Comments on: Better Spelling In Magicka

By: DemonDoll

DemonDoll — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:40:11 +0000

Thank you Anonymous. I don’t really like NoScript (and individually allowing every YouTube video) but as per your suggestion I used google to find the right URL: http://www.pentadact.com/index.php/page/n. Thank you for the suggestion, it’s just what I needed.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:35:24 +0000

Yeah, there’s meant to be an archive, but I never got around to building one.

TooNu: The fights with other spellcasters could be really interesting, but for some reason even the first time you encounter them they mix it with a high stress fight with other mobs, so you don’t have the bandwidth to focus on what the casters are doing and react to it intelligently.

Both modes, actually, introduce way too many elements and time-pressures too soon, particularly for a game that’s asking you to learn all the ways eight different attack types interact.

All of which would matter less if it had proper saves.

The magic system is so good, though, that it’d be one of my favourite games ever with those things fixed.

By: TooNu

TooNu — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:24:09 +0000

Magicka is incredibly hard. It’s so very difficult and button mashingly stressfull that It’s becoming a great game that I hate and do not want to play.

It only takes 20-30 times to be knocked into the air and sent off a cliff in some fake/lies/as if/no I don’t think so/bullshit combo from the baddies ranks of instacasting wizards to push me over the edge into baby murdering rage.

Great game with a great spell casting mechanic on one hand, piss annoying spitefull little shit on the other.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:12:30 +0000

Suggestions in the absence of changes toward your tastes, DemonDoll:

The autoload can be killed by setting a rule forbidding this site from Javascript in the Firefox extension NoScript (assuming you don’t want to enable it for the Web at large like I do). It leaves behind an ‘older posts’ link at the end of the page which navigates properly with a /page/n URL.

If you hover over the title/full article link the URL always includes a date, and as far as I can tell posts are always listed in reverse chronological order. There is not and has never been a dating system for comments, however.

By: DemonDoll

DemonDoll — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:58:11 +0000

I’m sorry this is not relevant at all to this post but I couldn’t find another way to contact you. I’ve seen your blog linked a few times and was kind of interested in reading through it but the site seems nigh unusable to me. I’d like to read through the archives because I don’t really go out and get all the new games (playing Far Cry 2, Deus Ex IW, and Dwarf Fortress for the first time right now) so I’m interested in what’s been said about the older ones. The system where more entries load when you scroll down is terrible because it is slow and difficult to navigate. It also resets whenever I click a picture or link by accident and while I see the appeal of leaving out any sense of time it’s kind of confusing to me to not have any idea when the posts were written and when the comments were entered. I’ll check back a few times in the coming month or so and I hope that your site becomes a bit more friendly to me. Sorry for cluttering the comments of this post and feel free to remove this comment from there. Later.

By: Blackberries

Blackberries — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:44:58 +0000

@Captain Harry
Replace on of those lightnings with an arcane. It’s the most powerful ‘shield attack’ I’ve yet come across.

(Ice + Shield + Arcane + Lightning + Lightning. Either cast it normally or as an area of effect).

By: Phydaux

Phydaux — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:33:06 +0000

Well, I bought the game and have played through the campaign alone. There certainly are a lot of pop culture references, but I wasn’t expecting a Ski-Free reference!

Oh I do love it when my enemies pop.

By: Aftershock

Aftershock — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 03:22:30 +0000

Those who think you can’t combine the special magicks with other elements, whilst you can’t do it with haste (i’ve only got the demo at the moment) you can definitely combine rain with things.

Fully charged blast of 4x rain + ice, does loads of damage and makes trolls almost stand still they’re so slow, allows you to unload with 4xrain + arcane, for about 4k damage.

By: Zacmanman

Zacmanman — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:41:02 +0000

I thought this game looked lack luster, and the comments on its stability scared me off… but this post makes the game sound amazing.

By: Captain Hairy

Captain Hairy — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 22:02:22 +0000

Best spell.

Ice + 3x Lightning + Shield. Tesla towers made of ice. Hot damn.

By: Jaz

Jaz — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:54:24 +0000

@EGTF: Yeah, the most disappointing part of the game (apart from horrendous bugs) is that the specialist recipe spells (the “magicks”) don’t fit into the same system of magic as your regular spells do. What if there was a way of getting things to rain from the sky, like another cast button?

By: Tweets that mention Better Spelling In Magicka, by Tom Francis -- Topsy.com

Tweets that mention Better Spelling In Magicka, by Tom Francis -- Topsy.com — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:22:36 +0000

[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Tom Francis, Ben Williams. Ben Williams said: RT @Pentadact: Some thoughts on why Magicka is cool: http://bit.ly/QWERASDF […]

By: EGTF

EGTF — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 19:01:50 +0000

I wish you could combine learnt space bar spells with extra elements, so maybe there could be healing fire rain and arcane teleport etc.

By: Grill

Grill — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:34:55 +0000

I can’t get into Multiplayer at all, three patches later. I wrote a review for Eurogamer on the basis of the first day being so awful, and each day it gets less relevant with the ludicrous fast patching. I hope they put it up soon. :(

By: Phydaux

Phydaux — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:30:21 +0000

My guess with the letters is that was arranged so you could tell opposites. The columns reflect the opposite spells, except for Earth and Shield. I don’t personally look at the keyboard when I play, and I don’t think W for Life in Magicka any more than I think W for forward in an FPS. And I daren’t change the keys now because I’d have to re-learn everything and it’s just asking for me to kill myself over and over by casting the wrong set of spells.

I have only played the demo so far, and I’ve cancelled my wow subscription so I can afford to pick this up soon, but I feel I should wait until the bugs are gone. I’ve had a few major crashes that have hung my whole PC.

By: PleasingFungus

PleasingFungus — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 18:17:39 +0000

Perfectly sums up everything I love about Magicka. One of the things about the game is that one of the more important skills is memorizing arcane key combinations (if not to execute your common attacks, then to pull off resurrections, lightning bolts, etc, etc), which really does feel like magic should. I mean, it has arcane right in the sentence!

Oh – and speaking of ‘better spelling in magicka’, a kind fellow in one of the RPS comments threads alerted me to the “arse” spell, which (with the default keybinds) summons a set of ludicrously overpowered land mines. I can’t count the number of times I’ve blown myself and/or my allies off the map with it since.

Ahh. Curse words in video games: so satisfying!