Even though the duties increase, the things to do pile up and the time available for video games isn’t the same as it once was, Sir Arthur has no intention of giving up one of his favorite digital activities ever. After all my newest PC is a setup explicitly built for gaming, and it would be a real waste if I simply used it to write Word documents, surf the Web or in other mundane tasks that don’t require particular hardware resources. My aim in the short-medium term is indeed to increase the hours I can spend every week for playing, while the following titles have absorbed my gaming evenings (and sometimes the afternoons) of the last months.

Diablo: a long, long time ago I had installed Blizzard’s classic ARPG (on a laptop with a Pentium III CPU) expecting to clean up the labyrinth beneath the Tristram Cathedral with all the three playable classes, now that I have reinstalled the game on Windows 10 I plan to finally complete that mission. For now I have completed Diablo with two classes (Warrior and Sorcerer) therefore I’m halfway there, even though this time I would like to do things properly and maybe also install the Hellfire expansion to test the Monk class. In any event Diablo will continue to reside on my HDD for a little while.

Diablo II: as far as I’m concerned Diablo II is a bit like origan, or cannoli siciliani. It’s good on everything, always, and I can’t get enough of it. Never. Windows 10 retrocompatibility is excellent here as well, but unlike the first Diablo the things to do, the classes to play and the skills to develop are much more plentiful and with a richer gameplay. My goal, after many years spent beating demons with the Paladin alone (and the Sorceress, once), is to finally play with all the available characters. And the first character I created is indeed a Paladin. As it has always been, Diablo II will keep me company for the years to come. “Not even formatting can save you from me!“

Diablo III: to me, committing time to this game equals to completing a trading card album. It’s an effort that you deem compelling even though it isn’t as much pleasant as you would like. Diablo III is anything but a worthy heir to Diablo II, but we will talk about this at length in a future post. Here I’ll just say that I will force myself to complete the game again and again and again until the last playable class, otherwise I won’t be able to view the money spent on the Collector’s editions of Diablo III and the Reaper of Souls expansion as recouped. Yeah I know, I should see a good specialist…

Portal: Valve’s first-person puzzle-platformer is one of those games I shouldn’t install anymore, considering that I know it inside out and I’m capable of finishing it in a bit more than an hour and half. Nevertheless in the last months I scored an original and sealed copy of Portal (on eBay), so I reinstalled the game, I asked Valve to recover the Steam account I originally created in 2004 (for Half-Life 2) and I tried to complete every single bit of the gaming experience, advanced chambers and challenges included. The advanced chambers were indeed a blast, but the challenges turned soon into boredom (less that 10 steps to reach the exit?!? oh please…) hence I decided to settle the matter for good. By completing the game one last time. But now I’m uninstalling it. No really: I’ll do it. Soon.

Portal 2: The sequel to Portal is one of the few completely new gaming experiences I tried in these last years, and needless to say I enjoyed it very much. So much, indeed, that I started the single player campaign again soon after I completed the game for the first time. I would have also liked to try the co-op mode, an absolute first for someone like me who viscerally hates multiplayer, but I had no luck therefore I decided to move on – not before testing some nice chambers designed by the community, however.

After having properly examined the two Portal games, in the upcoming days I will once again play Oni (which I already completed many years ago, on the Pentium 4) and then maybe Mirror’s Edge, this time going till the end. After that there are cinematic platformer Deadlight (where I never unblocked the bonus end scene), Doom and a lot of other games waiting on the HDD or still to install (nay to purchase), obviously without ignoring the evergreens I always install on every new PC like Super Hexagon, Another World (the 15th anniversary edition), the emulators (MAME, Gens, ZSNES), DOSBox, and who knows what else I don’t remember right now. Provided I can find a bit of free time between one Diablo and the other, of course…

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