Category Archives: Diablo II

Dogs; Diablo

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Our puppy, Zelda, took it upon herself last night to start chewing on a pair of glasses that my wife had just bought, instead of the normal rawhide things that she is allowed to chew on. She has drug some of the wife’s high heels out in the past and chewed on them also, but dogs and shoes are pretty much linked by the oral tradition of our society, so that is to be expected. But, eyewear? There is just the tiny little piece of plastic on each arm, why would a dog find interest in that? A pair of slippers I could understand, especially if they were fuzzy, but glasses? What the hell was that dog thinking?

That is rhetorical, of course, and something that I may have been better off not to mention since I am the one trying to say that dogs are the more intelligent pet. The thing about training a dog is that there is a point where a puppy who can’t really understand discipline turns into a dog that knows that what it is doing is wrong, and you have to figure out at what point that happens.

Just like children, dogs go through a teething process. It is a bit different because the dogs will continue to chew on any item available until their teeth have completely grown in. I am assuming that this is because of their base animal instinct, knowing (however subconciously it is) that they must have strong teeth to tear apart their prey. I am speaking only from observation and have done absolutely zero research into it, but that is what I theorize from what I have seen.

Having been a dog owner since I was very young (3 or 4 years old at best), I have found that certain things do not help in teaching a dog what it should and should not chew on. Like the glasses, if you find them on the floor and they have been chewed on, showing them to the dog and smacking the dog seems to make it just hate them and want to chew on them the very next time it is possible. On the other hand, if you catch the dog chewing on something that they should stay away from it just takes a quick smack on the snout and the word “No” spoken firmly to make them never touch that item, or any similar item, again. I think that is why our puppy only drags her high heels out of the closet, since she has been smacked for dragging sneakers outside but has yet to be caught with a heel.

One other odd thing that she likes to chew on is bras. There is nothing crunchy on a bra, even the underwire ones only have a little piece of metal below the cup. I didn’t know that dogs would really chew on metal, but there are several old soup cans in my back yard that can prove that they do. We do try to keep rawhide chews available for her all the time, but those things can get expensive when she is going through one every day ( I mean like a bone, not just a strip ), and even then when it is gone she will start chewing on things like the laundry detergent bottle that is in the room they stay in while we are not home. With a bit of luck, and patience, she will grow up to be a much better dog than most pit bulls get credit for, unless she decides to start eating the wife’s jewelry next, in which case I will call a buy a gun and call a taxidermist, and then she will truly be a very good dog.

D2 talk below, may as well turn away now if you don’t play it.

Well, I spent entirely too much time playing Diablo today. Or to be more precise, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction version 1.10. Way too much time. It started out innocently enough, just screwing around with the new single player character that I created shortly after the release of the patch, but then I decided to go check on the on-line characters that I have remaining. I lost about 80% of my on-line characters through lack of play while I was playing everquest waiting for them to put out the patch for Diablo. The sad part is that had I sold some of the gear that I had over ebay I could be a couple hundred dollars richer because of it, instead, it is just gone.

I had a level 67 paladin that had just killed Baal in nightmare before I put the game on the shelf for a couple of months. He is one of the few characters that I still have remaining. I had not really tried to do anything in hell level since the patch was released, so I figured I would give him a go, just to see. They certainly have increased the difficulty in hell level. I am not saying that is a bad thing, just that it was obvious from stepping out the game that they had.

There are Super-Unique monsters galore. It wasn’t too bad going through the first couple of zones, I was able to survive using only potions and running like hell a lot of the time. Blood Raven was a lot more difficult than I remember her, but it has been a long time since I have faced her on hell level. Even longer since I have faced her on hell level with a melee character. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard to kill her, but it was significantly harder than it was prior to the patch.

The theme of having tons of Super-Unique monsters continued through as far as I got in act 1, and they are pretty tough sometimes. It wasn’t until I got to the Black Marsh (beyond the Dark Wood) that I started to get my ass handed to me pretty regularly. I happened upon four Super-uniques that were in about a four-screen range of each other. Two were Shamans, and were taken care of pretty easily, the other two were the two guys I am going to put pictures of below.

Any time they are stone skin and immune to physical a melee fighter has to cringe, but the lightning immunity made it even worse for me, since my weapon only does lightning damage. Luckily, this is the character that I had built to survive against physical immune creatures, so he has vengeance maxxed also, but this was still a pretty tough battle. My mercenary died a few times, and I got way too close a time or two myself. Then I decided to do the tower.

The tower might as well be a hack that was added to the game later, judging by the number of people that actually do the quest, but that could also be said for the majority of act 3, so who’s to say. I died in the tower. I am not sure if this guy had died before, but he died in the tower, on the first level. There were, again, at least four super-uniques on the first level of the tower. The fourth pack that I encountered were the ones that killed me, I did not have time to see what exactly their attributes were, but one had curse and spectral hit. I died with a full belt (16) full rejuv potions. Dead before I could hit a button. Thank god I don’t play hardcore.

I have read a lot about people thinking that the patch is too easy, or too hard, I think that it is just about right, you really have to think about your actions, and pay attention to what you do. It is certainly not a cake walk, but if you play it right it can be done with less than elite gear. So instead of bitching about how it is too hard or too easy, I am gonna say that they got it just about right. You have to really TRY to beat monsters at the higher levels, while you can just beat them up at the lower levels. Isn’t that the whole point of a game? To make the beginning easy enough for novices while having an ending that challenges the most seasoned player?

If I ever happen upon a game in my lifetime with the infinite replayability of D2:LOD, I will probably never have to buy another game.

Games

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Well, it has been some time since I have spoken (typed) about the pain in my neck, so I am going to go into it a bit today. The good news is that I no longer feel like my heart is only beating inside my head, that is I don’t have the constant head-ache anymore. As a matter of fact, I have not taken any of the muscle relaxant pills over the last couple of days, and ibuprofin only sparingly. I do have a bit of pain when I wake up in the morning, but I suppose that is to be expected. Once I am up and moving about I can actually forget about the injury altogether, unless I sneeze or cough, but those actions do both involve a bit of head whipping, so again, I guess that is to be expected. With those two exceptions, the only real pain that I am feeling is in the trapezius muscles and it is more like the pain that you get with a muscle cramp than the debilitating, ‘I am going to die for sure this time’, type of pain that I was feeling at this time last week. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to say that I am healed, but I am a hell of a lot closer to it than I was last week. I now think that I can work through the pain as long as I am able to use liberal amounts of Tiger Balm on my neck region after having been up and active (working) all day. Let us call this issue done. -Barring any unexpected recurrences of the pain-

I believe this lack of pain has left me in a much better mood than I have been in over the last couple of days for sure, and as I result I have spent way too much time playing games. There is nothing like a good game to get you back into the swing of things. First, I will talk about the game that I tried after seeing BlackChampagne link to it.

On a side note. If you haven’t noticed by now BlackChampagne is the only blog that I really read. I visit and read CalPundit pretty religiously also, but it is a bit more political than I am trying to be with this site, so I rarely (if ever) link to it. If you have never been there, and you aren’t a seriously right-wing republican, you would probably appreciate someone looking at political news objectively and presenting facts rather than misguided opinions. Time after time I am amazed by the way he can quote articles that send me into a blind rage, but he just presents facts to rebut them, with seemingly no emotion. Some of the advertising on his site does tell you which way he leans as far as politics, but you would never know it to read his writing on very hot political issues. “He is wood that will not bend.”

To the games!

The game that was linked to over at BlackChampagne was Dynomite. It is one of those PopCap games. Some of their games I love, some of them I hate, more love than hate I suppose. I went into this game after never having played the arcade version when I was younger, and as such I had no idea what I was doing for the first few minutes. The first few levels (in puzzle mode) are so easy that it doesn’t really matter if you know what you are doing anyway, so it went well. The game is, I am sure, quite addictive. I would likely have been totally into throwing several hours into mastering it, had I not been experiencing exactly the same problem that I have with Snood. That problem is that I will think I have a shot totally lined up, I will be able to clear out a group of ‘things’, then I fire the shot and it just misses the target. Maybe it catches one of the objects on the way to where I want it to go, maybe it passes the object I am trying to catch the corner of and passes a level too far. End result, I am usually screwed.

It could be that I am just not very good at this type of game, I am certainly not going to deny that. But, when you have that shot lined up that is going to clear half the board and save your ass, and it misses, the frustration is overwhelming. Sure you can load it all and do it again, but it sure is frustrating. I will probably give the game another go tomorrow just to make sure that I both love and hate it as much as Snood, but I really doubt that I will be trying to master every nuance of it.

DiabloII:LOD, on the other hand, took away many hours of my life yesterday, and for no good reason. If you don’t play that game, don’t bother reading below as I am not going to go into a breakdown of the game for what I am going to bitch about.

My brand new paladin has been in act 3 for a lot longer than I would like to admit. I have yet to find a single waypoint. I am playing is single player mode, so the map stays the same and every area that I have explored is outlined on the map, but the monsters come back. I had already gotten the first two pieces of Khalim’s thingy and I had yet to find a single waypoint. The first waypoint that I found was actually in the ‘Great Marsh’, which is a zone that I rarely ever travel through, since most of the time (in my experience) you don’t really need to. I started mapping that zone thinking that I might find another entrance to one of the other zones, specifically the flayer jungle, since I was not at all concerned about having a waypoint in the spider forest.

I spent several hours last night following the edges of the great marsh, and I did eventually find another entrance to the flayer jungle. I followed that route for another twenty minutes or so and found the waypoint, about two steps off the screen from where I went into the great marsh in the first place! I would have really been irritated if I had not gone up two levels (23-25) during this, and had my mercenary (still an act 1 archer) not gone up very near three levels (20- a kill less than 23) in this little walk.

I know that I have previously written about why I started playing single player again, and I think that a little setback like this really kind of defines it. I can not recall having a mercenary this close to my level since the expansion came out, now that I have to walk around until I find the stuff that I really want/need (as opposed to someone just giving me waypoints on b.net, but then who on b.net would have the act 3 waypoints?) I gain levels, and my merc. gains levels, since she is fighting things that are very close to her own level. It is like the game seems somehow ‘Fresh’ again, even though I know where to go and who to kill.

One other thing of note that has happened since I started playing my new off-line character is that I don’t really care about any sort of magic find. That is the polar opposite of my on-line characters. My on-line characters are looking for gear that they can trickle down to the other characters who can use it, or else I will trade the elite unique items for items that I want/need for my new builds. My new pally is all about resistances and extra gold from monsters, all the better to survive and to gamble, respectively. A rare ring from ‘Ormus’ is usually absolute crap on hell level, but on the normal level it could be the difference between life and death against Mephisto. The same can be said for gambling. You would never gamble a belt when you already have a string of ears, or a helm if you already have a shako, but when you have nothing if it comes up with a little bit of life steal or resistance against the next boss in the way, that is good stuff.

When you are a paladin, and you have placed only six total stat points at level 25, you are going to be looking for any advantage you can find. At the same time, I think I could just probably kick it up to players 8 and run lower Kurast for a while, then be like level 30 when I take on Mephisto and likely take him down easily. But, for now, I am still just looking for better gear.

Aren’t we all.

Diablo; Signs

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I would like to go into a bit of detail about my neck again today, but let’s be honest, I am absolutely sick of writing about it, and you are no doubt sick of reading about it. Instead I will just say that you should assume that it is in the same condition as it was the previous update if I do not mention it. That way, hopefully, I won’t write about it again until the injury is healed…Don’t quote me on that.

I stayed up late last night playing DiabloII:LOD, several months ago that was a very common thing for me to do, but now it seems almost like my world has gone in a big circle. I started playing DiabloII after I had bought it for my wife as a birthday gift. I played single player for at least a year or more before the ‘purity’ of on-line play pulled me in. By the time LOD came out, I bought two copies of it, one for desktop, one for laptop. I played the game so much and had gotten so much gear muled that I never played a character that was not *helped* by my other characters. This became rather boring after a while, and I just resigned myself to just using a sorc, baba and zon for magic find, and that was all I played for the last few months of my Diablo career.

While waiting for Blizzard to get around to releasing the patch (that was like two years in the making), I split my time between everquest and a diablo mod that was really pretty cool. In the process of doing that, my on-line characters mostly expired. Out of a total of 32 characters, only four of them remained, one high level sorceress, and three mules, though not the mules with the elite gear. None of my friends were playing online anymore as they had moved on to the everquest for the PS2 or World of Warcraft, this made levelling a new character difficult. So what did I do? I started an off-line character so that I could adjust the difficulty to help me gain experience between act bosses.

It had been so long since I had played a character through from the beginning that I was a bit surprised at how difficult it was. Not that there was really any threat of my death in the first act, just that the monsters were all a lot tougher than I remembered them. Keep in mind that this was the first time in probably at least two years that I had been playing a character without hand-me-down gear to help him out. When Andariel (boss of act 1) died and dropped a magic mace I was overjoyed. I used that weapon for the majority of act 2.

That led me to thinking about just how different this was than my recent play style. I never picked up anything that was just magical unless it was an elite item, now I was picking up every magic item I saw and saying please,please,please as I identified it. It is a lot more fun this way, but if I were to start a character on-line again the temptation to trickle some gear down from my mules would overcome me (probably about the time I had to fight Duriel, since I always have a problem with him), and that would take away the anticipation and joy of seeing an item drop then seeing it is actually a useful item.

What is it about DiabloII that has this effect on me and so many others? In just a quick look around what passes for an office at my house I can see Morrowind, Alone In the Dark 3,Arthurs Knights 2, Atlantis: the lost tales, Egypt Tomb of the Pharaoh, I could go on. I haven’t spent more than an hour or two playing any one of those games( never even installed a couple for that matter), yet I am still consumed by DiabloII. The only logical answer is; Blizzard put subliminal messages in the game cinematics that make you want to play it more.

As long as I am in the mood to write about Diablo, I may as well throw a theory out here regarding ebay. In lots of articles over at DiabloII.net people have criticised Blizzard for not taking a firm stance against people who sell game items for real money. I don’t really care either way, if someone is dumb enough to pay actual money for a string of binary code that can only be used in an on-line game, the deserve what they get. A theory that I have had in my mind for a while, though, is that the Blizzard employees actually sell gear over ebay to cover the costs of maintaining battle.net without having to charge the players. The reason that I really love that theory is that it would mean that people who don’t play often enough to find the really good stuff (that is part-time players), and those with more money than brains, would be paying for the dedicated fans who devote ten hours a day to it without ever dropping a cent. This is also the reason that it can’t possibly be true, it would make me far too happy if that was the reality.

I woke up early this morning and was not able to get back to sleep, so I decided to watch a DVD. I found one under the end table called Signs and popped it in. Before I go into detail below, let me just say that there was a BlockBuster sticker on the front of the case that said “Previously Viewed $14.95”, and I think that BlockBuster is just assuming that whoever rented it was actually able to view it.

If you have never seen the movie and plan to, I am gonna spoil it all here, so don’t read it.

The trailers for this movie, as well as the description on the box, say that this is a movie about one family’s experience dealing with crop circles and extraterrestrials. That is true, to a point. The villains in this movie could have been pigeons, frogs hell even day-glow ping-pong balls and it would not have made a difference to the plot. Here is the entire plot in a sentence; Man loses faith in God, things happen to make man believe again. That is the entire movie.

To be fair to the movie I guess I should do a bit more detail about that. The main character (mel gibson) is a man of the cloth. His wife dies in a car accident which makes him question his faith, he turns in the cloth (this happened before the point where the movie starts). As the movie progressess he begins to think that his faith helps to save his son not once, but twice. He then believes that his son has asthma only because there would be a point where poison gas would be sprayed in his face, but God had made it so that he couldn’t breathe at the time. He then believes that what he used to think were his wife’s non-sensical dying words were actually a vision of the future, telling him what to say to his brother six months later when faced with a dilemma.

Okay, I am gonna take a few deep breaths and try to collect my thoughts since it does get even LESS logical.

There are a lot of things in the movie that are inconsistent or just don’t make a damn bit of sense. The first in my mind is why would the aliens decide to try to invade the earth when water is toxic to them. Wouldn’t they have noticed in their cursory exploration that we live on a planet that is more water than land? Wouldn’t they have seen that every dwelling in the entire world -regardless of wealth- had water in it? Attacking would be like trying to dig a paperclip out of a huge bowl of razors, are these beings, that have already mastered interstellar flight, really that stupid?

There is also the issue of the aliens and their ability, or lack thereof, to open doors. In one scene there is an alien that is not able to escape from a pantry which has a couch against the door, in another scene you hear them break out windows to get into a house, then find a disused coal chute (which would surely have been sealed off when the house went to a more modern climate control system) and somehow break through that. Even in the basement where two grown men had done the pole-under-the-doorknob trick and were also leaning against the door, the aliens nearly broke through. This was necessary to build tension, sure, but it was just not consistent.

Then there is the dead wife. So she was hit by a truck and pinned against a tree. In the scene you can see at least three ambulances and a dozen firemen and EMS workers. They just left her there until Mel got there. Great. The movie explained this away saying that the woman should be dead but that she hadn’t died…Well that is when one is supposed to use medical knowledge to keep them not dead, isn’t it? I am sure that letting her bleed internally for however long it took for Mel to get there was probably why she died, but I guess that was what the movie was going for. I think that what you are supposed to believe is that their combined faith had kept her alive long enough to talk to him one more time, so she could could say “swing away”.

My wife said that she has never even made it thirty minutes into this film, and I am actually kind of surprised that I did. I just kept looking at the timer on the DVD player and thinking, something has got to happen soon, and it never did. This is one of the worst movies that I have ever actually sat through, but I did sit through it, so that is something. I just sat through it waiting for something to happen, and then it was over, and then I was pissed off that I had just wasted over an hour and a half of my life watching a movie that you could see at vacation bible school. But don’t take my word for it, the Cap Alert guy gave it what I would say is the best review of his that I have ever seen.

Hoping to see how the movie was reviewed by people other than ultra religious kooks, I went to Rotten Tomatoes and found that it actually has a 78% positive review. Did those people watch the same movie as I did? 78% is like a C+ right? The movie I saw doesn’t even deserve a letter, or if I had to give it one it would be a ‘Q’ or an ‘S’ for Quit or Stop. But it doesn’t even stop there, I went and checked Ebert’s review and he is blowing more sunshine up your ass. The last two paragraphs of his review aren’t too far off the mark though;

Instead of flashy special effects, Shyamalan creates his world out of everyday objects. A baby monitor that picks up inexplicable sounds. Bo’s habit of leaving unfinished glasses of water everywhere. Morgan’s bright idea that caps made out of aluminum foil will protect their brains from alien waves. Hess’ use of a shiny kitchen knife, not as a weapon, but as a mirror. The worst attack in the film is Morgan’s asthma attack, and his father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie aside and is only about itself.
At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff. He knows, as we all sense, that payoffs have grown boring. The mechanical resolution of a movie’s problems is something we sit through at the end, but it’s the setup and the buildup that keep our attention. “Signs” is all buildup. It’s still building when it’s over.

The problem is that I could not find anything better (worse for the movie) to put here from anyone with a reputation. I guess I may be the only one in the whole world that hated the movie and I am okay with that. It just goes to show that there is a damn good reason why I rarely watch any movies other than comedies.