Even though I’m a console gaming fan through and through, I’ll be damned if I’m not excited about StarCraft II and Diablo III. Yes, I’ll be buying both of them on day one, whenever that may be; however, there’s one large nit with both titles that annoys me, and many other gamers as well. Indulge my going off a historical tangent for a few moments, and you will understand.

I used to be quite the hardcore computer game fan. This stemmed from the fact that I never actually owned a home game console until my sophomore year of college; I had a Game Boy for most of high school, but that hardly counts. Sure, I played NES and whatnot at friends’ houses, but that didn’t mean squat if I was stuck at home. That’s where computer gaming came in. My family bought our first computer in 1993. It was a Gateway 2000 i486DX system, with a 33MHz processor and a turbo button. Whoa, slow down. It wasn’t a state-of-the-art machine, but it wasn’t a slug, either. I could play a majority of the games available at the time, and since many of my friends had computers of their own, borrowing games was never a problem.

I didn’t get my own personal computer until I was more than halfway through college in 1998. Again, I didn’t get a high-end box, but it was more than adequate for my needs. Computer gaming was huge on campus, and my friends and I spent many an evening playing Quake, Grand Theft Auto (the original one, kids), and Command & Conquer: Red Alert across the school’s network.

So why am I not a big computer gamer anymore? It’s just too damned expensive. Console gaming isn’t cheap, either, but you don’t need to shell out thousands to have a high-end gaming system that way. Plus, there’s no worrying about system requirements with consoles (though, that’s sadly starting to change). More importantly, though, is that I’m a Mac user. I’m fluent in Windows, don’t get me wrong; I maintain Windows machines for a living. I just would never use one as my home system. They’re far too unreliable and unsafe, and there’s decades of empirical evidence to back up that statement. The tradeoff to using a non-Microsoft operating system is that the number of games available is sharply diminished (though not nearly as much as it used to be).

Fortunately, that won’t be a problem with the new games that I want. Blizzard Entertainment has a good track record of supporting older hardware, so one doesn’t need a top-of-the-line computer to play their titles. Not only that, Blizzard are staunch Macintosh supporters. Like many of their past games, StarCraft II and Diablo III will both be launched as hybrid discs that will work on both Windows and Mac OS X systems. So, not only will I be able to play the games the same day as the Windows crowd, I know they’ll run quite nicely even though I don’t own a Mac Pro. (I’ll have a shiny new iMac this fall.) Last but not least, their Battle.net online gaming service is crossplatform, so I’ll have no trouble teaming up with friends to play; few of them have Macs, and the ones that do aren’t really computer game fans.

All of this sounds fine and dandy, but here’s the big thing that really pisses me off about the two new Blizzard titles: lack of LAN support. It’s already been confirmed that StarCraft II won’t have it, and we can logically assume that Diablo III won’t, either. This is complete and utter bullshit; LAN support was one of the greatest features in the previous games! That’s what we used all of the time back in college. Why should my roommate and I have to connect to Battle.net just to play a skirmish game, when our computers are only a room apart? Blizzard claims the removal of LAN support is due to piracy concerns, but c’mon, we know that’s horseshit. They’re just pushing Battle.net, especially now that it’s an integral part of World of Warcraft, their real moneymaker. We can only hope they don’t decide to monetize Battle.net and start charging for access, like that Xbox Live nonsense.

Speaking of which, even though I think World of Warcraft is stupid, I can’t begrudge Blizzard for supporting that more than anything else, even though it’s meant delays for StarCraft II and Diablo III. Why? Because without World of Warcraft‘s tremendous success, StarCraft II or Diablo III may never have made it past the drawing board. Games are insanely expensive to develop these days, and if MMORPG addicts’ money is going to feed development of titles I actually want, then so be it.

Just give me back my goddamned LAN support, please.