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Diablo II: This Proves Mac Gaming Isn't Dead
Well Mac gaming certainly isn't dead these days, with Blizzard
working hard to take our money--and I give it gladly. Blizzard
has always been a good supporter of Mac gaming with such titles
as WarCraft, WarCraft II, Starcraft, Diablo and now Diablo II.
They are also expecting a same-day release for Win/Mac Warcraft
III in the first half of 2001, but that's a whole other article.
Diablo II is a great expansion of the original game Diablo. The interface is very similar with some modifications that have improved the game play. In Diablo I, the setting was a town which had an evil church with a quadrillion underground dungeon levels. Diablo II tries to make this same type of setting a little more realistic by expanding the outside world by quite a bit, and adding multiple quests that take you all over. There are still the nice underground dungeons, but more of them, and scattered all around the surface area. Like other games written for a PeeCee and graciously given to us Mac users, you'll find it a bit more difficult to play without a two-button mouse, it can be done with one button, but you better get used to COMMAND-Clicking all over the place.
If you like high quality, realistic animations, then Diablo II will not disappoint you. At the beginning of the game and various times throughout, the animation fellows at Blizzard do a fantastic job of relaying the plot to you. A nice set of speakers with a sub woofer (an iSub will do), and you'll think you are there in the game.
Blizzard has also made some great improvements to the Battle.net interface for Diablo II. It's still a little substandard in some ways, being hard to find your friends with no FIND feature--especially when 30,000 other players are online at any given time. The game play is lag free (at least at 56k), and most of the players online seem nicer than those I remember form from Diablo I. There are already Clans online, and more forming everyday, so the online community is looking real good.
There are some drawbacks to this otherwise wonderful game. If you don't have a G3 processor, forget it. If you haven't upgraded to at least 64 Megs of RAM, forget it. And then there's the installation. The game comes on three CDs and you can install as much or as little of the game as you want. The minimum install is around 500 Megs. The minimum install also requires you to change CDs right in the middle of playing at some points, a serious irritation in my book, but one you'll have to accept if you have a small or full hard drive. The full install, on the other hand, only requires you to have the PLAY CD in the drive so they know you actually bought the game, but it pigs about 1.4 Gigs of your hard drive (ouch!). Now, I easily had that much room free on my iMac DV SE, but I defragmented my hard drive anyway before installation, so I would know that the install was in one piece on my hard drive.
All-in-all, Blizzard has done it again by making a game that we can really sink our teeth into. And if you like Role Playing Games (RPGs) you had better not miss Diablo II, but you better have a machine that can handle it. Check out www.blizzard.com for more Diablo information, or to order the game.
Well, if you see me on Battle.net (my name is Alitnil), don't be surprised, I'll probably lose my day job next week because I'm in cyberspace too much! =)
-Andrew McVinnie known on Battle.net as Alitnil.
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