14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: My colleague Andrei Dobra is on vacation so you will have to endure my ramblings about why I tend to nominate the same video games when it comes to the titles that I tend to spend my free time with during the weekend.
I am obsessed with the Football Manager series, which I have played since I was a little kid using an AMD K6 processor and less memory than modern phones.
So it makes sense to spend a lot of time with the 2012 installment of the franchise on the PC, setting up teams, preparing myself for big matches, making the squad like me, creating rivalries with other coaches, scouting for the rare talent that will emerge out of South American in the coming years (look for Rondon and for Douglas Costa).
My weekend include quite a bit of housework, some social interactions and I also tend to follow some sports on television or online, and FM 2012 is the kind of game that can be consumed in short sequences and, at times, can progress without much supervision.
I can pause Football Manager in order to vacuum up my brother’s room when he takes a break from coding and I can safely let that match against Leeds run unsupervised in the background while I watch an intermediate sprint in some obscure cycling race.
When FM 2012 is not running, similar experiences with different themes do: Pro Cycling Manager 2011, which is linked to another one of my passions, or Civilization IV, always with mods and sometimes with the Colonization reboot attached.
These are other games that offer the player a lot of freedom and make gaming less of an obsessive behavior eating up time and isolating the player from the outside world and more of a constant companion during those days when work is not in the picture.