I love the few precious hours I get to spend with my daughters each day. These days this time seems to be getting less and less. Especially with the elder one, now eight years old. She has her homework to finish by the time I get home each day and after that she packs her bags, eats her dinner and is off to bed by nine, nine-thirty. She doesn’t have many friends near our home since most of her friends live close to her school which is pretty far from here. But since hers is really the best school in Bhopal for girls we decided that its better in the long run.
Among others, the one thing we do share in common is our love for the game – Diablo. A lot of people think its too violent but I think there’s far more violence on TV than in this game. Besides, its more fun than any of the other games we have tried. She does have more than her share of girl games like Barbie but since I don’t play those, we end up playing Diablo regularly. We always play over the Ethernet connection which links our two computers together. Without the network enabling us to kill all the monsters together, I don’t think we’d find it as enjoyable.
It is an old game, I remember when it came out several years ago. I think Eva was just two at the time. We had only one computer at that time and my wife and I used to take turns playing it. Then eventually my wife moved on to more challenging ‘thinking’ games as she calls them while I still enjoy Diablo almost as much as I did then.
Eva loves collecting gems in the game and I don’t think she ever trades them in. And since we play as allies, the unspoken rule is that all the gems I find have to be handed over to her without question. She’s not into melee characters, she’s much rather shoot arrows into the monsters from a distance then go meet them face to face. Her first choice of characters is the Amazon who just excels with a bow and arrow. I usually play the Barbarian with some kind of sword though I have several favorite Necromancers and Paladins as well.
And the thing is that we swap almost as much as we go on quests. She is one shrewd cookie when it comes to knowing a particular item’s worth. While she’s perfectly happy to take gems from me, she often charges hefty prices for health potions (of which I am always in short supply). Who says games don’t teach anything? Her typing skills, for example, are getting better messaging me all through the game. I’m bombarded with messages within the game about one thing or the other. I did get her a typing tutor but she got bored with it easily and now I don’t think its even installed on her machine. So the only practice she’s getting is from this game. She’s also figured out more combinations for the Horadric Cube than I ever knew existed in the game.
All in all, its fun playing with her even though we don’t nearly get as much time to play as we’d like. We try to squeeze in at least two hours on the weekends but the rest of the week totals less than a single hour. And for what its worth, I know that when she’s older and I’m just plain old, these will be the times I will be looking back on fondly.
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