| I walk through the halls of the huge
room in the Monroeville Expo Mart stuffed
to exploding with curiosity and anticipation. At that time, in November of 2000,
I had just bought Diablo II, and I couldn't open it 'till I got back to the car.
Twas . . . Aggravating. Since then I have beaten the game 4 times, 3 single
player and once over Blizzard's fantastic Battle.net service. Every time I have
enjoyed it more than the last. The game is indeed well worth fully installing
it, even at the outrageous 1.55 GIGS. The manual is very good, especially
considering how many Good games come with Crappy or even NO manual these days.
A fittingly creepy soundtrack, plethora of fittingly greusome creature sounds,
and good voice acting, added to the really cool
EAX, or environmental audio feature, make the game sound sweet. Gameplay is
drastically improved from the original game in just about every way. The 3
diffuculty levels are also in the single player game this time around.
Instead of
clicking for Every Single Blow like the original, you only have to click once on a
monster and hold the mouse button down to keep attacking/casting (yes it works
with spells too) until the monster is quite dead. There are 150 diffferent "skills,"
most of which are spells that require the use of a mouse button to cast. Each
character class has 30 to choose from. Spells are not learned by the use of any
book anymore, but are instead leveled up through skillpoints. Your character
aquires 1 skill point per level and one through completing certain quests.
Each skill can be leveled up to a max of level 20, and every one is mightily
impressive when this is done. The problem is that you can only have around 105
per character due to the level restriction of 99 and only 2 quests per diffuculty
level that give a bonus skill point. Having only 6 skills researched is simply
out of the question. You need diversity. Another neat feature is the skills
that remain on all the time once you have put a skill point into them. These
passive skills are often extremely useful providing benefits to attack,
defense, dodging attacks, resistances, better ability to weild certain weapons,
and added skill effectiveness. the sheer variety of magical items is stunning,
with over 800,000 different prefix/suffix combinations for regular magic items
alone. Rare, unique, normal, socketed and set items add to that number. |
Rare items are exactly as said; Rare. If you find one of any type you should
thank your lucky charms, because even if you don't use it, you can sell it for an
exorbant amount of money. If you can use it, do because unless you have another,
better one or a unique or set item, this is the best you will find. For instance,
when my level 19 Amazon was really hurting on the offensive side because of a crappy
spear, I found a superior Spetum, went back west for a spell and had Charsi use her
"imbue" received from completing Act 1 quest 5. Whenever she imbues something
it turns into a really nice rare item. from this I get the Bitter Picket Spetum,
which simply kicked ass all the way through the rest of Acts 2 and 3.
Set items are displayed in geen text and are usually just as good as rare items.
the special thing about set items is that they are in a . . . set of items.
this can be 3-6 items that, when all of them are equipped simultaneously,
give the character extra special bonuses. Unique items are also self-explanatory.
These are quite possibly the best items in the game, unless you are lev 99 and finding
holy ornate plates of the collosus every other step. I think all the character
classes are great, but in terms of coolness effect and showing off your graphics card,
go with the sorceress. For playing over that spectacular, free B-net I suggest
the paladin. You get lots of people hanging around to get advantage of your auras.
Do try to play all the classes, or you wont get maximum satisfaction out of the game.
The only things that I can think of bringing this game down a tiny bit
are some heavy lag in the afternoon on B-net, and the 640x480 resolution. This
game looks as good as 800x600 Baldur's Gate, so I can't imagine ow sweet it would
look in the same resolution. The game was started quite a long time ago, and
it would be a pain and a delay for Blizzard to change All of the Completed
art in a different res. So who cares? It still is one of the best games I have
ever played. |