Hey friends, welcome to Monday! I am so sorry I didn’t writing one of these on Friday, the day totally got away from me, which means I never got to share the last Dawn of Andromeda video! This was an odd one, as the war that was declared on me never amounted to anything, as I was never attacked. I had fun juggling my finances though, so I can build some defenses, that was fun. Overall I like this game. I hope it doesn’t get buried under all the other 4X releases of late, but it might, which would be sad.
This weekend I spent time with one of this week’s Games of the Week, Endless Space 2. Things didn’t start off too well, since pirates were just bugs that kept biting me, not letting me have any fun. I actually, eventually abandoned my first game and started a whole new one without pirates, which you’ll see later in the week. My first entry looking at the game was fairly fun, but those pirates really wore me down a bit.
This week’s other Game of the Week, SuperCluster: Void, is a lot more promising at first blush. Sure, your race has its entire home world wiped out, but hey, the combat is fun, and the writing is funny and I had a really great time with it, overall. This first video shows the basics of combat and mining and such, but also shows just how much fun this game’s simple premise it. It is SO Starflighty that it’s ridiculous. Seriously, in the best way though.
Getting back to the weekend, I actually played a lot of stuff. Beyond the aforementioned Endless Space 2, I surprisingly had an urge to play SimCity 4. I think it’s because, after reading somewhere about SimCity 2000 holding up, and Cities: Skylines being such a let down (to me at least, I know a lot of folks like it), I realized I’d never played much of 4, so I decided to load it up. After doing all the fantastic tutorials, I began my own city and immediately realized why Cities: Skylines didn’t do it for me. There’s little challenge, little optimization, it’s just build this there and watch it move. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Seriously, I think this is why I couldn’t get into Planet Coaster either. Sure, building stuff is nice, but I also wanna manage and optimize finances, face challenges beyond “You can’t put that there.” and so on. I therefore spent a few hours slowly building out a small city in SimCity 4, and it’s getting big enough now that I need to figure out transportation beyond roads, such as rail lines and freeways. I’ve not really toyed with those yet, so hopefully I don’t mess it up.
Beyond SimCity 4, I spent a lot of time with the amazing LOGistICAL. Recently the dev added a tutorial island to the game, so I eschewed my original game (which is still saved if I wanna return to it, the game saves automatically via Steam, which is really nice) and began the tutorial island, which is just south of Australia, before finishing that and moving onto a borough of Sydney proper. I had a delightful time “solving” towns and fixing roads. It’s actually a very relaxing experience because there’s really no clock, so you just solve towns at your own pace. Eventually you can move onto other regions and solve those as well, which should be where the game gets a bit complicated with regional storage and what not, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. The game also opened up the Netherlands for me (thanks to the DLC, which will I think eventually encompass the whole globe), but I wasn’t able to do much there yet, so right now I’m gonna focus on Australia. Such a fun, fun game. I also played a bit of 2016’s DOOM, but I’m seriously stuck in one part because I can’t get past these guys with shields. Seriously, I keeeeep dying, which is honestly frustrating, so I took a break from that and went back to more LOGistICAL. I also played some Remnants of the Precursors to record footage to use in the background for the podcast this week, and honestly had a blast with it. Don’t forget that the game is free, and you can try it right now. ;)
I also spent time reorganizing my Steam library. Inspired by this thread on Quarter to Three, I reorganized my library into a flow that I feel will work for me. I put games I immediately wanna try in one category, before moving them elsewhere, and then reorganized other games based on a similar priority until I came up with a system I feel will work for me:
Now, if I’m not sure what I wanna play, I’ll start with category #1. If nothing hits me there, I’ll move onto categories 2 and 3 and so on. Between this and using Fences on my desktop for a similar flow, I should be much more organized when I want to decide to play something just for myself, something I’ve been having increasing trouble with as my library grows.
Alright, enough about me (even though it’s my blog, I know), there’s a lot of news and deals to talk about since I missed Friday, so let’s dive in!
- The amazing Lazy Game Reviews has a video up of Wing Commander. Speaking of, this isn’t news, but Joe of the Upper Memory Block Podcast found an awesome YouTube channel of gaming music using using the Roland MT-32 which includes the first two WC games. Definitely worth a listen.
- CDF Starfighter VR hit 1.0 last week.
- Endless Space 2 got a pretty huge patch on Friday which fixes a ton of stuff.
- Stellar Tactics got a nice patch which includes quick team reload functionality.
- Fractured Space has added something they call quick play, which finds games quickly, apparently.
- Vendetta Online has a new patch which seems to mostly tweak gamepad stuff.
- Lightspeed Frontier got a new patch which adds new weapons, fixes balance issues and more.
- Stardrift Nomads is now available on Linux!
- Starpoint Gemini Warlords has a new dev video and a video asking if you’re ready for it. ;)
- Starpoint Gemini 2 now has x64 support (and is also free right now!).
- Dimension Drive got a new patch that adds stability fixes.
- Convicted Galaxy hit v0.5.0, which adds a ton of new stuff like new weapons, solar system styles and an improved HUD.
- That drone that’s been causing grief in Jumpgate was finally shot down by some intrepid players.
There are also a lot of deals going on! First off, again, if you missed it, Starpoint Gemini 2 is free for the next couple of days. There are also several Steam Weeklong Deals:
- AI War Collection
- The Last Federation Collection
- Lemuria: Lost in Space
- Dead Effect 2 (not a space game, I know, but so great)
- Descent: FreeSpace
Finally, you can get Distant Worlds: Universe on sale at Bundle Stars, and GOG is having a weekly sale which includes both I-War games.
That’s it folks, have a great day, and I hope you had a great weekend!
