Diablo III

Blizzard is hiring for console Diablo Game

Blizzard has been one of the few developers that support almost solely the PC/Mac Platform for its games. At the same time most of the developers in the industry opt for multi-platform releases of the same game. A job listing was spotted on Blizzard's website that asks for designers and developers for a diablo console game.

Blizzard entertainment is looking for a talented and experienced designer for the Diablo team. This position involves setting design direction for a team, as well as contributing heavily to game design. The ideal candidate has prior experience in console game development, proven experience in game design, an exceptional aptitude for critical thinking and analysis, outstanding people skills, boundless creativity, a strong visual aesthetic, extensive knowledge of Diablo, and a longstanding passion for playing games.

Many will say that this is heretic but i 'll say its good news. I do not see Blizzard abandoning the PC/Mac platform any time soon and I trust the company 100% for providing quality titles. Thus there is not anything bad about kicking evil's ass on your TV screen. This listing indicates that it will be an entirely different game and thus there will be no compromises either in the console game or the computer game because of a multiplatform release. Since it is Blizzard we will probably see the game in a decade, so keep your panties on...

"StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty" release date announced!

After 12 long years the time has finally come for the sequel to one of the best games ever, to be unleashed upon the world! Blizzard has announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will be released on stores worldwide on July 27 2010.

The release of StarCraft II will also mean the official opening of the new Battle.net which will offer many new features.

I am excited about the game but I have to say that I still think it was a wrong move by Blizzard to release the game in three parts. This basically means that in order to experience the whole story you will have to pay the same game 3 times.

New Diablo III class announced: The Monk

Yesterday it was officially announced at BlizzCon 2009 that the 4th playable class in Diablo III will be the Monk. Watch the cinematic introduction of the character and some gameplay footage below:





Hmm sort of like a replacement for the Paladin. My guess for the last class would be a Hunter. From what I've seen so far though the first class I'll try will be the Wizard.

must...play...this...game...NOW!

Starcraft 2 delayed for 2010

Blizzard announced yesterday that the release of the much anticipated (understatement) second installment in the Starcraft franchise will be delayed. The justification behind this decision is that it "became clear that it would take longer than expected to prepare the new battle.net".

Today we announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will not be ready for release by the end of 2009. Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service.

Our mission is to develop games that deliver an epic entertainment experience. As part of that commitment, we will always take as much time as needed to ensure that our games and services meet the expectations of our players and the standard for quality that we set for ourselves as developers. As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we’ll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series’ legacy in the first half of 2010.

We will share more details about the beta, Battle.net, and StarCraft II’s launch in the future. Keep an eye on the official website at http://www.starcraft2.com for updates, and as always, thank you for your continued enthusiasm and support for StarCraft II and all of Blizzard Entertainment’s games.

Blizzard remains faithful to the "when it's ready" policy of releases. Compared to other companies that release unpolished/buggy software this is a good thing, but at the same time disappoints the die hard fans that just want to play the game. The new battle.net is essential to the multiplayer aspect of the game. The perfect balance and flawless multiplayer gave starcraft a faithfull following and a, still, very large active community of players around the world for the past 10 years. Blizzards wants to keep it that way with Starcraft 2.

Gold Farming Holywood style: World of Warcraft Movie announced

It had been circulating for some time but it is now official: A movie based on the Warcraft universe is in the works. Blizzard and Legendary Pictures will produce the film while Warner Bros will co-finance it and handle distribution. Not a bad team I 'll say, as it was emphasized that its going to be a big budget movie and not some lame-ass game adaptation like the really bad Wing Commander (I actually paid the admission ticket for this one back in the day), or the even worse Super Mario Bros(shitiest movie based on a game ever).

Will the warcraft universe undead look like the zombies from Evil dead. I sure hope not...

The director of the movie is going to be Sam Raimi who directed the Evil Dead series and the spiderman films. Not the worst choice but I guess we'll have to wait and see. I am not a big fan of WoW, in fact I don't like it, but I am always pro Big-Budget, Epic-Scale, fantasy movies so I hope they don't screw this up.

StarCraft II Beta Test Opt-in

Blizzard has started accepting request for the upcoming StarCraft II beta. All you have to do is create a new Battle.net account, register at least one Blizzard game and download a small program that gathers information about your pc and sends it to your Battle.net profile. When the time for the beta comes Blizzard will select a number of the people who have opted in based on various factors. For more info read the beta opt-in FAQ.

This info will be used for upcoming betas of other games too (Diablo universe, Warcraft universe) so if you love Blizzard games (and who doesn't?) be sure to opt-in and cross your fingers!

Starcraft 2: Terra-Tron. April Fools day unit

In what most probably is an April Fool's Joke, Blizzard announced the new Terran unit, Terra-Tron. The unit is a really big compilation of other units and acts and works like a transformer robot. Blizzard's attention to detail extends even to jokes like this as the company released videos, screenshots and sounds from the "new".

UPDATE (more jokes)

Blizzard made a couple of more jokes today. The company announced a new feature for WoW called pimp my mount. In the same spirit a new Diablo 3 class was unveiled, the archivist.

Blizard rolls out new Battle.net

Battle.net in its day was revolution. It changed the way people were playing games on the net. It brought people together to find game-mates to enjoy the games, compete or even collect ears (Diablo PvP anyone?). Since then a lot has changed. Many similar services were out and many different companies did various things differently. Blizzard though is not someone who can be outgamed on the very game Blizzard invented.

The new battle.net offers all the goodies found in its previous incarnation in their classic form(that is about to change) but the whole thing is geared towards a unified way of accounts for all games including World of Warcraft and the upcoming Diablo III and Starcraft II. This of course includes all payment stuff as well(as if Bli$$ard would not include an easy unified way to depart people from their money).

Registering my old games worked like a charm

Registration as expected is a breeze and your up and running in, like, 2 minutes. One very nice feature, with the whole unification thing, is a manager page for all your games. In order to register your games you provide the system with game's CD Key or Digital Key. I even tried my old Starcraft CD-key and it worked. This is a convenience similar to what is offered by Steam. Since I have registered my games I can simply forget about the discs. Battle.net gives me the option to download their latest version directly from there using the Blizzard downloader. Of course they all come patched and everything. This feature is available for both Windows and Mac. I tried to register all my old games and the only one that did not work was Warcraft II. I do not know if they will include it or not but after retrying to enter the Warcraft II key a couple of times I noticed that on the top of the screen it said:

The following games are supported at this time: StarCraft, StarCraft Battle Chest, StarCraft + Extension, Warcraft III, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, Warcraft III + Extension, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Diablo II + Extension

Currently the account merging for World of Warcraft is only avaiablle for the north american servers and not for the europeans or the asian servers. I guess its not gonna be long until merging will be available for all.

All in all Blizzard has started something that seems that its gonna make our digital gaming life with all Blizzard games a lot easier. I still cannot tell if Blizzard is aiming for something more than that but I would certainly enjoy more features and options. Being able to backup my my game saves, or downloading a ready to run games rather than the installer would certainly help. Ok, I admit it, I want Blizzard to create a game management system like steam but better and not involving Valve.

The state of Mac gaming

In the mediocre 1995 film The Net Sandra Bullock, in one particular scene, played on her Macintosh a game. This game was Wolfenstein 3D, the father of all FPS and one of the first games by id software. This was a 1992 game but its inclusion to the 1995 movie strikes me me as something ironic and prophetic as to to the state of mac gaming. Despite the efforts of some companies and despite the RDS at work in various occasions(such as inviting Carmack to talk at WWDC) the state of mac gaming is bad.

Even though I am a mac user (among all major OSes as well) for years, I rarely do my gaming on the mac. I have a Windows box for games as well as consoles for that. The reason is simple I cannot find the games I want for the mac platform and, even if I find them, they are far more expensive than their PC version. A visit at any major e-shop will persuade you. Old Mac games cost more than new PC games and you can only find blockbuster titles.

Get "brand new" games for your mac at "fantastic" prices

There are some companies, though, that for years now support the mac platform consistently by releasing hybrid discs that work on macs and on a PCs alike and release the patches at the same pace. The biggest of them all is Blizzard that releases all the games for both platforms. Blizzard is so commited to the mac platform that even released patches to play older games written for OS 9 to the modern OS X. Another company is Cyan (I admit it I am a Myst fan) who releases all the game in hybrid discs as well. EA said that it would support the platform and as a result Spore was released in a hybrid disc but I guess that was due to the nature of the game. Some marketing director concluded that the people in the mac community will likely buy the particular game. All these companies though are not the rule, but merely the exception.

Fortunately we will be able to kick Diablo's ass using our mac thanks to Blizzard

Most mac game realeases are not done by the original developer but instead are ports made by third parties. Most of the games I have played were bad ports. The most common flaw is the performance hit. Older games that you would think they would play fine are slower than death in extremely powerful mac configurations. A very good(bad) example of that is Neverwinter Nights 2. An old game by PC standards and yet it plays awfully slow on a current gen Macbook Pro. I blame Aspyr for that and I have to say that I am very disappointed about other ports done by that particular company.

The transition to Intel processors some years ago allowed companies to create mac versions of their games easier and the current market share increase made some companies think twice before ditching the platform. I am not optimistic though. We will just have to wait and see what happens in the future.

Diablo 2 Lan Party

No, you are not reading a 6-7 year old post. We actually decided that we will spend this Saturday completing Diablo 2 in one sitting. I have to say that we failed...not miserably, but we failed nevertheless. We stopped playing around act 3. I don't know, we must be getting old 'cause we managed that during university years with no problem. 7 die hard fans of Diablo, we gathered early afternoon and started the day as any good LAN Party should start...with a barbecue. Most of us had completed the game multitude times in the past so we did not really care about story and stuff. We just wanted to get the action going. I have to say one thing though; with 6 other people ninja-looting everything it is hard to get decent equipment...

Around 3 o' clock in the morning we were pretty tired to keep going. Kicking evil's ass is serious business and very tiring for that matter. Now that I am writing these lines, it is around 4 o'clock and people have started playing Pro Evolution Soccer on the PS2. I guess it is an after party game. You know...just for a few more ludicrous comments and a more chilling gameplay without the minions of Diablo chasing you around.


After almost 9 years that the game is released I can safely say that the game looks old, but still kicks ass. It is very fun. I can't wait for the third installment of the series. In the meantime if you are into action RPG I suggest you try Sacred 2 or even the first Sacred game as they are both good, with addictive gameplay and a huge gameworld. Blizzard knows how to create games that can be played enjoyably even 10 years after they are released.

Inmate sues Blizzard for identity theft

In what can only be described as yet another boggy legal dispute, between a guy with nothing to loose and a big company, an inmate sued Blizzard for identity theft. The guy accuses Blizzard for his addiction and for the fact that he lost touch with the real word (Isn't this a good thing...? I mean the guy is in prison).

Jonathan Lee Riches is reported to have filled many motions against companies excepting compensation as well against other 'entities' that are somewhat difficult to bring to trial such as "Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party" and the "13 tribes of Isreal". If you can read his handwriting here is the hand written motion in pdf format.

Diablo 3- Wizard character announced

Blizzard announced the 3rd chracter of Diablo 3: Wizard. apparently is plays like the sorceress of Diablo 2. I do not know where they take it with this secrecy. It is obviously a publicity stunt since all game characters are bound to conform to the rpg standards like wizard fighter, rogue etc. The new video, by the way, looks like it has a more dark environment than the previously released videos that caused controversy over diablo hardcore players. Here is the video:

Starcarft 2 to be released as trilogy. Damn you corporate bozzos

Blizzard announced in BlizzCon that the Starcraft 2 is going to be released as seperate Games. What? I say What? They said that the campaigns where too long and that it would be a very big game that it would take more time to be released. Now, that is pure BS. Blizzard always releases games when they are ready and not earlier. It might take years between releases but the studio always delivered top notch games. In addition to that, older games, when video games used to be more than dollar cows for large publishing studios, would be long and when say long I mean huge. Baldur's Gate 2 had more than 150 hours worth of gameplay and that was part of the whole experience. So what is this thing with the campaigns being long.BS...pure distilled BS I say. If it will take them a year longer I DON'T CARE, I will wait in order to get the FULL game and not some episode of the game.

I am not saying that the game(all three of them, for that matter, now) will not be excellent. All Blizzard's games are quality games. What I am saying, is that probably some corporate bozzo decided that this would be an excellent oportunity for even more money. And the thing is that they ll make them.Everybody will buy it. It is as if World of Warcaft does not generate tons of reveneu for them they want even more. Well I guess that's capitalism for you, but Blizzard never worked that way. I am disapointed.