Introduction

Developed by: Blizzard
Diablo 2 official page: http://www.blizzard.com/diablo2/

Shhh…

I have a dirty little secret. I can count on one hand the number of PC games I've really played during my time here at FiringSquad. Come to think of it, I've only played two games extensively in the past eighteen months: Quake and Quake 3. Sure, I dabbled a little in Quake 2, but I went back to Quake (NetQuake mind you, not that QW garbage *puts on flame suit*). I gave Unreal Tournament a shot, but it just didn't feel right. Yes, I'm a hardcore Quake player. That's probably why CalBear doesn't let me write game reviews (it's okay, I don't let him write hardware articles either).

In the days before I became addicted to Quake, I was a pretty normal guy that actually played other games, and one of my favorites was Blizzard's Diablo. When I first heard that we were going to get a couple copies of the Diablo II beta, I wasn't sure if I would have the time or the inclination to try it out. When the beta discs first arrived on Monday, I was able to ignore them for a couple hours and concentrate on work. I've seen plenty of highly anticipated games pass through these walls, why should I pick this one up when I didn't touch any of the others? By the end of the day, I stopped being stupid and installed the game on my system.

Starting...

A ring of torches

Holyboy!

As Bob mentioned in his first Diablo write-up, the beta installed fine on my W2K, Dual Celeron 550, TNT2 Detonator 3.68 machine (I'm still not sure how the 64MB GeForce ended up in Bob's system).

Once I had everything up and running, I had to choose my character. I'm just a hardware guy, so I wasn't up to date on the new character classes yet. Bob had seen the game earlier at various trade shows and kept up with the game's development, so he already knew that he wanted to be a Necromancer. That left me with a choice between a Barbarian, an Amazon, a Sorceress, or a Paladin.

The Cairn Stone

Holyboy!

Since I didn't feel like being a chick (not confident enough in my masculinity yet), the choice was between the Paladin and the Barbarian. I choose the Paladin since the Barbarian somehow reminded me of the original Diablo's Warrior class and I wanted to try something different. Of course, I later learned that none of the characters really match the old classes in the original games. Blizzard did a great job on differentiating the character classes in Diablo II. Each character has its own special abilities not available to other classes.

After I chose the Paladin, I had to think up a name. I had played as Railboy back in the days of Q3Test, so I decided to revive the "boy" moniker and came up with Holyboy. Hey, it sounded like a good name at the time.