I played a whole bunch of Diablo III today with my friend Mark. I've discovered that Barbarians and Wizards really don't get along. Seems like we were at each other's throats most of the time. I think it was due to playing on easy. You don't really need two characters at that difficulty, so it becomes a competition for who gets the most kills quickest. After a while, I had to take a diferent part of the map so we wouldn't be kill-stealing each other. When we start playing this game for real on higher difficulty, I'm sure we'll cooperate more; we'll have to.
My level 34 wizard and banner. Reminds me of old portrait painting.
So we beat the game today on Normal Mode, Easy Difficulty. It was very, very easy. Honestly you could play this solo, barely pay attention and you'd win handily. Still, it was a barrel of fun as long as we didn't steal each other's kills too much or race to the next area too quickly, which is very easy to do. At one point, I stopped fighting all together and just ran around everything until I got to the gateway to the next area. The enemies weren't budging my health bar, so why not? My friend Mark wasn't pleased though; so instead, I started herding enemies until I had a huge bunch of them and then let them have it with a meteor blast. That was fun!
Mark's level 36 Barbarian. Totally looks like King Conan.
I watched the credits and noticed Troy Baker doing monster sounds (he was also the scoundrel, Lyndon). Where is he not these days. The music was by Russel Brower and is really good. It may have appealed to me due to the Wagnerian influences. I really noticed James Hong as the voice of Covetous Shen, the gems artisan. It was so familiar. After reading his bio on IMDB, I know why. He's had major TV and Film roles since the mid 50's, basically since TV began. Now he's in a lot of games. I've probably seen/heard him in more stuff than I remember.
Once we beat The Prime Evil on Normal, we started over in Nightmare Mode, still on Easy. I noticed subtle changes in the new mode: more beasties, harder beasties and more interesting drops. Diablo III definitely keeps your interest the second time through. I'm finding myself digging deeper into the item stats to get just the right boosts to my skills. The battles are still fairly easy but I have to start paying more attention now or get killed. I was way to confident after Normal Mode and got myself killed by monsters that used spells against me I hadn't seen before.
So Diablo III is a blast really. Next weekend though, I'm thinking of doing a little retro first. I'm going to pick out a game after I write this. Ciao.
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