The Lag Beast Striketh

During a session of Dungeon Runners last night, I experienced the bane of many online gamers. While in the midst of my thirteenth quest to defeat [fill in a number] of [insert monster type], I found my character unresponsive to my commands, whereas the monsters he had attacked a fraction of a second earlier were quite active. Yes, lag had bound my poor hero in place while he was decimated by a swarm of creatures who had no business killing him. At least at my current level, Dungeon Runners seems to have no death penalties, since I merely respawned in town and found myself unfettered by my previous demise. Anyway, I need to log back into the game tonight to finish mowing down whatever fiendish thingamajigs I missed yesterday.

On the console front, my wife and I have spent a good many hours playing Final Fantasy VII over the last few days. We are now past the game's most famous spoiler, which makes my life much easier. I can freely talk about the game without censoring myself upon the mention of important plot points. As an old-school roleplaying fan, though, I still find myself surprised by the malleability of FFVII's characters. The Materia system, while madly customizable, ends up making your rock collection more important to combat than who you bring with you. I suppose this tends to soften the blow when a 'critical' member of your party leaves for some reason or another; the loss of your only healer would greatly complicate things for the rest of your party. However, does anyone else see any irony in a game with such an epic, sweeping plot forcing you to say, "Well, what did s/he have equipped again?" several times in quick succession and placing the exact same stuff on someone else?

I saw a couple of new trailers recently which may complicate my gaming budget during the holiday season. Tomb Raider: Underworld has a teaser on Xbox Live which left me scratching my head. The video begins with what I thought were Lara's trademark pistols underwater. Well, they turned out to be dry, but everything after that is where things go bonzo bananas haywire. I will leave you to form your own opinions, but I must say that Eidos and Crystal Dynamics accomplished their mission of getting me intrigued by the goings-on. I also downloaded the Prince of Persia gameplay montage, which has some really good music. Seriously -- the ethereal, yet mournful, tune accompanying the trailer left me with a tear in my eye earlier today. I am also a big fan of well-done cel shading, so the art style scores massive points in my book.

Well, off to track down whatever those silly things were. Take care, and keep your controllers charged!