14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: I am done with Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad because the learning curve is a bit too much for me and because of the amount of glitches and issues that big patches from the developers have failed to eliminate.
But I am still happily playing Sengoku and finding that it takes time to renounce the Western gamer way of declaring war in order to get land and money, which is a problem in a game that rewards intrigue, careful long term planning and secrecy above everything else.
Sengoku is one of those Paradox Interactive game that will have a long life on my hard drive even if I fail to ever take a game to the time limit.
I will also continue to spend gaming time with my zombie pals in Dead Island and I plan to only play with other people to get a better handle on how the game changes when two to four players are tackling the same challenge.
And, for one on one gaming with my brother, there's always FIFA 12.
Andrei Dobra: As any red-blooded first person shooter fan out there, I'll probably spend quite a lot of time this weekend with the multiplayer beta for Battlefield 3, the upcoming title from DICE and Electronic Arts. The test stage kicked off on September 29 and already people are spending way more time that they should with it.
Seeing how my skills at multiplayer shooters have faded since my glory days in Counter-Strike, I'm mostly checking out the beta to see just how beautiful the game looks, while hoping that its release date, at the end of October, arrives quickly enough.
When I'm not multiplayer fodder for other, more passionate shooter players, I'm going back to Driver: San Francisco and engage in the variety of side-quests and challenges that the game throws at me, and maybe indulge in a bit of multiplayer mayhem with the few who aren't dedicating their whole weekend to Battlefield 3.