DIABLO 2 (1.0 UNPATCHED)
god, this version is so fucked up. my boy Ser MalePattern (Barbarian) was strapping every trinket and bauble with triple digit Gold Finding% modifiers to his person and had to bring it all back to kurast in a dumptruck. no runes, no charms, no runewords, no A1 countess runs; you gotta just gamble it all away over and over and exploit the unusually high chance to get uniques. the system's so wonky that you can force spawn the best ring in the game if you have two others in your inventory when a third generates and necromancers can farm their own bonewalls
don't agree with claims that this is any more difficult than 1.14d, but it is much slower. so much so that the most thorough resource i found on 1.00 recommended running eight instances of the game simultaneously and swapping between characters to speed things up. if you ever struggled to decipher the transition from diablo's ponderous rogue likeness to lord of destruction's lightning round maximalism, this is the closest thing to a rosetta stone you're gonna get. it's easy to forget that the current understanding of diablo II's based on years of iteration, but the bones of this thing were real weird. vendors don't even sell mana potions, you gotta pick that stuff off the floor of each and every map by hand, piglet
and then there's other stuff, like how enemy attack ratings are bugged to be four times their intended value, or that you can kill the cow king infinitely and deterministically manipulate his drops. barbarian whirlwind procs 25 times per second regardless of weapon speed, but if your class wasn't so blessed there's no respec or skill synergy so you have to reroll any time your points get all sloppy and embarrassing. as a special bonus to me and only me, maggot young and eggs give xp and drop items, making the best dungeon (maggot lair) even better, much to the dismay of folks who think Bug Holes should be more pleasant and scaphism less sticky
the resolution's locked to 640x480, which is probably the best way to play this cos it makes you feel like you're in the prettiest prison cell. it took me an entire night-long wrestling match with shit ass windows 11 just to get this thing to run at all, and then i had to figure out sven's glide wrapper to get it to scale larger than a postage stamp, but it was absolutely worth it to see golden era blizzard at their messiest
this is also one of the few times true melee classes got to be stupid good in an ARPG. all it took was a time machine to put an end to hundreds and hundreds of hours spent wondering why the guys that have to shake their ass in a monster's face also have to be gear dependent, have low hitrates, shitty aoe, and poor clear times. turns out... they don't!!! (so long as you're level 30+)
unbelievable. blizzard does it again