| DIABLO |
  Diablo is a action RPG released by Blizzard North software in 1997. And it's the first installment in a series of games now coming up to it's 4th installment as of 2023.
In Diablo, you get to pick one of three character classes to be the role of the sole hero tasked to save the Kingdom of Khanduras from the Lord of Terror - Diablo - essentially, the Devil himself. You start out in the city of Tristram which is host to various shops, a town drunk that provides useful clues, and a dungeon of sixteen levels that you must traverse to take down Diablo and save the kingdom. The entire game is mouse driven, and was released for Windows 95 and Mac OS on PowerPC based Macintosh computers. There was also an option to play over the internet using the now defunct "Battle.Net" servers where you could converse and chat with other Diablo players before embarking on a MMORPG type experience. Diablo was such a success that around 2002 Diablo II came out and was also a smash hit. After that, the series oddly went silent for awhile until sometime around the turn of the first decade of the 21st century when Diablo III was finally released. Diablo IV is coming out soon in June 2023.Warning Label Null and Void - My Experiences I bought Diablo sometime around 2003 and it became one of my nightly activities couped up in my childhood bedroom dialed up to mFire on a 56K modem. I would plop in some Pat Benatar or Iron Maiden, and do long, late night campaigns with various people on Battle.Net - this was the beginning of me playing games online. Most of the time I was on my 486 DX4-100 IBM PC-330, which ran great. What's funny is I had Lag on my pentium system but not the 486 - though the Diablo manual stated "Do not Run this on a 486". It's also the game of some consternation early on because an ex-girlfriend cratered my PC with Limewire and complained that I lost her Diablo savegame due to a reformat and reinstall of the O/S - well, it was MY computer, not hers. A particularly fond memory was one night I started flirting with and fighting along side a girl in Austrailia and wound up beating the game that night with her and a team of 4-5 other people at higher levels than me. How I held my own was I was playing with a giant PC-TRAC trackball whcih had a huge left mouse button I could spam rapid fire by tapping like I'm Eddie Van-Halen playing Eruption on guitar - got a lot of uplifting comments thata night on how I would "insanely" go roaming into danger and then beat the crap out of a huge pile of enemies in the dungeon by rapid-firing the PC-TRAC's left click while steering my weapon cursor with the giant trackball. Probably the weirdest Diablo player anyone has ever seen because I still use that strategy today - actually the NEC VersaTrak is GREAT for this (and I can do it one handed on that one). Maybe I should bring this one to the wife, seems chicks really dig Diablo. Diablo is one of the rare few games post 1995 that I actually quite well got into, because around that time, my interest was moving away from video games and more into guitar. So most of my internet time was spent looking up guitar information, not video game stuff (unless it was extremely old). These days I run Diablo on the NEC Versa P/75 the most, and Creeping Net 486, as they are the best equipped to handle this game (thoug hthe M/75 joins in the game as well). |
