Normally, I am not a person who likes eggs, but they have this incredible breakfast sandwich with a fried egg on it. It's so delicious it makes up for their pathetic "pub hash browns" that are just undercooked fried potatoes, not neither hashed nor browned.
Finally found a game to relax with, in a kind of roundabout way. I was desperately browsing the playstation store, seeing what popped out to me. Did I want to get Lies of P? Maybe wait for the new Lords of the Fallen that out on friday and looks surprisingly good? Maybe jump back into the Trails series with Cold Steel? Perhaps pick up an Assassin's Creed?
In the end, I went with an old reliable pick: a $20 Diablo Battle Chest. I remember buying the Diablo 2 version of that a couple times in high school, because I kept losing my discs. This one had the new 2 remake as well as 3, so I figured: what the heck. It's a good excuse to check out that remake, see how they handled the console port.
What I discovered was very telling, in a way. The console port of Diablo 2 Hellfire? Godawful. Felt clunky in the way the worst PC-to-console ports do. They kept the inventory tetris, and it's a huge pain to manage with the controller. Targeting enemies felt super sloppy. The UI was tiny and awful to parse. It reminded me a lot of the Diablo 4 demo, where I was very annoyed by the UI not really feeling like it worked for either PC or console.
But I tried the Diablo 3 console port, and god damn is it good. They put in the fuckin' work to translate that game into an ever-so-slightly different format, and it just works! If anything, it feels even better than the PC version to play. They built practically a whole new UI for use with a controller, it works like a charm. I'm even playing a wizard, a class that gets a lot of utility out of careful mouse targeting, and it's been a blast.
It really goes to show, I think, how there's been a huge brain drain at Blizzard, following the abuse allegations and layoffs and whatnot. They simply can't make 'em like they used to. I think there's also some weird internal politics where Diablo 3 is still regarded as an embarrassment, even though it's sold tens of millions of copies and has a rabidly loyal community at this point.
Diablo 3 simply remains an incredibly good game after all these years. I was in the demographic for D2, it came out when I was 11, but somehow 3 ended up being my absolute favorite. I adore the art style, it's so much better than the grim boringness of 4, though the prerendered goofiness of 2 has its charms (destroyed in the fully 3D remake). I love the skill system that does away with point buying and trees, I love the focus on sets and legendary items, I love the way the cube works, it's all so, so good.
Probably won's sink another thousand hours in or whatever, but it'll tide me over until november, at least.