The Latest Time Suck

More than anything else lately, I’ve been spending the greater part of my free time writing. A couple weeks ago, though, I had the fortune/misfortune of looking at some of the software in the iTunes store when I came across Undercroft, which is made by the same folks that make Runescape.

It’s a basic dungeon crawler type game, where the player controls a party of up to four adventurers as they travel the country to complete one big quest, with many, many other side quests along the way. Players can choose from Warrior, Mage, Priest, Summoner, and Assassin. It uses a turn-based movement and combat system, and the only real drawback I’ve seen for it so far, in terms of game play, is that it’s very items-heavy, and it seems like you have an infinite storage capacity. Despite selling off a lot of junk every chance I get, I still accumulate a lot of crap. Overall, though, I’ve really enjoyed it and it thus far has been my favorite app for my iTouch, free or paid (it’s a free app).

For a while now, I’ve felt a hankering to get back into Dungeons & Dragons, which I haven’t played in years. But things get in the way of that, kids, wife, work, house hold shit, life. And it’s the same for the friends I used to play with, adding in distance now that we all at least think we’re adults and don’t all live 5 miles from each other.

The worst part of the game though, is that every time you save, it the game tells you how long you’ve been playing to that point, up to the second. Looking at my most recent save file, I have logged 12 hours, 57 minutes and 5 seconds playing the game. This does not include times I forgot to save, the couple of times my character has died, or the times I’ve gone in to try and solve of puzzle, haven’t solved it, and not bothered to save. Counting all that I’d probably round up to 13.25 or 13.5 hours worth of game play. There’s nothing wrong with that when you consider I’ve been playing the game for a week and a half to two weeks, but still, that makes me wonder what all I could have accomplished in all that time.