Return to Sanctuary

Operation: Awesome Week has been postponed. This is in part due to me not having many of the movies that I said I was going to watch, a general lack of interest from all parties involved, and this:
When this game came out in 2000, it took over our lives. I was in college at the time, and on a floor of about 20 strapping young men, it was the downfall of at least 4 of the 12 or so that played the game, and became a career for a short while for another one. We played this at all hours of the day and night. On more than one occasion, my friend Keith would kick my door or the wall to wake me up and so I could log in so we could get better drops. Somewhere between then and now I lost my copy of D2, and have been wanting to play ever since I heard the announcement for Diablo 3, but have been holding off due to cost. Well, this week the battlechest went on sale and I had no excuse, so I'm back into it now with a vengeance.

For those of you who don't know the story behind Diablo and Diablo 2, I'll sum it real quick.

Diablo

Diablo moves into the church basement in the local town of Tristam, and convinces everyone in the town that he fucking rules, so they rearrange city ordinances to give him all sorts of building permits to expand his dwelling. the townsfolk are in awe of him and are excited to have jobs again since they haven't in years due to the black plague killing everyone, but when its time for ole Diablo to pay the contractors, he turns them all into succubus and zombies and imps (cutely called Fallen). Deckard Cain is pissed so he calls in the repo men to get their money (thats where you come into the story). the Repo men have to wade through all the shit to find Diablo and take their payment, but he catches on pretty quick since he has survelance cameras everywhere (He's not stupid you know. He knows what Succubus do when they are alone with each other) and sends his hordes after them. If your good enough, you get to his panic room and fuck shit up. when you're finished, he drops a crytal shard, and then you slam it into your forhead for safe keeping. The End.

Diablo 2 picks up more or less where the first one leaves off, only several years into the future. the three repo men that you can play as classes (warrior, sorcerer, and rogue) have gone evil (apparently Diablo made a side deal with them) and the Warrior becomes the Wanderer that you are chasing down throughout the game.

My memories of the game are that the graphics were pretty ahead of their time when it came out, but playing it now it seems that not only have we caught up with the graphics, but have now passed it by a few years. That said, its still pretty good looking, and the cinema scenes are still really well done. The opening cinema left me with chills as I remembered the game.

as soon as I started playing everything slowly started coming back to me, and I am getting more and more excited to play more and more. I made a barbarian named "Running with Scissors" on the US East server, though the game only lets you have 15 characters in the name, so he's really called RunningScissors, but that with is there in spirit damnit. I think I am going to try and max out Leap and whirlwind and just kill everything in a fury of steel and then jump away.

Playing also reminded me of how much I used to smoke while playing the game too and my friend Chuck who was notorious for having multiple cigarettes lit at the same time in different ash trays around the computer while playing and would forget he had them lit and start another one. And Manowar. We listened to a lot of Manowar. Weird.