Busy Dang Weekend – Hailing Frequencies Open for 6/26/17

Hey friends, welcome to Monday! I am so sorry I didn’t write one of these on Friday, but I spent the morning of my half day at work actually working, then I had to run home and record video for Galactic Civilizations II (more on that in a second), then had a dance lesson so it was a SUPER busy day. First off, I did put up the last Renegade: Battle for Jacob’s Star video up on Friday, and thank god, because that game is so, so, SO boring.

I think this game was made for die-hard fans of the FASA setting, because I feel like those are the only folks who would not only understand what was going on, but actually give a crap. There was so much about this game that just didn’t work, from the boring story to the floaty flight models to the uninteresting characters to the lack of any emotional attachment. The best thing was the soundtrack. Seriously, it was awesome, I ripped it from the CD. So good. Rest of the game…..so meh.

On Friday though, I loaded up Galactic Civilizations II. It got a massive patch in 2015 that was built upon changes from the community, so I wanted to see how it held up. It came out at a time when I was taking a break from gaming in the mid-aughts, so I never spent much time with it originally. I was therefore pleased to see that not only it held up, but it was a lot of fun and really well-paced, at least my game was. In this first entry I go through the races and start a new, small galaxy as a human, which is what the manual recommended. It’s a fun time so far!

Saturday I had a LOT of gaming time to myself, so I got to both work and play. Work-wise, I made two videos. The first was for an ARPG shootery thing called Nova Drift which just had a successful Kickstarter. I got sent the alpha back in May, but May was so cray I’m only now just getting to it. I was super pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was. SO FUN. When you level up you get to change stuff on the fly, be it weapons, hull or other benefits. I had a GREAT time playing it and I can’t wait for it to be finished.

I then spent time with another early access game called Impulse: Space Combat. This game has two main modes, a tower defense survival mode and a skirmish mode. I spent much of my time in survival mode, and while it was fun, the entire time I was hoping and praying for targeting commands, which this game DESPERATELY needs. Right now, when a wave of enemies jumps in, there’s no way to quickly locate them. You have to spin around and hope you catch a view of the combat your drones are engaging in. This bugged the HELL out of me. All I need is a “target nearest enemy” command and this game would be a BILLION times better.

Once I was done with those, I got to fiddle with a bunch of other stuff. I mostly played Skyrim and LOGistICAL, but also spent time in Unexplored, SUPERHOT (which was damned fun), Sublevel Zero, TOXIKK and Exoplanet: First Contact (which seriously needs some work). I also spent time with Galactic Civilizations III, since I wanted to compare/contrast it to GalCiv II. I hadn’t really played it with the new Crusade expansion, so I launched it using the same settings I used for GalCiv II (humans, small galaxy, default settings, three opponents) and had a great time. Overall, I got a TON of gaming in on Saturday, and had a lovely time.

Sunday morning was the MMO Meetup, the final one with Discovery Freelancer. I was only able to play an hour or so because we had a wedding shower later that day and had a bunch of stuff we needed to do beforehand. Discovery is such an amazing mod, and I have really enjoyed my time with it. I’ll likely try to fit it into my regular gaming rotation somehow.

Tonight I’m gonna sit down to play around with the game we’ll be talking about on tomorrow’s podcast, Spacecats with Lasers. It’s got cats, it’s in space and it has lasers. I’m sure to love it.

Now since I missed Friday, there’s a ton of news, so let’s get to it.

• SuperCluster: Void got a patch that hopefully fixed some crashes folks were having.
• Disputed Space got multiple volume control sliders as well as some better HOTAS support (but not MY HOTAS yet because mine uses multiple devices, sadly).
• Space Impossible’s alpha 8 is well underway, and looks pretty great.
• Falling Stars: War of Empires got a massive patch that adds morale and formations, among other things.
• Astrobase Command’s latest devlog is a neat roundtable of the various devs saying what they’re working on.
• The CIC has scans of a magazine article from 1995 talking to Mark Hamill on the set of Wing Commander IV.
• Cosmoteer (a game I just found out about and hope to play soon) got a new alpha with new weapons and more!
• Starsector posted some in-game lore/fiction stuff that looks great, but is apparently spoilery so I just skimmed it.
• Elite Dangerous got a patch today with stability and anti-exploit stuff.
• Star Fleet Armada Rogue Adventures got a fairly significant patch, then rolled it back because it was causing issues for folks. Good on them.
• Empyrion hit alpha 6.2 over the weekend, which has a lot of bug fixes and stability improvements.
• The developers of StarFringe: Adversus (which I never got around to playing) apparently have moved onto their next game, a space station sim called StellarHub.
• Osiris: New Dawn apparently will be getting a character creator soon.
• Strike Squadron: Caracará now has localization in Brazilian Portuguese. I just realized I somehow missed covering this game entirely, so I need to fix that.
• NIGHTSTAR: Rogue Wings has a new controller scheme, a new level and new weapons in its latest update.
• Celestial Command has a new game mode that should make it a bit more accessible. I hope.

In non-space game news, just a couple of tidbits I wanted to throw out there. First off, Cliff Harris (of Gratuitous Space Battles fame) wrote an excellent blog entry entitled, “Your Indie Game Will Flop and You Will Lose Money” that is totally worth reading. Secondly, a friend on Quarter to Three wrote a LOGistICAL Newbie’s Guide, if you’ve been intrigued by this game I can’t stop talking about and wanna get it on the sale.

Speaking of sales, GOG is having two sales right now, one which includes awesome games like Uprising and Deadlock, the other which includes stuff like the System Shocks and Master of Orion 3.

That’s it for today folks! Thanks for sticking with me, I know it was a lot. :) Have a great one!