Monday Night Games Meeting Minutes (Apr 18, 2011)

It was another Magicka Monday.  We had 3 people playing, with one person brand new to the game, so we started from the beginning.  It was chaotic but at least we didn’t have any Total Party Wipes (TPW).  Constantly spamming revive is the key.

The humour is just as good the second time around even if you know the jokes.  I still get a kick out of the “language” they speak during the game.

The game seems less buggy now as well.  We only had one instance of someone randomly dropping from the game and that was right at the beginning so it wasn’t to painful to restart.  What Magicka really needs is the ability to drop in/out of games in progress.  Right now you can only join at the beginning and there is no saving between levels.  This means if someone drops halfway through a level you have to decide if you want to finish the level first and then get them back in or do the level over again.

For all it’s faults Magicka is still a great game for only $10, less if you can get it on sale.

Monday Night Games Meeting Minutes (Mar 21, 2011)

For those of you that haven’t played Magicka I have two totally unrelated tips for you:

1. Friendly fire is always on.
2. To resurrect your dead friends hit W->A->Spacebar
3. Sometimes tips are shown during the loading screen.

Magicka is a very fun game but you have to assume you will die, lots, and mostly because of your so called friends.  There was only 2 of us playing last night and I’m scared to play with 4 players.  All the fire, energy beams, ice blasts, flying rocks, thunderbolts, etc.  It was very chaotic and trying to remember you spells as you run around enimies and try not to fry your friends with chain lightning.

The humor is also fantastic with tons of inside jokes related to software development, Monty Python,  miniature games, and bunch I’m sure I missed.  Plus everyone speaks a Scandinavian Lorem Ipsum language with some English words thrown in for good measure.

We made it to chapter 4 of I don’t know how many and hopefully next week we can pound through another 4 chapters or so.  Remember, Vlad is not a vampire.

Monday Night Games Meeting Minutes (Mar 14, 2011)

This week I tried to get a Dawn of War 2 game going but ran into a problem where one friend only had Retribution and the other only Chaos Rising.  So we fell back to our standard L4D2 and this time I made sure to pick the Swamp Fever campaign and not Freudian slip into Hard Rain like last week.

I always forget how hard L4D2 is and if your team isn’t working like a well oiled machine you will get crushed.  It didn’t help that the players hadn’t played the level and/or couldn’t remember it.  We had 4 human players but ended up dying twice on the first level at the bridge.  In a moment of desperation, as three of us lay on the ground, our final standing party member ran to the ferry and started it.  Only to get pounced by a Hunter when he was a quarter of the way across the river.  It was a pretty amazing Hunter jump.

I did remember the jukebox but, in retrospect probably shouldn’t have played with it even though it does play this funny song.

If you haven’t played with the jukebox I won’t spoil anything but lets just say it doesn’t help you finish the level.  We ended up dropping the difficulty to easy and completed the campaign.  We still had some trouble but didn’t get wiped.

Right after our L4D2 game I had my rubber arm twisted and ended up getting Magicka.  For $10, less if you get the 4 pack, it’s pretty easy to talk people into getting.  Hopefully it’s a fun co-op game and we don’t run into technical issues.  I also hope I’m the red wizard.  Please, please, let me be the red wizard.