Down the Loot Shoot

On 12/13/2016 at 01:32 AM by KnightDriver

Played Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition all day today on XBO. I chose the Witch Doctor character because I wanted one that could conjure minions. The whole time I couldn't stop singing this old novelty song, Witch Doctor, from 1958. Check it out.

I had Mark ready to send me home several times because of my singing, but that's all part of game days: irritating each other until someone is about to snap. Glad I wasn't drunk. Who knows how much worse I would've gotten. I'll have to try that next week.

In the game, I was a regular zombie wrangler. I had three to four zombie dogs and a gargantuan zombie following me around the whole time doing my dirty work. Then, when things got crowded, I would conjure a pillar of zombies, each zombie standing on each other's shoulders, to crash down onto the enemy. Each zombie in the stack was a fat zombie, and I couldn't help thinking of The Three Stooges, even though there were at least four of them. Every time I launched it I'd do the Curly "wo wo wo" (I wish I could replace all the sounds in the game like you probably can on PC). If things got really serious, I'd lay down a wall of zombies as a defense line and lob gobs of numbing darts, or shoot Fire Bats over the wall. Frickin' cool! Fire Bats!

We got about 2/3rds the way through the campaign playing co-op on Normal difficulty. Boy is Normal easy. I barely had to even look at my health bar the whole time. Still fun though. The story and levels are really familiar to me having played it several times on Xbox 360. Man is this some fantasy claptrap. Love it though. Somehow I expected improved graphics on the XBO version. It looks about the same as on X360. This isn't a remaster or anything, just a port, so I shouldn't expect much improvement, I guess. I really wanted to zoom in to an over the shoulder view, but I don't think you can. I didn't try it though, so I'll check next time.

I'm wondering to myself right now how far I'm going to go with Diablo. Am I going to hunt achievements? I'm kind of trying to resist that urge. In a quick glance at the game's features, I saw Hardcore Mode and suddenly knew what I'd do next. I like the tension of permadeath. It makes you really focus on technique. But right now I'm just having fun using zombie minions. Mark and I might do the campaign again on a harder difficulty or play adventure mode next weekend. We'll see.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

12/13/2016 at 01:58 AM

i hear the superhard difficulty on Diablo 3 is pretty ruthless. Permadeath and all that. So be careful.

KnightDriver

12/13/2016 at 02:02 AM

I played it on Xbox 360. You can get surprised sometimes and end up surrounded. You got to be careful. Luckily you use brand new characters and not the ones from the main game. I wouldn't want to lose a level 70 character that I'd played in the campaign.

goaztecs

12/13/2016 at 11:58 AM

Hot damn Hardcore sounds like a pain with permadeath but I can see the appeal in tackling this game mode.

12/15/2016 at 02:32 AM

Diablo can be really tricky in hardcore. You'll be playing a while and doing fine and then suddenly a higher level monster will appear out of nowhere and start kicking your ass. Sometimes you can get surrounded too and suddenly start to lose health really quickly. You gotta keep alert. I like the mode because I start thinking harder about the various systems in the game and how to optimize them.

Halochief90

12/13/2016 at 08:19 PM

I've considered playing Diablo III but only co-op. Game seems super boring to me as a solo game.

12/15/2016 at 02:23 AM

Co-op is great as long as everyone is about the same level. The game adjusts to the highest level character. I remember playing with Mark when he was several levels ahead of me, and I got bushwacked like crazy. I power leveled though, but it was no fun having to hang back and let him do all the fighting. I seem to remember Borderlands does this too. I kind of wish it would take an average of all the player's skill levels to determine difficulty so no one would be getting their butt kicked.

PixlBit