Act III is the longest of the original four Diablo II acts, but with my newWarlock, it honestly flew by. There was little friction as I continued my approach of allowing my summoned Goatman to tank while I ran around getting potshots in and picking up loot.
On Valentine’s Day I made a big purchase at Micro Center, in the form of a recordable CD / DVD / Blu-ray drive and a 5TB portable hard drive (and some BAWLS).
If you’ve been keeping track at home, you may have noticed that I haven’t added to the PlayStation First-Party Project lately. That’s because it’s dead. I didn’t end it out of malice or anything, but rather just that fact that I simply wasn’t feeling it.
I’ve seen many video game announcements in my day, but I don’t think any have been as truly unexpected as “new DLC for Diablo II in 2026.” From WoW Classic to StarCraft Remastered, Blizzard has no problem revisiting past glories, but new content for Diablo II never felt like something even on the table. While Diablo II: Resurrected felt like an inevitability, adding on to the game seemed (ironically) sacrilegious.
When Spider-Man was revealed for the PS4, I was somewhat confused. A first-party developed licensed superhero game? We hadn’t really seen that since the Sega Genesis days! It sorta made sense considering Sony had the Spider-Man film rights, but superheroes are so ubiquitous, with Spider-Man arguably being the most popular of them all, that it seemed baffling to limit the game to a single console. And then the developer. I love Insomniac, but Sucker Punch, the first party developer who had spent the last decade making open world superhero games, was right there!
And yet, despite all of the conventional wisdom being defied, Spider-Man was released and it reviewed and sold extremely well, creating a new key Sony first-party franchise.
I love EverQuest. For years, Norrath was my favorite fantasy game world, so I was ecstatic to play an action-looter (my favorite genre of RPG) in that setting. What made it even better is that Champions of Norrath was from Snowblind Studios, who had released the sublime Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on PS2 in 2001. Needless to say, for me, Champions of Norrath did not disappoint.
In early 1997 I traded in my Nintendo 64 for a PlayStation, due to disappointment in the N64 launch window games (and their prices) and in anticipation of Final Fantasy VII. In the lead up to FF VII I discovered a handful of games that would become among my all-time favorites, like Suikoden, Twisted Metal 2, Resident Evil, Ridge Racer Revolution, and the original Persona. But the game that was most aligned with my FF VII hype was Wild Arms.
Initially I wasn’t going to include EverQuest as part of this project. It was never released on a PlayStation console and Sony no longer holds the rights. But I kept thinking about how important this game was not just to Sony’s gaming division, but to the industry and to me, and I decided to include it.
I completely skipped ModNation Racers at launch. The game seemed like a perfect storm of things I’m not really into: kart racers, customization, and post-Mii art direction. I remained ignorant of it until I started working on my PS3 Games Still Playable Online list. In my research I learned about ModNation Racers Revival, which inspired me to pick up a cheap used copy of the game. Digging into it now I’m learning that my initial instincts were correct, but there’s also quite a bit of ambition here, and a surprisingly active community.