GAMES Devilish Fun Diablo is back and he’s not a happy camper. The hulking, ill-tempered title-demon from the best PC game of 1997 returned last week in the long-awaited sequel, Diablo II ($50, Blizzard, 800-953-7669). It’s challenging, exciting and horribly addictive. This three-CD dungeon romp features the hack-and-slash action and spooky atmosphere of the original, which sold 2 million-plus. You control a heroic character charged with defeating a resurgent Diablo. Even after three years in development, though, the game needs debugging: the day before it hit stores, Blizzard released a patch (get it ).
GADGETS Sony Shows Its Hand Could things get any worse for Windows CE? As if the meager 6 percent market share held by its Pocket PC platform (compared with 57 percent for Palm and 31 percent for Handspring, according to PC Data) weren’t bad enough, Sony is now poised to grab a hunk of the PDA market. Its Palm-based PDA, due out later this year, is slimmer and lighter than the Palm V, and includes slick improvements like a color screen and a dial that lets you access data one-handed, so you don’t need a stylus. Sounds like a smackdown to us.
DOT-COM Hunting and Gathering If you’re frustrated by messy Web pages peppered with links and littered with dead ends, you’re not alone: 85 percent of surfers flee a new site because of poor design. Octopus.com promises to ease the pain. The site lets users build their own “views” by cobbling together content from other pages. You build a personalized view by grabbing stuff like photos, forecasts, headlines and stock quotes from any Web page. Mr. T fans, for example, can build a page with his biography, filmography, a few choice photos and an “A-Team” episode guide. Share your masterpiece by e-mailing the view to your friends and family. No doubt they’ll be jealous. Pity the fools.
