Diablo - PC Review - Gamecenter

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Diablo
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CNET Gamecenter Review
By Hugh Falk
(1/16/1997)

Game Worthy If you like RPGs, let me save you some time: stop reading this and go buy Blizzard's Diablo. Reading the rest of this article will only waste valuable Diablo playing time and subject you to some terrible prose--even worse than my usual. The reason I'm writing so poorly this time around is I can't stop playing long enough to think. In fact, I'm using only my right hand to type this review while playing with my left.

For you gluttons who chose to read on, Diablo is little more than a killer version of two of my favorite games: Avalon Hill's Telengard and Epyx's version of Rogue. Telengard is the only game produced in 1982 that still occupies space on my hard drive. (The fact that it only takes up 206K helps.) All three games focus on finding magical artifacts and weapons while holding onto hit points (health). Both Telengard and Rogue sacrificed plot for pure hunting-and-gathering bliss. No matter how powerful a character became in those classics, there was little sense of closure and nobody to prove your worth against. Diablo not only adds plot elements and amazing graphics to the basic hunter/gatherer premise, it also adds multiplayer capability.
starting off on the wrong foot
My initial impression of Diablo, which I realized while selecting a character, was negative. There are only three to choose from: Warrior, Rogue, and Sorcerer. Aside from a name, each character is predefined in statistics and appearance. One of my favorite tasks in an RPG is rolling my own character, and it would be especially nice to choose the race, sex, and appearance of my character for Internet play where it is important to set yourself apart from the commoners.
Diablo's intriguing plot unfolds slowly throughout the game in various mystical books. It's so complex that I can only summarize it by consulting a never-before-seen tome from the Book of Hades, which I discovered in the deepest recesses of a dungeon. It says, "Here's the story of a beast from Hades, who was bringing up three boys of his own. They were four demons living all together, yet they were all alone. Until one day when the angels fought the demons, and they knew it was much more than a hunch that this crew must somehow be imprisoned. And that's the way they all became the Hades Bunch." (I told you this was going to be worse than usual.) The story continues as a noble adventurer enters the dungeons beneath the town of Tristram in an attempt to defeat the youngest of the three brothers, Diablo, before the demon escapes his prison and destroys humankind.

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Diablo

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