> > For Darien et al: I never played Diablo and don't have the game, but for the opportunity to play with a few other Rinky-dinks, I might be persuaded to pick up a copy somewhere!
>
> Should be pretty cheap. Though I still don't get what people see in the game. It's just a MUD with fancy graphics...

I think I can see where you're coming from. On the surface, Diablo appears little more than a simple hack 'n slash with some pretty pixels. You can play it once, to the end, with a Warrior and "beat the game" (i.e. kill Diablo), perhaps gaining a few of the poor Quests along the way. Then you can shelf it back into its box and forget about it, like all the other games.

However -- Diablo's strength lies not in simply completing the game, but in its background immersiveness, its replayability, and its multiplayer feature. Mastery of the 3 different character types requires VERY different playing styles. Learning to play a Sorceror at first is quite challenging compared to doing the Warrior. Eventually a Sorceror can become such a terror that some folks play using only *cursed* items for themselves, and give all the "good stuff" they find to other players. This behavior underscores one of the joys of this game: Diablo is a *cooperative* multigame. It's great when you play a private, password-protected game with friends you can trust. It remains a haven of welcome respite, away from the rabid over-competiveness of other multis like Starcraft and Quake.

Diablo has an internal complexity that makes it a game programmer's game program. It's probably the most intensively analyzed (reverse engineered, etc.) game in history. What makes it so special is its Randomized capacity, where everything in the dungeon is new at each level and in every game. The dungeon map layouts are random. The inventory items themselves, i.e. weapon and armor attributes, are random; many of them (like the gold unique items dropped in the dungeon) have special powers, and they can be exceedingly rare and hard to find. Monster selection and the very large variety of them makes the matches very challenging... After 2½ years, it still has the ability to make me jump with particularly lethal combos of various attackers...

Bottom line: while it has its flaws, Diablo is an exceedingly well-designed game. It is inherently made for a cooperative environment, and it has infinite replayability. Most of all, it still carries the capacity to surprise -- an attribute that I value above all else in any worthwhile entertainment.

Wolfspirit