Freaking Friday – Hailing Frequencies Open for 8/25/17

FRIDAY IS HEREEEEEEE YEAHHHH! Seriously y’all, happy god damned Friday. I’m pretty happy because for the first time in WEEKS, I’ve a pretty open weekend y’all. Like, I think my only obligation is Sunday’s Earth & Beyond stream, which I am seriously, super duper looking forward to. Before we get to what’s ahead though, let’s talk about our last video of the week covering Tachyon.

I’ve finally joined the Bora, because to hell with the corporations (though I might go back and take that branch at some point, depending on my time and energy level. Then again I keep meaning to do that in Star Crusader as well. No time!). In this entry, I first do an escort mission, followed by a data transport mission. The second mission has me flying through a nebula, which in this game looks like fire, and trying to land on a station. I subsequently forgot that the enter key is basically an interaction key, used to pick up crates and, in this case, land on a landing pad. First I had to FIND the damned pad, then I flailed for a billion years until I found an old forum thread wherein someone had the same problem. “Hit enter dummy.” They basically said, and they were right. Overall I’m having a great time with this game, and can’t wait to play more.

Last night, Spaz and I played a bunch of Ticket to Ride, which is a train-based competitive boardgame for up to five players. We first played the US map, then Europe, and found that the AI is super duper cutthroat. Spaz and I were like, asking how our routes were going, he was giving me tips, it was very casual. The AI was like, “FUCK YOU ALL I’M WINNING THIS.” and win it did, at least the first time. Overall it was a great time, and I could totally see us revisiting it for another board game night.

After dinner, I began (at PapagenoX09’s insistence) in XCOM 2, which I’d never played before. I did 1.5 missions, and was having a good time until suddenly I just felt just anxious and stressed, so I turned it off. I had a feeling this would happen. Ever since FTL, I’ve noticed games in which I direct named individuals just make me super stressed and anxious like these people are real and I’m leading them to their deaths. I therefore then loaded up LOGistICAL’s Hawaii DLC and had a much better time. It’s weird, both games have stakes and both games are challenging, whereas one is down in the weeks while the other is super abstracted. Maybe I just can’t enjoy games like XCOM 2 anymore, which would be a shame, because I certainly enjoyed the originals a lot, plus similar games like the Jagged Alliance games.

This weekend should be a pretty fun time with gaming. Tomorrow I’m gonna record video of next week’s Game of the Week, the classic 4X Stars!! I also hope to get another Tachyon entry in, and maybe an entry of something I need to preview, like Masteroid or Interstellar Transport Company. I also hope to get a little time for myself in with some more LOGistICAL, as well as this new game called Deadhold, which looks to be the Myth successor I’ve been wanting since I finished Myth II ages ago (I never played Myth III since it was by a different team and I heard it wasn’t anywhere near as good). Sunday will likely be mostly taken up with the aforementioned Earth & Beyond stream. Overall, it should be a pretty solid weekend for gaming, one that is sorely needed after the chaos of the last several weeks.

Alright, let’s wrap up the week with some news!

• Three new spacey shooters dropped today on Steam, including Expanse, Spaceship Trucker and Star Walker. I’ll try to play these as soon as I’m able, but to be honest, I usually don’t prioritize shmups like these unless they offer something really different or special like NEXT JUMP: Shmup Tactics, which I really loved. Star Walker looks to be the most interesting of these new games, but when I tried to go to the developer’s website to ask for a key, I got a 404 error. Noooooot a great sign.
• Helium Rain got another fairly extensive patch just days after the last one, which is impressive.
• I’m Titanium (which I DID get a key for) got a boatload of hotfixes in its latest update.
• Starship Corporation now supports the German language and has made its tutorial German along with it.
• No Man’s Sky got a patch which fixes like, two dozen issues. Glad to see they’re still plugging away at it.
• Everspace got a small patch which adds sensitivity sliders to joystick axes, among other things.

And that’s it! Have a great weekend, my friends, and I’ll see y’all Sunday morning!