14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: For Christmas I will be far away from home and my favorite gaming platform, the PC, which means that I shall put no time at all into my favorite titles of the year, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Football Manager 2012.
I shall spent the holidays in another city, with my extended family, and this means that I will also lack access to the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3 that I sometimes share with a group of friends.
I haven’t yet found any games on handhelds like the PSP and the Nintendo DS that can hold on to my attention in the long term so I will probably just fire up a few rounds of Angry Birds on my cousin’s iPhone if the video game itch gets too much.
But in my mind I will also play another interesting game, that of imagination, which allows me to create strategies and stories based on my favorite games and see how they pan out when freed from the confines of the actual mechanics that power them.
Andrei Dobra: Thanks to various deals made in the last few weeks, like the Humble Indie Bundle 4 or the Steam Winter Sale, I have more than enough games to go through, not to mention some I postponed up until now, like I mentioned in a previous Weekend Reading piece.
As such, besides plenty of indie games, I’m planning on spending this extended holiday with games like Skyrim, Driver: San Francisco, Warhammer: Space Marine, as well as Bastion or Costume Quest.
I’m still pretty early in my Skyrim playthrough, so I want to spend some quality time with my battle mage and try to progress through the story and the huge number of quests I already started.
After this, I’m probably going back to Driver: San Francisco, the best racing game of the year in my opinion, as talking about it really made me miss the wacky adventures I had on the streets of the Californian city.
Thanks to a challenge during the Steam Winter Sale, I got back into Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, specifically its cooperative Exterminatus mode, which I didn’t get to experience after its release in October, and fell in love with it, especially since I had some great players to experience it with.
In between these big games, I’ll spend some time with Bastion and Costume Quest, two lightweight games with impressive visual styles and very original stories.