Last week, we took a brief look at some of the more painful random dungeons of the past decade or two and spent a few moments reflecting on their common miseries. If you’ve already read that article or you’ve slept through any of .hack’s random dungeons, you’re probably wondering if there’s any redeeming qualities to this design trick at all. Worry not, random dungeons have been entertaining gamers for 30 years, and some are still strong today. So without further ado, let’s see some games.

Random Dungeons. Love them or hate them, they’ve been around more or less since the inception of the role-playing game and have become a fundamental trope of the genre. However, with the possible exception of random battles, no other RPG convention incites such ire gamers (though unlike random battles, random dungeons actually have many ardent defenders). While it’s ultimately a matter of taste, there are definitely some implementations of the idea that have been more successful with the critics than others. With that in mind, we can take a look at a few of the popular and panned dungeons of the past 30 years to see what they did right and wrong.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, so this editorial will be broken into two parts. This part will focus on the misery that random dungeons can engender when mismanaged. Part two will surface next week and will cover the lighter side of this quirky design trick.

While Advance Wars: Days of Ruin doesn’t deliver anything fundamentally new to the successful series of strategy games, it does offer more of the same excellent gameplay. Genre fans will be pleased by the freedom offered by WFC connectivity, the hardcore will appreciate the sheer volume of content, and casual gamers will like the pick-up put-down gameplay.

Dead Rising is probably about the only survival horror game that manages to have a playable combat system without wholly abandoning the genre’s trademark tension. The game’s over-the-top amorality and shamelessly open design combine into an experience that’s difficult to get into, but ultimately a fun investment of your game time.

There’s more potentially shoddy journalism regarding video games today. The Sunday Post (via Gamasutra) has an article where John Hillier, a spokesman for the UK Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association’s intellectual property crime unit (ELSPA), is attributed with the estimation that 90% of American DS owners play pirated software. Gamasutra has since posted an addendum to the story; evidently ELSPA later criticized the article for actually consisting of a real conversation, an unrelated news article, and outright fabrications.

While ELSPA would obviously want to discredit the Sunday Post’s article because, “ELSPA would certainly never presume to comment about America,” the article seems suspect all on its own. While there’s a significant incentive for core gamers to pirate games (hey, it’s an expensive hobby and a financially crippling obsession), casual gamers and their low attach rates seem unlikely to make the necessary effort to seek out illicit storage devices and illegal ROMs.