Trapped in the Hells

So. Like (almost) every other gamer on the planet right now, I purchased and have begun playing the long-anticipated Blizzard game, Diablo III - the sequel 12 years in the making after the ridiculously successful Diablo II.

I, for one, absolutely adore the universe and the gameplay in these games. The world is filled with interesting characters, the missions are intriguing and the monsters are grotesque and evil. You, as hero, stand as the lone light of salvation in the doomed world.

Set 20 years after the events of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, wherein the last of the three Prime Evils, Baal, is killed last after his brothers - Mephisto and the eponymous Diablo - were killed, the heroes must rise again to fend off the encroaching hell hordes. The last of the Lesser Evils have surfaced after a mysterious fireball smashes into the Earth and causes the dead to rise.

If you were one of the many who received their game on its May 15 release date, odds are, you were met with the various Error messages, informing you that you couldn't log on. The servers had crashed with the traffic.

"What?" you may ask. "How can the servers of a single player game crash?"
Good question. Let me tell you.

In a move that has royally pissed off more than a fair share of people, something which is concisely summed up in this article. The main problem being that, in an attempt to curtail piracy - which has run rampant in the gaming community for, well, ever - Activision/Blizzard have decided that you have to log in to the server to be able to play your game.

"Hell," you say, "that's not so bad! You have to do that for Starcraft II and it works just fine!"

Oh, but you see, for Starcraft II, you have the option to play offline. Not so with Diablo III. You must be online at all times with Diablo III. It's no longer a "single player game with an online/multiplayer option", it's an online single player game that has the option of being played alone. But never offline.

And god help you if you have anyone on your friends list, because they can just pop into your game whenever they please. Without asking. Just PING! and they're in. But, that's neither here nor there.

My main gripe is the fact that, as happened to me on Tuesday night, if their servers are down or if my internet just plain isn't working that day, I have paid $69 for a game that I can't play. I know this is the case with World of Warcraft or any other number of MMORPGs, but those are designed for online play. You play them, you accept that servers need maintenance and sometimes they're going to go offline. But, when I purchase a single player game, I expect to be able to play it whenever I damn well feel like.

This means that unless my train has wireless, I can't play on the train. I can't play at someone else's house who's internet I can't get into. I can't play anywhere where there is no internet. And that just shits me.

That said, it's a pretty damn great game.

Mahalo.

Gaming Loses One of Its Own

Though you may not know who he was - and it is likely that a lot of you didn't - Adam Adamowicz designed gaming worlds that most gamers know and fell in love with. Most notably those of Fallout 3 and the new worldwide time-consumer Skyrim.

Yesterday, he lost a fight to cancer and passed away. The gaming community has lost a truly great talent and I would like to extend my greatest sympathies to his friends, family and coworkers at this difficult time. To quote TechPowerUp:

The industry and the world has truly lost a great visionary and no matter what the next Fallout or Oblivion game will be, it will be a little less wonderful because of it.

 Mahalo.

Half-Life News and Blues

Odds are, if you are a fan of well-scripted, story-driven games, first person shooters or really have a love for Valve games (who doesn't? Seriously), you have played Half-Life 2 and its subsequent episodic releases, titled of course Half-Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two. Also likely is that you, like everyone else who has played these games, wants to see the series come to a conclusion in the long-anticipated Episode Three, which was announced way back in 2006, supposedly to finish "a trilogy...that will conclude by Christmas of 2007."

Well Valve Boss, Gabe Newell, has recently teased that we should be seeing an Episode Three sometimes pretty soon. Well, we certainly hope so, after it turns out that the Valve employee with the Half-Life 3 t-shirt was only trolling, with comments being made by Cheft from Valve that, "there has been no directive from Gabe [Newell] to leak anything. That is all false."

Let's hope Episode Three comes out soon, because we've all been away from the Half-Life world for too long! No release date has been set, though. Alas.

Mahalo.