14 DAY TRIAL // Florian Totu: 2K Marin launched Bioshock 2 four days ago, and I still haven't even managed to install the game. It's still sitting there, all pretty and comfortable in its case, next to the first Bioshock, which at least I did install. I never really finished the first game in the series, and really didn't want to start the second one with incomplete knowledge of the universe, acting like that annoying friend at the theater that needs to have the movie explained to him. Yes, sure, I know what Adam is, and Eve, and what splicers and Big Daddys are, but there's no closure to my adventure in Rapture. And while this may be a bit embarrassing, not as much for me as it is for Bioshock 2, the thing that kept me away from the underwater breath-taker is not even a full title, just a beta.
While S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat has managed to snatch a few hours away from me, I haven't been really doing anything else except play the PC beta of DICE's Battlefield Bad Company 2. I've already unlocked every little thing that I can, for each and every one of the classes and reached the maximum rank you could in the beta, and, even so, I have yet to have my fill of the game. And while the beta ends on February 25, I can't possibly wait that long before I end my service run in the Battlefield military. So, whether I want to or not, this entire weekend is going into finishing the first Bioshock and getting my hands dirty in the second one.
Andrei Dumitrescu: With Mass Effect 2 pretty much behind me, I need to focus on something different for a while before taking on Bioshock 2. So, this weekend I plan on firing up Empire: Total War, which I picked up complete with all the downloadable content and the patches as part of a Steam sale. The game disappointed a lot of people and was not perfect by any means at launch, but The Creative Assembly has a good track record of deploying patches for its titles, like Rome: Total War, which allow them to realize their full potential.
And if the patches do not suffice, then I'm sure that some good mods have been created by the community until now. I will probably fire up a game as Sweden and take on mighty Russia. It will make a nice preparation for the upcoming release of Napoleon: Total War, which comes in late February. If anything interesting turns up, then I plan on writing about it.