What are you playing this weekend?

Ready for the weekend? We are beyond ready.

Lucky for us, the weekend is now in full swing, and it's time to play some games outside of work.

This week, we will try to fight off the Ridden, indulge in an arena-style shooter, fight a bunch of annoying orcs, do some tactical shooting, and fire up our lute to play some metal in-game.

Dorrani Williams, Video Producer – Splitgate, Back 4 Blood

This weekend I'm playing a mixture of games.

The first is Back 4 Blood. The beta has started and I've really been enjoying it. It's the first co-op survival zombie-style game I've enjoyed in a long time, maybe even since Left 4 Dead 2. Sherif and I discussed what we thought about the game in the video below if you'd like to watch it.

Also, since I didn't get into the Halo Infinite technical test I've been playing the next best thing. It's a free-to-play FPS game called Splitgate and it's a combination of Halo's core gunplay and combat fundamentals mixed in with Portals...portals. I've always loved arena-style shooters and the portals give you a crazy amount of movement options and outplay potential. Give it a try. It's free.

And of course, I'll be grinding Valorant like I always do.

Sherif Saed, Staff Writer – Back 4 Blood (PC)

We’ve had access to the Back 4 Blood beta build for a few days now. I knew the game was fun from my time with the alpha, so I went in this week to explore the potential of the deck-building system and ended up loving what it does to the game. The card system’s UI, in particular, has been overhauled, and I imagine many people’s first experience with it in the beta will be much better than mine back in the alpha.

I haven’t stopped playing since, but now that the first beta weekend is live, plenty of people on my friends list have access, which means lots of opportunities to play with people who aren’t terrible, and with whom I can safely voice chat with.

I also want to mess around with creating more specialised decks that really serve a particular playstyle, rather than just group up all the good perks into one deck.

Stephany Nunneley, News Editor - Lord of the Rings Online

It's been about a month since I logged into Lord of the Rings Online. I needed a break after playing it almost every day for the last few months since talking my buddies into reinstating their accounts. My friend Dow was wondering what the hell happened to me, and sent me a text a couple of times to see if I was still alive and kicking. Between Pokemon Go, Steam demos, trying to limit my after-work screen time, and other things, I just haven't socialized online with my friends of late.

I plan on remedying that tonight and throughout the weekend. My character is finally level 120 (although I have two maxed-out characters and eight others I use as bag space) and it's time to try and get to that sweet level 130 so I can survive the War of the Three Peaks content - which I have yet to purchase.  Plus, I have neglected my band of late.

See, in Lotro, you can have a band. Basically, I am multi-boxing five characters, each one playing a different instrument. What you do is, you take a midi and using a program designed for it, turn it into a .abc file. Then you slot it into your music file in the Lotro directory on your PC, and voila! You can play music.

Each file has its own instrument line. So for example, No Leaf Clover by Metallica uses the Lute of Ages, Sprightly Fiddle, the Lonely Mountain Fiddle, a basic drum, and the basic clarinet. Then there's The Memory Remains which makes use of the Lute of Ages, basic clarinet, basic drum, basic horn, and the basic bassoon. Yeah, I play tons of Metallica in the game, along with some really cool, and some obscure, 80s tunes. Oh, and I throw in some Gaga for good measure.

I would post the video I made of my characters playing No Leaf Clover in here so you could see how it works, and hear what it sounds like for yourselves. But, I am both terribly shy and afraid of ridicule (lol).

Those are the game we are playing this weekend. What are your plans? Anything interesting going on in your lives? And what games do you plan on playing? Let us know!