14 DAY TRIAL // Totu Florian: Last weekend ended up being a complete mess. I played pretty much everything I had that still held a little bit of interest for me. Some games caught my attention for just a few hours, while one demon of the past made a far more unexpected comeback. While I still toyed around a little bit in Divinity 2: Ego Draconis and killed a few thousand zombies in Left 4 Dead 2, most of my time was spent in two other games.
Surprisingly, the old demon that haunted me this weekend wasn't alcohol, but a far worse vice. With all the news going around about it, I figured I'd go back and try some World of Warcraft, and, before I knew it, I spent eight hours doing raids and camping players. When I finally snapped out of it, I quickly looked for something to take the edge off, and, to my luck, I found DiRT 2.
The game is a very interesting combination of a driving simulator and arcade driving, set across an off-road, rally course. The one thing that stands out about the title is just how much fun it is. While still being a challenge, it takes away the frustration of going off-track with its elaborate physics engine. Honestly, I think I spent more time watching the replays of me driving through the ruins of a church over and over again, proud of how I made a true impact on the game world, more than I did racing.
Andrei Dumitrescu: With the many big releases of 2009 now behind us, I plan to spend the weekend looking forward to 2010 and to the game that seems the most interesting out of the ones coming in the first half of the year, Mass Effect 2. Ever since the sequel was announced, BioWare was adamant about how you could use a save from the first title in the series to jump-start your experience in the second.
So, I plan on actually installing the game and play through it again, even if this means again suffering through the almost atrocious dune-buggy elements and putting up with some pretty annoying combats at times. Still, I hope that another playthrough (I hope to actually remember which class I played as initially, in order to aim for a slightly different experience) will make it easier to appreciate Mass Effect 2 when it arrives on January 29.