After my absence last week (thanks to a 17 hour day at work) I am back here at Reticule Towers for another edition of Our Week in Games. There are a lot of rumours circulating now about the upcoming new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, with the former expected to reveal details of their next machine on the 20th of the month. The week ahead sees the release of Aliens: Colonial Marines and doubtless there will be more videos released for other big titles coming soon like BioShock and Tomb Raider. I meanwhile will probably spend the forthcoming week working on the project I started last week. Hit the jump for football management and a Roman history lesson from Nick.

Chris

As you may have guessed from my blog entries, I have been delving into the Football Manager 2013 Editor over the past week in my attempt to make a Game of Thrones inspired update. The Editor is really quite a beast of a toolkit, though it isn’t always the easiest thing to use. But then again I’ve never really got too involved in game editing, so it might actually be a really easy tool to use, and it is just my incompetence with it that is making it seem more challenging to use than anything.

I kind of wish it was a bit more user friendly, but it would be hard to make it so with the amount of options you can tinker with. However it is a slight annoyance that there are so many hidden rules governing how leagues and cups work. But I have made some decent progress with my mini-project, and I can’t wait to get it to a point where I can play a career game with it without too many distractions from the Game of Thrones theme.

Nick

The Xth Legion have been having a rather mixed year.

After erecting a crude fort in the Alps to protect one of the few land routes into Italy, it was only a few months before the first Gaul assault on their position. A thousand or so rather angry looking barbarians hurled themselves against the Roman walls, but that was nothing compared to how angry they looked after being slaughtered almost to a man.

Burying that many bodies is not a fun task, considering the cold hard ground of the Alps, but it had to be done. After all, no-one likes stepping on corpses on their way to the latrine. Happily, within a few weeks shovelling, the landscape was once again pristine and corpse-free. A difficult job completed, the lads took a few days off to go skiing.

The next attack came in Spring. Having suffered defeat via their previous tactics, the Gauls instead opted for a new strategic approach of being riddled by a storm of arrows, courtesy of the freshly arrived contingent of archers from Italy. Whilst an original approach, ultimately it proved just as successful at providing fertiliser for the alpine soil.

The fort had proved its worth; not one Gaulish foot had stepped foot on Italian soil since its erection, but now the Xth Legion were beginning to become restless. Months had passed without combat, and the nearly two-thousand strong Roman force were sitting idle behind wooden walls, desperate for something to do.

Finally, fresh orders from Rome. A single word, written in a fine hand, delivered by UPS.

‘Attack.’