As an adolescent, I grew up playing Diablo 2.

Many afternoons after school, after I had done my homework and studied for a sufficient amount of time, were spent grinding and leveling up characters. Many afternoons during the summer were spent playing it. So as an adult, when I found out that Diablo 3 was finally being made, I was stoked. Absolutely stoked. It was something that I could introduce to Bub. Everything that I heard about the game from the announcement that it was actually coming into existence all the way until day one sounded extremely promising, and then when it finally came out and I purchased it, put it on my computer, and was installing it, there was the realization that something about it was undesirable, almost not worth playing, but not quite…

You always had to have an Internet connection if you wanted to play it on the PC, which at the time was the only way to play it. No Internet connection? No way to play it. Because trust me, it was going to check. Even if you wanted to play a single player game, it was going to check. And you weren’t playing if it wasn’t there.

This literally almost made the game not worth playing to me, but I was committed to introducing this game to Bub, and I was going to play it with him. We were going to get through this together. We did. …narrowly.

When I found out that a port to the Nintendo Switch was coming out, and that this port did not require constant Internet connectivity in order to play, I jumped on that and purchased a copy of the game to play with Bub. So far, that copy has been a lot more enjoyable to play with him. It also makes one of his favorite games portable, which means that we can take it with us when we need to sit in the waiting rooms of doctor’s visits and specialty visits (as Bub is autistic and has severe social anxiety, so being able to distract him with something that can calm him down enough to get him through a distressing situation is always good to have on hand). We actually prefer the Nintendo Switch version by far though, come to think of it.