Diablo

"Not as good as the PC version, but not as bad as you'd think."

My initial reaction when I heard this game was making its way to consoles was ''Ahh crap, another PC port.'' I never had a PC when I was younger, and all the gaming I did was on consoles. The first time I ever played this game was at a friend's house, and even then I didn't actually ''play'' it. I watched my friend play it for something like 3 hours, and though I thought it was a pretty neat idea for a game, I never understood the multiplayer aspect of it. Of course, it could have just been that friend I was hanging out with, but later that week I attended a LAN party and watched people link up to play the game together. That friend would go into the dungeons ahead of everyone else and start killing stuff, collecting items, all that. It made everyone else get really agitated with him.. what's the point of multiplayer if he doesn't play with anyone else?.. and I decided that it was just that friend that had no social skills and didn't know how to get along with anyone else.

Okay, so what was the point of that story? Well, to me the strongest point of Diablo for the PSX was the multiplayer. It is true multiplayer, as in you can't have one guy wander off the screen and do his own thing while the other guy does something else. You have to work as a team to get things done, especially on the Hell difficulty level. I had night after night of fun playing this game with my best friend at the time, because we were actually playing together instead of taking turns or getting mad at one another and being sore losers when we competed. It's games with this level of cooperation that really push my buttons, and for that alone the game gets a 10.

The developers also did a good job bringing the voicework over to the consoles, as well as translating all those rare and sometimes oogy-named weapons and armor over. Replay was still amazingly high, having my friends and I swapping characters, starting a new game with guys we had created long ago, all uber-powerful with awesome gear or even newbies we had started for the heck of it. For a game with only 3 selectable classes in it, with 3 difficulty levels, we still found plenty to do. Again, I stress the multiplayer component of it, as single-player just doesn't hold up with this game (PSX or PC) the way it does with other RPG's like Final Fantasy or whatnot.

However, it does have some drawbacks, common side effects of being a PC port. First and foremost, the interface. I never really noticed how bad it was until I played the PC game more than passingly. The home version is clumsy with the standard button layout, and though it was considerate of the developers to add an ''advanced'' button mapping, it doesn't really alleviate any of the problems. Speaking of controls, using the L1+R1 buttons for health and mana was a good idea, and overall the PSX controller lends itself well to a hack-n-slash game. I wish there was Dual Shock support, as my thumb took a beating with the D-pad, but it wasn't all too bad.

Overall this game wasn't as pretty or have as many options as its PC brethren, but it holds its own as a good hack-n-slash RPG with a great twist on multiplayer. Rent it, and if you like it and don't own a PC, buy it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/08/03, Updated 07/08/03