14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: I've been all alone manning the Games section of Softpedia this week and I am again alone as I head into the weekend, with my colleague Andrei Dobra lounging somewhere on the beach rather than in front of a computer gaming away the hours.
For the next two days, I plan to engage mainly with two games: the Dune Wars mod for Civilization IV and last year's reboot of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.
The Dune Wars mod has long been a favorite of mine and is one of the great examples of what taking a successful game as a base and creatively adding another intellectual property on top of it can achieve.
Blizzard might not be interested in making Diablo III mod friendly, but Firaxis made it easy to change up aspects of Civilization IV and Dune Wars, now up to version 1.9.6, manages to create a game that feels more immersive and more challenging than the base experience.
It's also gorgeous to look at and makes a great introduction to the Dune book universe.
I reinstalled Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit because I never really got to finish it and because my own brother bragged about his skill with the game and about how he was ready to post better times than me in all of the races.
We tend to quickly settle this kind of friendly rivalries and we’ll probably never match up using all the Need for Speed races, but this weekend I will be polishing my racing skills and hoping to hold a better line than my brother.
I will also be returning to FIFA 11 for a few matches, not too many, in order to see how the game plays and how the animations feel so that I can have a better felling for the big changes that will be introduced by this year’s installment of the game in late September.