the gothic masterpiece - Diablo

A lot has been said, written and spoken about the Diablo games created by Blizzard. Mostly you hear die-hard fans use the word "awesome". And that's precisely what these games are.
Now as a precursor to this post, I'd like to proclaim that I'm really pretty much only into RPGs and beat-em-ups. I have been known to indulge on the occasional other genre, but these 2 are pretty much the genres that float my boat.
That out of the way, back to Diablo. Diablo was a smash hit game that really deserves a place in the games hall of fame. The game has an awesome gothic feel to it. It makes your skin crawl as it sucks you into a dark world where your hero has to slay a multitide of different monsters and get a lot of different stuff in the process (monster drops). Your goal is to travel down into successively lower levels of the labyrinth and in the end, face off with the lord of terror, Diablo. An awesome experience, including the haunting music, realistic sound effects, the awesome graphics (for that time period) and a mind-blowing theme. Character development makes each experience unique, and that combined with different character classed makes for a mindboggling number of gameplay variations.
I didn't dwell much on Diablo, because I got it as a part of a "battlechest", which also contained Diablo2 (aka Diablo2 Classic or D2C) and Diablo2 Expansion - Lord of Destruction (aka LoD).
LoD went where even Diablo hadn't gone. The game is simply mindblowing! What can I say? Amazing graphics, tremendous gameplay variations (and I mean truely truely staggering!), 7 character classes (as compared to 3 in Diablo and 5 in D2C), continuation of the gothic theme, introduction of a host of highly desirable gameplay results (in the form of awesome item drops) and most of all - the ability to be played online in games of 8, with 100s of 1000s of other likeminded players!

It needs to be played to believe how good it is. That's all for this post. Watch out for subsequent posts to find out more about gameplay aspects, character classes, strats I used, awesome items and more...