For those of you wondering if Galactic Civilizations II is the only big thing coming out this Spring, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

We've got 2 new games about to be added to TotalGaming.net, a third one that's in development, and a bunch of others in the pipeline. Oh, yea, one other thing, we have a MMORTS in development too that we are very excited about.

Next week we should have the preview ready to go to give you an idea of what's happening.

This week Blizzard updated its popular massively multplayer RPG game, World of Warcraft. The main changes was a "bug fix" that dramatically decreased the amount of damage the Paladin class was capable of doing.  The change occurred in how the "Seal of the Crusader" is handled.

Previously it allowed the Paladin to swing faster AND keep doing the damage he would normally do with each swing.  Now, it's been changed so that the Paladin swings faster but each hit does less damage (so the effect is mainly that the player is getting more hits in with the same overall "damage per minute" occurring).

The problem is that the Paladin becomes pretty tedious to play in the game once the player has reached level 40 or so.  Prior to that, the Paladin is probably one of, if not the most, powerful classes in the game.  Needless to say, players who remember having been killed in PvP by Paladins during their character's "youth" (level 20 to 40) aren't sympathetic to the plight of the Paladin.

What they don't realize is that the Paladin in World of Warcraft tops out. That while the Paladin may be king of the hill (not so much now but still pretty damn good) at the early to mid stages of the leveling, it ends up being one of the dullest, most tedious classes to play. The end game of the Paladin is a study in bordeom.  Battles, which used to take 5 seconds at level 20 take 30 seconds ore more at level 50 (battles against creatures of the same level).

Meanwhile, other classes, particularly preists, rogues, and mages, see their damage dealing continue to properly scale as they move up. The Paladin, in effect, falls behind in every way except in how difficult they are to kill.

In effect, the Paladin is good only in that he is hard to kill and outlasts opponents. Hardly a fun trade-off for most people.  I suspect most players would gladly have their Paladin be more vulnerable in exchange for more damage power.  The Paladin at level 50 is very very hard to kill. The Paladin at level 20 does serious damage but is, relatively speaking to the level 50 Paladin, quite vulnerable.

A suggestion I emailed off to a friend of mine at Blizzard is that the Paladin at level 40 should get a new spell.  "Aura of Might" that doubles their attack power for 30 seconds but with a cost -- it counts as a use of shield of invulnerability.  Aura of Might would have a 15 second cool down but every time it's used, it would reset the cooldown on the various invulnerability shields. So the Paladin would have to make some tough choices.

Any Paladin under level 40 complaining about the changes is, as others gleelfully point out "just whining".  But there were serious problems with the Paladin class even this "fix" was put in after level 40.  Blizzard needs to address the post level 40 Paladin fighting ability that becomes increasingly problematic as the player rises up in levels.

 

If you're interested in seeing how Galactic Civilizations II is progressing, check out the Galactic Civilizations II developer journals pages. It'll give you a week by week outline of what's going on and where things are going.

Irrational Games, the developers of the hit "Freedom Force" go through their experiences with the development of Freedom Force along with their trials and tribulations over how best to get its sequel, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich into the hands of gamers. Check it out!

The Political Machine (the game) was released this past August and it sold quite well. It was published by Ubi Soft at retail and distributed electronically via TotalGaming.net.  But as a money maker, it was so-so.  That's because a game that retails for $20 that has only a few month life span is going to have a hard time making back its investment.  Luckily, The Political Machine made its money back.

But even if it hadn't made its money back, it was worth doing. In fact, it would have been worth doing even if it had only made a quarter as much money.  Why? Because during the months of August through November Stardock had a tremendous spike of overall sales. We're talking a spike of 40% in sales from our electronic store.  And when you're talking about an electronic store that does millions of dollars in sales each year, that's significant.

You see, the game itself generated so much coverage because of its topic that it brought hundreds of thousands of new people to our websites. And many of these people then purchased something else.  Some bought TotalGaming.net subscriptions. Some bought Object Desktop. And some bought a whole bunch of things.

After the election, sales returned back to where one would expect..well not quite, they have remained higher than projected ever since. But the lesson learned is that there's more to products than just their sales. Something the retail world has known for a long time.

Here's the dirty little secret I've picked up about successful business people - they have mastered the art of not just figuring out what the most important tasks are but, and this is key, figuring out which needed tasks to drop off.

I don't claim to be a paragon of business. But I am coming to understand that each day, there are things that need to get done that I simply cannot get done. I haven't fully made the transition to doing this optimally as I still end up trying to do more things than I can realistically do with the resulting "half-assed" results. But I am getting better.

Each day I receive requests to do this or that or come up with tasks that will better our business prospects.  And each day I'll look through those tasks and see that many of them simply cannot be done in the time required.  Maybe it's an interview. Maybe it's a skin that I need to do. Maybe it's some code I need to write. Maybe it's a product evaluation.  It's different each day.

I wonder which things I won't be able to finish up today.

WindowBlinds is a program that enables users of Microsoft Windows to apply themes (which we refer to as "skins" or "visual styles") that change the look and feel of your Windows GUI. However, WindowBlinds 4.5 allows users to change the color of each particular "theme". Traditionally, people would download a given "theme" and if it wasn't the color they liked, they were out of luck. Now, with WindowBlinds 4.5's hue/saturation support, the skin's default colors are only the beginning...

Let's have some fun with the new coloring feature of WindowBlinds 4.5. I don't think most users, even long time users, really appreciate just how powerful the built in coloring features are in this new version. Going to a hue-based coloring system is a big deal.

To demonstrate it in action, I'm going to pick a skin that that one wouldn't necessarily would realize how much coloring it would add to its longevity - Morphium's SouLuna skin.

So the image to the right here is how it looks on my system with no coloring at all.

 

So here's what I do. I click on the "Change Skin Color" in the WindowBlinds configuration (found in your system tray typically or by double clicking on the WindowBlinds icon).

Now I'm going to go to town..

Now it's somewhat bluer..

I feel..pretty..

All business now!

Evergreen enough?

How about now?

Drab?

Same as above but with saturation turned up a bit.

Bloody!

Far out! (inverted)

My final desktop appearance today with the colors changed. I've got so many blue skins already that it's sometimes interesting to go with a skin that has more of an earth tone. But as you can see, with the hue/saturation/gamma features of WindowBlinds 4.5, you can get a lot of different looks with just a single skin...

WindowBlinds 4.5 Price: Free to try, $19.95 to register on its own or $49.95 if purchased as part of Object Desktop. Web: www.windowblinds.net Developer: Stardock (www.stardock.com)

 

My car's lease is almost up so I have to think about getting a new one.  I currently have a 2003 Bonnaville. It's a pretty good car actually. Cost around $35,000 back in 2003.

But now it's time for a new one? Any suggestions? Here are the specs:

(1) Needs to be front-wheel or all-wheel drive.
(2) I prefer American made cars.
(3) Prefer a head's up display
(4) Prefer but don't require 4-door vehicle.
(5) Needs ot have built in nice GPS type unit.
(6) Needs to have enough horse power so that I never feel like I'm pushing it (I tend to drive fast).
(7) Would like adaptive cruise control

I'm not terribly price conscious. The limiting factor is typically that the cars I want are rear-wheel drive which simply isn't an option in Michigan.

For instance, I'd be tempted to get the Cadillac XLR if it was front wheel drive or all-wheel drive:

 

JMS, the creator of Babylon 5 along with a fantastic writer of many graphic novels (including the long delayed "Rising Stars..ahem..) has put his two sents on the recent cancelation of Star Trek: Enterprise and his thoughts on what Paramount needs to do..

I'm sending this to both the B5 folks reading this and any Trek fans
looking on.

Bryce Zabel (recently the head of the Television Academy and
creator/executive producer of Dark Skies) and I share one thing in
common. We are both long-time Trek fans, from the earliest days, who
felt that the later iterations were not up to the standards set by the
original series. (I'm exempting TNG because that one worked nicely,
and was in many ways the truest to the original series because Gene was
still around to shepherd its creation and execution.)

Over time, Trek was treated like a porsche that's kept in the garage
all the time, for fear of scratching the finish. The stories were, for
the most part, safe, more about technology than what William Faulkner
described as "the human heart in conflict with itself." Yes, there
were always exceptions, but in general that trend became more and more
apparent with the passage of years. Which was why so often I came down
on the later stories, which I did openly, because I didn't feel they
lined up with what Trek was created to be. I don't apologize for it,
because that was what I felt as a fan of Trek. That's why I had Majel
appear on B5, to send a message: that I believe in what Gene created.

Because left to its own devices, allowed to go as far as it could,
telling the same kind of challenging stories Trek was always known for,
it could blow the doors off science fiction television. Think of it
for a moment, a series with a forty year solid name, guaranteed
markets...can you think of a better time when you take chances and can
tell daring, imaginative, challenging stories? Why play it safe?

When Enterprise went down, those involved shrugged and wrote it off to
"franchise fatigue," their phrase, not mine.

I don't believe that for a second. Neither does Bryce. There's a
tremendous hunger for Trek out there. It just has to be Trek done
*right*.

Last year, Bryce and I sat down and, on our own, out of a sheer love of
Trek as it was and should be, wrote a series bible/treatment for a
return to the roots of Trek. To re-boot the Trek universe.
Understand: writer/producers in TV just don't do that sort of thing on
their own, everybody always insists on doing it for vast sums of money.
We did it entirely on our own, setting aside other, paying deadlines
out of our passion for the series. We set out a full five-year arc.

But when it came time to bring it to Paramount, despite my track record
and Bryce's enormous and skillful record as a writer/producer, the
effort stalled out because of "political considerations," which was
explained to us as not wishing to offend the powers that be.

So on behalf of myself and Bryce, I'm taking the unusual step of going
right to the source...right to you guys, fueled in part by a number of
recent articles and polls, including one at www.scifi.com/scifiwire in
which nearly 18,000 fans voted their preference for a new Trek series,
and 48% of that figure called for a jms take on Trek. (The other
choices polled at about 18% or thereabouts.)

See, if somebody doesn't like a story, doesn't want to buy it, that's
all well and good, that's terrific, that's the way it's supposed to be.
But when "political considerations" are the basis...that just doesn't
parse.

So here's the deal, folks. If you want to see a new Trek series that's
true to Gene's original creation, helmed by myself and Bryce, with
challenging stories, contemporary themes, solid extrapolation, and the
infusion of some of our best and brightest SF prose writers, then you
need to let the folks at Paramount know that. If the 48% of the 18,000
folks who voted at scifi.com sent those sentiments to
Paramount...there'd be a new series in the works tomorrow.

I don't need the work, I have plenty of stuff on my plate through 2007
in TV, film and comics, so that's not an issue. But I'd set it all
aside for one shot at doing Trek right, and I know Bryce feels the
same.

If you want this to happen...it's up to the Trek and B5 fans to make it
so.

The rest I leave to the quiet turning of your considered conscience.

J. Michael Straczynski

"

Our friends at OSNews.com also have given a head's up to an interesting article that outlines the history of BeOS. Check it out.