Who blogs here:
Erik spends his night and weekends saving worlds, slaying beasts and organizing mismatch shapes into straight lines. While First-person shooters (FPS),
survival horror and platformers are some of his favorite, there are no genre of game he won't play. From PC to PSP, Xbox to Wii. Erik is just as passionate
with playing games as he is talking about them.
J.R. is the sorta-completionist gamer. He almost always completes the main story arc in all games he plays, but seldom plays the "gamer's game" to complete everything. He'll never get all 120 stars or fight Emerald Weapon, but he will save the day. His favorite genres are RPG, Action/Adventure, Platformer, and MMO. He doesn't like fighting games and is rather picky about FPSs.
Ted has been hooked on gaming since the birth of the Atari 2600, when high fantasy adventure consisted of maneuvering a colored square through a castle maze while dodging pesky dragons that looked like 2D seahorses with beaks and wacky bats that took great pleasure in stealing your keys. To this day, while he enjoys platformers, first-person shooters and puzzlers, he is most passionate about RPGs and any other games which weave great stories into the overall experience.
Amethyst, a gamer that giggles at calling herself a gamer because she fits none of the glamorous stereotypes of female gamers, has been gaming since her father brought home the sparkly new Nintendo Entertainment System back in '89. Up until then she had dabbled with the Atari at a cousin's, but it was Super Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt and pounding with her hands on the Power Pad in World Class Track Meet that sealed her fate. Despite a three year stint that she doesn't talk about, she has been playing video games and other nerdly activities with enthusiasm. She enjoys puzzlers, RPGs, MMORPGs, certain shooters/fighters, platformers, magic carpet rides and um, mechanical pencil sharpeners. She hates, despite a couple of exceptions, racing games and sports games. Amethyst is married to Erik and is friends with J.R. and Ted.
The Draw of Diablo
jr.gameon
| 7/02/2008 7:40 am |
Game On
Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last week, a rock that doesn't get wireless internet, you know that "Diablo III" was announced. "Diablo III" is obviously the third major release in Blizzard's much-loved RPG dungeon-crawling, left-click endurance test of a series. I've never even played the series and I know it was announced.
Yes, I've never played "Diablo". Well, that's not entirely true. One afternoon about 5 years ago, three members of the Game On crew, myself included, networked three Macintosh computers together and played the original "Diablo" in a multiplayer fashion. Despite this event not only being my first taste of "Diablo", but my first taste of a top-down dungeon-cralwer since the original "Gauntlet", things were going well. Until we attempted to kill the butcher. The butcher was an optional kill that shouldn't have been attempted by our group until we were all at much higher levels. I didn't realize either of those facts and was disappointed. After many disastrous attempts, we gave up on killing the butcher and just started playing our own version of Hide & Seek in the forests surrounding the town.
I always knew I wanted to go back and experience those games through the single-player adventures, but never made time for them. There were always other games to play and for the most part, the "Diablo" series had stalled, with Blizzard putting more emphasis on their other games, "Warcraft", "World of Warcraft", and most recently "Starcraft". Now with the announcement of "Diablo III", I need to get my game on and catch up on this series so that I'm ready to play on the release date if I so choose to. I may not want to, but I want to have that option, and in my mind that means I need to finish "Diablo" and "Diablo II".
I stopped at the store and picked up a copy of the "Diablo Battle Chest", which has the entire "Diablo" library of games, including a strategy guide. I think it's a testament to the quality of the games that you can still find them on the shelves of your local stores, sitting right next to more recent releases. "Diablo" and "Diablo II" came out in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Other newer releases that came out as recently as January can't even be found in local stores, but "Diablo" sits there proudly.
I must not be the only one that is thinking like this. The "Diablo Battle Chest" quickly sold out at Amazon after the "Diablo III" announcement was made. Ditto at BestBuy.com, as well. If you've been thinking about playing the "Diablo" series, now might be the time to do it if you can get your hands on a copy. These games also have a free online experience through Blizzard's Battle.Net service. It should be an interesting time to play online, with a healthy mix of new players like me just discovering "Diablo" now, and the experienced veterans that have been with it all since the beginning.
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