"; if(is_file("header.php")) include "header.php"; else include "../header.php"; ?>

the greatest game ever made If you've never played a little game called Diablo II, then you are cheating yourself out of the greatest gameplay experience in the world. When I first started playing this game, I just had Diablo II, because the expansion hadn't come out yet. In fact I had been playing atleast a year and a half by the time Lord of Destruction emerges. And in that time I had had the greatest experience in my life. At first I was just a lowely Barbarian, who wore a loin-cloth and hit monsters with my crappy axe. But countless hours of online and offline play later, I was a badass looking barbarian with a thirst for blood. And the online gaming is really where this game shines. For one thing, Battle.net is free. And another thing is that people don't just play this game online, they live it. If my computer hadn't been total crap and stopped working, and I hadn't had to do other things, like go to work and try to maintain a relationship with actual people that I could touch and smell, then I would be going on my fourth year of playing this game. But now that I have recently gotten back online and into the new wave of gamers, I am now, once again, completely addicted. And when I say new wave of gamers, that's exactly what I mean. Recently I was down at my local EB Games to pick up some games when I got into a conversation with the clerk there about Diablo II. And for the first once, somebody actually knew where I was coming from. You see, he had also played back in the old days before the expansion came out, and also noticed a difference in today's gamers. For one thing, people nowadays want something from you, even if you have nothing. For example, I was playing with my level 64 sorceress and I was searching all over the active channels looking for an item called a Lum Rune. Finally, I came across a room with a lvl. 83 amazon who, when asked, told me she had three Lum Runes. After seeing that I had nothing she wanted, she told me off and left the room. I mean, come on! Be nice, she had three and I had none. She was like close to 30 levels ahead of me and couldn't spare to drop one of them. Back in the day, people would make rooms just to drop things for free. Of course back then almost everybody who was cool was a hacked character. And things like elixers and the Jamella editor still existed. Nowadays, people think being hacked means to have your stuff stolen. No kids, that is getting screwed. Getting hacked means you have acquired items from the games mainframe and are using them even though you aren't really supposed to for another 50 levels. Being hacked meant you had everything you wanted and nobody was the wiser. But anyway, about the expansion. It introduces two new character classes, the Druid and the Assassin. Making the total amount of playable characters seven (including the last game's Barbarian, Paladin, Necromancer, Sorceress, and Amazon). Both of which are pretty cool characters. Anyway, the game's praphics got touched up a bit, they are still sprites, but they fit the game perfectly. I guess the one good thing about not having hacked cheater characters in the new version is you don't have to worry about anyone being invincible when you're dueling them (hacked characters tended to have something like 10 million hit points while the average player had less than a thousand). So if you like your social life, steer clear of this drug, because once you're in, there's no telling when anybody will see you again.