14 DAY TRIAL // Andrei Dumitrescu: This weekend I plan to spend some time with racing games, see if anything changed in a significant manner since Need for Speed: Porsche (the best of the series, in my humble opinion) launched. For a more animated and playful experience, I will try out ModNation Racers from Sony, a game which seems to take the design concepts of Little Big Planet and apply them to the art of moving fast around a track with weird drivers and complex machines.
For a more explosive time, I will also take a look at Split/Second, a game developed by Black Rock, the makers of Pure, and published by Disney. The game has a more realistic look but very arcade mechanics, with players being able to trigger destructive events all along the racing track in order to slow down and wreck their enemies.
Despite the racing focused hours ahead, I also plan to find the time for some more (you guessed it) Neptune's Pride. I just won my first game and started another one, where pretty bad starting planets forced me to expand a little too fast and too far.
Mihai Cernea: This weekend I'll be finishing Assassin's Creed 2. I hated the first one, but I'm happy to report that Ubisoft Montreal has finally made a game and not a technology demo. The story and the characters are much better, as Altair's arrogance and the so-called villain of the series dr. Warren Vidic are not present. Also there's a lot to do in the beautifully designed city with less annoying repetition.
Unfortunately, there are no stories to be explored other than the main one, as the developers relegated the side-missions to hit-or-miss mini-games or collecting various items. A really good example of more of a miss than a hit is the failed attempt at humor, represented by the husband beat-up event. Maybe more time should've been spent on crafting a small side-narrative that would've given much more context and period flavor to the rich in potential Renaissance Italy, than thinking of places to put feathers for gamers to gather.