14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: This weekend I am planning a trip back to my hometown in order to attend a jazz and rock festival and meet up with some old friends and that has got me thinking about the lack of interesting games based on relations between humans.
When I was young, I liked to play The Sims from Electronic Arts because it allowed me to role play chains of interactions between humans, between individuals that could be designed to exhibit certain characteristics that I found interesting in my peers.
But as the series evolved, it became more about jobs and trips and furniture than about human interaction and I never managed to become interested in its third installment.
So this weekend, I plan to install Kudos 2 from Positech Games on the laptop that I will take on the trip.
The experience is in many ways simpler than that of The Sims, but the limited resources used to create it also make it much more focused.
The stakes of interacting with another virtual being seem higher in Kudos 2 and it’s hard to resist the impulse of using it to test our real-world situations, creating personalities that resemble those of friends or family members.
Speaking of social experience, I am still playing Game of Thrones Ascent, even if the third season of the HBO television series based on the books is done.
The game is still introducing weekly quests and there’s an exciting end game that involves hatching a dragon egg, which I am still far from completing.
Despite being launched via Facebook, the game requires a limited level of input from the player and a gamer can play solo most of the time if he wants to.
Andrei Dobra is off on holiday this weekend, somewhere in the sun, probably uninterested in playing any video game.