Diablo 3: How Many Headlines Can It Catch?

Imagine we told you the story of a game where you hack things up over and over and over and over by clicking the mouse to gain items. These items allow you to go into harder areas of a dungeon and hack things up over and over again. Would you buy into it? Probably not.

Yet Diablo, since its inception, has fascinated gamers with the fundamental goals of hacking and slashing your way to a hellish beast in hopes to hack and slash him as well. It does, however, have a firm storyline which has gotten better with age and usually marvels gamers with graphic advancements set to blow the mind.

Diablo II had some nice graphics, but they were not mind blowing and earth shattering but the game continued to be fun to play. So fun, some gamers continue to play Diablo II even today, grinding out armor and weapons. What’s the fascination?

Blizzard Entertainment seems to be born on the wind of success, each title pulling more gaming headlines than the last. Diablo III has taken over gaming RSS feeds, headline news and has presented itself on social media sites like it was the second coming (perhaps, just the opposite?)

Diablo 3, graphically, and functionally, seems to highly exceed the levels it set with the last two titles. Destructible environments being one of the best additions to the franchise, along with new classes, weapons and enemies.

The core of the game, based on the gameplay footage, is fundamentally the same: beat baddies in excess and capture cool items. Blizzard has mastered the “grind” for items and the repeated quest plots in all of its title, especially World of Warcraft, but they’ve done it in an addicting manner. We know its repeatative yet we desire to continue to play. Work of genius.

How much Diablo 3 can a single person play before growing bored? For most, boredom is quite the opposite of the hack and slash experience, choosing to sit down with their Fritos and Soda and waste away the days.

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We Need Another Ikari WarriorsWe Need Another Ikari Warriors

In 1986 SNK released Ikari Warriors, it had all the makings of a classic title. Cool weapons, time strategies, two player action and a great challenge. We’re now seeing folks reproduce some of the essence of classic games by creating platformers like Little Big Planet and Mega Man 9, where is the love for the top-down scrollers?

Ikari Wariors was one of the first game titles to use a rotary joystick along with a directional system. Looking at the current generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 it’s plain to see the joystick is equipped with this design. We’ve seen Geometry Wars utilize the analog stick to create a 360 directional attack, so it’s possible to utilize this behavior for Ikari Warriors.

Given SNK is still alive under the name SNK Playmore the intellectual property must still exist to breath fresh life into an Ikari Warrior remake, with about six to eight months development time a classy title could be re-developed using old concepts brought to the current generation hardware.

Blast grenades, RPG’s, smart bombs, air strikes the options are limitless and the concept has been proven to work. Given the gamer demographic of 18-34 it’s plain to see old gamers of the Arcade and NES would recall and rebuild their love for the title while attracting younger audiences whom have never seen an Ikari Warriors title; if it worked in 1986 are we so adverse to it working again?

Games do not have to implement full 3D perspective graphics to be cool, we’ve seen proof in that with the Wii and the demand for titles like Little Big Planet. We neeed another Ikari Warriors.

Episode 750: Three QuartersEpisode 750: Three Quarters


[Reupload]
Sorry for the audio issues in this episode. In this episode, the guys discuss Ubisoft’s defense against The Crew lawsuit (you don’t actually own your games), Bowser telling Nintendo fans “Don’t want the Switch 2? Just buy a Switch 1!”, Marathon won’t require a PlayStation Network account on PC and Xbox, and Endless Legend 2 comes to Steam Early Access in summer 2025.

The news includes:

  • Former Blizzard president says ‘I’m not sure where Diablo is going’
  • Xbox announces June showcase event
  • PlayStation legal issue delays Vampire Survivors cross-save on PS4 and PS5

Let us know what you think.

Users Pwn MetaCritic Review SubmissionsUsers Pwn MetaCritic Review Submissions

Although we’ve found Metacritic a userful resource for game reviews, many folks have gone on a user submission rampage to discredit games that haven’t even launched yet. Their first attack was on LittleBigPlanet followed by Resistance 2, now their hitting Gears of War 2.

While Gears of War 2 has a Metacritic score of 94/100 the user’s have reviewed it to be a 3.5 out of 10, with a bright red box around the user review due to its low nature we’re sure. Although users are free to give their own honest representation of the game from their perspective, Gears of War 2, as of the review dates, hasn’t been released yet – these reviews are bogus.

This style of attack was popularized in Spore, when Amazon got nailed with poor reviews of the game because Spore’s “Draconic” DRM made people angry. However, it’s more reasonable for people to voice their opinion on a known issue with a game; Gears of War 2 review spamming is just mean.

We use Metacritic as guidance when we do our gaming podcast to understand what games are rated in the industry, but we don’t use user reviews as our main guide. There are plenty of folks out there that may utilize these reviews in more seriousness because they may feel journalists reviews are tainted by advertisers or “the man” and want the common gamers opinion.

The common gamer cannot possibility be reviewing Gears of War 2 before the title has arrived. This is bogus. Metacritic has this to say:

“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.” (1up)

So, to those looking for holiday gaming gifts, keep this in mind while you start hunting down games you’ll want to buy.