I think I may have reached a point where I can’t play games “to complete my education” anymore I already have bad enough executive dysfunction around playing games in the first place.
(This is just an epiphany of sorts on my part and not a refutation of your sentiment, Cubes)
Diablo 1 also rules you should play it because it rules
Diablo 2 is better.
Diablo 1 is a game and not a loot piñata, it is the progenitor of the roguelite genre, so it’s not necessarily my favorite thing but it’s cool, especially in the context of how much it invented.
Every modern AAA game with loot and progression mechanics owes a lot to Diablo 2 for sanding off edges and turning stuff into pure reward loops, and I don’t think it actually has much going on of note with it as just an adventure game.
I keep meaning to play Diablo 3 because people who love 2 hate it so that makes me curious about it. But never quite enough to actually play the PS3 copy I got so 
i only had Diablo 1 growing up bc 2’s aesthetics turned me off and it really ruled but i had no idea how to play it because i was a dumb baby who’d never heard of the concept of a roguelike.
anyway, years later i bought Diablo 2 and yeah idk i think it’s more fun to play (however i should replay Diablo 1 some day).
Diablo 3 i had fun with but it did sort of lose me about halfway through and kind of played more like Gauntlet Legends than Diablo
Now I almost want to post a poll
What do you think the tagline to the Diablo 3 remake will be?
Diablo 1 is a more limited yet visceral experience that I remember more fondly than 2, which is way more polished and probably a “better” game. 3 is great if you’re gonna do co-op and you’re better off skipping it otherwise.
Are there any good isometric platformers
Is Solstice better than I remembered
Should I play Knight Lore? Are there lots of hidden ZX Spectrum gems? Is my fear of stumbling upon another series as deeply problematic as Dizzy keeping me from finding the true gold…
Games like Landstalker don’t count, I want squat chibis waddling around single screen rooms.
Mario RPG
(actually, it has all the enjoyable parts of Solstice or whatever)
anyway I think the galaxy brain Diablo take is that they’ve all been pretty compelling at release but aged fairly poorly because they are all very zeitgeisty
somehow I think I played all of them at release despite being skeptical + not necessarily ever a huge fan of the series, so I trust this take
yeah diablo 1 really nails the aesthetics, the sound design in particular is great.
d2 is the ur-“high speed murderdungeon” game (i’d differentiate those from roguelites cuz they still focus on longterm character building + customization vs quick disposable loops) so it’s notable for that but like – if you don’t have nostalgia for it there are better modern options that do what it was trying to do imo? vampire survivors and path of exile are both worth mentioning cuz i think the former carves d2 down to the bare minimum while path is an eldritch character building math puzzle that has a diablo 2 on the side
i did buy the remaster if only cuz i like playing offline solo self found on the switch and i wouldn’t touch it if i was interested in playing with others – they seem to have completely botched that as far as i know. it does kinda give me some warm nostalgia to know that it’s just as full of item trade scammers in 2022 as it was in 2002
diablo 3 is fun as a co-op brawler where you can clown on the cutscenes but playing it solo if you aren’t a true doom grindhead sounds like hell. god awful writing that they force you through, little-to-no agency in your character build beyond picking a class, and you ain’t gonna do much but clobber stuff while some npc you met 5 minutes ago yells about soulstones
Snake Rattle n Roll and Sonic 3d Blast are both pretty decent
Great callout on the sound, the audio is like 60% of the reason that I have the warm fuzzies about the original, the rest being a combination of playing it in a living room with 4 PCs on like, a fucking token ring network with my friend yelling about how he had to go back to town because he always played rogue and rapid-fire clicked his bow durability down in like 10 minutes tops and the loot table being more wonky than 2 (which is a positive in my eyes, 3 in particular was awful in that you’d never get excited about anything you found because you knew you’d find a marginal upgrade in the next half-hour or so).
Yeah I replayed Diablo 1 recently because I had very fond memories of it and it was worthwhile but only barely. Diablo 1 is extremely barebones in terms of both tactics and RPG progression: despite being so short it still felt draggy because of how repetitive it is. And the overall difficulty level and where the challenges are varies hugely depending on character class and random seed that generated the world, but due to the aforementioned it’s not worth playing more than once, and that’s kinda weird.
Diablo 1 knocks it out of the park in the first stratum though, where the tactics are still fresh, the enemy type randomization not as swingy, and not to mention has the best artwork and music. The problems mostly arise if you try to beat the game. I guess I would recommend playing through Diablo 1’s first stratum and then stop
yeah I think something like Shiren has aged better in practice but Diablo gets a lot of theoretical aesthetic credit because the sequels took themselves so much less seriously
otoh I remember the lead up to the act bosses in D2 being incredibly cool and well handled for such a clickfest, so it really is all relative
they are all both kind of classic and kind of bad
I bounced off Mario RPG instantly when I tried it last year but this did remind of that re-translation where the author replaced all the Japanese pop culture references with Austin Powers jokes so I went to check that out…
…and sadly it is no longer available for download from romhacking.net, as the author requested its removal, because people were very hostile to the idea of Mallow quoting Fat Bastard 
Instead of Diablo folks should play the Dreamcast’s Record of Lodoss W- * CLANGCLANGLCANGCLANGCLANG *
I like a lot of Landstalker, especially with save states. Solstice seems cool, with save states. I vaguely remember playing a game called Mr Robot on like, gametap back when indie games weren’t a real thing yet that seemed like “what if a ZX Spectrum game was aligned with PS2 era usability” but it’s been a really goddamn long time since I played it.
Oh! There were some light aspects of it in Nox as well, that game is weird/cool/bad/fucked/interesting.
Pc gaming… Evolved