MacBook fan going off the rails

I've seen some threads on here about MacBook fans failing to spin fast enough, and oddly I have the exact opposite problem. My fan is very normal during typical computer usage, but acts up very loudly and spins quite fast at two times: when I watch videos online, and when I play Diablo 2.
Now I'm guessing the videos make sense, but I play a lot of games on this computer that are more graphically intensive and otherwise demanding than Diablo and the fans aren't half as busy. When I start the game up, a dialog box opens for settings and such before it goes fullscreen and all that stuff starts. Today I left it at this simple little dialog box and watched my fan speed: It jumped from around 1800 to around 6200 rpm in about the span of 45 seconds. I had no other applications open nor was I so much as moving the cursor on the computer. The temp went from 120ºish to 160º F.
It worries me that the fans are working this hard for what seems like no reason. What's more, I usually play the game when I'm plugged in, but a couple of times I've tried on battery power and as soon as the fans get in full swing, the computer just shuts off. This has happened while watching videos online too.
Naturally I'm worried. Any help would be very much appreciated!

Loud fan behavior while watching online videos is normal due to the stress placed on the processor by Adobe Flash.
Regarding Diablo, you are right that it is not a graphically intensive game. However due to the age of the game, I believe it runs in Rosetta, a software translation layer that allows you to run the game on Intel processors. So there is a lot of background software translation going on, and the GPU is used very little or none at all.
More about Rosetta:
http://www.apple.com/rosetta/

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