The Lighting of the Torch

I may deny addiction to any other game (and yes, that does include WoW), but I must confess to being a long-time Diablo junkie. It is true that I don't even have Diablo II installed at the moment, but I wouldn't say I'm off the habit, precisely. Not one of the last 12 years has passed without I have succumbed to the urge to click furiously upon the demon horde.

Annually, as if alerted by some primal biological imperative, I will agonize over skill trees to give birth to the character which will slaughter demons with the greatest efficiency. Such a character, by necessity, is truly feeble for the first 20-30 levels of the game, often requiring great patience and care to overcome simple obstacles, like some sort of dark fantasy kid-in-a-helmet. But there is no padded bus to escort my charge safely to the top of Mount Arreat, and so I must caudle him through the deadly poisons of Andariel, past the impossible might of Duriel, beyond the freezing reach of Mephisto, and deep into hell itself, unable to cast my array of rank 1 spells for lack of mana, unable to wield even the modest club for lack of strength. Beyond all this, the prize: a character with no wasted skill or ability points, free to invest heavily in the deadly-orb-of-killing-everything or perhaps the mighty-smash-of-monster-obliteration, and free to cast forever from the pool of mana that surges forth from the goofy-hat-of-infinite-resources.

In Diablo II, a single solo playthrough (including the expansion), will take the average player through approximately 35 levels of character advancement. And while I have a deep and abiding love of the game, despite my well laid plans I rarely play a character long once I have slain Baal. What this truly means is that I make the game much more difficult and less enjoyable than it ought to be in exchange for the promise of a reward that never comes. A sensible person may not repeat such a process, but I am clearly not such a man: I have endured this tortuous cycle a half dozen times now.

To be honest, Torchlight stayed completely off my radar until only a few days before it launched in October. I happened across a couple of trailers for it which immediately filled me with a sense of "This is just like Diablo!" In truth, I think that what I felt at the time was that the game appeared to be strikingly similar to what I have seen of Diablo III, a notion that bears further consideration (but will have to wait for another day). Clearly I had not learned my lesson about Diablo clones, because despite being completely disgusted with Titan Quest, Divine Divinity, and Dungeon Siege (also the sequel), I resolved without delay to acquire Torchlight as soon as my resources allowed me to do so. I would like to say that the $20 price point was a motivator in this decision, but such a claim would be a fabrication. I most likely would have felt the same had the game been offered at $50.

Over the weekend Steam offered Torchlight for only $10, and some elaborate cranial process alerted me that, despite being broke, this qualified as "within my means". I consulted the wife (the phrase "Christmas present" may have been invoked) and moments later found myself downloading the game via Steam. I've since begun sampling this offering in small doses, cleansing my virtual palette with WoW before nibbling at the entree. Already Torchlight has revealed to me flavors both sweet and foul, and provoked a whirlwind of notions regarding the making of games, especially when they closely resemble other games, and doubly so when your team is led by folk who worked on said other games.