Couch Crawl

After deciding that the game would be acceptable, I rented Diablo III for Xbox 360 to play with Sam. In the demo we tried beforehand, I had started a barbarian character with the name "Hogar," the default suggestion. Sam went with a wizard named "demena," a name of her own design. It took no time for her to get acquainted with the game's controls as, when you start out, you have the control stick to move your character, the A button to perform your basic attack, and the Left Bumper to quaff a healing potion. We started out right away smashing up zombies with my axe and her magic shooty spells.

The only concern she raised was her character's starting garb, which was very little. I joked that part of the game was finding more clothes as you loot for more and better armor, but it still bothered her. When you're not a 14-year-old boy anymore, the fantasy trope of scantily-clad warrior women loses its sex appeal and feels more like sexless nerd pandering. It bothered her for different reasons, ones I could understand but not fully given my male experience. I wondered about Sam's choice of character name: "demena," nearly a homonym of "demeaning" depending on how you pronounced it. Was it intentional?

We played the demo for a significant amount of time, longer than she's been able to sit through Bioshock Infinite due to motion sickness. It helps that Diablo III fixed camera perspective doesn't pan or spin quickly to induce dizziness. We played long enough to level up to level 6, her at a slightly faster rate than me. I'm not sure if it was some piece of equipment giving her an experience point boost, but her character would shout an epiphany to signal leveling up sooner than my dim-witted barbarian would. I discovered that, unlike the PC version, the 360 version did not alert you to new abilities when you gained a level. Instead, a new button-mapping would appear at the bottom of the screen, not informing you what abilities were attached to which buttons. On one hand, I like the idea of having to experiment with different buttons to see what mystic explosions emanate from the wizard's wand. [There has to be a better way to say that. -Ed.] But for a newbie like my girlfriend, it doesn't help when they only window that pops up with instruction is at the beginning of the game, telling you, "Push A to hit shit."

When I told Sam about this, the dynamic of the game slowly began to shift. We started to wordlessly strategize. She'd keep her wizard a decent distance away from the action, blasting with arcane energy or icing baddies with a freeze ray. My barbarian would stay in the thick of it, cracking skulls and stunning my enemies with hearty ground pound. This strategy mostly worked until we got further into the game when the minions seemed to multiply ten fold.

Demena died a few more times than Hogar did, but given that this is a video game death has no permanence. I'm not positive what the consequences of death are in the Xbox 360 version of Diablo III. I had thought it was an experience point penalty, but if that's the case Sam must've been raking in hella experience while I bashed frozen zombies. Demena's mortality was no fault of Sam's, however. She being a wiz guarantees some degree of character squishiness, to borrow a term from the pencil and paper side of role-playing. 

We made it a great deal further than I had in my first outing into Sanctuary on the PC with my monk Severian. We met a scoundrel whom Demena talked to a great deal more than any other character (except for the cowardly mayor who wouldn't move his cart out of our way). We fought goatmen in the Festering Woods. We saved a burning town from witch-worshiping zealots. We turned criminal brigands into charred skeletons. And all from the comfort of an aged futon.