Dark Force Rising

September 14th, 2014

During my last vacation I read Dark Force Rising on my kindle. This is the second part of the original Thrawn trilogy from Timothy Zahn. In the early nineties I read the first part Heir to the Empire and found it really great. Back in those days books were still printed on paper. :)

 

At that time it was also difficult to get science fiction books in the original version in Germany, since most bookstores had only small foreign language books sections (filled with classics from penguin books and the like). I therefore read it in the German translation. The second part was however only published in German many years later (1998).

 

Even though I really liked the first part, I meanwhile somehow forgot about it and didn’t buy the follow-up. Now I saw it on kindle. Strangely enough it is not available for purchase in English. My speculation (and hope) is that this trilogy really is the basis for the new films and for that reason they are being held back until after the release of the movies (when revised and adapted versions of the books will be published).

 

 

Anyway, those who wish to read the trilogy now, can still buy second hand paperback versions, or (as I did) get the German version for kindle.
The first part was really good, the second was OK, now I’ll read the last part…

 


				


				
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Lord of the Rings – Parallels to the Real World

				September 7th, 2014 

				

					
Some time ago I bought the Blu-Ray version of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Just recently I finally found the time to watch it. This is one of my favorite movies. (I’m counting the whole trilogy as one movie, although the extended edition is easily over 10 hours long) There are some people (like my father) who say it should be condensed in a 90 minute format. I actually would like to see that, that would be interesting.


Anyway one of my favorite scenes in Return of the King is when Aragon storms into Edoras “The Beacons of Minas Tirith! Gondor calls for aid!” and Theoden takes a moment and then says “And Rohan will answer!”


 




 


The odd part about it, where the parallel to real live lies, is that the Steward of Gondor did not want to light the beacons. He gives one unreasonal order after the other. But he is the boss. That’s just how it is. This seems to be a typical management flaw. Who has not at one time or another had a superior who acted like Denethor? 😉


 


 

				


				
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Hearthstone – Card Rarity

				August 2nd, 2014 

				

					
Recently, in expectation of the Naxxramas Expansion, I played a bit of Hearthstone. What I usually do is play a few games on the weekend. So I look at my three quests and cancel the one which has no synergies with the rest. Ideally I hope to complete the quests by as few games at possible. The other strategy (which I don’t follow) would be to always cancel the 40 gold quests, hoping for 60 or even 100 gold quests.


Anyway, since I didn’t buy cards with real money so far (except for the one purchase during the Beta phase to get the promo card Gelbin Mekkatorque), I decided it makes economically more sense to buy access to the Naxxramas quarters with real money, instead of buying cards with it. The ratio of gold per Euro/Dollar is almost twice as good with the Naxxramas bundles.


A “legendary” card (rarer than “epic” or “rare”)


 


Having said all that, what I actually meant to say was just that I noticed something and I don’t know whether Blizzard already commented. In WoW white are the trash items, green are OK and starting from blue items become good. In typical collectible card games (CCG) there is usually are large chunk of uncommon cards between the common and the rare cards. In Hearthstone white is common and blue is rare.


I therefore suspect that with further game expansions the green category (uncommon) will be added to the game. Maybe next year…

				


				
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So this is it (finally)

				July 22nd, 2014 

				

					
Finally I started my own blog. I had been thinking about this for some time. I had decided I wanted to set up a blog about gaming. At first I thought about a video blog, but due to hardware limitations my video (about the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game) editing did not converge…

Recently I had another idea, I would start a German language blog at the site www.einzelspieler.de (which means something like solitaire player or solo gamer). Unfortunately that URL was not available. Well actually it is for sale but since my blog is noncommercial, I didn’t want to spend additional money on this. So after trying different things I found that spielkritiker (meaning something like game critic) was available. Since it was only available as a .com URL I thought >>whatever, I’ll do it in English then<<.

So anyway, this is how it started. I haven’t put much thought into the concept yet. Let’s see how it develops…

				


				
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