Holy Heckfire, What a Week – Hailing Frequencies for 9/7/17

Hello my friends, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been a week since I last wrote one of these things, and helllfire has it been busy. Last Friday I spent much of the day recording this week’s first game of the week, the AMAZING (seriously y’all, it’s so good) Battlestar Galactica Deadlock. This game, my friends, is just so good. It seriously is so good. The folks at Black Lab took what worked about Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy (which was ALREADY fantastic), tweaked it and made it better, then put it in the first Cylon war of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica universe. You can tell the developers LOVE BSG, because they’ve captured the look, feel, music (especially important to me) and the flavor of the newer BSG universe realllllllly well. Overall, I am loving this game, and it’s a serious contender for the best space game of 2017 so far. Seriously. These first few missions you’ll see here show the versatility of the story, the game’s engine, and put me in a decent amount of scenarios. Overall, this game is a joy.

On the opposite side of the coin, we have Starway Fleet, a game that looks to be a Unity asset grab that is so poorly designed and half-assed I’m actually angry at it. Seriously, we NEED more good first person space sims, and this one is worse than games from a decade or two ago. Seriously, it has poor controls, no targeting commands at all, no overarching narrative, no scores to keep one coming back and so on. It’s a shame, because it’s not a bad flight engine, and the combat can be fun in those moments you forget you can’t chose your next target, but it’s so infuriating to see such a half-hearted attempt at what is truly my favorite type of game. I actively dislike, if not loathe this game. As someone on our Discord put it, it’s as if FPS shooter fans made a space sim. It’s just that…weird. Bad. Poorly made. This is truly one of the most infuriating games I’ve played this year, and let me tell ya, there have been some dang clunkers this year. Watch these if you wanna see me get almost irrationally angry at a poorly-made, half-assed game. I actually find the game insulting.

Moving on from that feces-covered garbage fire, I actually got a decent amount of gaming in. I played several hours of LOGistICAL (gotta boost up Hawaii’s industries before fixing its towns) and quested around a lot in Lord of the Rings Online and Asura. I also spent time with a lot of older games. First up, I got Future Cop LAPD working thanks to the folks at Play Old PC Games, who made a custom installer for it. Even though the controls are wonky as hellfire, I had a wonderful time going stompy stompy stompy around future Los Angeles. I can’t beat the first mission (the second big boss always gets me), but I’m having a great time with it.

The other day, I was gonna play more Deadlock, but my cat took up my computer chair, and I didn’t have the heart to move her since she was just soooo cute, so I was gonna go to my PS2 to play some Burnout Revenge (which I think has become my favorite of them all, not sure, I love Takedown as well). I then noticed the 2003 Battlestar Galactica game in my collection, and recalled I’d never finished the first mission (game is HARD, yo). Well, after about a dozen attempts, getting better with the controls each time, I finally beat the first mission and made it all the way to the third! Man, that original BSG game is GOOD. Like, seriously, SERIOUSLY good. I’m now mad it never came out for PC. It’s also made by Warthog! You know, the Starlancer folks who also made Star Trek: Invasion (which I also need to play). It’s just so satisfying, I can’t wait to play more.

Then, after reading about a new HD patch for the first game (thanks Qt3!), I loaded up both Battle for Middle Earth RTS games. I’ve never played the first one, and only dabbled in the second, so I figured, why not give them a shot? This is great stuff y’all. The patches make these games look great, and they really are fun RTS games. I definitely wanna play through the entire campaigns at some point. Seriously glad I own the disks for these.

Finally, I began trying a game I’ve been meaning to play for a while but am only now getting around to, Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients. The AMAZING looking DLC was on sale, so I figured I’d actually try the game to see if I actually like it before buying it, and MY GOD DO I LIKE IT. It’s like a mix of grand strategy with missions, and y’all know how I love missions. Seriously, I’m gonna probably find time to play more this weekend. Speaking of which, since it just got a massive new patch, I’m looking forward to diving into Star Wars: Empires at War. It originally came out when I was taking a break from gaming, and I’ve only dabbled in it since, so this should be a great time!

Alright, enough rambling, let’s get to some news, and there’s quite a bit of it today, especially after yesterday’s news machine gun burst!

• Dawn of Andromeda got a MASSIVE patch that has a reworked tech tree, revised AI and much more! Time to revisit this bad boy!
• Battlestar Galactica Deadlock has gotten its first update which, to my sadness, slows down Adamants, but to many’s delight, now has a scalable UI.
• Hellion, hot on the heels of our podcast, got a new patch that has a ton of tweaks and improvements.
• Stellaris has a new dev diary looking at descendant and ascension changes in the upcoming expansion.
• Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander’s Lightspeed Edition got a new difficulty level you guys, as part of its latest update.
• Gangs of Space got another patch recently with more fixes. Gotta love active devs y’all.
• Another day, another alpha update for Remnants of the Precursors y’all.
• The Away Team is getting a stability update for Linux and Windows builds!
• Iron Armada is having a battle event starting tomorrow!
• Endless Space 2 might be getting fighters, according to this GIF on Twitter!

Finally, a couple of big sales going on. The smaller is a Focus Home Interactive sale on Steam which includes Battlefleet Gothic Armada, among other titles. Then, Humble is having an End of Summer sale which is god damned huge, and likely has a ton of space games. Too many stuff on sale for me to dig through, sorry.

That’s it for today folks. Thanks for reading!