Lots of Sevens… – Hailing Frequencies Open for 7/17/17

Hello my friends, and happy Monday! How was your weekend? Mine was pretty busy but overall good! Friday I actually got a bit of gaming time to myself, which was VERY welcome. I was able to get in around two hours with Lord of the Rings Online, which was the kind of relaxation I SORELY needed. LOTRO can be intense sometimes, but most of the time it’s relaxing just doing quests and exploring the gorgeous world of Middle Earth. Much of the time has been spent playing an Elven archer, but now I want to return to my Man minstrel. Minstrels are fascinating characters in LOTRO. They’re like an artillery class, able to deal massive damage at a distance just by strumming some chords. I kinda love how this kind of character has been included in the game. Before you ask, I’m not gonna be buying the recently-announced Mordor expansion for a while, as my highest level character is only in their 30s, so I wanna enjoy the journey on my way to level 105.

Saturday I got absolutely no gaming in, as we were out much of the day, and worked on wedding stuff in the evening. Much of Sunday was also taken up with wedding stuff, but I was able to spend time with this week’s game of the week, 1996’s Gazillionaire Deluxe and the modern web-based version of the game.

I was inspired to play Gazillionaire a while back after playing — and enjoying the everloving hell out of — Space Bucks. When these games originally came out, they looked boring to me, as I just ultimately wanted to shoot stuff. Once I saw how much fun the economic side of space can be, I decided to give this game a whirl, and I’m glad I did. They’re similar in that the end goal is to make money, but the execution is very different. While Space Bucks has you making deals across planets as the owner of a larger company, building facilities, managing a fleet and the like, in Gazillionaire, you’re basically an independent space trucker. You use your cargo and your passenger compartments to haul commodities and passengers to the various planets, buying low and selling high (hopefully). While it’s definitely more micro, it’s not any less fun, and while I enjoyed Space Bucks more, ultimately, this game is a really fun diversion.

This week my gaming opportunities will be sporadic at best. Tomorrow for the podcast, our guest had to reschedule, so it’ll be something of a mixed show, with news and what not.  Not sure if that’ll require gameplay of anything, but we’ll see. Borderlands 2 on Thursday might be it until the weekend. Even the weekend is pretty busy, so hopefully, I’ll be able to fit in something beyond next week’s game.

Anyway, enough about me, there’s a lot of news and deals to go over, so let’s dive in!

• Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander is getting an updated edition called the Lightspeed Edition, free to existing owners, on August 10th! Yay! You can see the trailer for it here!
• Avorion finally got its massive Alliances co-op update live for everyone, and it’s absolutely MASSIVE, so go check it out.
• Alliance of the Sacred Suns’ dev posted a couple of posts recently and somehow I missed them! First off, an apology regarding the lack of communication, and then a dev diary about the game’s trade system! Yay! (Somehow I didn’t have their RSS feed in my Feedly! This has since been fixed.)
• Ancient Frontier’s developer posted a dev blog update thingy on The Human Federation faction.
• Starship Theory now has a friendlier crew, according to this update.
• Remnants of the Precursors’ blog has some Mrrshan Galactic Council artwork to share.
• Vendetta Online got a fairly large patch that fixes a lot of things.
• Freeworlds: Tides of War got a fairly significant update to its conflict system.
• Starsector’s blog has another in-game fiction update that could be a spoiler if you choose to read it but looks really cool.
• An old, pre-production trailer of Super Wing Commander shows off a Kilrathi ship not really used before in anything else.
• Void Destroyer 2’s dev has posted a new video of a remote interface that looks really cool.
• Astrokill now has gamepad customization, along with other stuff in its latest patch.
• Star Explorers has had its beta updated with some crash fixes.
• Sirius Online got a hotfix the other day as well!

But wait, there’s more! As it’s Monday, Steam has a new set of Weeklong Deals, including:

• Darkstar One
• StarDrive
• StarDrive 2 and Sector Zero
• Unending Galaxy

Finally, I’m unsure why, and it’s not a space game, but GOG has the amazing Freedom Force games on sale, and any gamer deserves to own copies of these unique and amazing games.

That’s it for today folks. Have a great one!