Diablo (1996)

Honestly I am impressed with how competent this port of Diablo 1 is. It's basically the base game with the added Hellfire feature of Nightmare and Hell difficulty. I do wish they included the Hellfire content in it's fullest especially because you can just ignore it if you want to. But overall this is very well done for a PS1 port. The graphical fidelity is honestly very similar with a bit more moody lighting effects compared to the PC release. The single screen co-op, the only reason I played this version, is very fun albeit quite simplistic with this first foray into the action RPG genre. The controls are very functional. Sure it's not as responsive nor as accurate as a mouse click, but the auto-aim feature works well enough and didn't really cause too many problems.

The main draw back to the game's multiplayer is how the "pvp" mode is always on and cannot be turned off. Thus you can easily kill each other. This gets doubly more challenging if you play as a mage and level up chain lightning, which coincidentally I did. Multiple times I evaporated my friend who was playing as a warrior. It can be kind of hard to gauge the directions of the lightning arcs. So I ended up using regular lightning and fireballs more often, unless a room was particularly devious. I still ended up accidentally killing my friend a few more times, but it did happen less often. Particularly after my friend leveled up elemental resistances via better gear.

Another notable issue with the multiplayer is how experience works. I believe you only get experience if you land a killing blow on an enemy. This is a problem for a warrior when you have a mage ally who is capable of one shotting an entire room of enemies with a single chain lightning. Thus I started to quickly outpace my friend which is kind of a bummer. Why not have shared XP? Come on EA!

A big change from the original game and this port is how death works. In the PC version of Diablo, if you die, you spawn in town and need to run back to your corpse to get your gear back. In this port, if you die, you die. It's not exactly hardcore mode, because the game doesn't auto-save at all. Instead, you always need to make your own save files by manually saving. Thus, if you die, you just load from your last save. So save often! In multiplayer, you get resurrect scrolls that you can use to raise your ally. So I recommend you always carry a few on you. Especially if you are playing as a mage and liable to erase your bro from time to time.

Another notable difference between the PC vs port version would be the saving and loading times... dear God... it takes about a minute per each... So if you are trying to fish for better loot off Griswold or specific spell books from Adria, it takes roughly 2-3 minutes per reload (saving and then loading the game) to reset their loot tables... Compared to the PC version which may have taken 30s or less to do the whole cycle...

Another major difference is how starting a new game works with a character. You need to "save character." Which you can then load when starting a new game. The main drawback to this is how you need to start from level 1 each time and progress back linearly to later levels... it really sucks you can't start a new game and immediately go to Hell or other later levels and farm... you got to walk there first. In addition, for a given save file, each time you save and reload, the enemies you killed stay dead. Thus a save file has finite resources which in turn kind of makes this into a survival horror game. You will need and want to loot most things to sell and start dropping those stacks of gold in town as your makeshift bank!

While the duping glitch doesn't seem to exist in this game version, due to how inventory management is only done through a pause screen, you can still "dupe" items using the save character mechanic. There is a caveat though. You can't load two characters with the same exact gear into the same game. The duplicated gear will disappear! You can still work around this in clever ways if you want to re-use multiple spell books (which I did to ease the farming). Since you can have a save with the spell books you want. Drop them, use them, save the character and rinse and repeat. Given how long it takes to save/reload this didn't feel too dirty to me. Another major caveat with the save character mechanic is how all unique items WILL NOT carry over via character save. Thus unique items are only useful for the current run... really lame actually. Making unique items basically useless.

In conclusion, this was surprisingly fun! I only recommend this version of the game if you want to play some couch co-op with a friend. While this version is A LOT better than I was expecting, the PC version is still superior. Though you don't get couch co-op with it!

It took me a very long time to finally complete this gem, but one night, it just had to be done. The classic Diablo is the embodiment of nostalgia and one cannot deny that it can be labeled as one of the greatest foundations of video game history.

That being said, I will focus on the game from the perspective of the time it was released and how it holds up today.

Story wise, Diablo is full of lore and sequel material. Something the developers did very well. It made a solid foundation to create more games, what, of course, happened.

You play as a hero returning to her/his hometown and finding that strange things are happening. The dead rise from their graves/tombs and a unknown evil has taken over the land. You investigate the cathedral, where it all starts and dig deeper into the labyrinth, eventually ending up in hell itself.

Through the story, you learn that all the events and evil can be traced back to the demon lord Diablo. By speaking to Deckard Cain, you learn the gruesome history of his origin and backstory and he must be stopped at all cost. Deckard Cain is not your stereotypical wise man, but actually a Horadrim, a member of an ancient order that always fought against the forces of hell.

Gameplay wise, Diablo is easy to understand and plays smoothly. You pickup weapons, armor, and spells to improve your character, level up to increase your stats and become stronger. You just kill stuff for experience and jug health potions like they were cold beers.

The variation in enemies and environments is nicely done. Every four floors, the setting changes and become darker and more vile. You really get the feeling that you are progressing towards something really disturbing and evil.

The graphics are amazing for its time and, even today, I had no problem looking at the “aged sprites”. Animations are smooth and the enemy designs are very cool. In a time like today, it is hard to imagen that you encounter some sexy succubae with massive juggies that shoot flaming stars at you. As a kid, this would be something else. The piles of gore and blood when you slay the spawns of hell are epic and give a nice stimulating presentation of your hard work.

In the sound department, I still think Diablo is one of the greatest I have ever experienced. The sound of hitting enemies, the grunts and screams, the sound of casting spells and the dreadful music is a piece of art. Everything feels violent and disturbing when it comes to the sound.

There are some small issues in Diablo, like the snail pace movement speed. Moving around town and in the dungeons feels so incredibly slow that my skin crawled in pure agony sometimes. An other small annoyance is that you can get very rich, very fast by selling unique and rare items. This does not sound like a problem, but every five thousand gold takes up a square in your small inventory. So when you sell an epic chest armor that you don’t need for two hundred thousand gold, your inventory is full.

The biggest irony in Diablo, is that the game has a reputation for being relentlessly hard, which is true, but only when you reach the Butcher. If you kill him (by luck, prayer and running), the game turns around and is actually really, really easy. This is mainly because of the unique items you receive from the four main bosses in the game. With those items alone, you are so powerful that the game becomes laughable, especially when you kill the big man himself. Sure, there are still some areas in which enemies bombard you with a million projectiles at the same time, but with some strategy, you can outsmart them by luring small groups at you at a time.

The Butcher is the ultimate beginners trap and, by far, the hardest boss in the game. Mainly because of his “animation stun lock”, in which you cannot move and have to endure hit after hit after hit (which does not end well after hit number 4). After that, it is smooth sailing. The realization that this asshole was the whole reason that I never finished this game before is stunning and funny. I just wished Diablo himself was somewhat more of a challenge. I just put on the unique, and unmissable, Constriction Ring which grants max resistance to fire (while slowly losing health) and blasted him away in seconds.

I would definitely recommend Diablo, even to this day. It is an experience that you must have completed at least once in my honest opinion.

Replaying this right now, only played until level 5 or so as a child when it scared the living shit out of me back in the days.

I remember I couldn't enjoy it anymore after D2 came out, especially because of the slow walking somewhat.

Dear jesus, this was a brilliant game though. It's so ridiculously atmospheric and immersive that probably only D2 can compete with it.

The graphics are just so stylish and old school and the music easily the best soundtrack ever made.

It's also still super addictive and fun to just click those monsters away, it has this amazing hack 'n' slay satisfaction already.

Wasn't D1 supposed to be a round based crpg and just accidently ended up being real time? Well, this accident invented the action rpg, ladies and gentlemen.

I just replayed this game for the first time since I was a kid playing with my dad over TCP/IP. I remember our long struggles through the dungeons as two mages, blasting away and fighting our way to the final fight. We did this at launch and I was... maybe 10 years old?

That was the only time I'd ever played through the game, and I just found out the single player is different, just a bit, at the end. There was stuff I didn't remember at all. I also played with the Hellfire expansion this time. I did this because I'm prepping for D2 remastered next month, and I gotta say. The first game is still fun for playthrough. I got it off GOG, and it was a bit of a pain to get working just right... also there were some quality of life things I was missing from the secon and third games.

I've played a bit of the Beta for Diablo 2 on my Xbox Series X and it's great, it feels and looks amazing. So my suggestion, do what I did. Jump on the GOG version now while you can, and then next month join me in Diablo 2! It's worth your time.

And I know it's hard right now to appreciate things by Blizzard. But a podcast I listened to made a good point. IN a lot of the reports, it seems the abusers would often shirk the responsibilities and duties and jobs on the victims, and then just hang around and play video games and not contribute... so the game Blizzard have made that you love... aren't really the product of the abusers, their the conclusion of all the passion and pain that the victims put into it. That's their very lives blood sweat and tears on display and I think on some level that's worth appreciating.

Dificilmente algum RPG lançado desde então seja tão sombrio e profundo quanto o original da série Diablo.

Logo no início em Tristram, o jogador percebe o caos que ronda toda a atmosfera do jogo, o quão macabro é a situação da catedral logo ao norte da vila e como a desesperança é o único sentimento comum a todos os moradores.

A jogabilidade é frenética, uma vez que é necessário o uso do click do mouse para se movimentar. Isso torna a jogatina um pouco mais difícil, notadamente nos níveis mais avançados e em alguns bosses.

A trilha sonora é imersiva. Quem nunca se arriscou jogar Diablo com as luzes apagadas e no meio da noite, não sabe o que é estar inserido completamente em um jogo. A sensação é que Satanás poderá enfrentá-lo a qualquer momento. Ao mesmo tempo, a trilha sonora serve de portal para uma espécie de passado desconhecido, algo de certa forma conectado ao nosso mundo real, ao nosso momento histórico, a tempos sombrios de séculos atrás.

Diablo certamente estará nos corações e mentes de todos.