My view on Magicka...

Taken from the official game site

..is that the game is an absolute blast in multiplayer. Yes, Magicka has been out for a while and I have had the opportunity to play through it not only in single player but also with a friend. For those that haven't yet heard of Magicka it is a game from hitherto unknown Swedish developer Arrowhead Game Studios, published by Paradox Interactive. I touched upon it in a previous post. It blends light RPG elements with humour and has given the well used concept of spell casting somewhat of a twist. While there are some pre-defined, named spells, most of the spellcasting is done by simply combining different "element-energies" and pulling the trigger. The game encourages the player to experiment with different combinations and this system actually works rather well, even though I did find myself relying on a few different favourite combinations for large parts of the game.

Taken from the official game site

Taken from the official game site

I didn't play the single player for very long, but had a fantastic time playing it cooperatively with a friend sitting in the same room. And I think this is the way the game should be played. I highly recommend it, especially now since the latest patches has improved greatly on stability, which was a problem at launch.

The game is not to be given a thumbs up only for being fun, but also for trying something new, testing a new concept. And the combination of expanding upon gaming concepts and delivering them in a package that is very fun is always commendable in my book.

All the best

Jumping through hoops

So... Dragon Age 2 is soon out, and my expectations are high. They remain high even after having tried the demo that, frankly, wasn't great. The changes to the core gameplay are huge, but I'm still hoping that it will turn out to be the fantastic game that it should be. I do hope it will not be another Command and Conquer 4 experience.

I am, however, growing a bit tired of the constant stream of extra items that Bioware/EA are constantly throwing out to hype the game. In case you have missed it there are loads of extra in-game items to be had as  rewards for jumping through various hoops. If you pre order you get special items, pre order very early (Bioware Signature Edition) and you get even more, play the Dragon Age Legends Facebook game and get a few, sign up for the Dragon Age 2 newsletter and get another one, sign up for the newsletter again (?!) to get one more, make sure that the demo reaches 1 million downloads to unlock two items and finish said demo to also unlock an item... phew... does it never stop?
The latest of these hoops is to "share" Dragon Age 2 posts on Facebook, and after a certain number of "shares" another item will be unlocked.

I can deal with a few in-game perks as incentive to preorder, or as part of a deluxe edition, that's pretty common and can be somewhat fun. But this is, in my opinion, just ridiculous. To unlock all those items feels more like work than anything else. I don't want to suddenly be an EA marketing employee and spam my friends' Facebook walls with commercial messages, I've already got a job, thank you very much. Either put the content in the game or don't, don't make us "earn it" by doing chores when we're already paying a hefty retail price for the game.

Ok, I'll calm down now... deep breaths... but it annoys me, it really does.

All the best

Dragon Age DLC... Not so easy to install.

I'm doing another run of Dragon Age Origins recently. It's really a fantastic game, and I figured that I should play through all the DLC that I haven't had the time to play up until now. So, I started off by buying a bunch of BioWare's/EA's pretend-money called BioWare points. Ok, It's not my intention to be a douchebag about this, but this post will be a somewhat irritated one, sorry. I think that it's very unnecessary to bring another transaction step into the deal, why could I not be able to buy the DLC directly with my credit card? I could buy the exact amount of BioWare points for the DLC, so I wasn't forced to buy more points than I needed (which could of course be a sneaky way to make more money otherwise), but then why couldn't I buy directly, with real world currency?

Superb game... not so superb at having easily installed DLC

Well, anyway, the transactions went smoothly, both of them, and I soon had the DLC "The Darkspawn Chronicles" registered to my account; but here is where the troubles began. The in-game installation process did not proceed beyond 0%. I waited and watied and finally I restarted the game. After the restart the game didn't even aknowledge that I had bought the DLC, it didn't attempt to download anything at all. A quick look at my online BioWare profile did assure me that I had the DLC registered to my account though. So why wouldn't the game recognise this? Why wouldn't it install?

Some quick googling revealed loads of people with DLC problems of varying nature, including several with my exact problem. The thing is that fixes supplied by helpful forum members or internet game gurus, that seemed to solve many problems, didn't solve mine. I googled a lot more, read forum posts, attempted proposed solutions, deleted files, changed files, reinstalled the game, installed the DLC manually, deleted them, redid it etc. etc.

In the end, after nearly a day's work and now having significantly more grey hair than before, I got "The Darkspawn Chronicles" to work, finally!
The problem now was; none of my other DLCs worked, inlcuding all pre-order and promotional items, and even Awakening. Can't have it all, I suppose, be humble and grateful my mother always told me.

Ok, but seriously, this was a mess, and my internet searches suggested that I wasn't the only one having problems with the DLC. I guess the system has been blessed with some sort of super security measures to stop piracy, but come on. If the proposed method to stop piracy is to simply make the DLCs unplayable for everyone I think it's time to go back to the drawing board with it.

Well, anyway, I figured I should play though "The Darkspawn Chronicles" while I had the chance, and it was a blast, so I'll probably be suckered into buying the rest of the DLC packages as well. Which I guess means that I'll use my wallet to vote "Approve" on the DLC system... damn...
Before I do any of that I have to get all my old DLCs and Awakening to work though. Wish me luck!

All the best

The most epic video game competition of all time?

I recently watched a bunch of videos from "The Angry Video Game Nerd". Not only are the videos extremely entertaining, but one in particular really blew my mind. Check this video out, isn't that the most epic video game competition of all time?

The Angry Video Game Nerd seems to think so, and I totally agree!

All the best

Ah, justice being served... or?

One of the game companies being sued

The idea of software patents is in my opinion a sketchy one altogether. Nevertheless, they are the quite scary reality of today.

The latest story to catch my eye regarding this is that Walker Digital is suing Activision Inc, Activision Publishing, Activision Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment and Zynga over a patent describing "a method and a system for a distributed electronic tournament system in which many remotely located players participate in a tournament through input/output devices connected to a central controller which manages the tournament."

It's one of the vaguer patents I've seen, but they got it accepted back in 2002 apparently, and now they're trying to cash in. To me that patent describes pretty much any online game of today, and certainly also many games predating 2002.

We'll have to wait and see how this turns out.
Looking at this (unrelated) story it seems there's no limit to what one can apply for a patent of.

Now I just have to hope that no one has patented writing a blog entry about patents...

All the best

Heroes of Might & Magic is back for a new installment

I first considered the title "Time for some more heroing" for this post, but quickly decided against it when "heroing" turned out to look a lot more like "heroin" when spelled out than it had done in my head.

Screenshot taken from the official game website.

Anyway, I absolutely fell in love with Heroes of Might and Magic II in it's prime. It was the first in the series I tried and I have since played and enjoyed them all, including the original King's Bounty. It's a fantastic game concept in my opinion, and it was quite a while since I was so excited about a piece of game news as when I today aimlessly surfed the web for gaming goodies and came upon; Might and Magic VI: Heroes. Supposedly planned for release in 2011, this was something I had completely missed.

The graphics are redone but markedly reminiscent of the fifth game in the series. There seems to be some changes to the gameplay as well, as is expected. Judging from the screenshots the types of resources available are fewer and so far only three different factions are presented on the game webpage (which doesn't exclude the possibility that more will be presented at a later stage, of course). The current presented factions are Haven, Necropolis and Inferno. If this results in the absence of the, to me somewhat iconic, Black Dragons and Titans remains to be seen.

Many great games are planned for release this year, Dragon Age 2 and Diablo 3 just to name two of the huge ones. With this in the mix as well, 2011 is looking like a really superb gaming year. Good kick-off for the new decade I'd say!

All the best

EDIT: After some deep delving into the website news it seems that the Orcs will be featured as a faction as well.

More on the OnLive System

OnLive now plan to sell their systems preinstalled in
television sets, smartphones, tablets and blu ray players

I recently wrote a post after having tried the OnLive game streaming system. According to this article from Gamespot, OnLive has now teamed up with Vizio to deliver OnLive systems already built into television sets and other products. Interesting concept, and might gain them a piece of the market on sheer consumer convenience.

All the best