Category Archives: diablo

diablo

The Diablo Cody Backlash Continues

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You need not look far to see the widespread backlash greeting Diablo Cody’s recent success, which reached its peak with her Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for Juno.

Yet another group of people have emerged to vent their disapproval of Ms. Cody’s past work.

Morgan, age 33: She never did understand the aesthetics of the pole.

Chris, age 31: Could not or would not make change.

Casey, age 33: Offstage she was all, ‘I love Iggy and the Stooges!’, but as soon as she got onstage it was all urban light contemporary.

Alex, age 53: You could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Dancing was just a stepping stone. She wasn’t in it for the long haul.

diablo, rpg, world of warcraft

World Of Warcraft: The Adventure Begins

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So, I’m having lunch with my brother a week or two ago, when he mentions he is going to start playing World Of Warcraft (WoW).

He first downloads a free trial version, which apparently adds up to about 4 GB of space taking up his hard drive. This download takes about 2.5 days to complete on his pokey DSL connection.

After the download finally completes, he kicks off the installation program. He is then immediately informed that he does not have enough memory to run the game on his PC. So, he trudges off to the store to buy another 1 GB of RAM.

He gets the memory into his PC and kicks off the installation.

So far, he is very impressed with the game’s graphics. His main characters thus far are a Night Elf Paladin and an Undead Mage. If he chooses to play beyond the 10 day trial, he’ll be forced to subscribe to Blizzard with a monthly fee of US $15 in order to play on their game’s servers. I’m not sure what day of the trial he is on right now. I’ll ask when I talk to him next.

One thing I remember from my Diablo II days is the impressive number of petulant jagoff assholes (pja) I would run into in a typical online session.

One lovely thing I never used to tire of was some emotionally-stunted middle school dweeb with a horrendously powerful character run after me with a duped Windforce bow, all the while yelling at me “NOOB” (i.e. newbie, as in an insult indicating you are not an experienced player — it’s important that “NOOB” is capitalized, otherwise you wouldn’t know they were yelling at the top of their asshole voices).

I ask my brother, who henceforth will be known by his WoW Night Elf character “Baklava”, have you run into any assholes in the short time you have been playing WoW?

He says, “Sort of.”

The monsters roaming the countryside in WoW are apparently kind of similar to the monsters I would encounter in Diablo II. For the most part, they’re just standing around, not doing anything. When you get within a certain distance of these monsters, the AI of the game triggers them to engage you in combat. Well, Baklava was getting the holy hell kicked out of him by one monster, so he starts to run away.

Little does he realize that he enters the vicinity of a whole host of other monsters lazing about the field he is sprinting through. He passes another adventurer as he splashes across some water, leaving the monsters standing back at the bank, unable to cross. This now large group of monsters then turn their collective attention to the adventurer unfortunately now in their sights. This other adventurer messages my brother, “NOOB”.

“So you sort of deserved that one, didn’t you?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I called my brother this past Saturday afternoon. The answering machine picks up, so I hang up. Seconds later, I get a call. It’s Baklava.

“You called?” he asks.

“Yeah, I was just wondering how you were doing on the game.”

It turns out he was on a quest, when my phone call caused his internet connection to be dropped. He’s not sure exactly how it works, but whenever he gets a phone call, the connection goes bye-bye.

I apologize.

“No, it’s okay.”

“So what level are you at?”

“My Night Elf is at eleven.”

“Cool.”

I ask him how much he has been playing. He mentions that there have been a couple days where he has put a lot of time into the game. One particular weekend day involved him getting up and starting to play. Later as he is playing he realizes he has not eaten or gone to the bathroom yet.

Did I not mention that this game is very commanding of one’s attention?

Here’s some more night elves.

diablo, dungeons and dragons, rpg, world of warcraft

An Ongoing Investigative Series: World Of Warcraft, With Sprinklings Of Diablo

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Hi.

I have mentioned before that I have dabbled in the arcane arts of role-playing adventure, particularly those which are computer-based.

One of my favorites was The Pool Of Radiance, which I played on the good ol’ Commodore 64.

A few years ago, I got pretty unpleasantly addicted to Diablo II, an initially enjoyable game which eventually devolved into an unpleasant grind of killing monsters in hopes of getting some decent treasure.

Blizzard Entertainment, the company that produced Diablo I and II, has in recent years produced an even more popular game called World Of Warcraft, which is the equivalent of Diablo I and II on crystal meth and crack combined.

Both my brother and myself were at one time both addicted to Diablo II. We were both able to kick the habit. I should probably mention that we were casual addicts rather than hardcore, sit-in-one’s-filth addicts. You can take this statement however you want — I’d be suspicious of the same kind of comment coming out of an alcoholic’s mouth.

My brother recently informed me that he has started playing the World of Warcraft game.

I asked him if I could periodically provide updates to his character’s progress, impressions of the game, etc., to which he consented.

In this series I’ll recount some of his experiences, and mix these with some of my own observations about my Diablo II experience.

To keep your interest, I’ll periodically include the odd picture of a hot, busty elf.