Diablo couldn't have arrived on my desk at a worse time. I was leaving the next day for a weeklong business trip and had a million things to do before I left. Not having played a game obsessively in years, I thought I'd just take a quick look at it, then prepare for a talk I was to give on my trip. That was around 7 p.m. Around 9 p.m., I thought I'd just finish the level before getting a bite to eat. At 2 a.m.,I was still playing - and no, I never had dinner. Nor did I finish preparing my talk. Oops.
Diablo is a multiplayer Dungeons & Dragons game. You can be a fighter, a rogue, or a magician. You kill monsters and find magic treasure. There are a million of these sorts of games out there, but this one is simple enough to be playable. You feel like you're fighting the monsters, not the software. Think of it as a spiffed-up 3-D version of the old arcade game Gauntlet. Individual players need their own CDs, so no one else could play that night - people in my lab watched over my shoulder in shifts, offering advice: "Don't go down yet!" "You missed a chest - down there to the left, on the floor." "Go right! Let's see what's behind that door!"
By the time I returned from the trip, my MIT labmates had bought three more CDs - which for starving grad students is quite an investment - to play the networked four-player version. They had played all week, too, building up high-level characters. My little guy was left in the dust, and had to be resurrected several times. Fortunately this time we remembered to get dinner. (OK, so we had pizza delivered.)
You can play Diablo over a local-area network or over the Net by connecting to one of Blizzard Entertainment's battle.net servers. The game has really taken off - lately there are more than 5,000 players on battle.net most nights. Around my lab, it's practically an obsession. Some friends and I started talking about Diablo at the local Thirsty Ear pub the other night, and the people at the next table joined in, the bartender spoke up ... soon the whole bar was talking about Diablo.
But be careful about playing with strangers you meet online. Killing other players is allowed, and the killer can take the victim's gold and keep an ear as a trophy.
Most important: Be careful to take the shrink-wrap off Diablo on a day when you're not too busy!
##### Diablo for Windows 95: US$54.95. Blizzard Entertainment: (800) 953 7669, +1 (714) 955 1380.
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