Dungeon Runners: Laugh Your Way Through the Grind

This game is a joke. I mean that in the best way possible. The humor, however, may hide some sinister subtleties that could leak into and perhaps influence some of the less critical minds of the popular masses.

First, for those of you who go way back in the role-playing game genre--all the way back to some old school table top dice-rollin' Dungeons & Dragons nerdtopia--let me ask a question. Remember Castle Greyhawk? Dungeon Runners is a Castle Greyhwak treatment of World of Warcraft. It's absurd, dumb, and funny. LOL funny. Funny haha.

Character creation is none too clever or flashy, but it ain't bad neither, and the game is free, so if you complain about it, you can't get your money back or nuthin'. All the character options are white people, but you can choose to be a girl if you want to. Chalk up another victory tally for feminism while shaking your head sadly for race representation. Most MMORPG players probably don't care about that stuff anyways. If you don't and you just want a beefy character or sizzlin' diva with an axe and magic who can obliterate whiskers (Dungeon Runners caricature of WOW's kobolds) with a wink, nod, and purr, you've got it, baby! Download this game now.

And that's good advice, really: download this game now. The graphics are swell, the controls are fairly intuitive, and the leveling is all bing! ding! ding! w00t! for the first five or ten levels. As you progress towards level 15--as far as I've gotten, although it seems that the level cap is 100--things slow down considerably, including the laughs, and the grind becomes a bit tedious, which is a big problem.

That said, for casual gamers, this spoofy WOW parody may be a good match. Log in for fifteen minutes and complete a quest or grind away for hours at mass murder of those lesser, reportedly evil beings such as wolves and savage chittering humanoids--whatever pleases you. For added dementia and bloodlust, there's a gibbering, cackling, demonic, drooly red-faced imp named Karl in the lower left hand corner of the screen. He really gets excited when your character mutilates those baddy mobs, those nogoodnik punks that stand around and wait to be slaughtered. Watch him. He might make you laugh, that crazy demented Karl.

Bloodlust, Terrorism, and Squelching the Dissident Minorities

It's easy to get carried away and be a bully in this game, just gaily blazing a trail through pathetic whiskers and the occasional brawny bigger whisker. There are also ogre-like creatures early on, but they're called something else--oroks¹, I believe. Funny thing about the oroks. They are painted as troublemakers: protestors and political gear-wreckers. At one point, a quest-giving field commander even describes them as hippies, then charges you with the task of killing several dozen of them and bringing him their bones, or something equivalent to that.

One of the slapstick-tabulous things about Dungeon Runners is that dropped items are named things like Rusted Shoulder Pads of the Dissipated Kangaroo or Hot Slice Handaxe of Pizzazz from the Chilly Ghetto. Now I should note here that, while I've ripped neither of those item names directly from the game, they are representative. That's right, you can get weapons that originated in the ghetto. On a related note, some of the baddies in this game are wannabe rappers, and it is the player character's duty to collect those wannabe rapper's microphones. Now this is not done by guile, cunning, diplomacy, barter, or MC-stylez battling, but by the much more direct route of hack-and-slash, which, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a euphemism for killing them all.

Now if I were of a mind to make a social commentary on this game at this point, I would have the following items on my agenda:

Character creation is limited to white avatars. Every avatar is very fit, buff, and hot. This is pretty standard for MMORPGs, which tend to under-represent ugly, goofy-looking, overweight, or otherwise imperfect character bodies. A shout out here to Star Wars Galaxies, which for all its shortcomings, had a beautiful and versatile avatar customization system. I loved my fat Twi'lek chef and musician. I believe his name was Poolo, and as I remember, he could be quite obnoxious. But I digress.

The only way to progress in the game is by slaughtering animals and other humanoid beings. Again, this is standard fare for MMORPGs, and so this criticism holds true for dozens of other games as well, some of the most popular being WOW, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, ad nauseaum. Some of those games do have crafting, but it's difficult to simply play the game as a straight crafter. MMORPGs are not role-playing games. They tend to be hack-and-slash festivals that glorify and normalize poaching, wholesale slaughter, murder, and even genocide.

Part of this game's storyline involves hunting down protesters--described as hippies (which, I admit, is good for a laugh)--and goons who, with a bit of imaginative stretching, could be paralleled to inner-city folks that like to express themselves by rapping over beats. These people's in-game storyline crime? They are mining ingredients for and developing fizz cola, which works like speed. I don't know... there's some ambivalent morality represented here, at best: "The rappers are making better drugs than the city has to offer and encroaching on our sales. I need you, brave hero, to smoke 'em out and mow 'em down, bring me 25 of their scalps and a bottle of this fizz cola for analysis. We gotz to corner the market!"

If I didn't know better, I'd think these kinds of games were setting people up to support heavy-handed military interventions and surges in the name of consumerism, capitalism, or fizz cola.

But it's just a game. When played as such, with a cautious eye towards the subliminal context and an appreciation of the satirical humor, it's a good fifteen minutes or couple of hours of entertainment. Just don't think too hard about it. Whatever you do, don't imagine that those whiskers or oroks have families, or that wolves are anything other than vicious, blood-curdling, aggressive nuisances in need of a good harvest.

Happy gamering!!

Footnotes

Someday I want to be responsible for naming mobs and monsters in these games. I think I've figured out the trick and the formula: take a consonant, insert a vowel, sprinkle another couple consonants. If you like, add another vowel. Repeat until satisfied. Here's a real-world example: Pikhomajarithta. That one sounds mystical and elusive, doesn't it? Advanced namers can scramble those rules and throw in dashes and apostrophes to get chilling, awesome effects like Urk'nebozoid-P'shKar. For those who are wondering, Urk'nebozoid-P'ShKar are oversized undead teddy bears from the Shallow Underworld of Ru. This location is not in Dungeon Runners, to my knowledge. As far as I know, the undead teddy bears from the Shallow Underworld of Ru exist only in my imagination, and now on this page. Bing!