The Stack

So, I’ve decided to start another game while I decide whether or not spending more time on my joystick problems is worth it. Picking one at random, I find Throne of Darkness, a Samurai-themed Diablo imitation from 2001.

Man. I haven’t thought about this game in ages.

I think I bought it mainly because it was cheap and the screenshots on the box looked appealing. I played it briefly when I first got it, but it turned out to be more complicated than I was in the mood for just then.

Installation Annoyance #1: It has two disks, and you have to swap them three times before you can start playing.

Installation Annoyance #2: Throws a silly error, even when patched. Finding a site that would let me download the patch without the hassle of “becoming a member” was frustrating enough (and I’ll save anyone else who reads this the frustration by offering my copy here), but discovering afterward that it didn’t help? Bleah. I eventually found help on a third-party forum. It turns out that the solution is to overwrite the game’s copy of msvcrt.dll with the one from WINDOWS/System32.

First session: The mechanics are pretty complicated, but I haven’t yet reached the point where I have to understand what I’m doing in order to make progress. Hopefully I’ll be able to learn and apply things as I go along. Like I said, it’s Diablo-like, but you have a team of seven characters with different abilities, of which four can be active at a time. It seems like it might be a valid strategy to play with just one or two characters at a time so they can level faster.