It’s been a while since I attended one of our Monday Night Games Nights. Let’s use… uh… summer as an excuse.

But last night Chris gathered a few of us together for an altogether-satisfying, nearly three-hour round of Magicka bleeding well into the hours somewhere between past-my-bedtime and not-quite-midnight.

It’s been six months since I played that particular game and for the first hour, give-or-take, my chops were still a little rusty. Unlike the typical WASD control-scheme employed by most every other PC game these days, Magicka makes use of those same keys plus QERF to control spell combos that are then launched through various mouse-clicks. The mouse itself is your movement control. The short-of-the-long is that I spent the first hour or so attempting to control my dude through the whole WASD key-scheme, and instead found myself blasting Chris with bolts of lightning or gusts of fire, while simply trying to navigate the map.

It was messy.

To give you a sense of perspective on our (both of us were rusty) initial lack of gaming finesse, after stepping into Adventure mode and starting at the very beginning, we were dropped into the initial Level Zero or tutorial mode. We were defeated. The tutorial did us in on the first time through. How sad is that?

But, a few hours and a half dozen memorized key combos later (QFASAspace = ThunderBolt or WAspace = Revive your Teammate) we had played through enough thinly veiled Star Wars and Star Trek references to send us all packing off to bed like the responsible middle-aged parents we all are. And with winter looming so closely on the horizon, those soon-to-be Monday evenings promising nothing more than long cold evenings shuttered in our respective houses, I think gaming season may be back in style.

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