Diablo deflates

M's final impression of Diablo.

It sucks! Blizzard, kindly hire whirlpooled to be your story writer to save gamers like me who spent hours for the story from the most anti-climatic ending ever.

*SPOILER ALERT*

There are so many loose ends and the ending's so ridiculously happy, it makes no sense! One of the major characters is never mentioned again, they didn't even spend half a minute to show what happened after. All we get is Heaven is saved. The ruins that was Heaven was restored to its former glory, Diablo plummets from Heaven and is scattered into a gazillion bits of ashes, Tyrael is back in Heaven as Wisdom, but is still mortal.

What about Leah? What about my character? What about Imperius? What about the siege survivors? And the little boy emperor? Is he dead? What about the citizens of Caldeum? Are they still in the sewers? Surely after surviving a million monsters pouring out of Arreat, the villagers there deserve a foot note?

All I got to see was a pretty city and Tyrael's feet.

Nice.

Anyway, I lagged out my game to high heaven and had to get my cousin to save my ass from Diablo. Tried to take screenshots but lag + clicking + pressing ctrl-shift-3 is no fun. Only managed to grab 2. Time for me to try the Demon Hunter class and fool around in Nightmare mode until Blizzard comes up with a Mac patch.

Word of advice, Blizzard. Just fork out money and hire W. You'll make gamers like me loyal fans in a heartbeat. Nothing grabs hold of a person's heart like a great story that you will love to play 4 (Normal, Nightmare, Hell, Inferno, was it?) times over with 5 different classes. This? I think after fiddling with the Demon Hunter, I'll be done.

And I liked Leah, stupid Blizzard!

Diablo eats Macs

Okay, I have something embarrassing to admit. It's been a week, about 40 hours of gaming and I'm still at normal mode in Act 4. In a gaming point of view:

OMFG M sucks so bad! 40 hours and STILL on normal?

I have a very good reason for it. Blizzard hates Macs. And yes, all you gaming geeks with spanking new PCs, I have a Macbook Pro, live with it. I will engage Diablo himself in a tumble if he ever tried to take my MBP from me. (I will never part with anything that has my collection of anime, manga, stories, Big Bang Theory and pictures.)

I have never been much of a PC gamer. The only games I played on the PC were  Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII (PC, because I had no access to the Playstation on school months, ah bittersweet youth), an MMORPG here and there. Oh, and Solitaire. Sitting in a computer chair just doesn't do it for me.

Imagine my joy when Playstation 3 had wireless remotes that allowed me to curl up on the bed and have my killing sprees while hugging my pillow. But I digress, topic at hand, yes, I'm a console gamer, not a PC one. Again, imagine my joy when I found out that Diablo is Mac compatible. An awesome game on a computer that hasn't made me tear my hair out in frustration since 2008! A dream come true!

Until Act II of Diablo. My amazing wizard who was blasting critters left and right suddenly started running like she has arthritis in her knees. Enemies started teleporting and all my character could do was run like a girl in a cheesy romantic reunion for 3 lagged out seconds before a grave marked the spot where she was last seen with a full health orb.

I credit my gaming (and Q button bashing skills, coupled with prayer, crossed fingers and a level 60 wizard belonging to my cousin to rescue my lagged ass) that I even made it to Act IV. Remember how I said Act II was bad? Act IV's Izual boss kicked my ass in 0 seconds. Because in one frame, he was barreling towards me, in the next frame, there was the grave. After 5 more tries of the magic grave appearing act, I logged out of disgust and started trouble-shooting the problem.

Apparently, irregardless of how new the Macs are, many Mac users have the same problem. People who ran Diablo via Bootcamp had it working fine, so it was not a graphics card or performance issue. Though the problem seems to be Macs with Nvidia 9400m cards.

Yes yes, my graphics card ain't no shiny new piece of technology but hello! The last game I played on my Mac was Farmville 2 years ago, who needs graphics card?!

BLIZZARD HATES MACS!

Granted, they have announced that they are aware of the problem and are working on fixing it, but I found a workaround that didn't require bootcamp. (Sorry, I only have 250GB of space on this dear ancient MBP that is barely enough for my anime, I'm not about to waste space on bootcamp.)

Download Parallels, download windows as an .iso, install Windows (7 or 8 works fine, but 7 takes up a lot of memory, I used 8 beta). It improves the FPS issue significantly though anything above low/nil display option kills my Mac.

DIABLO EATS MACS!

If Blizzard doesn't release a patch that stops my wizard from acting like an old crone, I swear I will master that ray of disintegration spell, march down to their HQ and blow them all into bits!

*grumble* Ninety bucks to get forced into using low-res display *grumble* shitty servers with their long maintenance times *grumble grumble grumble*

My favourite scene thus far. SPOILER ALERT!!

Diablo III

M here again, now to give my first impressions of Diablo III.

And my first impression?

It sucks!

Wait wait wait, before I get stoned to death by the sea of rabid fans, allow me to explain why. Think about this, why are MMORPGs popular? I mean, millions of people play these games, the story is usually very simple to provide the scene in which your adventures happen. The graphics can be good, but a lot of time, console games have much better graphics. So why is this genre so darned popular? To me, two words:

Interaction and Customization. Customization!

I played a few MMORPGs before and if that game had a mage/wizard class, it was always my first choice for the first run of the game. Gaming is always a quick escape from reality and nothing is more detached from reality than throwing fireballs willy nilly and seeing everything explode around you. But customization is always key to me. I love having the option of choosing which skills to upgrade, which stats to concentrate my points on. I tend to lean towards creating a mage who kicks ass with skills but with her low health, has to hide behind a tank or start running when mobs come after her.

Diablo III offers ZERO customization. The only thing you can choose is weapons/armor to put on your character, but skills? Nada, you earn new skills as you level up, and EVERYONE has those same skills.

OMG HOW LAME IS THAT?!

At most you can choose which skills to put in your battle slots and maybe tweak it with a rune but EVERYONE HAS THE SAME SKILL SET!

*Insert epic face palm*

While everything else was okay, (I was too busy twacking mobs to talk to my cousin who was in a party with me) and the story was fairly generic, (Diabolic Diablo's deranged kin is here to take over the world, you get the drift) I realized everyone in the game seemed to be in a hurry to finish it. So I hopped out of the party and started running through the game solo, simply because I had no idea what the other dudes were doing, they were completing quests at the speed of light, while I was trying to figure out why the hell I was here in the first place.

Apparently, some Koreans finished the game in 6 hours, yep, a game that took 10 years to make, they got it down in 6. I think I'll take a week to run through it, simply because I need my story to know what to do. LOL.

Back to Diablo, hopefully they have the servers up now, (yep it crashed, not surprising, considering how many people are playing it at the same time, but it's always amusing to go to Diablo's forums to look at the peeps whining about dead servers.) Yes, I know I said Diablo sucks, but I'm not gonna waste my money after playing only 4 hours, Imma at least run through the game with ALL the classes before I am satisfied.

OCD remember?

Oh, if anyone wants a party, my battletag is moonstone#6465


M signing off!

People can be so stupid

Moon here will admit, (W and K knows, I think) that she has thinly veiled contempt for immigrants that come from a particularly crass, noisy and moral-less country known as China. (Though a lot of the times, M completely omits the veil.)

Recently, the news have been abuzz with the tragic accident at Bugis, where a Ferrari traveling near Mach speed beat the red light, crashed into a taxi, which then sent the said taxi flying into a motorcyclist nearby. The Ferrari driver (a foreigner from above mentioned country) died horribly (an almost clean decapitation, I heard), the taxi driver succumbed to his wounds, via bleeding in the brain, the Japanese lady passenger he was carrying also died and the motorcyclist had a spinal injury and I wouldn't be surprised if he was paralyzed for life.

Tragic, it's very very tragic, made worse that the Taxi driver was the sole breadwinner and his eldest daughter might have to put her university studies on hold, his two younger sons were going to take their 'O's and 'A's this year. Very sad.

That's it right? Well, if this was it, Moon will have just cursed the stupidity of the Ferrari driver and put it out of her mind. Until she came across comments from the said immigrants defending the Ferrari driver by blaming the Taxi driver for not checking the road before moving off.

*insert atomic bomb explosion*

Look at the video of the crash. Er, very violent images ahead, you have been warned.



Now rewind and count how many seconds the light turns green and the unlucky cab crosses the path of the Ferrari. About 4-5 seconds yes? Before the light turns green, there is a gap of time between the red light on the left, before the lights turn green in favor of the taxi yes? On large junctions like this, the gap is usually at least 3 seconds long, (though I wouldn't be surprised if it was 5 seconds). Factor in another 5-7 seconds for when the light turns from yellow to red on the Ferrari's side. That makes a grand total of at least 14 seconds.

14 SECONDS!

At the rate the Ferrari was travelling before impact, I estimate it to be above 100kph, though I think it's closer to 120kph. Simple math would suggest that Ferrari was actually pretty far away from the traffic light and the junction when it started turning yellow. It meant that, the STUPID foreigner simply carried on his merry little way that ended with a huge climax, (if there was a fireball, it would have been a crash worthy on Hollywood).

Why would anyone, ANYONE, say the Taxi driver was at fault?

a.) The light was in the Taxi Driver's favor
b.) He wouldn't be able to see the Ferrari on the road because stupid cars like that are low and the adjacent road was blocked from view
c.) Even if he did see the Ferrari after he crossed into the path of the Ferrari, what was the taxi driver supposed to do? Teleport?

Sorry, M just finds it annoying that people side with stupidity for the sake of saving the face of their countrymen. It also didn't help that the newspapers her mom is bringing home sing praises of the stupid Ferrari driver, who according to eyewitnesses, reeked of alcohol and had a woman beside him who was not his wife. (His pregnant wife was at home with their young child)

Wow, it's so tragic a cheating husband died by his own hands. Wait no, this young successful man didn't cause the crash, it was the taxi driver's fault! WHO SAID THE TAXI DRIVER COULD DRIVE WHEN IT IS THE GREEN LIGHT AND WHY DIDN'T HE CHECK BEFORE MOVING OFF?

On a happier note, today is the day Diablo III is out. If there was a world full of epic events, Diablo III would be king! All hail evil!