Hailing Frequencies Open – 3/29/17 – Hittin’ the Wall

Hey y’all, happy Wednesday! Today’s Battle for Orion 2 video could go along with hump day, because rather than getting over one, this one causes me to crash into a wall. I actually felt really frustrated after this session, so much so I had to walk away and take a break. It really left me demoralized, because I felt like I was spinning my wheels again and going BACKWARDS. I still have two more videos to make for the series, which I plan to do tonight, but I still feel so bitchslapped from the campaign that I’m gonna instead showcase the game’s built-in editor and battle generator, both of which are pretty great. It’s a shame, really. I feel like I’m playing the game incorrectly, and it’s making the game look poor as a result. It’s not a poor game at all, I’m just bad at it.

Last night’s podcast was a technical clusterfuck. First off, my PC apparently HATES Space Engineers. I’ve 12GB of RAM, and at one point the game was using nearly all of it, to the point where the PC froze a few times. I was worried I was gonna get a BSOD or a hard reset while live, but thankfully that didn’t happen. What DID happen was that, annoyingly, one of those freezes caused my mixer/recording program, VoiceMeter Banana (which is wonderful much of the time, to qualify) to crash or freeze or something, wherein the recording stopped about halfway through the podcast. SO ANNOYING. So now, AGAIN, I have to rip the audio from YouTube. This is on TOP of all the issues I was having with Discord, which was unhappy throughout the entire show, cutting out, giving me bandwidth errors and so on. I couldn’t even change the server or anything. REALLY frustrating, but in the end I thought we did an okay show. It’s just super frustrating when you DO have things set up correctly (like actually hitting the record button) and things still go to pot. Ah well, I’m sure it’ll be fine in the end.

Before and after the show, I installed and played a bit of Secret Weapons over Normandy. Wow, that is some good stuff. Seriously good. More arcade sim and less simmy than Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, but that’s an advantage, as this game is super easy to get into, and VERY fun. The combat is super satisfying, and pleasantly surprisingly, it installed and ran on Windows 7 without a hitch. No administrator this or compatibility that. A nice change of pace, that was. I also spent a little time with the tutorials in Guns of Icarus Online, since the co-op/PVE version of the game, Guns of Icarus Alliance is coming out in a few days. What a fantastic little game. The strict PVP thing is what kept me from playing the original, so I’m super excited about the PVE nature of Alliance.

So, onto newsy stuff. In release news, you can now get Space Rogue Classic on Steam! As you may recall, I wasn’t fond of the game itself, but it’s a fascinating part of the genre’s history. Also releasing soon is Starfighter Origins on April 18th! I’m not sure if this will as yet be an early access or full 1.0 release, but I hope to find out soon. Finally, this massive Space Pirates and Zombies 2 patch adds a huge new map and a ton of other stuff.

In other newsy news, the Wing Commander CIC has some fantastic scans of Wing Commander articles from Computer Gaming World magazine. Arkin had a nice big dev update talking about their work on the game, which looks like it’s coming along nicely. Infinity: Battlescape also had a little dev update as well.

Oh, finally, if you’ve not already voted, check out the poll I’m running about what to do with the Monthly MMO Meetups, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

That should do it for today! Have a great one y’all!