Monte Carlo

OK I've played up 'til level 5 in the Cathedral near the start of the the game as a Demon Hunter. I played a little MP with Gfted1 last night as a Barbarian but it crashed. I like it. The graphics are nothing special but they are solid, workmanlike and the performance on highest settings is great. The dungeons / level design is good, I like the interactive environments (dropping chandeliers on monsters etc) and the creature roster is interesting. The Diablo feel of the game is there, in fact if anything I think they've been *too* slavish to canon / feel of the original. The normal difficulty however, is a joke. The Demon Hunter was quite good fun, he's basically a pistol-wielding rogue with traps and there are some interesting tactical possibilities with him. I had a lot of fun zipping around the cathedral setting traps for lumbering undead hordes and shooting them from afar. All I really wanted was an up-to-date D2. I'm pretty conservative in my expectations so I'm not disappointed: it's a jump-straight-in H&S romp as you would expect, at this stage I'm giving it a solid 8/10 and will be picking up the full version.

I've been trying on and off for three hours - error 37 all the way. I suspect folks who get logged on will stay logged on. But yeah, release day will be horrible. And the whole online SP deal they've lumbered themselves with won't help either. But not anticipating the interest in this? Come on, it's Diablo 3 FFS.

Majek was that Euro or Ami servers?

What a waste of time. sigh.

I think the stress test has proved that if you open up a free play Beta of one of the most hotly-anticipated games ever then you get "latency and connection issues" although I could have told them that from my armchair TBH

I've had a party-pack of error messages from the Blizzard 'Diablomatic Random Error Message Generator'

Error 75 too! Methinks this is going to be too busy to actually play this weekend.

Just tried that, it defaulted straight to the start menu. It's 21.30 CEST so I don't know what the problem is.

Hmmm the Blizzard forums are melting too now.

^ From where? The log-on screen says the game is up to date. Thanks.

No. Error 3003 FFS

21.00 CEST....

Rolling Stones at the moment, I'm loving Tattoo You. Ceremonials by Florence and the Machine is getting lots of play in the car.

Oooh, I like his Friendly Arm Inn pic.

The good news is that I'll be up all night playing so pm me those battletags!

ARGH only 65% downloaded... Am only achieving a paltry 376 kb/s download speed damn my shoddy budget internet...

You know it will be addictive crack-gaming Morgie

^ Yes, it has a certain raffish charm. You need to kind of explore a bit, maybe head south to the lakes. Although Berlin is really about sneaking about bars all night.

I want to go to Russia, badly. But need an excuse.

Was on top of The Wall when it came down, hammering away with a piece of lamp-post we'd liberated. Some East German naval infantrymen helped us. It was crazy, although David Hasselhoff wasn't in my bit of town (which IIRC would have been near Kreuzberg).

Patience, Tigs, patience.

I like Germany. And Berlin is one of my favourite cities in the world.

Installing now...

My battletag is AirfixPanzer#2822

* downloads furiously *