7th October 2021, 6:09 PM
So, since my last post here, I have mostly been playing the recent games I got. I did get two more, though:
Digital Download Xbox One / Xbox Series X (Series X Enhanced games)
--
Diablo II Resurrected - $40
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 - $16 (on sale)
Considering the awful stuff Blizzard is (almost certainly accurately) being accused of maybe I should not have gotten Diablo II Resurrected, but... I just could not resist. I got the original for my birthday back in 2000 when the game came out and quite liked it. I wasn't addicted to the game for years like some, I basically finished it once in Normal and then mostly and moved on to other games because I don't care for the grind-for-better-items postgame and at is what the hardcore Diablo II fans spend so much time doing, and I've never found it interesting at all as a multiplayer game, but while it lasts it's a pretty great game.
And is this remake good? Yes, it's very good! Because I got it on Xbox I can't carry over my old PC save files, but that's fine; I wanted to start over anyway. The game looks amazing and plays great. I really like the added button mappings you get on a console controller, to be able to use more than two abilities at once. It's mostly a very faithful port of the original, but one major change is here. No, not the graphics; the new graphics mode looks really good, but that isn't the best thing about this. No, the expanded storage box is! In the original game you have almost no storage. Your character's storage is just as tiny here as ever, but your storage box in town is a lot larger! There are four tabs now instead of one, and each one is larger than the original storage box. Three of the tabs are shared between all of your characters, which is nice. It's a dramatic improvement over the original game, where storage runs out fast and there's nowhere to keep the many interesting items you will find if you keep playing. Here space is still limited, but you can keep a lot more than you could before.
Other than that though, it's a largely very faithful remaster and that's exactly what this still-fantastic game needed. The core of the game is still one of the best in the genre, I strongly strongly disagree with some reviewers who seem to think that games get significantly worse over time simply by continuing to exist. That is wrong! Diablo II is far from perfect, there could be more content and quests, and the grind-based postgame is tedious, and multiplayer never interested me too much in part because it's often just 'people running around and doing stuff in the same world' as opposed to something requiring people to actually work together (and this games' lack of text chat on consoles does not help this, as an aside... but oh well), but even so, it's a fantastic game and this is the best way to play this classic.
(And while Activision-Blizzard is unquestionably a company which needs serious cleaning out of abusers, I haven't heard anything bad said about the team that actually made this new version of the game, Vicarious Visions.)
Digital Download Xbox One / Xbox Series X (Series X Enhanced games)
--
Diablo II Resurrected - $40
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 - $16 (on sale)
Considering the awful stuff Blizzard is (almost certainly accurately) being accused of maybe I should not have gotten Diablo II Resurrected, but... I just could not resist. I got the original for my birthday back in 2000 when the game came out and quite liked it. I wasn't addicted to the game for years like some, I basically finished it once in Normal and then mostly and moved on to other games because I don't care for the grind-for-better-items postgame and at is what the hardcore Diablo II fans spend so much time doing, and I've never found it interesting at all as a multiplayer game, but while it lasts it's a pretty great game.
And is this remake good? Yes, it's very good! Because I got it on Xbox I can't carry over my old PC save files, but that's fine; I wanted to start over anyway. The game looks amazing and plays great. I really like the added button mappings you get on a console controller, to be able to use more than two abilities at once. It's mostly a very faithful port of the original, but one major change is here. No, not the graphics; the new graphics mode looks really good, but that isn't the best thing about this. No, the expanded storage box is! In the original game you have almost no storage. Your character's storage is just as tiny here as ever, but your storage box in town is a lot larger! There are four tabs now instead of one, and each one is larger than the original storage box. Three of the tabs are shared between all of your characters, which is nice. It's a dramatic improvement over the original game, where storage runs out fast and there's nowhere to keep the many interesting items you will find if you keep playing. Here space is still limited, but you can keep a lot more than you could before.
Other than that though, it's a largely very faithful remaster and that's exactly what this still-fantastic game needed. The core of the game is still one of the best in the genre, I strongly strongly disagree with some reviewers who seem to think that games get significantly worse over time simply by continuing to exist. That is wrong! Diablo II is far from perfect, there could be more content and quests, and the grind-based postgame is tedious, and multiplayer never interested me too much in part because it's often just 'people running around and doing stuff in the same world' as opposed to something requiring people to actually work together (and this games' lack of text chat on consoles does not help this, as an aside... but oh well), but even so, it's a fantastic game and this is the best way to play this classic.
(And while Activision-Blizzard is unquestionably a company which needs serious cleaning out of abusers, I haven't heard anything bad said about the team that actually made this new version of the game, Vicarious Visions.)
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