There is a phenomena described by serious mountaineers who, having finally struggled to the crest of a vertiginous peak, experience not the sense of elation and celebration that was perhaps visualised back at base camp, but instead a blank numbness; a complete inability to think anything at all. Bodies and minds are wracked with exhaustion and ravaged by hypoxia, to the point where mental faculties are reduced to those of a small child.

One might well wonder why anyone would choose to put themselves through this at all.

This is the closest I can come to describing the feeling of finishing the development of Clever Beans’ first game, When Vikings Attack!
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The moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived! Tomorrow evening we’re giving you the opportunity to get a mob together and pelt SCEE employees with rocks, chairs, trash cans, explosives, grand pianos and whatever else you can get your hands on. Come get some!

Between 5.00pm and 7.00pm GMT on Thursday 15th November, myself, Jawad from the Store team and the fearsome Yappadog from Marketing will be taking on all-comers at When Vikings Attack! – the bonkers action title that’s just emerged from our XDev studio, via developer Clever Beans.

If you haven’t had the chance to check the game out yet, it’s a multiplayer-focussed romp that sees you defending your precious homeland against gangs of Viking marauders by gathering a crew of your own and pelting the enemy with any projectile you can find. It’s a simple concept, but fiendishly addictive and, in the Blog team’s humble opinion, one of the funniest games we’ve played all year. See the trailer below for a closer look.
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Hey everyone… did you know it’s just under a week until the launch of When Vikings Attack on PSN?!
We’re pretty excited… are you? If you are then we’d recommend that you take the chance now and pre-order the game on the PlayStation Store ASAP because in the run-up to launch we are offering a 30% discount to all users who pre-order!

So head to the PS3 store and either do a search for When Vikings Attack! Or go to the ‘Most Popular’ section and check the pre-order charts. Choose to buy the game and when it’s launched on the 7th you’ll only pay £5.49/€6.99 instead of the full price £7.99/€9.99 for BOTH versions of the game!
What are you waiting for?!

If you don’t know about the game already here’s the full final feature breakdown:
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Hey everyone. It’s been a while but we’re back with some updates on When Vikings Attack!
So what’s been happening since the last update? Well, apart from tirelessly working on the game day and night, the team have been to Gamescom, Comic Con and just this last weekend the game took a trip to the Eurogamer Expo in London. All of the events were great, we were all super happy to get your Tweets and positive reactions, so big thanks goes out to everyone who played the game!

Anyway, it seems about time that we announced the winner of our ‘design a character’ competition. We got so many crazy, weird and wonderful entries and it was incredibly hard for us to choose just three from all the entries across the globe. However, in the end, the team made the call to choose designs that allowed them to do some cool animations to flesh the characters out. There was a desire to make some cool stand out characters and with the help of your deigns we think that’s been possible.

Here’s a video we’ve made to illustrate the entries:

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Would you like to help the war effort against the Viking hordes? How about win a PlayStation Vita whilst your own character design is implemented in When Vikings Attack! as a playable character?

Well now you can, thanks to the When Vikings Attack! Character Design Contest that begins today!

Sony PlayStation and the awesome guys over at Clever Beans are offering one lucky gamer the opportunity to design a character in our upcoming Viking ‘em up for PSN.

Need a catch up on the game? Here’s Martin and Andrew from Clever Beans being all British at E3, describing When Vikings Attack! for both the PS3 and Vita.

During the second Viking invasion of Great Britain in the 1970s (you remember that from history class right?), many brave townsfolk took up arms to become one of the greatest civilian armies the country has ever known. Men, women and children fought the good fight to keep their idyllic land free from Viking oppression. Now we’ve done our best to represent all these brave people in the game but we thought it would be pretty cool to throw it out to the community as well…

All you have to do is take the character template that we’ve created, fill it in with any design you can think of and provide a short description. Once you’re ready, head on over to the contest page and upload your entry. Creations can be hand-drawn or created using your graphic design program of choice. We will do the technical bits and the fine artists over at Clever Beans will interpret it into the game.

Here are some examples of a few of the existing townsfolk in the game and how they came from sketch to character model.

Don’t feel you have to be constrained to the time period or location of the game. We understand that all sorts participated in the great battle so go wild and let your imagination have at it. We understand some of you may be hesitant to enter a contest that entails drawing, but have no fear. Artistic skill is not a requirement here — this is a contest of creativity! To ease your nerves, some of the folks at SCEE have volunteered to share their quirky character designs – head on over to our Flickr set to check them out.

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