Opening/Random Thoughts
Hey friends, happy Wednesday! I actually have a block of time to do a digest! HUZZAH! How have you guys been? I’ve been really tired y’all. So tired. My job sitch — in which I feel like I’m on an extended probation — is keeping me up at nights y’all. Seriously. I really hope I have a job in six months y’all, and am gonna work to keep it, but hell, if not, I guess I can devote more time to you guys, right? ;)
Beyond that, things are great. My closest friend — who I’ve known since I was seven — is flying in next week for the first time in over a decade. He’s hoping to move out here, so is gonna do scouting fo jobs, places to live and the like, and I couldn’t be more excited. I don’t know about you guys, but in life I’ve found that people around whom you can just be your total self, without any airs or pretense, is exceeeeeedingly rare. Well, he’s one of those folks in my life, so I can’t wait to spend time with him. That does mean no streams next week, as he’ll be our houseguest, but regular content should go on as usual.
Anyway, a lot to talk about for this digest, so let’s get to it.
Today’s Video(s)
This week’s game is Element: Space, which is something of an XCOM-style tactical combat game in which you also apparently have a spaceship (how much the spaceship factors into things, I’m unsure). Since it has a spaceship, and just came out of early access, I figured I should cover it.
Gah, what a waste of my time. I find, as I get older, I have less patience for pushing people around a map in order to kill other people. There are exceptions, and if this game had great gameplay, or a story that made sense, or compelling progression, it might have been amongst them. Sadly it had none of those things, along with an inexplicable difficulty spike a few missions in that’s basically a massive “fuck you” to the player. I couldn’t uninstall this fast enough.
For Descent: Freespace’s second entry, we finally meet the Shivans, and it’s a rough meeting, as we are not in any way prepared for them. I also am apparently running the game incorrectly for the second entry, as I was for the first. The third entry deals with this, and shows the Freespace Open project in all its glory. We also find ways to better deal with the Shivans, thank goodness. So far, so fun!
For last night’s podcast, since we didn’t have a guest, we decided to try out a new structure we’d been discussing internally, which included news, and more extended outros and such. I think overall it went rather well, and with some tweaking, we’ll likely adapt it for future shows.
Finally, as both OBS released a major new version, and Restream.io released a new service, I figured I should try them both, so I did so with Hitman 2. Having just passed the three training missions in the game, I was trying out the game’s first level, a fashion show in Paris (the first level from the first game, which you can play in Hitman 2). I’ll tell y’all what folks, this game is teaching me something nothing else has: patience.
Today’s News
There’s a lot to go over, so we’re gonna keep it brief.
Releases/Release News
- Battlestar Galactica Deadlock: Sin and Sacrifice
- Predestination (Blog Post)
- Interstellar Prime Demo
Galactineers - Hades’ Star
New Games Discovered
Development Blogs/Updates
- Starflight Remastered
- Eons of War
- Wandering Star
- Remnant
- Stellar Nomad
- Star Explorers
- Tales From Galaxy 34
- Wayward Terran Frontier: Zero Falls
- It’s Not A Moon
- Allspace
Major Patches/Updates
- Sirius: Age of the Free Agents
- Transcendence
- X4: Foundations
- Star Traders: Frontiers
- AI War 2 v0.815 and v0.814
- Avorion Beta Patch
- Battlefleet Gothic: Armada II
- Spacebourne
- Celestial Command
- Fleets of Ascendancy
Minor Patches/Updates
Today’s Miscellany
- Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) has a new version, as I mentioned, but it also has new ways to support its continued development. If you love and rely on it as much as I do, please toss ’em a little something.
What I’ve Been Playing
- Hitman – So after getting both Hitman 2016 and Hitman 2, I finally decided to dive back in after a lot of failed attempts at the second training mission, which is the first unguided mission you have. After completing that and the final training mission (where I used a freaking ejector seat to kill a guy), I’ve been giving the first actual level — a fashion show in Paris with two targets — a try. Boy, this game rewards patience and forces me to be patient, alert and astute in the survey of my surroundings. I’ve gotten caught/died a LOT, but I’m getting a little better each time, and it’s AMAZING. I mean one of the challenges is to kill one of the targets with a chandelier. I WANT TO DO THAT.
Welp, that’s it
