Hailing Frequencies Open – 4/27/17 – Sleeeeeeeeppppyyy…

Hey friends, welcome to Thursday! Sorry about no entry on Wednesday, but the day totally got away from me, and I was feeling just run down all day. This continued into today, so much so that I took a sick day today, and am writing this from home, rather than during my lunch break over at the office. Hopefully a day of downtime and rest will get me back on track. I mean I’m sure Worms Armageddon tonight will be a great time, and I should have enough energy for it, but I might need a nap beforehand. ;)

Moving on, today’s video of Flatspace IIk is pretty great, until the last 30 seconds when I somehow forgot to turn off my recording software. It’s weird in that I’m usually better at that. Anyway, BEFORE that, I tried both of the scavenger and trader professions, and found that they really weren’t for me. I’m VERY glad they’re there, because they seem perfect for those folks who wanna minmax trade routes and stuff like that, but for me, I prefer missions my own self. Still I didn’t have a BAD time trying my hand at trading, I just had MORE fun as a merc, you know?

Over the past couple of days, I’ve had some pretty fun time gaming. My good friend Ben (who I’ve known since I was a professional gaming journalist back in the late 90s) had an extra copy of Pillars of Eternity lying around, so decided to send it my way. I’m a pretty big Obsidian fan, thanks mostly to the amazing Alpha Protocol, so I was intrigued to see how they’d do with a 90s-era party-based RPG. Well, my first time in I lost an hour without even realizing it, so well done to them. I really like how they make meaningful dialogue choices that actually affect how the game will play out immediately after your choice, and well-written dialogue at that. I also liked the varied classes (I decided on Druid since I do loves me some shapeshifters). I played a bit today too, only to stop when my small party of two was quickly killed by a couple of beasties. I’ll get back to it soon though, as I’m really enjoying it. So much so I might shell out for the DLC, if the interest maintains itself over more hours.

I also spent some time with Discovery Freelancer of late. Hunter and Jim have been working diligently trying to spin up our own server before Sunday’s MMO meetup, and after some help from community members (and Freespace modders) FriendlyFire and Sindroms (who work on Freeworlds and Discovery respectfully), they got the server up and running yesterday afternoon. I was able to play a few missions on the test server, and had a grand old time. My time quickly ended when some vicious AI killed me in just a second or two. I’ll likely be playing more today in the run up to the Worms stream tonight as well, so that’ll be fun. Say what you want about Freelancer, it’s a damned finely balanced game, so it’s always fun to just jump in for a spell. It’s really a crime it’s not available digitally. Anyway, once the server is ready to go, we’ll tell ya all about how to log on and join us for some shootey, tradey action.

Now, onto news, and there’s quite a bit of it!

• Galactic Civilizations III: Crusade now has a release date of May 4th. Wow, May is gonna be a buuuuusy freaking month!
• Lost Sol is in the last days of its IndieGoGo campaign, so check it out!
• Convicted Galaxy got a big new update that adds, among other things, friendly AI, finally. ;)
• Dawn of Andromeda got a massive new patch that adds the ability to need a shipyard before being able to build ships, which sounds fascinating.
• Offworld Trading Company has a new dev diary entry looking at its upcoming Jupiter expansion, which I can’t wait for.
• Remnants of the Precursors’ devs are going dark for a while as they work on Alpha 4. They also have some new artwork!
• Infinity Battlescape has a new update detailing a new destroyer and Steam integration.
• Stellar Monarch got a big new update that includes autonomous fleets!
• Starpoint Gemini Warlords got a teensy little update leading up to their release next month. Again, May, wow.
• Interstellar Rift got a small patch mostly with bug and balance fixes.
• Wayward Terran Frontier: Zero Falls has a big update incoming that adds just too much to list here.
• Void Vikings added screen shake and more with their most recent update.
• Stellaris has a new dev diary looking deeper at the upcoming Adams update.
• The CIC added a couple entries looking at the room backgrounds of both Wing Commander and Wing Commander II.

Whew! My god, I’m out of breath. ;)

Finally, only one deal today, as 2016’s Master of Orion is 50% off at the WinGameStore.

That’s it for today folks! See ya tonight on the Worms stream! Have a great day!