Nearly Over the Hump – Hailing Frequencies for 12/20/17

Hello my friends, and welcome to Wednesday! I so don’t feel energetic enough to write one of these today — I am still sooooo tired from whatever this cold thing is — but there’s so much news and such — which is surprising given the closeness to both Christmas and tomorrow’s Steam sale — that I wanted to get it all out to y’all before it backed up too much. First up, let’s talk videos though!

In the latest Orbital Racer entry (you can see yesterday’s here), I up the AI from “easy” to “medium” and boy am I not disappointed. Whereas the last couple of races on easy, I was easily pacing my opponents by ten plus seconds on the clock, here I feel like I have to fight and claw for every position I gain during the race. They are also brutal with powerups, using everything at their disposal to win. It’s my goal to work my way through events in the game, boosting the AI as I get better at it, then eventually creating a character that will fly in simulation mode. I so can’t wait. Truly, I am loving this game y’all, and I hope it’s successful enough to get more content and such (hint hint). ;)

Tomorrow we’ll be streaming some more Borderlands 2, which I’m really excited to try with my new mouse! I’m not gonna get much gaming in between now and then, but I have all of Friday off, which I am super excited about. I’m definitely gonna play more Sanctus Reach and Orbital Racer, along with some more Yule Festival fun in Lord of the Rings Online, plus I also wanna actually try and get into Company of Heroes 2 for some reason. I’ve owned it for a while, but I’ve always been a bit intimidated to try it. Welp, since I need to cut back on game spending and enjoy the games I actually own, I’ve decided to start with this one. I also have all of next week off, so I hope to get a nice amount of gaming in before the new year as well. We’ll see how busy family keeps me, however. ;)

Alright, enough about me, let’s dive into the news, of which, as I said, there is a LOT:

• Interstellar Space: Genesis has a nice meaty dev update looking at the progress towards their next alpha!
• Star Command Galaxies has released its first beta! Can’t wait to try it!
• Sunless Skies has a new dev blog talking about one of my favorite things: exploration.
• Galactic Civilizations III has a new dev blog talking about upcoming AI advancements, along with a new patch that includes a lot of said enhancements.
• Avorion has a nice dev blog talking about their recent combat updates, and are also running an X-Mas fighter building contest.
• Hellion has released their massive Kessler update, which includes a ton of new features.
• Starship Corporation has a patch to fix some issues that arose from their Cyo update.
• Worbital has a new dev update talking about how 2017 has gone for them.
• Elite Dangerous has a new ship, the Type-10 Defender.
• Orbital Racer got its first patch! Yay!
• Children of a Dead Earth got a new patch with foreign language support and new things to design with!
• Osiris: New Dawn has released their Rise of Zer Update which includes a new planet and more!
• Star Traders: Frontiers got yet another patch with some quality-of-life improvements.
• Stationeers continues to fix a lot of things, according to their consolidated patch notes.
• Ancient Frontier has a dev update on their upcoming free DLC.
• Interstellar Rift got a patch with a dozen or so fixes.
• Interplanetary: Enhanced Edition finally adds a “repair all” feature in its latest patch.
• Heathen Engineering’s Terran got a big beta patch with overhauls to UI and empire management.
• Finally, Wayward Terran Frontier: Zero Falls got another teensy little patch.

Finally, in deals, first off, Fanatical has Battlefleet Gothic: Armada as their daily deal for $9.99, which is a good price for that one. Then, lastly, the WinGameStore has launched their Holiday Sale, likely to get the jump on Steam, which launches their sale tomorrow.

That’s it for today, and maybe for the week folks. If so, have a great weekend and a happy holiday!