As someone who spent a significant portion of his middle school and high school years playing hack-and-slash games (two in particular – can you guess which ones?), I was pretty excited to get my hands on Sacred 2. It’s been a while since any hack and slasher caught my interest, and having missed the first iteration of the game, I was curious to see what Ascaron was able to do with the genre.

Of course, I wanted the answer to the one big question that is on the mind of all fans of the genre when a new hack and slash comes out. It’s not a particularly fair question, or even one that we should necessarily BE asking, but nonetheless it’s the question that always gets asked.

“How does this game compare to Diablo”?

Hit the jump to find out.

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[Editor's note: This is a special edition of the Monthly Musings. Aerox and CaffeinPowered have a weekly column on the C-Blogs where they each have a counter-point to a specific subject. This week, Aerox here takes a look at why he thinks licensed games are bad. For the good take, just click this link or look right above. Who do you think had the better argument? -- CTZ]

This is the sixth in a series of ‘dueling C-Blog editorials’ I will be doing with CaffeinePowered.
You can check out his opinion on today’s topic over here.

Since the days of the Atari, there have always been a slew of mediocre and downright terrible videogame adaptations of popular movies and books. These licensed games, or games that use material not originally created by the developer, are incredibly common. Go to your local Target/Best Buy/Gamestop and look at the shelves, and notice how many terrible games are there that are also major motion pictures or stupid Nickelodeon shows about stupid kids/animals/inanimate objects.

While it’s true that every once in a while a decent licensed game comes out, that’s typically the result of the developer and not the content they’re working with. As it stands now, licensed games are a scourge on the gaming public, and the industry would be far better off without them.

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