Frustrations and Evolutions – Hailing Frequencies for 8/31/17

Welcome to Thursday, my friends! Today brings us the last video of the week, because I’m a different gamer than I was in 1995 when Stars! was new and shiny. Maybe I had more patience back then, because there were fewer games and I had more time. I’m not sure, but in today’s video, I just run out of steam. Seriously, I just get bored and decide to stop playing. I’m neither proud nor happy this happened, but I wasn’t gonna play through something I wasn’t enjoying, nor was I gonna make you watch me play something out of a sense of duty rather than fun (and no, it’s not a bad game, so I couldn’t even entertainingly hate-play it). It’s a shame really, because Stars! is a great, great game, I just don’t think it’s for me any longer. I’m not sure if it’s more I need (in terms of things to do) or less (in terms of complexity). So yeah, today’s entry is kind of a wash, but I hope you enjoy it just the same.

Last night, since it just came out of early access, I attempted to play Starway Fleet. I say “attempted” because you won’t get to see the thirty minutes I spent trying to get my joystick to work properly with the game, which I never could. Since the menus are so bugged — something I told the developers about weeks ago when it was still in early access — I couldn’t set up the axes properly, so it just flew terribly with my stick. It also flew poorly with a 360 pad, so I ended up flying with a mouse and keyboard. This wasn’t so bad until I began actually playing the game in earnest beyond the tutorial. In short, Starway Fleet is an exercise in extreme frustration. It has a solid flight engine and fun combat. What it DOESN’T have is a cohesive narrative or even a scoring system to keep the players engaged, targeting commands of any kind or fully-functional AI (I saw ships flying around in circles during missions).

While I usually try to record five videos for a series, this time I could only get through two before throwing my arms up in frustration. I basically told people to use the money they’d spend on this to buy Freespace 2 instead if they didn’t own it already. Game is eighteen years old in September and does everything better than a game that came out last week. It’s just maddening, so much so it basically sapped my joy for a while. I tried to play some Lord of the Rings Online afterwards, but couldn’t even get into THAT. I ended up eschewing games entirely and watching the pilot to the new Tick series on Amazon, which was VERY good. I’ve got my joy back though, which is good, because tonight we’re returning to Deep Rock Galactic, which I am SUPER excited about. The game just had a massive update, so I can’t wait to see how far it’s come since the last time we visited it.

Anyway, enough of my rambling, let’s dive into news!

• Avorion’s huge multithreading patch is now live for everyone!
• Dominus Galaxia is now on Steam, and you can email the devs to get into the beta.
• Dual Universe has a new dev update which details its upcoming pre-alpha access and more.
• FAR Colony has a new dev update talking equipment lists for characters.
• Flat Universe has a new Border Worlds Banshee, and it looks AMAZING.
• Star Explorers has a new tutorial video that helps explain how to play the game.
• Star Traders 2 should be hitting Steam early access soon, according to a new dev entry on Kickstarter!
• Starway Fleet released a patch that doesn’t address the issues I had above, so whatever. ;)
• Everspace also got a teensy little patch as well.
• Disputed Space also got a little patch which added some mouse functionality.

Finally, we have one sale. Over on GamersGate, they’re having a Disney Weekend which includes a bunch of Star Wars games.

That’s it for today folks. See you on the Stream tonight!

PS. Since tomorrow is a half-day here at work, and I’ll be spending the rest of the day making vids, I might not have any remaining energy to make one of these entires, so this might be the last one of the week, FYI. If it is, have a great weekend! If not, I’ll talk to y’all tomorrow!

PPS. I realized that this site turned six years old while I was out of town a couple of weeks ago. Happy birthday site! :)