Saturday!

http://youtu.be/5mIQrMgTvzQ

The have been a number of games that Maribou and I have deliberately sat down and played together, as a together kind of couple.

The first of which was probably Heroes of Might and Magic II. We held hands for this one.

Moving past that, I’d say that there were about a dozen games… scrabble/tetric for the SNES, Arkanoid, Chronotrigger (the original for the original SNES) that worked for not only “hey, do you want to play this too?” but the whole “let’s hand the controller back and forth” thing.

Now, of course, the more intricate games weren’t good at “I’ve gotta pee! Here take over!” but they were pretty good at two people sitting next to each other and one of them saying “hey, go there, go there, attack that guy… wait! Attack *THAT* guy!” which may have even turned into a discussion of “dude, play it yourself”.

Which allows us to leap to Diablo II.

Diablo II, you may recall, was FREAKING AWESOME. It had the action RPG thing, the gorgeous setting thing, the ability to find a character best suited to your own particular playstyle thing… it had it all, pretty much.

Sadly, Diablo III was not Diablo II.

So you find stuff like Titan Quest or the various Fate games or the Dungeon Sieges… but all of them lack that special something that Blizzard somehow managed to sprinkle into the game.

I think that The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing might have captured a small percentage of that something, though…

It establishes a perfect setting in monster-peppered Eastern Europe and then gives you a nice variety of playstyles from the in your face guy with a sword to the somewhat more distant guy with a handgun to the guy who just prefers little robots to do his interactions for him. After doing all that, it drops traditional monsters from the whole monster-peppered Eastern Europe movie era on top of your monster hunter.

Diablo II veterans should know that they’ve figured out a way to rip off the barbarian, amazon, necromancer (and others!) but package them in a just barely pre-modern monster-hunter template. People who have never played Diablo II should know that they’ve hammered out (ripped off) a number of really, really awesome ways to kill monsters.

Which, if you’ve missed Diablo II and have noticed that Diablo III ain’t Diablo II, is quite welcome.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is “Untitled” by our very own Will Truman. Used with permission.)