Thanks for the money!

Ha! Life is fucking hilarious. Ever had one of those days where you do some stupid shit, just because you're in the mood and you really, really like doing that one thing you're good at and then people show up from all over the globe and throw money at you? Probably not. I'd assume that's a relatively rare thing, right?
What the fuck am I even talking about? Well, I had ignored the whole monetization thingie on my blog for a while until it turned out I'm actually making money with all the stuff I'm posting on here. No "time to stop being a games critic and pay all the bills blogging about obscure old arcade games, reptiles and my penis" money, but "oh hey, I can totally afford a pizza right now" money. I'd throw together a nice little something for cracked.com and try for even more money if I wasn't so afraid of getting rejected by my #1 favourite comedy site on the 'net, but I'll find the motivation one day.

So. Yeah. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for the pizza. And the ego boost. Life is good.
Oh hey, about the whole games critic thing - you may know how I occasionally mention what a shitty games critic I really am. I'm not talking about my abilty to write or how reliable I am with deadlines - you won't find anyone better than me at freelance slave work price range. So they hire me for the funnies and all that, but I don't know shit about rating games. Case in point: TESO vs Diablo 3.

You may recall how hyped up I got about The Elder Scrolls Online a while back. Then I got stuck on a quest blocker for an entire week. Then my account was hacked. Then nobody could be arsed to look into the hack (as of this moment, my unresolved ticket is 20 days old). Then bots raped the everloving shit out of every boss in every public dungeon, making it impossible for (human) players to even get a single hit in. Long story short, I've cancelled my subscription. I thought this game had the potential to become the next big thing and right now I don't even wanna look at it.

"The... The... um... Hey Bob, what did the elves call that stupid tree again? Bob? Ah fuck it, I'll just leave the text the way it is, no one reads that shit anyway."

I'll give it another chance at some point, benefit of the doubt, yada, yada, yada. Right now I'm glad I don't have to play it for work anymore.
Meanwhile, I've moaned about the Diablo 3 expansion a lot, saying it'll lose it's appeal within a week or two. To be fair, I wasn't entirely incorrect. My Bnet friends list used to show 20ish people playing Diablo 3 at any given time. Now they're AFK or they're on Hearthstone or WoW. The hype has definitely died down a lot. Ironically, I'm completely hooked on this repetitive shit.

Blizzard makes characters look badass with the blurriest, shittest textures imaginable.

Yes, I'm getting my guaranteed legendary every hour or so and there's been a major shitstorm on the forums the other day, when all the slow pokes finally figured out how the loot system works months after I complained about it on this very website. And my biggest point of criticism still stands: Diablo doesn't reward player skill or talented play. It just rewards you for logging on. For spending time on there. Or spending time outside the game for a day or five, then logging back on to get showered with even more legendaries.

But let's not get into that all over again. Despite all of that annoying crap, I'm hooked to Diablo's legendary items. Not all of them. Many legendaries are just like any other item, but with slightly better stats or some boring extra stat nobody gives a crap about. But the really cool legendaries can completely alter the way one of your skills works. A special attack might no longer require resources, it might fire larger, stronger projectiles or benefit from every possible skill rune all at the same time. These items can significantly alter your play style and the way your character handles and feels, which is pretty fucking awesome.

I had a halberd, which summoned a herd of murderous cows to fight by my side. There's a ring, which summons an imp, who gobbles up all your useless vendor trash and converts it into higher quality loot. Legendaries might slow down or haunt all the baddies around you for a certain amount of time or protect you with an energy shield whenever you get surrounded by enemies. Some of them make you run faster when you're injured or cause you to leave a trail of lava, which isn't just a cool visual effect, but causes damage to anyone unfortunate enough to stand in it.

When Diablo 3 first came out, it was devoid of innovation. Legendary items looked fun, most of them had abysmal stats and were complete garbage and when they finally got an upgrade, they'd been traded for ridiculous amounts of real money on the now defunct auction house. The new legendary items are inventive, they're incredibly fun to use and it's damn addicting to collect them, because there are so many of them. An amulet, which creates clones of my character and has them fight beside him? Fuck yeah!

Well, looks like my first impression was wrong. For both games. Stay tuned for when I'll hate Diablo and go back to TESO in my next entry!

-Cat