Part 1: For those who know nothing about hack and
slash

In 1993, a friend of mine said to me, "Dude, you would
love the internet. You should try it out." At the
time, I equated the internet with email. And since I
had a hard enough time remembering to return phone
calls, I decided that the last thing I needed was yet
another way for people to get in touch with me.

"You don't have to use the internet for email," my
friend explained. "You can use it for games."
Then he showed me NetHack, a game which gave me the
opportunity to pretend that I was an @ sign on a quest
to slaughter various letters of the alphabet. When my
@ sign became weak, I fortified him with exclamation
points (potions). My @ sign picked up brackets (armor
and shields) and armed himself with slashes (swords).
Walls were nothing more than lines of asterisks. If
we're willing to call letters of different colors
'graphics,' then NetHack had graphics. It's more
realistic, however, to say that the game was purely a
statistical affair.

So how could I possibly justify sitting in front of my
computer (for more hours at a stretch than you will
ever get me to admit) and trying to build my @ sign
into the most statistically powerful @ sign that there
ever was? Part of the answer was that my poor
vulnerable @ sign could die at any minute. The little
guy never knew what letter of the alphabet was lurking
around the next corner, waiting to destroy him and
force me to revert to a saved game. Somehow (and I
don't pretend to understand how), I identified with my
@ sign. He was like the protagonist of a book that I
was helping to write. I wanted him to survive, to
succeed, to triumph. I wanted him to wear the best [
that was out there, to wield the most finely honed /
in existence, and to have a pack full of !'s that
would heal his wounds and neutralize the poisons of
venomous creatures.

What kept me playing NetHack was the really quite
perfect pace at which the game dispensed goodies for
my @ sign. If I became greedy and allowed myself to
get in a hurry, I would invariably be killed by
letters of the alphabet that my @ sign was not
prepared to tangle with. But if I proceeded soberly,
sanely, and cautiously, I was sure to find fights that
would challenge me without overwhelming me and
treasures that would prepare me for the next fight,
which would be slightly more challenging.

For a while, I deluded myself into thinking that the
joy of the game was to be found in the search for the
perfect pace of gameplay. But once I found my pace,
once I hit my stride, I was more addicted than ever.
It was profoundly satisfying to know when I
needed to play a level twice before moving on to the
next one and when I could just race for the next set
of stairs in my quest to defeat the king of all
beasts.

We've come a long way from NetHack--and yet not so far after all.

Part 2: What Diablo II is and why it's a heck of a
lot of fun

There are people who will tell you that Diablo II is a
role-playing game; even the package says so. That
seems a bit of stretch to me, since I think of
role-playing games as involving personalities and
politics and puzzles. While it's true that your
character in Diablo II will speak with various
townsfolk in order to acquire quest assignments, you
never get to choose how your character addresses the
townsfolk or how s/he will react to them.

However, you do have more control over your character
than in games such as Final Fantasy VII. Each time
your character goes up a level, you get to decide how
to allocate various skill points and which specialties
you want to concentrate on. In other words, Diablo II
gives you the opportunity to oversee the statistical
development of your character. And when statistical
development is so nuanced, so manipulable, so crucial
to the effectiveness of your character, then it can
absorb our attention every bit as much as a thoroughly
developed plot (which is not to say that there's
anything wrong with the storyline in Diablo II, simply
that it doesn't allow for the range of possibilities
that I associate with genuine role-playing games).

Although I purchased Diablo II the week it was
released, I wanted to postpone reviewing it until I
had a chance to see how different the gameplay is for
the five different character classes. The first
important decision that the player faces in the game
is whether to assume the role of an Amazon (missile
weapon specialty), a Barbarian (melee combat
specialty), a Paladin (holy magic specialty), a
Necromancer (death magic specialty), or a Sorceress
(elemental magic specialty).

I can honestly say that the different strengths and
weaknesses of the various classes definitely make
Diablo II worth playing at least five times.
The differences between the Barbarian (a one-man
wrecking crew) and the Necromancer (who raises and
relies upon his army of undead) necessitate completely
different approaches to the game.

Those familiar with games influenced by Dungeons and
Dragons will not be surprised to learn that the
primary statistics in Diablo concern strength,
dexterity, vitality, and magic. But as important as
these statistics are, the specialties (which vary
entirely from class to class) truly captivate the
imagination of most players. Once a Sorceress reaches
the appropriate level, for instance, she can learn how
to summon a hydra. But doing so will tax her magic
reserves to such an extent that she might be better
off tweaking her abilities in a simpler specialty,
such as her ability to create and cast fireballs.
Then again, perhaps she will find an artifact that
enables her to cast fireballs so adeptly that there
isn't much point in developing the specialty any
further.

The true joy of Diablo II, in other words, is
not in the hacking and slashing. It's in the
treasures that one finds after dispatching a group of
skeleton warriors. It's in deciding which gear to
equip your character with and which gear to sell. Do
you want armor that provides extra resistance against
lightning or armor that enables you to recover from
blows more quickly? Do you want a sword that will do
extra damage to your enemies or a glowing axe that
will help you to see better in the darkness of the
dungeons? And when you go up a level (somthing that
comes easily at first, but that becomes exponentially
more difficult to do), how will you allocate your
skill points? Which specialties will you choose to
develop?

Diablo II replaces the @ sign of NetHack with
incredibly compelling graphical figures that actually
run and swing weapons and cast spells. When you throw
an exploding potion, you don't simply see an
exclamation point drift a few spaces away from your @
sign. You see your character hurl the potion, and
then you see the explosion. The creatures you face
are not merely letters, but quite cool looking zombies
and sand maggots and javelin-throwing saber cats.

In D&D, a dungeonmaster might say, "The archer has
shot an arrow at you." Then he would roll a
twenty-sided die to find out whether or not you had
been hit by the arrow. In Diablo II, you can
see the arrow coming at you. If you want to be sure
that it misses you, you can simply move your character
out of its path. But you might decide to take the
damage from the arrow in order to finish of the
spell-casting monster that you have been hacking away
at. Diablo II combines the best elements of
action-oriented and statistic-oriented video games.
Lots of important conflicts are resolved through
numbers, but hand-eye coordination also comes into
play.

The main drawback to Diablo II is that it
doesn't play quite as much like an arcade game as it
could--at least not on my machine. The possibilities
for truly fluid gameplay are there, but whenever too
many enemies end up on the screen at once, the game
freezes up for a few seconds and then starts to move
in slow motion. (I play on an Aptiva with 64 meg of
RAM, a gig of hard drive space, and a Pentium II. I
stripped everything but my word processing program
from the machine in order to keep interference to a
minimum, but still ended up having freezes and
slow-downs several times per quest.)

If your machine can handle the strain that Diablo
II will put on it, you can genuinely play the game
(particualarly the Barbarian character) very much in
the same way that you would play Defender (that
classic arcade game with more buttons than most people
could become comfortable with). You can assign F1-F8
to the specialties of your character and use your
right hand for your mouse and your left to whirl over
the keyboard as you change what r-clicking on the
mouse will do from leaping over your enemies to
attacking with two weapons to searching a corpse for
the healing potion that you desperately need (and that
you'll be able to swallow by pressing '1' as soon as
you've had a chance to pick it up). If the game
weren't so prone to slowing down, I would say that
playing the Barbarian character is as cool a video
game experience as any of us have a right to given the
current state of our technology.

If you're looking for an intricate plot, you'll be
better off with Baldur's Gate. If you want to
face more challenging decisions, I heartily recommend
Planescape: Torment. If what you're really
after is truly mindless hacking and slashing,
then go with one of the Final Fantasy games.
But if the only thing that can tear you away from a
video game is a trip to the restroom--and if you
intend to study the statistical charts that govern the
game during those trips--then I'm not sure you can do
any better than Diablo II.

Happy hacking!



Recommended: Yes