Donkey God

There are two types of online poker players that you need to watch out for-the newbie and the reckless player. They can both be pretty sketchy to play against, and for the same reasons.

You just have no idea what these guys are going to do: the noob is usually too ignorant to know any better, and the reckless guy just plain doesn’t care. Now I know that these guys are usually easy pickin’s at any game, but there’s usually one or two hands that will absolutely screw you.

You’ll hear Mike Matisow whining about this process-the guy who doesn’t know any better will play a lousy hand, say a 5-6 unsuited, and you go in with a K-Q unsuited. Flop comes out King-5-5, and you think that no one would start a hand with a five in it, and throw some chips in the pot, and lose them because some rookie didn’t know enough to fold preflop…can you tell this happened to me recently?

Anyways, this goes back to knowing the other poker players at the table. If you pay attention to who’s playing lousy starting hands or chasing a longshot draw, you’ll be able to spot the newbie or the reckless guy and play against them accordingly. Be careful with your marginal hands and bluffs, many times they won’t know or care enough to fold against you. Try to reel them in when you know you’ve got the winning hand, and get them out before they manage to suck out on you.

With the early craze of PC adventure games back in the 80s, you just couldn’t get enough of them. Every month, game players would wait for the next release. What adventure would they be up against next? And what could be better than to be able to create your own adventure? That was the premise of the original Dungeon Hack by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons. Unfortunately the game didn’t deliver on its promises.

Dungeon Hack could have been a great idea if the makers of it had put the time into it that was necessary. But as with so many products that we see everyday, this was obviously a rush job and it showed.

The premise of Dungeon Hack was simple. Instead of the game engine giving you a set game to play where you journey through some dungeon looking for treasures and fighting monsters, with this game you could design your own adventure and your own dungeon so that each game was different. What could be more exciting than that?

Except the game was anything but exciting. The number of problems with the game far outweighed the number of things that were good about it. Let’s start off with the good parts as that won’t take very long.

The only good part about this game was that you could indeed “technically” make an infinite number of dungeons and adventures. You could designate how many levels, what kinds of monsters and treasures and a number of other things. On the surface, this would appear to make this a game you could play over and over without ever getting tired of it.

But the actual game play itself didn’t quite work that way. Dungeon Hack was simply a random dungeon creator. Even though each one was “technically” different, the truth of the matter was, each one was the same. The only difference in the game, from one play to another, was that the maze was laid out differently and you encountered different monsters in different areas and found different treasures. But the game play itself felt the same each time. It wasn’t like playing a different game. It was simply a continuation of the game you played the last time you fired it up. Add to that the fact that the graphics were horrible, even by 1980s standards and this game was almost unplayable.

In the years since the original Dungeon Hack was released, other customizable games have come out. Whether or not they were able to achieve what Dungeon Hack could not is a matter of opinion. Certainly Dungeon Hack had its appeal. For those who didn’t need more than just a random dungeon each time they played, it served its purpose. But for those who wanted a different story, in which case this game had none, then you were really out of luck. Dungeon Hack had no story, no cohesive structure and no real interest to a die hard game player.

Maybe the next time somebody comes out with Dungeon Hack they’ll do a better job of it.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to PC Games