Fun: Films, Books, Games & more

When you ask around, you still get the feeling that people think – what you don’t pay for is worthless. In line with traditional business models and experiences over 4000 years old, we seem to stick to the thought of associating “value” with “money” – and often, vice versa.
But the winds of change are coming over us: Linux and other free OS’s are all around; OpenOffice is a true competitor of Microsoft Office; free Software that is worth at least as much as the traditional, often costly counterparts.
Now – how comes that “free” is actually a business model? Well – you can claim “not to be evil” and still leave that odd feeling behind; think Google – everything they do is free, but yet, it all has value – to us (Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search, Google Docs – good software, folks!), and to Google (think of all the data they collect).
Or you might stress your brain a little more – how can “free” possibly yield revenues? Well, another example I just read about is “Dungeons and Dragons Online“. Although launched as (yet another) Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game, in the tradition of “Worlds of Warcraft” and “Lord of the Rings Online”; the game suffered from its initial price (50$) and the monthly fee (15$). And here’s the solution: The game is FREE now. You don’t buy it – you download it; you don’t pay monthly charges – you simply use it. The challenge behind this is to turn it into a working business model – and the simple answer is to make certain items, areas, characters, events or whatever else available only if you pay. you want that shiny dragon armor? No problem – 50 cents. You want a better sword? 1$. An elaborated quest? Maybe 5$. And so on. The interesting thing is that Turbine, the game’s publisher, claims that some people actually spend MORE every month than they used to in the past (remember: 15$ – not less, but also not more; now, it’s truly on-demand!); and actual (paying) subscriptions went up 40%.
You can read more about this on ars technica – and who knows, maybe you are the next dragon fighter?

I recently bought “Mirror’s Edge” for a few bucks – I heard it’s an interesting game, at least design-wise, and wanted to try it out….

However, I ran into some troubles – the game simply did not start; I could see a flash screen with some EA logo, and then the application was terminated by windows (“…detected an error” kind of error message)

So, I searched around quite a lot, updated my nvidia drivers, but nothing helped. I found this post with a lot of tips, none of which helped.

But then, I realized that the post actually has more pages – and on page 2, there was a tiny tip, saying that in the file Documents/EA Games/Mirror’s Edge/TdGame/Config/TDEngine.ini, one should change the line

MaxMultisamples=2

into

MaxMultisamples=1

That did it – I can now play the game!

This is classic – some of the greatest adventures ever made in “speedruns” – i. e. played through in the shortest time possible.

Maniac Mansion:

Day of the Tentacle:

And – a really long one – King’s Quest 6 (first part – use YouTube links to get to parts 2-8):

As TrekMovie.com and 8of5 reported, the Star Trek books for 2010 will focus on the original series (TOS) and the relaunch universe created in the Movie “Star Trek”.

However, the 2380ies also come back to life – some books will deal with the aftermaths of the disappearance of the Borg and the new Typhon pact, established in “A Singular Destiny”.

What I miss, though, is some more DS9 post-series stuff – the “season 8″ was so great, but somehow it seems to loose the pace, and there are no new books continuing the storyline, as everything focuses now the Aventine and the 2380ies (while the post-series books were set in the late 2370ies).

(For an overview on the DS9 relaunch series, look at my user page on memory-alpha)

I hope that this is just a first shot – let’s see how the saga continues!

They say, legends never die…. sad but true, yesterday died one. However, maybe he was dead in a way for a long time already… RIP, the music lives on.