diablo posts

Games that are coming out soon have a lot of unknowns that the average person might not know. Who is this character inspired by? Is all the talk of volumetric fog or cel-shaded graphics really worthwhile? Do the game mechanics really seem solid, or are they lackluster? In All You Need To Know we provide information to help you fully appreciate what these upcoming games have to offer.

Feed your head after the jump.

Check out our collection of Diablo III related downloads here on Big Download!

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past few years, first of all, welcome back to civilization. Second of all, remember Diablo? Yeah, they're making the third one finally. But we don't know when it's coming out, so to hell with them ... literally. Because third of all, Runic Games's Torchlight is dropping on the 27th! Yes, of this month!

What? You've never heard of Torchlight or Runic Games? Well, then, let me school you big money style. Read on to find out why Torchlight is going to stave off those waiting-for-Diablo 3 jitters.

Amazon.com has the occasional one day sale that might be of interest to our audience. Today their one day sale deals with the "Battle Chest" game collections from Blizzard Entertainment. For today only three of these collections are on sale for 50 percent off.

If you haven't bought these games already you can get the Diablo Battle Chest (Diablo II and its expansion plus strategy guide) for $19.98, the Warcraft III Battle Chest (the original game, the expansion plus strategy guides) for $19.98 and the StarCraft Battle Chest (the original game, the expansion plus strategy guides) for just $9.98. That's 50 percent off their normal price.

A few months ago we reported on the official public launch of the stealth Gazillion Entertainment, a multi-studio developer that worked mostly on MMO games. Today the company announced that one of their various studios, Gargantuan, will be lead by David Brevik who previously was the president of Blizzard North.

Blizzard North, as many of you may know, created the first two games in the Diablo action-RPG series.Brevik and several of the team's members later left the company to form the now defunct Flagship Studios. Brevik will now lead Gargantuan's efforts to make the upcoming Marvel Universe MMO, the long awaited massively multiplayer game based on the Marvel super hero universe. He will also be attending this week's San Diego Comic-Con where he will be participating in an MMO panel on Thursday.

It's good to be working at Blizzard. The massive PC game developer continues to rule as its various games sell, sell and sell more copies. The NPD Group's list of the top 20 best selling PC games for April 2009 (via info from US retail stores) shows that Blizzard-published titles took up a full third of the games on the list

Also of note are two strong debuts for Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor at number four and Demigod at number 6. And an ultra-cheap price point has put Illusion Softworks' 2004 released WWII shooter Hidden And Dangerous II at the number 20 slot.

1. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - Blizzard
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts
3. World Of Warcraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
4. Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor - Relic/THQ
5. Empire: Total War - Creative Assembly/Sega
6. Left 4 Dead - Valve
7. Demigod - Gas Powered Games/Stardock
8. Diablo Battle Chest - Blizzard
9. The Sims 2 Apartment Life - Electronic Arts
10. Spore - Electronic Arts
11. Warcraft III Battle Chest - Blizzard
12. StarCraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
13. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade - Blizzard
14. Warhammer 40, 000: Dawn of War II - Relic/THQ
15. World Of Warcraft - Blizzard
16. The SimCity Box - Electronic Arts
17. Bejeweled Twist - PopCap Games
18. Fallout 3 - Bethesda Softworks
19. The Sims 2 Pets - Electronic Arts
20. Hidden & Dangerous 2 - Illusion Softworks/2K Games

The two year period of 1996 and 1997 was a huge era for the PC gaming. It seemed as if there were a number of things that came together at the right time for PC game developers to take advantage of. One was the success of Windows 95 which quickly became the de facto development platform for titles (good bye MS-DOS). Another was the farewell to 3.5 inch floppy disks for game distribution. It had already started by 1996 but by the end of 1997 nearly all PC games used the CD-ROM format allowing for more content to be crammed into games.

But there were even more developments that occurred, such as the surging popularity of this new-fangled Internet dealie that made online multiplayer much easier to get into. The Internet itself spurred consumers to buy PCs like never before. More powerful processors allowed games to have higher resolutions and perform faster. Finally the 3D acceleration movement popularized by companies like 3dfx allowed games that supported such hardware to look more realistic than ever.

It goes without saying that the 1996-1997 period had some pretty remarkable games come out, and we look back at just 15 of them in our latest feature installment.

Click on the image above to continue reading We Love The 90s (for PC Games): 1996-1997

Blizzard has been hinting about this for some time and tonight the developer/publisher has just launched the new version of its Battle.net web site. The 2.0 version of the site still serves as the multiplayer gaming hub for a number of Blizzard games, including the original Starcraft, their Warcraft RTS game series, the Diablo titles and of course their World of Warcraft MMO.

While the "classic" Battle.net accounts are still around for Blizzard's older games the new 2.0 version will give people who play World of Warcraft and the upcoming Starcraft II and Diablo III a way to sign on via just one Battle.net account. Creating a free Battle.net account also gives anyone an option to beta test upcoming games, including Starcraft II. In fact, Starcraftwire.net states that beta invites for the RTS sequel have already begun to be given out to random Battle.net account holders (it should be noted that these are invites only; the beta test itself has not yet begun).

On Wednesday we began our series of the most influential PC games of all time by going through our choices for the 20-11 spots. Today the gloves come off as we reveal our picks for the top 10 PC games that have been the biggest influences on the industry as a whole.

Our list of games in the top 10 includes three first person shooters, an RTS game, a turn-based strategy game, a action-RPG, a RPG-MMO combo franchise and a game that has become the best selling PC title of all time. We know all of you reading this most likely have your own ideas about what games should be on the list and in what position and we want to hear what you think. So, make sure you put in your two cents in the comments.

Click on the image above to continue reading the top 10 most influential PC games

Diablo III's official reveal was the biggest PC game story of 2008 (at least according to us) and just before the Christmas holiday 1Up.com posted up a new interview with the game's lead designer, Jay Wilson of Blizzard. The rather extensive chat goes over some new info about the game including why the Barbarian class was the only hold-over from Diablo II (Wilson states, "We decided that this is the one class that, when you look back [Diablo 2], you feel like he could be significantly better.")

Wilson also goes over details like the new game's "deeper" combat system, randomized scripted events and the fact that their character class plans are still in a state of flux. Wilson states, "The fourth class is playable in game but is using a placeholder model." And what about the fifth unnamed character class? "We're just about finished concepting it and are about to start building it." It's clear that there is still a lot of development work to go for this title.

It's been a little while since new screenshots of Diablo III have been released but today Blizzard posted up seven new screenshots from their highly anticipated action-RPG sequel on the game's officially web site. Naturally we have put in those shots in our ever growing gallery of visuals from the title.

The new shots continue, for the most part, the trend to showing the more "colorful" graphics and visual effects in Diablo III, as opposed to the darker graphics in the first two 2D games in the series. Blizzard has defended the move, saying that in making Diablo III a 3D game they wanted people to see the combat more clearly. Still this seemingly minor change has got some long time Diablo fans concerned. We still have a long way to go before this game is released, however. Blizzard has yet to announce a release date.