Press Start

By Shamus Posted Saturday Mar 31, 2007

Filed under: Links 19 comments

In response to this, Rebecca posts this, where she says:

As soon as I left the camp, I realized that I could kill zombies! Yes! The thing that frustrated me about Ragnarok so much was the hours and hours of killing low-level monsters before I could fight anything that wasn’t absolutely pathetic, like a bouncing flower or something. In this game, a Level 1 guy with no special equipment could take down an entire cave of zombies and red goblin-like creatures. Now THAT’S a videogame. I might have to get a copy of this.

And so it begins.

Diablo players can be divided into two groups: Those who become addicted, and those who are consumed.

 


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19 thoughts on “Press Start

  1. Rehtul says:

    Too true.

  2. Dylan Zimmerman says:

    Just to touch on her first comment about not being able to kill anything powerful, I would like to add Everquest to this list. There is nothing that kills a game for me like being unable to kill BUGS at level 1. Not just any bugs, but I got killed by giant BUTTERFLIES. Call me impatient, but I don’t enjoy spending hours trying to GET to the point where I can kill giant butterflies.

    [/rant]

  3. Jason says:

    I understand that pay-for-play games have to build in SOME timesinks to extand the time the player has to invest in the game (and thus extend the time they have to pay for in monthly fees) as part of their business plan. However, some (like the afforementioned EQ, and the even-worse-on-this-score UO) take it a little too far. Running around an area littered with scores of “deadly threats” that wouldn’t bruise a hemopheliac in real life, and actually being at risk from these monster rejects, gets real old real quick.

  4. Brian says:

    Beware Diablo II! Major blackhole of time! But make sure you pick up the Lord of Destruction expansion pack. A whole extra level and boss, as well as enhanced items, rune words and weaponcrafting. My wife says only play it when your wife is out of town. I agree.

  5. Brian says:

    Final fantasy games tend to pit you up against pathetic monsters a lot too, however dragonquest games are the worst about that probably even worse than rose online. To Rebecca: You should play through the single player game before ever going online; it tends to ruin the story which is really good.

  6. Polk says:

    Glad to see she found some fun!

  7. GreyDuck says:

    Dammit.

    Now I need to reinstall D2X on my spiffy new uber-computer. Like I needed more timewasters! (For years and years before City Of Heroes/Villains came along, Diablo, Diablo II and Lord of Destruction were my #1 games…)

  8. Coarse.Sand says:

    I guess I should suggest Dungeon Runners to anyone wanting to get into a Diablo style game, especially one where the online community isn’t horrible. Dungeon Runners is going to be a free hack-and-slash MMO released by NCSoft (NC Austin to be specific, no Lineage worries), and you could imagine it as a version of Diablo II that doesn’t try to take itself seriously in any way. It’s not in its final form yet though, but you can find plenty of places like the GameFAQs and MMORPG.com forums where you can get a referral sent for you to get in on the current beta, and it happens to be really quite good despite being incomplete. Oh, and for people who hate the graphics race happening in the industry right now, it looks decent without needing cutting edge hardware (256mb RAM, Radeon 9500ish graphics card).

  9. Ryzz says:

    Hey Shamus, what do you think of these twenty sided fuzzy dice?

    I’ve never played Diablo but was consumed by Guildwars for about 6 months.

  10. Patrick says:

    Diablo? Hmmm…. can’t remeber if I ever played that one….
    OOOHHHh…. THAT game!

    I think between Shamus and I, we figured out we logged close too 900 hours on the game. Even heather got bit by the bug andf logged a hundred or so I remeber. We even had “bucket characters”, simply a empty character that we never played, but whenever we had too much stuff ( gems, armor, weapons) that was too good to throw away but our ‘real’ characters couldn’t carry, these ‘bucket characters would come into the game ( we played on the LAN) and pick it up for us. We had about 10 such characters. one character for each of the following:

    1.runes
    2.gems
    3.unique armor
    4.unique weapons
    5.set item armor
    6.set item weapons
    7.rings and pendants
    8.crafted weapons
    9.crafted armor
    10.anything else of value we didn’t want to throw away.

    Yea… i think you could say we fell into the consumed category….

  11. Dragonbane says:

    For those who are thinking about reinstalling Diablo2, might I respectfully point you towards Titan Quest, which is the closest thing to Diablo3 that I’ve yet seen on the market. They have also just released an expansion but I haven’t had the opportunity to take a look at it yet. It’s veeerrrry pretty. :)

  12. AndrewNZachsDad says:

    I got sucked into the WoW craze running through my office (tech support call centre for major computer company) and played until July 11, 2006. How do I remember the date so well? We determined that we got pregnant on July 14 and my wife won’t let me forget that I clawed my way out of that time-sucking black hole 3 days prior.

    Zachary (boy #2 after Andrew) was born last Tuesday AM, btw. I don’t expect the majority of you to give a hoot, but I think it’s in the rules somewhere that I get to crow about it randomly. Proverbs, maybe? :)

  13. Shamus says:

    AndrewNZachsDad: Happy birthday to the little guy. Congrats.

  14. Will says:

    Titan Quest is very pretty. So pretty in fact that it’s the only game other than Oblivion that causes my video card to overheat without some extra cooling “modifications.” That seems a bit excessive for a simple hack & slash.

  15. Wyrm says:

    Diablo 2… oh yeah, that black hole in my life around college. The one that made me fail 2 exams due to addiction. That empty hole in my life i cant remember anything about. THAT Diablo 2.

  16. John Fiala says:

    Heh. One of the things that impressed me about WoW was that moments after creating a character I was fighting off wolves. Yay testosterone!

  17. Huckleberry says:

    AndrewsDad: Congrats on being AndrewNZachsDad now! :)

    Enjoy watching the two grow up. It’s bound to be more exciting than getting that flying mount! (Though I’m not sure how it compares to the *swift* flying mount… ;) )

  18. Merle says:

    I could not believe in Unreal World (graphical roguelike survival game) when, after starting with a warrior sort of character, getting a good sword and some basic armour, I made the mistake of attacking a tiny bunny.. which proceeded to kill me. Several other games saw a deer and, I think, a squirrel kill me. Bandits were no problem, but the wildlife was fierce.

  19. tomas says:

    just listened tristram theme on youtube. again. brilliant, i must say.

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