Narn wasn't born on the battlefield or
in the pages of a pulp fantasy novel. He was born out of a few
hundred lighted dots on a screen, based on a preselected image of the
Diablo II Barbarian class. Through a mix of armor, weaponry, and slap
dash skill point assignment, he became a killing machine... of sorts.
Along with his plucky amazon sidekick, who sadly never saw the same
kind of weapons upgrade and thus wound up dying repeatedly, he
traveled the wild lands of Sanctuary, seeking fame and fortune. It
turns out sidekicks aren't cheap to resurrect.
Back in 2008, a girl I worked with,
we'll call her “Amazon Vegan,” convinced me to buy the
Diablo II Battle Chest, which, at the time, contained the original Diablo,
Diablo II, and the Lord of Destruction expansion. She had everything
planned out for us: I would play a “tank” and she would be the
ranged fighter. It was a weekend around Easter, and I had had a
particularly bad day at work. To console me, we went to VA's
apartment and, with her husband looking on, installed Diablo II on my
old Compaq Presario laptop.
Now back in the early 2000's, I had
seen the counter monkeys at my local comic book store play Diablo II,
and it looked interesting. Unfortunately, my parents were lagging far
behind when it came to home PC's, so playing the game on our computer
at the time was out of the question. In fact, it just still barely
ran on the laptop. That might have been due to us leeching off the
local RadioShack Wi-Fi.
This was the first time I had played a
video game with the hopes of beating it on at least the normal
difficulty. We had a Sega Genesis when I was young and I played a
little Sonic the Hedgehog here and there. Now I was being introduced
to fairly complicated RPG mechanics and character building, and it
was a little bit intimidating. I had to learn to sort through loot,
use gems and runes, level up my skills, repair my equipment, read a
map, read a mini map, and use various hot keys. Teaming up with a
level 97 electricity sorceress, we were able to make it pretty far
into Nightmare mode. Then I had to quit to work on the Geek.Kon
convention for the summer. It was fun while it lasted, though.
Towards the end of my run on Diablo
II, I ventured into the world of MMO's with a subscription to
City ofHeroes. Like with Diablo II, I had seen some of the people at the
University of Wisconsin Madison Anime Club playing it before meetings
and became interested. My system was just barely able to chug through
it. On top of that, I had never really played a video game that had a
3D interactive environment to it. I literally had to learn how to
walk all over again using the WASD controls and the mouse.
Soon, Narn ached to return to the
battlefield. I remade him in CoH as a Willpower/Battle Axe Tank. One
of the most satisfying things is slamming a battleaxe into the face
of a startled Hellion. Narn is still growing in this universe, so
expect to hear more of his adventures in Paragon City.
Narn can also
be found wandering the mines of the town of
Torchlight, slowly
uncovering the truth behind the incursion of evil there.
And now that
Diablo III is out, Narn can return to his own universe to confront
the seemingly invincible Diablo once again. No matter what strange
worlds he finds himself in, he'll always be there to fight against
the powers of evil, even if only for the chance to gain the best
sword in the game.
