Diablo II Review

ActionButton.net has published what has to be one of the most bizarrely-written video game reviews I’ve ever seen, and Blizzard’s Diablo II is the target of their scrutiny. Here’s a bit of rambling to go with their score of ZERO out of 4:

But this is about Diablo II, and we need to say the whys and the wherefores of beatings and love. Generally, when we dislike something, our urge is to disengage immediately. This is why we didn’t play Ico past the first forty minutes (don’t look at us like that if we’re going to have fantasies about saving a foreign woman from certain doom, we want those fantasies to not make us look like an underage minotaur with lukemia fighting shadows with a stick; I also want (calling her to my location so that she stands next to me) to have roughly the same game effect on magical bullshit as)’˜holding her hand) (the ham-fisted metaphor here for holding hands as being a fantasy form of intimacy only makes sense if the woman isn’t a pale spectre (and on the subject of holding hands, if you’re holding someone’s hand, it’s because you don’t trust them, and you intend to grip some part of their body, because you figure they probably wouldn’t accept wearing a leash)). So, then, to truly render something into paste with hatred, it has to possess a strange ability to make us love it and give nothing back. Like the illegitimate child in The Count of Monte Cristo who was buried in a box in the back yard at birth (on the assumption that he was dead because he was blue and also wasn’t breathing and they didn’t have incubators in those days), adopting it will ultimately destroy you. This thing doesn’t understand love, and doesn’t want it, and you are a fool to think otherwise.

This is also how we feel about cats.

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We’re probably being pretty obvious here, but the only reason Blizzard made Diablo II the epic, endless bag of cookies they did was because that’s what they believed their audience wanted (and they were right, as they are always right, and the audience doesn’t really get that the pigging out it wants to do isn’t good for it you have to be firm with your audience and act in their best interest even when they don’t know that’s what you’re doing (and the audience has to eventually tell you to screw yourself, and they’re marrying him, and they don’t care *what* you say)).

There is no atmospheric escalation in Diablo II. You appear in what passes for a verdant field a la late 90s computer graphics (I say late 90s, because Blizz aimed for the proletariat’s machine specs, to reap the greatest harvest of cash money). You appear there without any kind of prelude or explanation, ex nihilo (again), because that’s what happened in Diablo. I’m not saying you necessarily have to have a reason to be in a weird hold-out camp full of lesbian archers, especially if you’re a shirtless barbarian, but I doubt anyone thought about it one way or the other. The character from the first Diablo fell out of the sky, so this one should too. Also, the character select screen sort of lies, in terms of how exciting it makes you look, but we’ll get to that later. If you talk to the domineering pussy cat standing nearby, you find out . . . something. I forget what. Honestly, it’s been so long, I have no idea at this point. You almost inevitably cut to the chase.

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Diablo II gets zero stars. It might as well be World of Warcraft, as well, but why say the same thing essentially twice? Besides, the formula in Diablo II is what makes WoW what it is. The fact that it is more enticing and popular is really a matter of refining the grim evil hatched in Blizzard North.

A zero star game has to kill other games. It has to not just be empty, but wither any other genuine and good things that might try to grow in its presence. If you crave personal competition, you will fight other players . . . in Diablo II. To make matters worse, you will have to play the fortune cookie monster game part to get the equipment you’ll need to compete. How about playing cooperatively? Same story. What if you meet a monster that you can’t defeat? Skip it. Walk away. You won’t come back later, because if you start a new game, it won’t be there. You’ll probably be too busy running past most of the content to get to the)good stuff,) anyway, that it won’t be an issue.

Ok, ok, that’s about enough.