Now that I have decided to give up on that horrible, horrible, Marvel heroes games (YES BLARGHE, you were right), I have decided I need to remind myself what a good ARPG plays like. I haven’t touched Diablo 3 in almost a year so I figured it was time to try again. The moment I started thinking this I hear a very quiet voice in the back of my head saying:

“Panzer… Panzer… You should try Hard core mode, it’s so much more fun!”

No Blarghe! I’m way too high strung for that kind of gameplay!

“Oh, okay …. I thought you were still cool.”

“Fuck you Blarghe! I’m still cool!”

Against my better judgement I decided to give it a try just so I could tell that son of a bitch voice I did it. So the first question I have to ask myself, what charcter do I play in a hard core version of the game I remember getting my ass kicked in? My first serious character reminded me a lot of an old Japanese Cartoon Dragon ball Z – the Mage. The character was a lot of fun, but way too squishy for me to attempt this insane venture with. I poured over the character screen and found my man.

“The Barbarian” I said to myself, a smile goes ear to ear across my face. “He looks like he can take a pounding and live to tell about it! Just take a look at him, he’s just COVERED in armor and he looks like a wall of sheer muscle. There is no way he’s going to get crushed like my mage did in normal!” I  named him, Panzer, too a deep breath, and hit the create character button. I was disillusioned to find all the bad ass armor taken away and my character standing on the character selection screen stark-naked and hold a little bitch axe. “False advertising!” I cried.

The Fucking Skeletons are Laughing at me!!

A few minutes later I was in the game, surrounded by evil and chaos! Now, remember I said that I didn’t have the nerves for hard core mode? Well, let me tell you something… I still don’t! I found myself jumping at every zombie coming out of the ground. I needed to look into how to play the Barbarian a little better before I got myself killed. I hit Blarghe Blogs to see if there was anything useful beyond him crying his HC toons were killed. In there I found a write up on “Monster power”, I remember Blarghe talking about it as a way to power level your character and then switch it down to fight boss fights. So this is what I did.

My adventure ran 3 hours last night. I had several close calls, I think my nerves are a little shot, near the end of the night I could swear to god that the skeletons were actually laughing at me…  The one thing about the Barbarian that scares the crap out of me is that he is actually encouraged to jump into the center of the mob and cleave /rend through them. This isn’t going to end well.

I tackled the skeleton king and managed to walk away with my character still in one piece. All and all I think I will need a break from it… but I fear the later chapters!