Hailing Frequencies Open – 5/1/17 – May Day! May Day!

Hey friends, welcome to both Monday AND May! Wow, another month gone, and boy, was April one helluva busy month, right? SO MUCH GAMING, in a good way. Speaking of which, this week’s game of the week is the fantabulous Freespace 2 mod, Between the Ashes. This mod takes place between the end of Descent: Freespace and its expansion, Silent Threat, and it’s truly fascinating in terms of how much work and love clearly went into the mod. As I write this, I’m actually stuck a few missions in, so HOPEFULLY I’ll be able to fix that before Wednesday so we get more than three videos out of the thing, but regardless, these vids should show you just how awesome this mod is.

I also spent time with a turn-based tactical shoot ’em up called NEXT JUMP: Shmup Tactics, which took me completely by surprise. It’s written by someone who loves shmups, but are terrible at them, just like me. The result is a fascinating mix of FTL-style sector jumping and turn-based shooting and dodging. It’s REALLY like a shmup, but turned based! Once you get into the rhythm of it, it’s just…mesmerizing. I really was blown away by how good it is, and at a $5 price point, it’s got an amazing amount of stuff to offer for the price. Definitely recommended.

After I got stuck with BtA, I took a break and played a little more DOOM, which was so, so good, yet so, so intense. So much so I had to take a break after maybe 30-60 minutes because wow, it’s kind of exhausting. I don’t think I played much else on Saturday besides Discovery Freelancer, in preparation for Sunday’s MMO Meetup stream. Speaking of, Sunday, all of my gaming was the massive, nearly-three-hour long stream of Discovery, and my god did I have a great time. The official server had multiple people on, and several dynamic events cropped up while I was playing, like alien incursions! I had a fabulous time flying around, getting killed, and learning so much more about this really impressive mod. Eventually I started a new character to engage in mining — which the vanilla game doesn’t really have at all — and had a blast, as I love mining. Can’t wait to play more.

Tonight I don’t know how much gaming time I’ll have, if any, since it’s laundry day and I might have chooooooooores. If I do, I really wanna dive into this fascinating resource management game I picked up called LOGistICAL. Speaking of, yesterday’s stream had all sorts of issues with dropped frames, disconnects and restarts. While I feel like I’ve diagnosed my network connection as best I can, the next step is playing with OBS settings, which I plan to do this Wednesday evening, so I’ll likely be steaming LOGistICAL and other games using a variety of OBS settings to see which one seems the most stable. That’ll be fun…I hope…

Now let’s dive into news!

• Freeworlds has a new post about cruisers, which look fantastic. This is another Freelancer mod to keep an eye on.
• Starfighter Origins got a patch which looks to add keyboard controls, something a lot of people wanted very badly.
• Legends of Azulgar posted an update reminding people that they’re basically still alive, so yay!
• StarSmashers is an upcoming game on Steam that we just discovered, and looks pretty neat.
• Icarus Starship Command Simulator was also just discovered by our community (sorry, forget who noticed it), but it also looks cool!
• Starpoint Gemini Warlords is featured in an interview over on Game Watcher.
• Remnants of the Precursors has both a patch and a post about the game’s Greek translation.
• Lightspeed Frontier has a video showing off their new ability system.
• XWVM, an X-Wing Mod thingy, has a new video showing off their latest work.

Now, since it’s Monday, Steam has weeklong sales, which includes:

• Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime
• Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity
• in Space
• Transcendence
• Battle for Orion 2
• Stellar Monarch
• Ascent – The Space Game
• The Sentient
• Freespace 2
• Nomad Fleet

Finally in sales, Gamebillet has the 2016 edition of Master of Orion, the collector’s edition at that, on sale as well.

That’ll do it for today! Thanks for reading and watching folks!