Magic Relentlessly Continues To Gather
Magic: The Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers - much like the FIFA games, except without any fantastical beasts quite as inhuman as Wayne Rooney. The vaguely long-running PC adaptation of the world's most famous collectible card game (presuming you're not counting lovely Top Trumps. Man, I used to know loads about motorbikes and aeroplanes thanks to Top Trumps) gets its latest more-or-less annual iteration in this Summer's confusing-named Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013. DotP continues to the major source of business for Carmageddon devs Stainless Games, so hopefully this being a success might mean a shinier, bloodier, sadisticer Carmageddon: Reincarnation.
Details are thin on the ground, which is just as well as somehow I've never played Magic in my life. A man at university tried to convince me to join his Pokemon CCG group, but I ran for the hills. Well, to the bar anyway. What has been spaketh about is 10 new decks, "optional manual mana tapping", a new tutorial, a new and exclusive multiplayer mode call Planechase and the chance to battle Magic's "ultimate evil mastermind" Ian Magic of Southend the dargon Planeswalker Nicol Bolas. Wow, a dragon with a first name and a surname. That's terribly civilised of him.
Probably the biggest news about DotP13 isn't strictly relevant to RPS, but I'm going to mention it anyway because I've got a sort of typing inertia going on and if I stop now I'll have to go and find, resize, crop and upload a screenshot then think of a witty caption for it and for some reason that seems like a terrible chore so maybe if I just continue this sentence forever I won't have to sort out the images so as I was saying there's some big new news for Duels of the Planeswalkers and that's that it's going to have an iPad version which I must admit does seem like a jolly good idea for the digital version of a game that's all about cards and socialising because you know while I love the PC I can't exactly drag mine to the pub but even so I bet there won't be a 'multiple players on iPad' mode so instead you'll need to have a bunch of rich friends who've all got tablets too and hey why isn't this on Android tablets too I know Walker's got one of those Asus Transformer Primes and he loves it so they should totally also support that and oh God I'm running out of Steam now whoops I meant 'steam' but it's become second-nature to capitalise the S anyway alright I'll go find the goddann image I hope you're happy you bastard.