A little video game history

I had a dream Sunday morning wherein I.. no, now I'm mixing it up entirely with Wall-E. No! Ok, I was supposed to take a test or exam (yes, in my dreams I'm often back in school, make what you will of that) and I wasn't prepared. It's funny, I haven't really had many stressful situations like that since school or university. When it comes to work you just need to surround yourself with resources -- people, internet, files and numbers. Rarely do you have to memorize a bunch of stuff and be prepared to demonstrate your skills. Except maybe in interviews. Anyway, the wall-e bit was.. hmm.. there was this kind of shuffling shelf unit, like where wall-e stores things he finds interesting. Eh, I did remember more at the time but it's all gone now, to a better place outside my head.

In a not so guilty way, I played several hours of Call of Duty 4 Sunday and yesterday. I was lightly upset that I had to tone down the graphics quite a bit for it to run on my machine, but the missions were still pretty fun. Playing it really did give me the urge to drop some coins on a new computer. But NO! Not at least until I've felt I've earned it -- you know, by making significant progress on my website (ha!) or in, say, an otherwise nonexistent relationship (double-ha with a bit of wah-wah thrown in). That, or StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3 is released. However, I've heard that much of the original Blizzard North team that was responsible for Diablo and Diablo 2 have since left the company. So, who is working on Diablo 3, and will it be any good? Sure, the trailer had me drooling for a little while, but having regained my senses I wonder if this will just be Diablo's version of Titan Quest. You know, just adding some pretty graphics to what is essentially the same game. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it'd be nice for them to make a real leap in the top-down RPG fighter genre or whatever the heck you call Diablo-type games. Which to me seems traceable back to Gauntlet (1985), and then back to Robotron: 2084 (1982) and Berzerk (1980). Hmmm! Apparently Gauntlet was stolen from Dandy (1983). Well, back to what I was saying, the Diablo 3 gameplay trailer gave little hint of any kind of major innovation or change in gameplay. Which is too bad! Personally, I'd love to see some capture the flag or other team-based variants applied to the Diablo engine. Large scale wars? Just say yes!

I had leftover chocolate cake for dinner. Someone tell me if this is good or bad.

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