I was talking to a friend at church today about online gaming.. I've been on and off playing Diablo2, most recently I stopped playing again, but only because I've been side-tracked with other games like No One Lives Forever 2, and Mafia, two pretty long games with involved storylines. I still have a long way to go in both games.

Diablo II has been a really special game because I have been playing it since it came out way back when I was on internship in Ottawa, in 2000. It's crazy to me that a game could have such lasting power. The reason this is such an addictive game is because it's an item driven game, meaning that you keep playing because you want to find everything. There are items that even I have still never found, that I want to find, and that's what keeps me going. Blizzard has promised a patch, 1.10 that has been delayed for months now and that's another reason that I keep going back. To maintain my existing characters so they don't get deleted and so that I can play them when the new patch comes out. The latest reports say it'll be out later this month.

Diablo II has actually claimed lives because of it addictive nature. I have read twice that someone has died because of long exposures to this game, including one just recently in which actually an adult died because he played non-stop so long that he just died of exhaustion.