Blizzard Entertainment - The once and current champ.

Well for a lack of truly interesting game news tonight, I'll start us off with a slam dunk topic. A nice easy home run for the kids. Blizzard Entertainment, up to this point in the history of gaming is the pound-for-pound best game developer around. Ask anyone about PC gaming and you'll hear stories of lore, their eyes lighting up as they describe that killer zerg rush in StarCraft (which I still truly believe is the finest game of any type ever created). WarCraft is a series with more lore and history then your mother's, your father's, and his mistress's family trees put together-- a series of imminently playable games that drew the competitive fires of more then one nation. Maybe even more importantly though, are two simple words that the official roommate of the B-man uttered the other day -- "Diablo II". Instantly shivers went up and down my spine, as thoughts of late nights killing "just that one last boss" in case of that magical Doodad of Whatever +7 dropped. It's a raw addiction, a near-perfect blend of gameplay and progressive rewards that sucks a player into playing for hours on end. I'm happy to say that not only is Diablo II still playable today, but it was just recently patched, and it's holy cow goddamned-ugly. But don't let that stop you, graphics whores... it's still an amazing game, 5 years later. In fact to contrast Blizzard and Diablo II's greatness... take a look at the recently released Dungeon Siege II demo. First of all... 1.6 gigs for a fricken demo? What is Gas Powered Games (creator of the Dungeon Siege series) smoking? You could release a Cat-Punting Simulator demo and I wouldn't download it at 1.6 gigs, seriously. Is that how you "encourage" people to try your game? Of course, initial reports claim the game is awful anyway. A terrible Diablo rip-off with no new revolutionary features, awful graphics, a muddled character improvement system, and no real direction at all. Bummer. Maybe they'll have more luck with World of Total Annhiliation an online MMORPG that allows you to be one of 34 different classes that all look like a block. The point is though... 5 years and still on top. That's good game design. Kudos to Blizzard... now please release StarCraft 2 before the Koreans declare war on us. Oh, and I'm not touching World of WarCraft in here. Not until they give me my 1,500 hours back. I... wish I was kidding. I appreciate the free video card I won though. -B.