It’s Hard to Be a Bad Guy… – Hailing Frequencies for 2/27/18

Hello my friends, and welcome to Tuesday! I really wish I could honestly do these dispatches daily, but I think I have to accept that it won’t always be possible. I hope that’s okay with y’all. If you need something every day, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel, that’s what primarily gets updated Monday through Friday. :) Speaking of which, let’s talk videos! This week’s game of the week is the fun, fantastic and infuriating “5X” grand strategy game, Space Tyrant!

This game is so fun y’all. It plays fast, yet doesn’t sacrifice depth or efficiency for speed. It has a great interface, tons of tactical options via cards and such, and a fun, varied battle system that keeps things moving. Procedural generation helps with varying events, enemies and the like, meaning it’s always different. I can’t really say enough good things about this game, even though, as these two videos will show, it’s kicking my ass.

I also spent time with Go For Launch: Mercury, which is a first person, primarily VR (though it has a non-VR version, thankfully) Mercury capsule simulator. This current alpha is pretty early, so you’ll basically spend time, prepping for, then launching, then orbiting a bit before coming back down to Earth. It’s really early right now, so there’s not a ton to do yet, but I really enjoyed what I saw, as it was really atmospheric.

Next up, I spent some time with Star Story: The Horizon Escape. This is something of a choose-your-own-adventure game with RPG elements and JRPG-style combat. I really like the varied choices you can make, which can apparently lead up to one of two dozen different endings. I really liked how you could make choices that would avoid combat entirely, which is something I wish more games featured.

The next video for today is something of a test of a tool. I was sent a copy of the GoPlay Editor video editor and recorder, and so I decided to use the amazing Solar Settlers as a test for my first video recording session. I chose Solar Settlers because it’s a vibrant game, yet isn’t a very system-taxing one. As you can see, the recorder did a fine job with recording the full desktop. I’ll also do a test with a more demanding game, like Titanfall 2 or Doom, and then will actually…gasp…edit something. I know, I know. ;)

The final video for today is our EVE Online MMO Meetup this past Sunday. We spent hours doing a massive mining operation from the asteroids left behind after Hunter exploded a moon fragment. It was neat and relaxing. I’m not entirely sure how engaging watching three hours of mining is — I mean we had a great time — but I hope y’all enjoy it regardless.

Tonight on the podcast, we’re returning to the game we love to bash on, Elite: Dangerous. It just dropped a major content patch today, of all days, so it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. I spent a little time with it since reinstalling it a week or so ago, and while it’s still fun to fly around, I’m still not fully convinced there’s a viable game there yet. I’ll also have some time to play stuff tonight and tomorrow night, but I’m not sure what yet. Sometimes I have paralysis of choice, and have been actually debating uninstalling all but a few games from my PC, to make sure not only I play the games I buy, but to make it easier to choose what to play (he types as he has five games in his Steam cart, including the recently-released Into the Breach).

Enough about me though, there’s plenty of news and such to talk about, so let’s get to it!

• Space Tyrant actually hit 1.0 today, so if you don’t already own it, go pick it up! It’s great! If you don’t believe me, check out the review from the great James Allen.
• Space Launch Engineer and Space Simulator also dropped onto Steam!
• Elite Dangerous: Beyond – Chapter One dropped today, and the patch notes are super extensive.
• You can now buy the Angels Fall First soundtrack, and it’s really great.
• Found a few new upcoming games on Steam, including Undercrewed, Space Fighters, Fleets of Ascendancy, COSH, Space God, Gaia Beyond, Asteroid Defender!, FSX SpacePort, Genesis Alpha One and Star Shield Down.
• Space Impossible has released their pre-release alpha 12 build 1. Well that’s a mouthful.
• Starmancer is doing a dev live stream this Friday!
• Astrobase Command has a new dev diary out talking dynamic stories.
• Cycle 28 has a couple of videos with a dev shoot out and more.
• War Tech Fighters released a Black Sails Update trailer showcasing a bunch of new stuff coming to the awesome mecha space game.
• Ancient Frontier has a progress report on its upcoming free DLC, The Crew.
• Space Fighters has its first update for its closed beta.
• Galactic Crew has a new dev update talking multiplayer and more.
• Fractured Space is getting a new Last Stand mode in March.
• Star Traders: Frontiers has a new update in which you can customize difficulty levels.
• Scavenger SV-4 has a new patch which adds a few nice, new features.
• Escort Commander has a new patch which hopefully eases the learning curve for some folks.
• Project Amalthea has a small new patch with a few new features.
• My buddy RazorsKiss took some video in Jumpgate of taking down a Conflux swarm. My other buddy Oberothton Lahnkara has a video of him out on patrol. Things are slowly ramping up in JG. Might be time to return. ;)

Finally, in deals, there are a bunch:

• Steam’s Weeklong Deals has a bunch of space games.
• Steam is also having a Slitherine midweek sale with some great space games.
• Humble has a CCP sale covering mostly EVE Online.
• GOG is having a weekly sale which includes the X games.

That’s it for today! Thanks y’all!