Another Week Gone – Weekly Dispatch for 2/22/19

Opening/Random Thoughts

Hey folks, happy Friday! Sorry, so sorry I didn’t do one of these sooner — I truly do NOT mean for these to be weekly — but the week once again got away from me. I am hoping to find a new balance between how my job is changing and the toll it’s taking on me mentally. It’ll likely be a spell before I’m fully acclimated to my new tasks/time requirements, but I’ll get there. I’ll try to do these more than once a week, but I can’t promise anything. Now with that said, there’s a ton to go over, so let’s get started.

This Week’s Videos

Voidship: The Long Journey is a mix of real-time tactical combat (with two control schemes and a tactical pause) and FTL-style sector jumping. It’s fascinating in that the time in a system is “real time”, but between systems, time dilates and so it takes years, in game, to travel between systems. This means your young engineer might die of old age on the way to a new system, so you not only need to manage the resources that build up your ship, but you need to keep bringing in new crewmembers as well. It’s a neat mechanic, and it works really well, making this a super fun game y’all should own.

Since Freespace 2 turns twenty later this year (it apparently came out on 9/30/99, which is the best date I can find for it), and I plan to spend the entire month of September dedicated to Freespace 2, I realized I’d not played its predecessor, Descent: Freespace – The Great War, since it was released, and only the one time. Descent: Freespace isn’t a bad game, it’s just that, at the time, there was a deluge of space games, and once I played its sequel, I never felt the need to go back. Well, now I do, so using the Freespace Port and Silent Threat Reborn, I’ll be revisiting this game over the next months in its entirety. This first entry is pretty basic, but the fit hasn’t hit the shan yet.

Since we were having the developer of the amazing Starsector on the podcast, I decided to finally dive in and give the game a serious go. I’d dabbled with it over the years, but always died quickly in the campaign, so I’d just set it aside and move onto something else. Well, I’m so glad I finally got a handle on the campaign because it is AMAZING. The combat, the exploration, the factions, all of it is so fun, and it’s not even done yet. This made me even more excited to talk to the developer…

Which we did on Tuesday night, and wow what a fun show. I was still under the affects of an annoying cold and its associated meds, so I wasn’t at my best (at one point I totally lost track of what I was going to ask for way too long), but overall it was a SUPER fun show, and was likely our most-watched stream ever, thanks to the game’s community. If you’ve not checked out Starsector, please do, it’s a steal at its current asking price.

Today’s News

Now there’s a ton of news, so we’re gonna keep this simple…

Releases/Release News

• Galactic Civilizations III: Retribution
  
• 2100
• Space Engineers
• RogueCraft Squadron

New Games Discovered/Announced

• Starpoint Gemini 3 (Blog Post)
• Astrox Imperium (Steam Page)
• Astra Exodus
• Avalon: The Journey Begins Ship Builders Expansion
• Astrog
• Project AETHER: First Contact
• Wartime Prologue
  

Development Blogs/Updates

• Lonely Adventure
• Battlestar Galactica Deadlock
• Eons of War
• Galactic Civilizations III: Retribution #7, #8
• Avorion
• Reentry
• Offworld Trading Company
• SimpleRockets 2
• It’s Not A Moon
• Alliance of the Sacred Suns and another
• Astrox Imperium

Major Patches/Updates

• Spacebourne
• Alliance of the Sacred Suns
• ASTROKILL
• Worbital
• Star Traders: Frontiers
• Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II (Beta Update)
• ΔV: Rings of Saturn
• Planetes
• AI War 2
• Sirius: Age of the Free Agents and another
• Star Valor
• Solaroids: Prologue
• Stellar Tactics
• Sunless Skies

Minor Patches/Updates

• Hyperspace Delivery Service
• Avorion
• 2100
• It’s Not A Moon and another
• Cosmonator
• Elite Dangerous
• Arc Savior and another
• Allspace

This Week’s Deal(s)

• Starpoint Gemini Franchise
• Galactic Civilizations III
• Rodina
• Imperium Galactica 1 and 2

What I’ve Been Playing

• Starsector – I try to avoid playing early access games, but man am I enjoying this one. The exploration feels great, and the combat is superb. Again, y’all need to own this one. It’s the closest contender for dethroning Drox Operative as “Best Space Game in the Last Decade” for me.
• Planet Nine – This top-down, twin-stick mech shooter from the developer of Ceres is DEFINITELY an indie project, but wow is it fun. Open world map with missions on it, and lots of toys and ways to tweak your mech. A great time so far.
• Enderal: Forgotten Stories – This massive Skyrim mod is now available on Steam, and wow is it amazing. It definitely makes a strong first impression, and it might have better voice acting than Skyrim itself. I also like how its magic system has consequences. You use too much of it, you die.
• Driftland: The Magic Revival – Got this last weekend, still no idea what I’m doing but it was a metric butt ton of potential, so I’m definitely keeping it installed.

That’s it my friends! Have a lovely weekend, and I’ll see y’all next week with more videos and stuff. :)