14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: I must be sounding like a broken record but my weekend will again be dominated by Civilization V, the turn based strategy title from Firaxis and 2K Games that models the evolution of a nation as years pass by.
My ultimate aim is to get a Utopia based victory with the French and, if that fails, any other civilization that has nice bonuses.
Civilization V makes that pretty hard and I spent significantly more time in the lower ages, starting and restarting trying to get a handle on how to grown my Culture at a significant pace without neglecting my military defense or my technology progression.
I'm willing to give the game many more hours from now on and eagerly expect more Artificial Intelligence tweaks from Firaxis and mods coming from the community.
And if I get bored with turn based strategy I can always move on into a bit of real time with Lionheart: King's Crusade, the new title from Neocore Games, the people behind the overlooked but solid King Arthur.
Andrei Dobra: This weekend I will be filling my time with Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, one of the biggest surprises, at least for me, this fall season.
It combines elements from Prince of Persia, God of War and Uncharted, with a stunning color selection that doesn't even suggest that it is based on the Unreal Engine 3.
The movements are fluid, the gameplay intuitive and it's just a great title to enjoy during a cold and rainy weekend.
Meanwhile, there's one game I won't be playing, and that's Dead Rising 2.
While I'm all for scaling difficulty and things like that, Dead Rising 2 is just too punishing on any difficulty setting.
Its protagonist, Chuck Green, is extremely helpless in front of the zombies, and in missions where he faces off against armed opponents amidst the horde of zombies, the game turns into a cruel and unusual punishment.
Yes, the situation is realistic, but don't forget that this is a game that lets you put three drills into a bucket and slap it onto the heads of zombies in order to kill them.