It’s Free, Dammit!

Whichever criminally moronic suit at Ubisoft decided to slap copy protection onto a freely distributed demo deserves to be bound and fed to a ravenous giant ape. The offending software is, as you may have guessed from the subtle hint, the demo of the new King Kong game. Apparently it’s not bad as movie tie-ins go. I wouldn’t know. Because the StarForce copy protection crashed my computer before it even loaded. Needless to say, after wasting twenty minutes of my life due to a subsequent crash on restarting (StarForce is notorious for causing system instability), the game was immediately uninstalled and will never be bought or played on principle. I strongly recommend you do not touch it with a barge, punting or, indeed, any other kind of pole.

If game demos are the sort of thing that you do, there’s always Quake 4 which now includes multiplayer. It uses the Doom3 graphics engine and the similarity is immediately apparent with the main difference being that that there is now actually light so you can see the pretty things the engine does instead of just imagining that they’re somewhere out there in the dark. A lot of people are also talking about Weird Worlds, which harks back to the days of bad sci-fi TV shows where man tentatively took his first steps in the blackness of space to meet rubber-faced aliens with rayguns. If that sentence made you feel at all nostalgic, you’ll enjoy the amusing parody of the gameplay. Although I can’t wholeheartedly recommend buying it, the demo is nevertheless a decent distraction for an hour or so. I managed to get progressively worse scores with each attempt until it finally clicked and I racked up about 5000.

Johnny Depp fans may consider it somewhat remiss of me not yet to have mentioned that a teaser trailer has surfaced for a little film called Dead Man’s Chest, which you may recognise better by its prefix, “Pirates of Caribbean”. The original was a film I truly wanted to hate, but thoroughly enjoyed, and as such I’m tentative about voicing any concerns about the sequel. Verbinski’s return as director is as surprising as it is welcome, although I’d speculate it’s probably due more to a chestful of gold than artistic integrity. But to be frank as long as Depp can reproduce a similarly enthralling performance as Jack, that’s all we really need. Although a bloody death for Orlando’s nancy-boy Will wouldn’t go amiss. Meanwhile Friya will probably be even more excited by Mr. Banderas in a new dancing flick, Take The Lead.

Meanwhile as Apple are converting their existing trailers into glorious high-definition, now seems like an appropriate time to remind you about the Quicktime Alternative. It’s a small, sprightly application that uses the Apple codecs but much less of your system resources. Oh, and no irritating pop-ups. I’d highly recommend it rather than upgrading to Quicktime 7.