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Going under-under-under-under-under-underground.
My cat can summon zombies. In a way, that's all I've ever wanted from a videogame - for something to come up with something absolutely, wonderfully, wilfully absurd, and let me achieve it with glorious ease. Something that only a videogame could do. Seriously, my cat summons zombies. I don't even have to tell her to. She just does it, because I've given her the spell to do it. I could summon them myself, but I just can't be bothered to add one more hotkey to my left and right mouse button repetoire. So the game does it for me, via curious cat-based necromancy.
And that's Torchlight all over - it's Diablo run through a "What If?" filter a hundred times over. All you're doing is clicking to kill things and clicking to collect things and clicking to assign stat and ability points - but what if your cat could summon zombies? What if you could fire a giant laser beam from your hands? What if you could wield two enormous wands at once? What if said cat could go sell all your unwanted loot for you? What if someone made a hackandslash RPG whose primary goal was to reward you so insanely often that you became paranoid you'd used up all your lifetime of Christmases in one fell, hyper-colourful swoop?
Torchlight's been available for just a couple of days at the time of writing, but it's been pretty much all PC gamers have wanted to talk about during that time. Understandably so - we've been teased by the bright spectre of Diablo III for so, so long now. Since, frankly, Diablo II, way back in the year 2000. In all that time, we've waited, prayed, begged for something to scratch that same overwhelmingly compulsive itch. We wanted to kill a whole lot of fantasy things very quickly, and we wanted to be given a large number of swords with complicated statistics for doing it. Pretenders have come and gone - the late Iron Lore's Titan Quest generally being considered the most successful - but nothing, really, has quite done it.
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My cat can summon zombies. In a way, that's all I've ever wanted from a videogame - for something to come up with something absolutely, wonderfully, wilfully absurd, and let me achieve it with glorious ease. Something that only a videogame could do. Seriously, my cat summons zombies. I don't even have to tell her to. She just does it, because I've given her the spell to do it. I could summon them myself, but I just can't be bothered to add one more hotkey to my left and right mouse button repetoire. So the game does it for me, via curious cat-based necromancy.
And that's Torchlight all over - it's Diablo run through a "What If?" filter a hundred times over. All you're doing is clicking to kill things and clicking to collect things and clicking to assign stat and ability points - but what if your cat could summon zombies? What if you could fire a giant laser beam from your hands? What if you could wield two enormous wands at once? What if said cat could go sell all your unwanted loot for you? What if someone made a hackandslash RPG whose primary goal was to reward you so insanely often that you became paranoid you'd used up all your lifetime of Christmases in one fell, hyper-colourful swoop?
Torchlight's been available for just a couple of days at the time of writing, but it's been pretty much all PC gamers have wanted to talk about during that time. Understandably so - we've been teased by the bright spectre of Diablo III for so, so long now. Since, frankly, Diablo II, way back in the year 2000. In all that time, we've waited, prayed, begged for something to scratch that same overwhelmingly compulsive itch. We wanted to kill a whole lot of fantasy things very quickly, and we wanted to be given a large number of swords with complicated statistics for doing it. Pretenders have come and gone - the late Iron Lore's Titan Quest generally being considered the most successful - but nothing, really, has quite done it.
Read more...
More...