Point and click, and combat is fast paced Point-and-Click ala Dungeon Siege. The mobs are party mobs, similar to that of Lineage2. If you’re not familiar with party mobs, party mobs are groups of creatures that travel together and usually have lower HP than a solo mob.

The sound is nothing to be excited about, as there are a lot of unaltered library sounds, and voice acting similar to that of a power rangers episode (humorous at times). The music seemed well done and fit nicely however. The environmental preset I heard in the first areas sounds clean, although there is no way to turn it off from the game menu or config files as far as I can see. I will say that as a whole the sound works for the game, just it seems like an afterthought… Hey its free after all.

Game performance is quite decent even at high resolutions and high settings, I seemed to be getting around 24-30fps @ 1680×1050 (AMD AthalonXP 3000+, 1gig DDR 400, ATI x800xt, WinXP Pro SP2). Network latency seems to be a large issue currently during the time of this review, in all 3 of the test worlds. I’m sure they will correct this by the time the game is ready for launch.

Overall if you like Guild Wars or Dungeon Siege and don’t mind cartoon like graphics, give Dungeon Runners a try.