Since the official announcement of Diablo 3 by Blizzard at Blizzcon '08 I have been contemplating on whether or not I should once again start playing Diablo 2 after so many years. I was put off because I had heard and read numerous cases that Diablo 2 and Lord of Destruction did not run properly on Windows Vista, and was plagued by a myriad of performance problems if the game even ran at all.

Earlier this week I was rummaging through my stuff and found my old copy of Diablo 2. I found myself with the incredible urge to install the game on my laptop right then and there to see if it would run. Unfortuanetly to my dismay after spending nearly ten minutes of switching out discs and copying files that Diablo 2 ran horribly slow and was absolutely unplayable. I mournfully uninstalled the game and once again locked the box away in the old storage chest at the foot of my bed.

The next day an extraordinary coincidence occurred. While visiting my daily gaming sites to check up on the latest news I saw that Blizzard had overhauled Battle.net and read that one of the new features was allowing players to register their old Blizzard games and giving them the option of downloading them from Battle.net whenever and wherever. I quickly rushed and registered both my Diablo 2 and Lord of Destruction expansion and immediately started downloading the clients.

This was extremely beneficial considering I did not have to spend another ten minutes swapping discs and both games installed incredibly fast compared to when I had installed them the other day. Unfortunately the game still suffered from terrible frame rate issues but by this time I was determined to solve the problem. To my surprise Battle.net had many solutions to this widespread dilemma and I managed to run the game completely fine in windowed mode.

Of course, while I was busy installing Diablo 2 and Lord of Destruction my brother had taken notice and wanted to install the game as well. I burned the files onto a DVD-R and installed the game for him on his laptop and solved the problems he was also having. We then set up an TCP-IP game and played till about 4:00 AM this morning going through all of Act I and finally stopping to take a short nap after we had slayed Andariel.

After waking up today I came to the decision that I did not want to play throughout the entire game in windowed mode, so I once again began combing the internet for a better solution. After tweaking things a bit I managed to be able to run the game completely normal in full screen mode by changing the compatibility mode to Windows XP (Service Pack 2) and setting the application to run in 256 Colors, then changing the game to run using DirectDraw 2D instead of Direct3D.

After playing practically all night I can say that it feels good to be enjoying Diablo 2 again. I remembered that the game was addicting, and I had forgotten how fun it could be running around killing demons with friends. Now all I have to do is wait for Diablo 3.