tekHedd – the blog

Torchlight 2 is exactly what I wanted. (Sorry, Blizz, you guys didn’t even come close.)

I’ve been playing solo for some 25 hours on Normal difficulty with a very generic  “hit things till they stop moving” type Engineer, and so far I’m still enjoying it.

I’ve died two or three times, so I wouldn’t say Normal difficulty is a total cakewalk… The mix of enemies is entertaining and the environments are pretty nifty. I’m still wondering what will happen when I randomize the dungeons… will most of these areas look strangely familiar?

When battles get chaotic the frame rate suffers a bit, but I have this ancient AMD processor so that’s hardly surprising. I can only imagine that it suffers a lot more with a multiplayer game. Of course, when there’s enough going on to slow the system down, it’s pretty hard to see what’s going on anyway… lots and lots of things blowing up all at once.

I think that sums it up. Lots and lots of things blowing up all at once. In pretty colors. With a big wrench and lots of other weapons. And lots of different kinds of enemies to hit. It’s the Ratchet and Clank formula, but top down.

See? I managed to compare it to a game that wasn’t Diablo. So there!

Torchlight 2 unlocked this morning, on Steam. But I was able to resist and got in a good morning’s work. At lunch I spent about 20 minutes playing–hey it looks good! And then I went back to work. After work I have a rehearsal, so I won’t actually be able to play until close to midnight…

Or I could be a bad boy and blow off work.

But I won’t do it.  That’s the worst part about working at home–you can just wander off and play games any time, but you don’t.

You know how when you’re sitting at the bar with a fresh beer and just for a moment all of life’s unnecessary drama has disappeared, maybe you’re watching TV, maybe it’s a baseball game that you don’t really have any stake in but which is halfways interesting, and just sort of enjoying how nothing is happening, and the guy next to you suddenly starts giving you all kinds of sage life-advice that I suppose has some wisdom in it but really you were happy before, and subtly ignoring him won’t make him stop and just when you think he finally is going to wind down and let you enjoy your moment of peace you realize he bought you another beer, maybe even a shot that you don’t need, which is nice but now that you can’t escape him until you finish another beer without being impolite and creating drama and just as you fear he has started up again and there’s no escape…