Diablo III

For years I kind of looked at Diablo III with a bit of distant interest. It was a game that I felt like I would totally enjoy, but was never quite the game I felt like playing RIGHT NOW. So I waited. I waited four years until one day I realized there was a playable demo of Diablo III that I could download and give a try. And so I did just that. And then I upgraded to the base game. And I knocked that whole thing out over the course of a summer week.

Diablo III was so damn good in fact that I had decided that playing any more of it should be done with good company. I should preface this by saying that even after all these years I'm never exactly sure what games will click with my wife and which won't. Some of her favorite games of recent years have been pretty random - Dead Or Alive 2 comes to mind when she generally doesn't enjoy other fighting games. But for some reason I just thought she might possibly enjoy Diablo III. I wasn't really sure why.

Even for more it's tough to say what makes this game so special. Is it the seemingly endless grind? The loot? The compulsion to constantly upgrade? Is it the music or the world or the writing? Is it the utter satisfaction that comes from leveling up? Maybe it's the buckets of blood that explode from your victims? Or watching a kill-streak counter keep going up?

It's all of these things and more.

So I knew that introducing my wife to Diablo III would be hit or miss. I convinced her to give it a shot sometime after Christmas. I told her that she'd basically be attempting the story on her own, while I just kind of escorted her, keeping her alive and walking her through the intricacies of the game. A couple of hours later she was hooked. She informed me that on New Year's Eve we'd stay in, make lots of good food, and just play Diablo III all night. So that's what we did.

My wife likes games, but not the way that I like games. She can easily go weeks without playing a game because it's just not her biggest hobby. She'd rather read a book or catch up on one of her shows while I'm usually spitting obscenities at Overwatch in the other room. So it's been interesting for me to see her get so into Diablo III. She actually likes going into menus and comparing armor and weapons and deciding on which skills to augment. It's like for whatever reason Diablo III has been the one game I've ever seen her getting really deep into. For whatever reason it just grabbed her the right way.

We're still playing the game now - slowly. Like I said she can go weeks without playing a game. So every week or two (or three) we'll fire it up and play for a few hours. We're currently sitting somewhere toward the middle of Act II. And because the Ultimate Evil Edition on Xbox One contains a bunch of expansions and stuff, we still have a lot more to get through including the stuff I never saw on my own vanilla solo run.

I will say this, though - Diablo III is infinitely better in co-op. To the point I kind of have lost interest in even playing the game by myself. Actually we just ran through the "anniversary event" this January. The Darkening Of Tristram is kind of sort of meant to be a bit of remake of the sixteen dungeons of the original Diablo. I had been itching to play it all month but I didn't want to bother alone. So this past weekend we finally fired it up and tackled it in a few hours. It was a lot of fun seeing this new HD tileset getting the pixelated treatment and all. We even started new characters just to do that one event.

Oh! And the ability to roll on consoles is awesome. I remember wondering how well this game could really work on a controller but it turns out it's even better this way. Flicking the right analog stick to roll out of the way of an attack just seems so much more natural and comfortable to me. It's awesome.

I know I'm just kind of rambling here, but Diablo III is truly a fantastic game. I imagine we'll be playing this one together for quite a long time...

...and we have been.

I remember one night my wife had dozed off on the couch and I put on some gaming news show. She woke up in the middle of it, squinted at the TV and mumbled "Diablo III is coming out on Switch? Awesome."

We picked up the Switch port along with a second Pro Controller over our Christmas vacation this year and have been randomly chipping away at it again. It's still a phenomenal game. It never gets old and it always sucks us in and makes us lose track of time. This HAS to be our favorite co-op game. The funny thing is we have date nights that are specifically referred to as "Diablo Date Nights."

It's been awesome having another reason to replay this game. And I love that we can share our joy of such an awesome game. Of course it's also incredible to have it running on Switch. It means that I can have the game on console for when we want to co-op, but I can also sit around with the Switch in handheld mode if I want to run a second character for seasonal play.

Please Blizzard, please continue to bring your games to Switch. I would kill for Switch versions of Hearthstone and Heroes Of The Storm and Starcraft II and Warcraft III. And honestly, if you ported Overwatch to Switch I could stop paying for Xbox Live haha.