Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Paradox have today squeaked out their excellently batshit DLC pack Magicka: Vietnam, which relocates wizardry to misguided war. Not that this is exactly approaching the Vietnam conflict with anything other than farce and satire, but it seems to be saturing its co-op monster-splatting with as much ‘Nam-themed excess as it can conjure up. POW camps, napalm, hueys, Rambo and raaawk all appear, but mostly it’s about making camo-clad goblins die by the dozen. It’s enjoying itself first and foremost, and there are precious few commercial games that can be said of. In what’s now Magicka tradition, the latest trailer is an exercise in explodey absurdity.
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Paradox send word that the mages of Magicka will be killing goblin-cong in Vietnam next month, and this exciting gameplay opportunity will cost a straightforward $4.99. It’s a new campaign setting, but “also contains a new survival challenge map with increased difficulty in direct response to the request from the community.” There is also a spell that calls in an F-15 napalm strike.

I’ve posted the announcement trailer below, again, because it is among the “best things” that are on my list.
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(5:12:42 PM) Kieron: OMFG
(5:12:44 PM) Kieron: OMFG
(5:12:50 PM) Kieron: The new magicka trailer!
(5:12:59 PM) Kieron: I don’t know here to start
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RPS reader Alex “Truthcake” Turpin sends word that Arrowhead Studios has released a free little bit of DLC for wizardly co-op title Magicka entitled “Mea Culpa”, which is nerd for “We’re sorry”. What are they sorry about? The game’s buggy launch, of course, as indicated by the list of new content after the jump. The developers have released a new song, too, entitled The Gamer and Magicka. Imagine if all developers routinely released songs for their games! The world would be a better place. With worse music.
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Magicka! It’s out. It’s smart. It’s broke. The entireity of Arrowhead studios and anybody else Paradox can muster are, allegedly, working on patches around the clock. So where did this infomercial-style video come from? Surely the developers aren’t fannying around with dry ice and cardboard orcs while gamers worldwide are struggling to play their game. Surely not. Thankfully, Paradox have released this video with a statement.
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Something we rather want to do on Rock, Paper, Shotgun is write about Magicka. It’s one of those games, not a giant AAA mainstream release, but a small project that captured our attention. We’d been watching it from the corner of our eyes during development, and then Quintin fell completely in love with it when he previewed it last week. Our looks were forward. And then it was released.

It’s been a real shame to see what should have been one of those feel-good stories become something completely different. A tale of bugs and woe and disaster. One Paradox has responded to by offering all Magicka DLC as free until the end of the month. As they fight to patch it into something playable, we decided to take a look at the game in co-op between ourselves. Except for Quintin, who organised it then remembered he’d bought tickets for the opera or something. So Jim, Alec and John set forth to adventure.

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Right, to keep you up to date on Magicka, a hefty patch has already appeared. That’s swift. And Paradox tell us the developers are already hard at work on a second patch to catch what they haven’t crammed into the first one. And, they tell RPS, there will be new patches every 24 hours fixing whatever may have arisen. For the angrier denizens of the internet, let’s remember that while it’s obviously massively frustrating to spend money on a game and then not be able to enjoy it, this is an £8 game from a small developer that’s working its arse off to fix everything as fast as it can. Not ideal, no. But not, let’s say, not patching your billion dollar selling AAA blockbuster for months. To apply the patch you’ll need to restart Steam, whereupon the 522MB of fixes will begin downloading. The long list of patch details are below.

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We’re very excited about Magicka at RPS, and I’m currently trying to begin an adventure for part of our coverage. But the keyword at this point is “trying”. The game has just gone live on GamersGate and Steam, but rather a lot of people are having trouble. Of the bugs reported, two have rather got in my way in the first two minutes, and an attempt to play a co-op game has already collapsed into an exchange of, “Can you connect now?” instant messages.

However, pleasingly, Paradox tells us that a patch is already in the works. And even better, new patches will be appearing every 24 hours to address any other issues that may arise.

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Magicka unlocks on Steam in 9 hours. What are you going to do until then? Ooh, you could eat a fruit. Read a book. Take care that patch of black mold in the bathroom that’s started to take on human form. Or you could download and play the Magicka demo, which has just this second been released on Steam. If this news doesn’t excite you, clearly you missed my preview yesterday covering a tiny handful of the ways you might screw up. There’s a new trailer, too! A dramatic one! It’s after the jump!
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Co-op wizardly action extravaganza Magicka comes out tomorrow, making this the perfect time for the following public service announcement. You will suck at Magicka. You will be so terrible. You’ll be introduced to its innovative element-mixing system, you’ll nod, smile at the power at your disposal, and then proceed to screw up in a thousand ways you never foresaw. You will kill yourself. You will kill your friends. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll accidentally blow up a monster in the process. Below I’ve outlined five examples of the terrible, terrible errors you will make, in the hope that you won’t make them. But you will.
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Release dates are not a natural source of comedy. There’s a limited number of jokes you can really get out of such a mundane piece of news. I mean, I even struggled below with the DNF announcement. Although believe me, if I ever get anyone pregnant I’ll be making “release date” jokes for nine solid months. Gosh, it will be so funny. “It’s due for Q3 2013.” “We’re pushing to meet the deadline, going into beta now.” “It’s gone gold!” “Oh, wait, it looks like the baby’s slipped into next week.” “OUT NOW!”

This is not helping in communicating the news to you that Magicka, the dungeon-crawling, spell-casting action RPG from Paradox will be out on the 25th January. Why, that’s in four days! Big Download bring us that news with their Exclusive Hat firmly wedged on their heads. We’ll have a review of the game pretty damned soon too, and I’ve put that funny video from last year below, because I’m nice like that.

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