14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: This week the game I will probably spend the most time on will be “waiting for video games I care about to get patched”, one of the least fun experiences of the modern gaming life that we all live.
One of my passions is competitive road cycling (watching it of course not actually doing the grueling 6 hours long rides) and the only simulation on the market is the Pro Cycling Manager series, done by Cyanide.
The games usually have a few issues when they are launched in the run up to the Tour de France and there's a reliance on patches and community made mods to fix them.
Now there's talk of a final patch that should arrive during September and has a beta stage going which makes me less than eager to start a new career (one last hurrah for Saxo Bank) before getting it for good.
The same thing is happening with Victoria II, the grand strategy video game from Paradox Interactive that I recently reviewed.
The game is in pretty good shape but there are some late game issues with rebels and with a world wide economic crisis that will be fixed on patch 1.2, with the only problem being that the developers are not talking about a launch date for it.
Elemental: War of Magic is another project where waiting for patches and reading notes becomes a video game in itself.
So over the weekend I plan to go back to Civilization IV and play a few more matches while waiting for the new turn based strategy from Sid Meier and Firaxis.
And while the vanilla game with the Beyond the Sword and Warlords expansion is fun in itself I plan on spending most of my time with the Dune mod for the game which does a surprisingly good job of translating the Frank Herbert epic into the mechanics of Civilization IV.