Long Weekend Incoming – Daily Dispatch for 1/18/19

Opening/Random Thoughts

Hey folks, happy Friday! YEAH FRIDAY! It’s a long weekend here in the States, with Martin Luther King Jr. day on Monday, and I for one am looking forward to it. I mean sure, we just had nearly two weeks off at the end of the December, but I need to recover from that still! Plus Space Tycoon too. That game robbed me of my energy and joy for DAYS y’all, I crap you not.

Also, I hate Gutenberg a little more now. Why? Tags. I put a tag in for every game mentioned, to hopefully add to usability and spiderability of the site. Welp, Gutenberg loves to lose my tags. LOVES. If it was just a few, no big, but these articles can have DOZENS of tags, so now I’ve taken to putting them in a separate text editor until ready to paste in. What a pain in the keister. Thanks Gutenberger. Stupid editor. Anyway, onto the stuff you’re really here to see…

Today’s Video(s)

Last night, Spaz and I (later joined by fellow former Jumpgate pilot Excelsior) loaded up the co-op first person survival horror game thing, Desolate, since it’d just come out of early access. I had a copy somehow, and Spaz had a coupon, so we figured we’d try it. It was creepy more than outright scary (which is mostly fine for me), but overall it was a lot of fun too. It was great trying to survive, not go crazy, laugh at our afflictions (two of our characters had sepsis!), and some situations were HILARIOUS, like when we encountered this really powerful thug. It took all three of us to kill him, but it also took one of us running back and forth between the other two to revive them after they got knocked out. So fun.

Today’s News

• Meeple Station dropped on Steam yesterday in early access!
• Alliance of the Sacred Suns has released 0.7, as well as a blog post talking about what’s coming up for the 0.7 branch.
• Odyssey VR – The Deep Space Expedition has now hit 1.0 on Steam. Still not sure exactly what it is, but I guess I’ve gotta try it.
• Endless Space 2 is getting a new expansion pack next week called Penumbra, which will add a new race, hacking mechanics and more.
• Stars in Shadow has a new development update with a lot of changes to the game, especially to diplomacy and AI, apparently making the game far more challenging.
• Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II has posted a community update discussing what they’ve learned from the current beta.
• Battlestar Galactica Deadlock has a new dev diary talking about their new, unlockable soundtrack.
• Star Traders: Frontiers has a new update with a lot of new equipment.
• STARDROP will be leaving early access on February 1st! Guess I’ll finally have to give it a whirl, huh? ;)
• Interstellar Rift has a new dev update about their new specialized systems, and patch notes to go along with it.
• HELLION has released its latest devblog, which outlines the next steps of their development.
• Heathen Engineering’s Terran has received its first patch in a dog’s age, and it has a TON of stuff in it. So much so it needed a hotfix.
• Stellaris has released it’s 2.2.3 patch — which is fairly extensive — as well as the beta for 2.2.4.
• Parabolus has received a fairly big patch with new game modes and more!
• Zero Sum Future has a patch which improves the netcode and more.
• War Tech Fighters has another tiny sneak peek at their upcoming Firestorm update.

Today’s Deal(s)

• House of the Dying Sun is on sale on Steam at its lowest historical price.
  

What I’ve Been Playing

• Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II – After clearing the prologue campaign the other night, I decided to dive into one of the two available campaign chapters in the current beta, and began with the Imperium. After some awesome cutscenes, we had some early battles that felt great, like the band getting back together. Eventually the meta map opened up, and this looks like it’s going to be GREAT. Each planet can help build and repair fleets, plus defenses for itself, along with points of interest that add flair (bonuses, enhancements, etc) to a planet. The tactical gameplay here is great, as you have to dominate specific points on the map in order to reach the winning point total. It made for a fun mix of terrain control and prevention, as the AI worked to take control of the control points we acquired, as well as balancing keeping those control points and damaging the enemy. I really, really enjoyed it, and I can’t WAIT for the full game next week.

That’s it for today y’all. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll see you next week!